Justice For All

When you go into the doctor for a check up, there is a standard procedure for checking the major biological systems.  Blood pressure and pulse.  Blood analysis. Body mass index. Clear lungs. Etc.  What kind of inspection would a doctor of civilization perform as a first look at societal health?  Of course, the supply and velocity of money. The cost and availability of goods will be huge tells.  Income distribution.  Malnutrition. Racial division and strife.  There are many tell tale signs of stress and disease.

Today we are going to talk about the immune system and its corresponding externalization for humanity, the justice system, as perhaps the greatest tool of diagnosis for chronic disease.  This is easier said than done because the brain of the immune system approaches the mystical and metaphysical boundaries of self versus non-self.  We have all had experience of our conscious mind being delirious and barely functioning during a high fever while our immune system is in a full scale war.  Who is ultimately in charge of keeping the organism alive?  The mind that loves alcohol?  The heart that repeatedly falls for abusers?

So clearly there is a separate part of our mind connected to a ruthless set of rules and powers we call our immune system.  For the United States, the immune system analog is clearly the US justice system.  The canon of law and law enforcement built from thousands of tests starting at birth is the higher mind that should mirror the long term memory of our immune system’s ability to distinguish self from non-self built from its lifelong encounters with forces invasive to life. So a doctor of civilization in diagnosing a culture can learn much about the systemic nature of chronic disease from a careful analysis of a country’s justice system.

Above all else, does the justice system rigorously follow justice for all by equal application of the law?  Or has the conscious mind with its petty needs and agendas (read governments driven by politics) somehow gotten operational control over the immune system?  The fastest growing immune system issue today is autoimmunity or the immune system attacking a productive and necessary part of itself.  The external analog would be the proverbial Pretorian Guard (FBI, CIA, NSA, Secret Service, etc.) more focused upon “domestic terrorists” attempting to redirect the organism they inhabit than say, for example, a border invasion.

So our doctor, after comparing the possibility of political agendas corrupting the state’s immune system versus the history of the cultural norms, he would turn to prosecutors and the criminal justice system.  What is the conviction and incarceration rate?  Of each race? Of each class? Of each political party?  Is the immune system simply overactive as in the 1918 Influenza pandemic when this first encounter with “the flu” killed many young and healthy people due to excess inflammation (over policing)?  Or is our immune system selectively prosecuting for certain political agendas of race, class or beliefs while ignoring organized crime of drugs and human trafficking, bank money laundering or political graft and corruption?

Tiny corruptions of the immune system of a single cell or a single human can spawn a cancerous tumor or a fully fed and ignored corporate marketing program of a product with negative human value? Can the same mind addicted to sugar also judge it’s value to the life of the body? Can a politician being paid in some legal or illegal way fairly judge the value of a self serving program or policy? Of course not.

Clearly the current design of an elected democracy from two competing parties being able to get its hands and its agendas upon the life and death power of the immune system is a fatal flaw we have seen fail over and over again.  Look at Argentina.  It was comparable to the United States in per capita wealth and rule of law a century ago.  The amplitude and frequency of swings between authoritarians and leftist kleptocrats using the tools of the state has brought wave after wave of hyperinflation, defaults, persecutions and suffering for the common people.

A properly designed immune function would have been able to stop Argentina’s fall at the beginning.  But once the immune system has become mis-programmed or the justice system becomes a tool of one faction then another there are very few examples of recovery save for a complete collapse back to core tribal ethics.

A human doctor can often clearly see the affliction of some patients.  That doctor also knows there are negative programs the mind and the heart stuck in repeating actions of the proverbial “death wish” that no medicine can heal.  Only a crash and burn can bring the patient to their knees and to choose life over death.  Diagnosis is rarely the problem.  Solution requires structural change and the re-establishment of a higher ethics within the justice system for the body or a people to trust it with true power.

Perhaps the proper rebooting of the immune system or justice system to its core intelligence and ethical behavior is the greatest challenge facing any human organism.  Life, by definition is the ability to properly react to disturbance with a restoration of homeostasis. Any prevention or misdirection of a return to homeostasis is the ultimate sin against life…and a short sighted wish to die or kill for some temporary benefit.

Life depends upon justice for all in the service of sustaining life for generations outside of a single event, a privileged group of humans or an ideology.  Our immune system and our justice system must serve life with ruthless integrity or die to make way for new life to emerge.