There is a very important 1974 book of Ivan Illich which today should be reread and re-edited. It is called “Medical Nemesis” and has as its object what Illich himself defines, in the subtitle, the expropriation of health. There are many issues addressed that have a strong impact on the understanding of the present linked to SARS-CoV-2.
In the first place it shows how the very concept of health is historically and socially determined and therefore connected, with the specific traits on the political, economic and social level, of a specific society, of a historical mode of production. Secondly, Illich argues that our society is undergoing a progressive integral medicalization, linked to the processes of capitalist business. In essence, explains Illich, health itself becomes an economic question, a mine from which profit is extracted, so that capital, which also becomes pharmaceutical capital, cannot refrain from the attempt, from the fury, to also occupy the space of the life of individuals, uniting so bio-politics in the Foucaltian sense to the economy, to the very reduction of the bios.
Thirdly, Illich adequately shows how in fact our society tends to consider us all more and more often as sick. Comparing Illich’s considerations with our present, I believe that there are notable and interesting points of tangency that need to be interpreted critically.
First of all, we can reasonably argue that the new society of the therapeutic leviathan, which has taken shape in the figure of new techno-sanitary order, in fact, it has the characteristic of treating us all as potentially sick and thus explains the intrinsically oxymoronic and unknown category before covid-19, of asymptomatic patient.
Before, there was only the healthy carrier, who was by definition a healthy subject even if a carrier of the virus. If, on the other hand, we all become potentially asymptomatic sick, this means that the society of citizens with rights and duties no longer exists. On the other hand, there is a mega clinic as extensive as the society in which there are only potential patients who must submit to the diktats of white coats, so that they cannot exempt themselves from being treated for not only their health but also the health of all the others. who are at risk of contagion.
This is why the new technical-sanitary leviathan puts in the foreground the figure of a hiatocracy that foresees the power of white coats and this is also why the new technical-sanitary leviathan tends to consider us all as potential patients.
I will not elaborate further on the question of the business of the new pharmaceutical capitalism because it is clear as sunlight where it is, just look at the immense business of mass blessings with the ever-praising sacred serum. Exponential profits, very low taxes, the work case scenario for pharmaceutical companies is the end of the pharmaceutical emergency, just as that of arms manufacturers coincides with the end of wars in the world.
One point I want to draw attention to is this. L’infamous green card of discrimination is the clear proof of this: today we are treated as potentially ill subjects. It is taken for granted that all of us are sick and we must always prove again and again, with special certificates, with samples, that we are healthy. No more healthy citizens who happen to get sick, on the contrary sick people who have to prove each time that they are healthy. This is why we are faced with a new figure, unprecedented and unknown in the past: the figure no longer of the right to health but that of the duty to health. The citizen cannot afford to be sick, he must continually show that he is healthy. This is why, to take Ivan Illich again, the integral medicalization of society is taking place.
Sick instead of citizens, blessings of the masses and therefore care for all: this is the secret of the hypertrophic insistence on the subject of vaccinations. Unlike treatments, which concern the sick in the strict sense, vaccinations concern the whole reduced society as a clinic. Everyone ends up being medicalized in one way or another. Here, then, is the secret heart of the new medical-technical leviathan, which we can decipher with the support of an enlightened thinker such as Ivan Illich.
Radioactivity, flashes of thought with Diego Fusaro