[p2p-research] Inflamed passions -- Why do vaccines trigger such passionate debate?

[Andy Robinson]

It's a shame we have to go through this ritual of scientific fundamentalism,
which seems to me to have little to do with p2p.  There is a lot I could say
on this but I'll keep it short.  We live in a world where there are many
people with many different perspectives.  To attempt to impose one's own
perspective as overarching truth and force others to live by it is a kind of
imperial arrogance which necessarily leads to persistent social war among
groups with different perspectives.  So, there can only be coexistence and
dialogue among perspectives, or social war among them.  The choice to insist
that others not act in ways which seem absurd or harmful to you but not to
them, necessarily entails the latter choice.  It matters not a jot if the
majority agree, because the majority only count as relevant if there is a
community within which they are the majority, and if they are not
recognising conditions of social peace with others, there is no such
community.  And it matters not a jot if scientists agree, because scientists
are also a community of epistemological privilege.  We simply cannot afford
a world where the way things seem from a certain perspective is taken to be
the way things are, and alternative perspectives are dismissed as absurd
etc.  I have no more tolerance for people taking this stance in the name of
science than for those taking this stance in the name of religion.  It's the
same either way.

We also need to remember historically, how science, rationalism,
instrumentalism and the like were and are complicit in colonialism, the
extermination of indigenous peoples, the belittling of other ways of seeing,
the strengthening of techniques of domination, and the demonisation of
psychological difference.  And we need to remember that the state is not
anyone's protector, it is an authoritarian entity which slaughters
millions.  If people want to worry about children dying then start with the
children dying of famine because of state-sustained capitalism, and the
children slaughtered by statists in Iraq and Afghanistan; and then look at
the vicious effects of authoritarian parenting and education and the misery
they cause to millions of children.

Where it comes back to p2p is the need for p2p to be extended to healthcare
also.  The distrust of doctors (rational or not) comes from the hierarchical
organisation of medicine and resultant inability of patients to make
informed choices (incase anyone mistakes me: there is no more choice in a
market of similar commodities than in a state system).  For people to listen
to a doctor when there is doubt, there needs to be trust, and reliable
information.  There will always be some who make bad choices because of how
they read the information through their own paradigm, but there is no way to
be sure in advance of which disputing party is making the mistake.  The only
way forward is to try to work through problems dialogically.  Of course the
monstrosity of the state gives people the temptation to substitute their own
arrogance for the difficult process of dialogue and seek to impose their own
conclusions.  It would have been better for history if the state had never
come about.  Now it's here, all we can do is resist the temptation.
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