Drew-r
This is a reply to everyone interested in the topics of this thread. This reply can certainly be accused of going OT but by the same token, isn’t this allowed, especially for a thread that’s already been separated from where it came so as to better facilitate wherever the conversations go?
This reply includes (under the break line below) a sequence of excerpts which i have taken from a larger interview which can be found at it’s (apparently) intact original (French, translated to English) whole at the link provided below. I do this based upon my observations coupled with opinion that the “statesmen” of this world, historically, are chief among those who get decide what is for “our greater good” (sic).
The interviewee here was/is Jacques Attali who, among other “accomplishments” was once counted among the “entourage” of “advisors” to Francois Mitterrand.
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MICHEL SALOMON. – Why is an economist so passionately interested in medicine, in health…
JACQUES ATTALI – In studying the general economic problems of Western society, I have noticed that health costs are one of the essential factors in the economic crisis. The production of consumers and their maintenance is expensive, even more expensive than the production of goods themselves. People are produced by services they render to each other, especially in the field of health, whose economic productivity is not increasing very fast. “The productivity of machine production is increasing faster than the relative productivity of consumer production. This contradiction will be overcome by a transformation of the health and education system towards their commodification and industrialisation.
Anyone who analyses economic history realises that our society is increasingly transforming craft activities into industrial activities and that a growing number of services rendered by people to others are increasingly becoming objects that are produced in machines.
The meeting of these two questions leads to the question: can medicine also be produced by machines that would replace the activity of the doctor?
M.S. – This question seems a bit academic, theoretical.
J.A. – Certainly, but it reflects the current crisis. If medicine, like education, were to be mass-produced, the economic crisis would be solved......
M.S. – Is it possible and desirable to live 120 years?
J. A. – Medically, I don’t know. I’ve always been told that it was possible. Is it desirable? I would answer in several stages. First of all, I believe that in the logic of the industrial system in which we find ourselves, the extension of life expectancy is no longer an objective desired by the logic of power. Because as long as it was a question of extending life expectancy in order to reach the maximum profitability threshold of the human machine, in terms of work, it was perfect.
But as soon as you go beyond 60/65, people live longer than they produce and they cost society dearly.........
As a socialist, I am objectively opposed to extending life because it is an illusion, a false problem. I believe that posing this type of problem allows us to avoid more essential questions such as the liberation of time actually lived in the present life. What is the point of living to 100 years if we gain 20 years of dictatorship?
M.S. – The world to come, whether “liberal” or “socialist”, will need a “biological” morality, to create an ethic of cloning or euthanasia for example.
J.A. – Euthanasia will be one of the essential instruments of our future societies in all cases. In a socialist logic, to begin with, the problem is as follows: socialist logic is freedom and fundamental freedom is suicide; consequently, the right to direct or indirect suicide is an absolute value in this type of society. In a capitalist society, killing machines, prostheses that will make it possible to eliminate life when it is too unbearable or economically too costly, will come into being and will be common practice. I therefore believe that euthanasia, whether it is a value of freedom or a commodity, will be one of the rules of future society....
M.S. – Do you see this forced normalisation governing all areas of life, including sexuality, since science today allows for the almost total dissociation of sexuality and conception?
J. A. – From an economic point of view, there are two reasons why I think we will go very far.
The first is that the production of men is not yet a market like any other. Following the logic of my general reasoning, it is impossible to see why procreation should not become an economic production like any other.
It is perfectly possible to imagine that the family or the woman is only one of the means of production of a particular object, the child.
We can, in a way, imagine “rental matrices” which are already technically possible. This idea corresponds entirely to an economic evolution in the sense that the woman or the couple will become part of the division of labour and general production. Thus it will be possible to buy children in the same way as one buys “peanuts” or a television set....
https://straight2point.info/the-1981-michel-salomon-jacques-attali-interview/