Dr. Aaron Kheriaty is a clinical psychiatrist, ethicist, and author of The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State (2022). In a March 16 Vancouver talk, sponsored by the James M. Houston Centre for Humanity and the Common Good, he outlined how the global pandemic response has benefited the emergent biosecurity model of governance, and the elite redefinition of personhood and society.
(I made the above video to go with his talk, using clips from Pexels.com. The footage ceases in a few minutes, in part because I thought it more important to focus on Kheriaty’s words without too much distracting imagery.)
“We need courage. We need millions of citizens, ordinary citizens in their ordinary life and their ordinary work and their families, being courageous... And then the house of cards will collapse. Regimes built upon lies, including totalatarian regimes, no matter how powerful the infrastructure looks, these regimes always eventually collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. That’s the good news. The bad news is that can take a very long time when they have the mechanisms of power in place…
So the question for us is not whether a regime like the one I've described that’s emerging will eventually collapse; the question is how long will it be able to be propped up by further propaganda and lies. And so our job is to try to accelerate that process, so that we reach that tipping point sooner rather than later.
Nobody in 1988, none of the observers on the world scene, would have predicted that in one year the Soviet satellite states and the Soviet regime and the Berlin Wall would fall. With not a shot being fired and no bloodshed. Now in retrospect we can go back and construct the historical dynamics at work; but prospectively most people on the world stage assumed the Cold War was going to be a feature of our existence for the indefinite future, and that these two global superpowers would remain in a sort of stalemate with the threat of nuclear war, and so on and so forth - and the peoples of Russia and Eastern Europe would continue to labour under this kind of regime; and suddenly we turn on our TVs and people are dismantling this symbol of oppression. I was a teenager when that happened, and that made an impression on me. So remember that when you're heading into a tipping point, a historical hinge point, you don't necessarily see it coming. Our role is just to do our part, big or small, to advance social change in the direction of a more humane society.”
- Aaron Kheriaty, during the question period.
Aaron Kheriaty Speaks: