20.

NEO-LUDDITES
AND PANIC
MONGERS

One of the West’s current problems - especially in Europe - is growing Luddism and panic mongering. Luddism, it should be said, is named after an anti-technology movement that existed in England from 1811 to 1817, where the so-called Luddites regularly stormed into factories and smashed their machines. Modern Luddites are increasingly inhibiting the West’s creative machinery, which, as we have seen, is vital for providing the solutions to many challenges.

In 1841, the Scottish writer and journalist Charles Mackay published a magnificent book, which now seems as relevant as ever. Its title is Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, and it’s about how people move from one irrational mass movement, euphoria or panic, to the next.

One of its chapters is about a period in which Westerners frequently poisoned one another. The trick, which prevailed for hundreds of years and culminated in the 1700s, was to poison the enemy so slowly that people thought they were just dying of natural causes. The murderers would often wear finger rings with hidden poison chambers from which they could easily and unobtrusively pour a little arsenic or other poison into their enemy’s food or wine. It may not be very surprising to hear that many people seriously feared being poisoned during that time.

But now? Western civilization is largely built on the use of science-based technology, however recently people have started rejecting new scientific discoveries and technology, because they consider it unnatural and its fruits possibly toxic. Today, when life is safer than ever, Westerners are driven from one irrational panic to the next.

The fluoride panic is a good example. In the 1930s, scientists noticed that children living in the town of Minonk, Illinois had significantly better teeth than people who came to the town later in life. The explanation, it soon turned out, was that their drinking water had unusually high levels of fluoride. It was consequently decided to add fluoride to drinking water elsewhere, which on average halved people’s dental problems. Dental problems, it must be pointed out, do not concern only the teeth; they also often cause atherosclerosis and other health problems as a result of chronic inflammation.

However, this fluoride dispersion soon created a panic because the atom fluoride appears within certain poisons. Of course, so do common atoms such as oxygen, hydrogen and carbon, but no matter. Furthermore, the concerned people pointed out that large doses of fluoride could be dangerous, according to some studies. However, in order to receive such a dose though drinking water, one would have to drink approximately 500 bath tubs filled with fluoridated water within a short time. That would indeed kill anyone (even before they exploded), but this is because the water from a tenth of the first bath would cause death, since all substances are toxic in local overdose. In this case, therefore, the water dose was 5,000 times as toxic as the fluorine dose within it.

The Fluor panic was an example of the widespread Luddism in Western civilization, but vaccine panic has caused more damage, and we can take the story of polio vaccine as an example. Polio often leads to few or no symptoms, so people can carry this infection without knowing. However, in approximately 5% of cases, people have clear symptoms and the disease is sometimes called “infantile paralysis”, because, in bad cases, it will destroy the patient’s nervous system within a few hours, so they become partly or wholly paralysed for life or die. This gruesome outcome occurs in an estimated 0.5-1%.

In 1916, however, an epidemic with a variant of the strain broke out in New York City, which killed between 20 and 25% of those infected and led to countless cases of paralysis. This soon grew so awful that police sealed off the entire area so no one could leave. As this local epidemic finally subsided, it left many paralyzed, 9,023 dead, the vast majority of whom were young children.⁴¹³

Many years later, in 1953, scientist Jonas Salk announced that he believed he had developed an effective vaccine for polio. People were now invited to take test shots, and only six months later, 1.8 million children were vaccinated. A Gallup poll that year showed that there were more Americans who knew about this vaccination programme than the incumbent president’s first name. Authorities then selected virologist Thomas Francis to examine whether all these tests vaccinations had been effective.

A few months later, Francis held a press conference about his findings in a packed lecture hall covered by a number of live TV and radio networks. His speech lasted 90 minutes and he revealed that the vaccine was indeed effective. Air sirens now went off, church bells started ringing across the country, and traffic lights were set to flash red. In the schools, students were invited to a minute’s silence in gratitude for the discovery, and in many places you could find parents crying in relief. The day after the press conference, the story covered more than half of the front space in many newspapers around the world, and the New York Times devoted almost its entire front page and another five full pages inside to describing this story in all its aspects. To many people, this was simply the biggest event since the end of World War II.⁴¹⁴

Polio was far from the only infectious disease that sowed fear in the hearts of past Western populations. Another was the more dangerous smallpox, which according to ancient records probably killed 300-500 million people worldwide during the 20th century, including approximately 10 % of the children in Europe. Before the introduction of mass vaccination, it was therefore quite common to have family members or acquaintances who had died of smallpox. About 80% of those infected were children, of whom 20-60% died. The survivors could often be recognized by their heavily-scarred faces and sometimes blindness and deformed limbs.

Other common diseases include diphtheria, which is a serious throat infection that probably killed around 30% of those infected. There was also measles which today kills more than 30 % of those infected in developing countries, but only about 0.3% in developed countries. In addition, there was mumps that could cause sterility in men, whooping cough, which could kill young children, and rubella, which caused damage to foetuses of pregnant women and led to abortions or severe birth defects.

All these can be easily prevented today, and children in the West are thus routinely vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus, polio, Haemophilus influenzae type b (a bacterium that can cause a number of dangerous diseases such as meningitis), pertussis and pneumococcus, and against even more, if they have to travel to exotic areas. The one disease against which we do not vaccinate anymore is smallpox because this is the first disease ever to be eradicated via a determined global vaccination programme.

Vaccination programmes do not only protect the vaccinated individual, but also, via so-called herd immunity, those who have not been vaccinated. This is because an epidemic becomes unlikely, if a sufficiently large section of the population is vaccinated. Herd immunity mainly protects babies not old enough to be vaccinated and the very weak, who cannot take vaccines.⁴¹⁵

Here comes the problem: despite all these obvious benefits of vaccination, there is a growing group of Luddites in society who decline vaccination because it is unnatural or because, for instance, they think it can cause autism. The latter (linked to the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination) has been thoroughly investigated and clearly rejected. Because of this, many diseases that were close to being eradicated, have started to spread again, where they not only affect the deliberately unvaccinated children and adults, but also the weak and the newly-born.

Luddism also affects our relationship with medicine. Most countries have very liberal laws for natural medicine, even though it rarely works. The world’s first university professor of alternative medicine, Edzard Ernst, made during his long career 160 meta-analyses of the effects of alternative medicine and alternative therapies. He concluded that approximately 95% were no more effective than placebos. In other words, if they had an effect, it was typically due to a psychological impact on the patient – in themselves, they were ineffectual.⁴¹⁶

And so what? People can take any medicine they want, can’t they? Well, yes, but there are two paradoxes here. The first is that science-based medicine, unlike alternative medicine, needs to live up to such enormous licensing requirements that it typically cost 1.3 billion dollars to get a single licence - approximately 100 times as much as 60 years ago.⁴¹⁷ The second paradox is the mere fact that many people are distrustful of medicine that is based on scientific research, and instead consciously prefer something that is not. This is luddism.

An instinctive fear of technology is most common in Europe; probably because it is a direct cultural extension of the German Romantic movement from the 1800s, where people longed for a simpler and less technological past.

Western Luddism has also affected the energy sector. In the 1960s, many workers in the nuclear power industry viewed themselves as environmentalists, as their technology cleaned up the pea-soup air produced by coal-firing. In fact, their vision included, for instance, that the US, around the year 1990, could be completely free of fossil fuel-use. However, to their surprise, violent demonstrations broke out against this new technology, which was therefore largely stopped it in its tracks. And the Western world maintained a large dependency on coal.

Coal is, arguably, the most dangerous and polluting energy form known, and although it sounds anti-intuitive, it actually creates hundreds of times as much radioactivity waste as the same amount of energy produced by nuclear power. Yes, it’s true, because while there is very little radioactive material in each tonne of coal, this is more than offset by the amount of coal necessary to gain the same quantity of energy. And radioactive materials from coal are not stored in containers for later transmutation, reprocessing or burial. No, they are pumped into the atmosphere.

If an average person’s lifetime supply of energy comes from coal, it creates approximately 68 tonnes of solid waste and 77 tonnes of CO2.⁴¹⁸ Alternatively, uranium-based nuclear power for one person creates no more waste than could fit into a can of Coca-Cola, and its radioactivity decreases to just 0.00001 times its original radioactivity over 175 years.⁴¹⁹

Average coal mining fatalities were approximately 100,000 in the 1970s - a figure that has only gradually decreased to about 15,000 today. Similarly, fatal haze pollution from coal still stands at approximately 350,000 annually in China alone.⁴²⁰ All of this means that several million people have been killed by coal that could have lived if nuclear energy had been used instead. Meanwhile, the burning of coal in poor countries let to significant local pollution and was obviously a main source of CO2 emissions.⁴²¹

Of course, nuclear power has killed too. Between 1970 and 2014 there have been two fatal civilian nuclear accidents: Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima Daiichi in 2011. Both plants were designed in the 1960s and were thus based on highly out-dated technologies when their accidents occurred. The first of these led to 28 immediate deaths. Furthermore, a survey in 2005 attributed to it a further 15 deaths from thyroid cancer. Altogether, it led to some 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer, which, however, has a cure rate of 96%.⁴²² So by 2014 – this is 28 years after the accident - the death count was 43 people. More may come to light, but scientists have not registered an increase in any other types of cancer since the accident, although some theoretical models indicate that this should have happened. By comparison, it went almost unnoticed when a coal mine explosion in Soma, Turkey, killed more than 240 miners and injured countless others in May, 2014.⁴²³

As for the Japanese nuclear accident, two people were killed in the explosion, but it did not immediately lead to radiation-related deaths - and one should bear in mind that it was a consequence of a huge natural disaster that killed in the region of 25,000 by drowning, building collapses and so on. A subsequent analysis by the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded:

“A comprehensive assessment by international experts on the health risks associated with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (NPP) disaster in Japan has concluded that, for the general population inside and outside of Japan, the predicted risks are low and no observable increases in cancer rates above baseline rates are anticipated.”⁴²⁴

In other words: they did not expect more than those two deaths from radioactivity, despite the fact that the plant actually exploded. It should be said that some elderly and sick peole may have died as an indirect result of being moved to temporary housing due to either flooding or radioactivity and that the fear of cancer (even if unfounded) can cause stress. However, everything is relative, and the point about the death numbers from nuclear is that for each person killed by nuclear energy, several thousand have been killed by coal.

The fact is that nuclear – even old-fashioned uranium-based nuclear and not the newer and improved designs or even thorium technologies - is very safe. The US Department of Labor has, for instance, concluded that it is safer to work in a nuclear power plant than in the real estate or financial industries.⁴²⁵ Moreover, a study of 54,000 employees at nuclear power plants found, in 2004, that they, on average, had lived longer than the rest of the population and (get this) had experienced significantly less cancer. In fact, they concluded as follows: “The cohort displays a very substantial healthy worker effect, i.e. considerably lower cancer and non-cancer mortality than the general population.⁴²⁶

Overall, nuclear power is - by a fairly wide margin – simply the safest-known form of energy, and yet, it is the one about which people are most scared. The table, compiled by the WHO, compares different energy technologies.⁴²⁷

Energy form	Number of deaths per TWh (terawatt-hours)	Mortality compared to nuclear power
Coal	100	2.500 times
Oil	36	900 times
Biofuel	12	300 times
Peat	12	300 times
Natural gas	4	100 times
Hydro	1,4	35 times
Solar panels	0,44	11 times
windmills	0,15	3.75 times
Nuclear power	0,04	-

Who would have thought that solar panels are 11 times as dangerous as uranium-based nuclear power? But the main point is that it really is coal that nuclear energy would have replaced.

Here is a question, though. Why can’t we just go with clean solar, biofuels and wind energy, because even though they are more dangerous, they don’t produce any waste...?

Well, they do leave waste if you count the energy and materials that go into making them and recycling them after they are worn down (how do you recycle a giant windmill with fibreglass blades or a square kilometre or mirrors or solar panels?) But let’s leave that issue, because the main problem is another one. The serial entrepreneur Saul Griffith – who has won a number of awards for innovation and entrepreneurship – made, in 2009, some calculations that provide a useful perspective. The world used, at the time, some 16 terawatts of energy, and Griffith calculated the effort that would be needed, if six of those 16 terawatts were to come from solar power, wind and biofuels.

Here we go: if two terawatts were to come from solar panels and if we assumed 30% efficiency - which is a reasonable estimate - we would be required, by Griffiths’ estimate, to install 50 m2 panels per second (yes, per second) for 25 years. This corresponds to an astronomical 4.3 million m2 a day - every day for 25 years.⁴²⁸

That was two of the 16 terawatts. Should we wish to achieve another two via biofuel, we would additionally have to install four Olympic pools with genetically modified algae per second. And we could then add two terawatts of wind power by constructing a hundred metre high wind turbine every five seconds. Taken together, this would give us six terawatt out of the 16 and thus make us somewhat renewable.

Even if all this could be done, we would have to take into account the planet’s growing energy demand due to growth in emerging markets. Suppose it increases to 24 megawatts in 25 years and all of this were required to come, in equal parts, from solar power, biofuels and wind. We would then have to install four times as much of each, equivalent to installing 17 million m2 of solar panels, half a million Olympic swimming pools with biofuel as well as more than 1,100 new giant wind turbines - every single day, for the next 25 years, which essentially amounts to industrializing a significant part of our landscape.

So what some of the modern Luddites seem to propose is that we shut down our safest energy form (uranium-based nuclear fission), abstain from implementing far safer alternatives (thorium-based fission and nuclear fusion) and instead do roughly what we have just described above. Good luck with that.

If there is one group of technologies that can instil even more fear and rejection among Luddites it is perhaps genetic engineering.

However, as we have already seen, genetic engineering has been a central part of human history for millennia, and not only have we modified ourselves genetically, but also through selective breeding, the creation of hybrids, and so on, we have genetically modified almost everything we eat. These are the modified species that people, including environmentalists, today grow as “organic”. So what is new about genetic engineering is actually only that it is done with deeper insight and greater precision by deliberately moving individual atoms in DNA chains instead of letting it happen more randomly.

There is an overwhelming consensus among scientists that genetic engineering, when carried out under standard safety norms, is safe for humans and the environment. In October 2014, German scientists published a meta-study covering all 147 studies of the effects of the use of genetically modified (GM) crops published in English since 1995, where GM production took off.⁴²⁹ Since all major research is indeed published in English, these 147 studies represented all available scientific knowledge gathered over these 19 years. The analysis, which was financed by the German government and the EU, concluded: “On average, GM technology adoption has reduced chemical pesticide use by 37%, increased crop yields by 22%, and increased farmer profits by 68%.”

By the same time, more than 3,400 scientists, including 25 Nobel Prize winners, had signed the Declaration of Support for Agricultural Biotechnology, which expresses support for modern genetic engineering.⁴³⁰ In China, which supports such technology strongly, the Chinese Academy of Science estimated that, through the use of genetic engineering, it could reduce the use of pesticides by about 80%. In the US, the American Medical Association has issued a strong statement of support for modern genetic engineering, and the EU Environment Commissioner Margot Wallström has described restrictions against modern genetic engineering as “illegal and not justified.”⁴³¹ Many ecologists also support it strongly, and the Rockefeller Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates foundation as well as the US Agency for International Developments view it as a vital tool for improving our environment and people’s lives.

However, modern Luddites consider it would be a disaster, if we were to make modified versions of just a fraction of a thousandth of the world’s species through such technology, even if it is clear that this can solve significant environmental and resource challenges and/or save millions of people from disease and death. Besides the fact that virtually everything they eat is actually engineered already, these people somehow ignore the fact that the global biosystem constantly creates an astronomical number of natural mutations - presumably many trillion per second. An example: in 2009, the first results from the so-called Cancer Genome Project were published and they showed that, on average, there were 23,000 mutations in each lung cancer cell tested and 33,000 mutations in each skin cancer cell.17 Mutations are simply happening everywhere and constantly where they create not only cell damage, but also new ideas.

In 2004, Craig Venter, who is arguably the world’s most famous expert in genetics and the main pioneer behind the first sequencing of human DNA, explained in a speech how extensive the biological experimentation really is. Venter and his team had sailed around the Earth to collect samples of seawater which they filtered so that they could extract and analyze its DNA material. Here, they discovered that a single barrel of water from the Sargasso Sea contained 50,000 unknown species with 1.2 million unknown genes. And every time he sailed 200 nautical miles, he and his team took another sample and saw that, on average, 85% of the genes differed from what he had found in the previous sample.⁴³² Here is how he explained real time evolution:

“In the air in this room—we’ve been doing the air genome project—all of you just during the course of this hour will be breathing in at least 10,000 different bacteria, and maybe 100,000 viruses. I would look closely at the person sitting next to you to see what they’re exhaling. This is the world of biology that we live in, that we don’t see, where evolution takes place on a minute-to-minute basis.”⁴³³

And this is the point; evolution happens all around us and within us, in a massive scale and on a minute-to-minute basis. Genes come naturally from one’s parents, but can also be imported via viruses, and much of our genetic material looks suspiciously similar to some in viral genes. Genes may be introduced from one’s surroundings as naked DNA fragments or even as whole DNA strands. As mentioned earlier, mitochondria are probably bacteria whose DNA was copied into other cells, and the same goes for chloroplasts in plants.

So here is what anyone who is scared of genetic mutation should know: nature changes all the time, and 99 % of all species had perished before the first human evolved. You are a mutation yourself, and almost everything you eat and may consider to be “natural” has been mutated by your ancestors. If you are white, then it is because your black ancestors mutated and changed colour. If you can tolerate milk, that is a mutation too because of the invention of farming. Each of your own body cells has mutated massively since you were born, but 90% of the cells in your body are, in fact, not even human cells, but bacteria that also mutate all the time. You are also absolutely full of viruses, many of which are messing with the genes in your cells at any time. So if you are afraid of even the slightest change in any genes, then you are either not very well informed or not very rational. You are a Luddite.

There is something that we need to understand: we cannot go back to nature, living like the Amish or !Kung- people – there are too many of us for that now.

If we were to live without modern technology, there would only be room for the ten or so million people who probably constituted the entire global population shortly after the last Ice Age. But there are seven billion people now.

And even if we just wanted to go a little bit back in time along the line of the German Romanticism and convert to organic farming, we would also have a problem. Here is why: a European meta-study based on 109 scientific studies of organic farming concluded as follows:

“The results show that organic farming practices generally have positive impacts on the environment per unit of area, but not necessarily per product unit. Organic farms tend to have higher soil organic matter content and lower nutrient losses (nitrogen leaching, nitrous oxide emissions and ammonia emissions) per unit of field area. However, ammonia emissions, nitrogen leaching and nitrous oxide emissions per product unit were higher from organic systems.”⁴³⁴

The reason why organic farming has a net positive effect per soil unit but not per food unit is that it takes up more land. This specific aspect has been thoroughly investigated in another meta-study, which found that organic farming, on average, requires 25% more land per produced food unit.⁴³⁵ If the entire world’s food were organic, we would need to increase our agricultural land by an area corresponding to approximately. seven times the area of France. If, conversely, it were produced as intensively as in the Netherlands, we would be able either to feed 60 billion people or to convert nearly 90% of our current farmland to national parks.⁴³⁶

But is organic food at least more healthy than non-organic food? In 2012, a research team at Stanford University conducted the, hitherto, largest meta-study into that question. The scientists examined the results of 17 previous scientific analyses of health conditions in people who ate organic and non-organic food, respectively. In addition, they studied 223 studies of nutrients and various forms of pollution in many common foods that were either organic or non-organic. They did not find any clear difference between the two cultivars.

Does oganic food taste better, then? Here we also have a meta-study, and its conclusion was that if and when organic tasted better, it was only because it was dryer, so the taste components were more concentrated.⁴³⁸

To protect nature, it is vital that we drop romanticism and make our farming as compact as we can. The scientist Indur M Goklany has calculated that if the world had not used technology to boost agricultural productivity between 1950 and 2002 (which it fortunately did) we would have needed almost twice as much agricultural land in 2002 as is actually used. This difference is similar to that of India, Brazil and South Africa’s total land area. If we take an even longer perspective of 100 years – from 1900 to 2000 - the positive effect of technology on farming is even more pronounced, because over that period, we managed to multiply productivity per land unit by a factor of five. Had we not done that, we would have used the entire suitable landmass and still starved. If we focus on high-tech farming going forward, we could decrease the farmland needed even as consumption grows considerably.⁴³⁹

The reality is that Luddism and irrational romanticizing of the past actually harms the environment as well as the economy and the poor (and few things harm the environment more than harming poor people). In his book Whole Earth Discipline the ecologist Stewart Brand commented aptly:

“I dare say the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than any other thing we’ve been wrong about. We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool. In defence of a bizarre idea of what is ‘natural’, we reject the very thing Rachel Carson encouraged us to pursue—the new science of biotic controls. We make ourselves look as conspicuously irrational as those who espouse ‘intelligent design’ or ban stem-cell research, and we teach that irrationality to the public and to decision makers.”⁴⁴⁰

Luddism, irrationality and panic-mongering are probably symptoms of very natural human instincts, but the lack of major, real threats has led us to become evermore frantic about ever less.

An example is how we reacted to “mad cow disease”. In 1996, the UK health minister announced that there was a possible link between bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and a similar disease that had been observed in humans. He was right, and this disease was a real problem which could cause a horrible illness. That evening on a news programme on television channel BBC2 newsnight, the UK government’s chairman of the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee, John Pattison, appeared on screen, where he, with little encouragement from television presenter Jeremy Paxman, conceded, that the disease could kill half a million people. The following weekend Sunday newspaper The Observer referred, in a major article, to a forecast by Professor Richard Lacey, who said that the disease would kill half a million people...a year...in England alone by 2016

The actual global number of human deaths from mad cow disease has since been estimated to be at in the region of 280 - equivalent to about 0.056 % of the government’s estimate. Lacey’s estimate that the disease would kill half a million UK citizens annually was also wrong; the actual death toll was, over the following ten years, a total of 176 people (0.0035 % of the professor’s prediction).⁴⁴¹

This was a typical example of how we massively overstate dramatic risks, but just two years later, came another instance. This was centred on potential major computer problems at the turn of the millennium because many computer systems only registered the last two digits of the year and were thus not prepared to deal with the transition to a new millennium, when they would register the year as “00”. The panic became known as “Y2K”, which is short for “year two thousand” and “the millennium bug”. At a Senate hearing on the subject in 1998, senator Chris Dodd said: “I think we’re no longer at the point of asking whether or not there will be any power disruptions, but we are now forced to ask how severe the disruptions are going to be.” In July of the same year, BYTE magazine quoted technology writer Edmund DeJesus calling Y2K “a crisis without precedent in human history”, which would bring it right up there with the world wars and the medieval plague.

So a disaster of epic proportions seemed inevitable, which is why the most pessimistic people stocked up on canned food and medicine as they prepared for the downfall of Western civilization. As a precautionary measure, the Federal Reserve began, well before the turn of the millennium, to increase liquidity in the market, so as to be able to whither the coming storm better.

However, when the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999/2000, life continued as before. Subsequent analysis indicated that the only serious Y2K-related technical error worldwide occurred in England, where 154 women were sent wrong amniocentesis test results.

Just three years later came the next panic; this time it was a bird flu pandemic which, according to the UN, could kill 150 million people worldwide – more than Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao combined. However, the actual death toll was about 200 people, or 0.00013% of what was predicted.

These panic outbreaks follow a typically pattern. Since 1980, such a panic has, on average, broken out every three years, and the scenarios have included descriptions of millions of deaths, global depression or mass annihilation of plants and species. Many panics are reinforced by reports from UN institutions and other public authorities as well as in books and newspaper articles by intellectuals, which all describe the incredible horrors that await people.

So we have a panic culture, and this is also playing out at the individual level. The Red Cross was founded by Swiss businessman Jean-Henri Dunant after he arrived, by coincidence, in the Italian town of Solferino on June 24, 1859 and found 40,000 soldiers, who had been injured or killed in battle between a French and a Sardinian army with virtually no-one to assist them. Who could have guessed that this same organization would, in April 2013, launch an emergency phone line to provide psychological treatment to Norwegian teenagers who had failed to obtain tickets for a Justin Bieber concert in Oslo?⁴⁴²

The increasingly widespread use of crisis therapy is not just odd, it is also problematic, because it means people lose the ability to face resistance and to overcome problems by themselves. In fact, quite apart from the erosion of norms and culture that such activities create, in many individual cases excessive crisis therapy can do more harm than good due to “counter-transference”, whereby the victim feels worse because their therapist “feels” with them and reinforces their perception that their experience is a clinical problem.⁴⁴³

The phenomenon of increasingly exaggerated fear of anything new or unexpected is very similar to what happens to the human body if it does not experience enough natural infections. Many studies have shown that the body can not only endure many infections in small doses, but it actually needs them, as they stimulate the immune system. A healthy immune system is not only useful for the control of bacterial infections, but it also kills the thousands of more or less cancerous cells that the body naturally creates. In addition, in the absence of real problems to work with, the body may compensate for this via autoimmune reactions (attacking its own healthy cells and organs) and allergies.

A similar phenomenon is known with toxins, which if given regularly in small doses, stimulate the production of degrading enzymes, which then keep the body fit and prepared for any greater shock. When testing the responses to toxic substances, scientists often seek the lowest concentration that gives a quantifiable health problem in test animal such as rats. They will then define a maximum exposure level for humans, which may, for instance, be one promille of that dose. However, such experiments often show that the test animals do better if they are given small concentrations of poison than if they receive none at all. Thus, a large meta-study from 2000 showed that 245 out of 668 toxins (37%), were, in fact, healthy in low doses when tested on animals, plants or cells.⁴⁴⁴

Yes, healthy poison, and this phenomenon is called hormesis and signifies that for many dangerous toxins, whereas large intake is unhealthy or deadly, a low intake has positive effects. This stands in contrast to the so-called LNT model (Linear, No Threshold), which says that any load of a given poison is harmful.

The important observation is that while hormesis doesn’t apply for all poisons or infections (such as AIDS), it actually applies to a large quantity of them. Even radioactive exposure seems quite healthy in moderate doses, because it stimulates the body cells’ genetic repair and protection mechanisms. DNA is frequently damaged, and we therefore have chemicals that do proofreading and fill in missing atoms. These don’t know what the code should be, but they can see if one of the two atoms in a base-pair is missing, which they then fill in. Of course, the fact that radioactivity, which messes with genes in the first place, also triggers a correction process that exceeds the damage, does sound odd when you first hear it, but it has been demonstrated in thousands of studies. Hormesis expert Thomas D Luckey thus estimated that the healthiest radioactive exposure for humans is about 6,000 millirem. After having gone through almost 3,000 different scientific analyses of the health effects of radiation, he concluded:

“We live with a subclinical deficiency of ionizing radiation. By ignoring the scientific data in almost 3,000 reports, advisory committees and government practices have caused, and are now causing, premature cancer deaths for millions of people. We need more, not less, exposure to ionizing radiation. There is proven benefit and no known risk from low-dose irradiation. Health and increased average life-span, not risk and death, should be the guide for new recommendations and laws. With the exception of suicides and abortions motivated by fear, people do not die from low-dose irradiation.”⁴⁴⁵

So, on average, people would live longer and have fewer cases of cancer if they received more radiation than they actually do. To put Luckey’s recommendation of 6,000 millirem in perspective, the natural background radiation in most places is about 300 millirem, so only 5% of the optimum he described. For another comparison, the maximum allowable radiation from nuclear power plants in the US is just 15 millirem. The real danger of radiation, Luckey explained, typically doesn’t come from the exposure itself, but rather from the anxiety created by the mass hysteria that often surrounds nuclear technology. In another meta-analysis, Professor Joel Kauffmann from Philadelphia University concluded:

“The prevailing view of regulatory agencies and advisory groups is that all radiation is bad for health, and exposure to any form of it should be minimized. While high-dose radiation, regardless of source or intention, is harmful to health, evidence is presented that chronic doses up to 100 times those of normal ambient (including medical) exposures are beneficial, mainly due to lower cancer rates. Further evidence is presented that single, acute doses of up to 50 rad are beneficial, including in treatment of cancer and gangrene. Data are cited to show that below-ambient radiation levels are unhealthful, and that some radiation may be essential for many life-forms.”⁴⁴⁶

Hormesis is akin to what happens when you grow stronger by training muscles hard or gain more energy in general by periodically draining your energy through jogging. If you carry out a blood test on an athlete in the middle of his tough training, you will typically see a lack of oxygen and overdose of free radicals, which, in itself, seems unhealthy. And yet, sport is healthy in moderation and even quite large doses. The same applies to moderate mental stress and much more, as shown in the table below.

Potentially beneficial effects of moderate physical and psychological stress
Impact	Possible beneficial effect
Tough sport	Stimulates blood circulation, muscle building, bone strength and immune systems
Infections	Strengthens the immune system; prevent autoimmunity and allergy
Mental stress	Promotes happiness, ability to concentrate and ability to cope with future stress
Poison	Promotes the production of toxic degrading enzymes
Radioactivity	Triggers DNA repair mechanism

All these panic stories show that Western civilization, as a whole, has developed severe autoimmune and allergic reactions to the fruits of its own creativity, and this undermines the spirit that made Western societies great in the first place.

This value shift is reflected in gradual changes to how societies make decisions about risk. The traditional principle is simply to weigh expected benefits and risks against each other, and this is called a “cost-benefit analysis” (or common sense).

The aforementioned “linear no-threshold” or LNT model (the one assuming that the negative effect is directly proportional to exposure) can provide input to cost-benefit analysis, which is correct unless there is a hormesis phenomenon in play. However, the increasing trend is first, to ignore any hormesis and thus always use the LNT model; and second to use its results as input to “precautionary principle” models instead of cost-benefit models. The precautionary principle states that nothing new can be done unless it can be proven, without doubt, that it can cause no harm whatsoever. This is called “proving a negative”, which is in most cases theoretically impossible.

There are even people who go further and use the so-called “slippery slope” argument, which says that even if a technology or behaviour is acceptable according to both cost-benefit analysis and the precautionary principle, it should not be used because that would be a slippery slope leading to a more malicious use of the same technology later. For instance, one should not do video surveillance of dark streets, because this is a slippery slope towards watching people everywhere. And one should not clone extinct mammals, because that can be a precursor to cloning a T-Rex, which eat people.

If we really were to model our lives on the LNT model, the precautionary principle and/or the slippery slope argument, no one would drive a car or start a business. Nor would we eat cherries, apples, tomatoes, raw almonds, apple cores or potatoes, as all of these contain toxins. Nor would anyone eat shellfish, peanuts, sweet dairy products, kiwi, sesame, corn, egg, soy or wheat, as these can trigger dangerous allergies and digestive problems. Beer, wine, coffee, mushrooms, red peppers and much more probably couldn’t be approved either, if someone invented or discovered them today.

What about table salt? No, this poison is extremely dangerous in large quantities. Extremely! And you would not be able to play football, go cycling or have sex - not to mention get pregnant.

In 2003, a group of scientists organized a conference In London called “Panic Attack: interrogating our obsession with risk”. This included presentations of many other examples of technologies that would not have been possible according to the modern precautionary principle. These included innovations such as antibiotics, birth control pills, blood transfusion, organ transplant, hybrid crops, microwave ovens, radar, refrigerators, telephones, televisions, water treatment, and X-rays.

When you really think about it, Vikings and Columbus would never have discovered America had they followed the precautionary principle, as their ships were not safe. And the Wright brothers would never have shown us how to fly.

The problem, if you refuse to make cost-benefit analysis, is that you end up rejecting better solutions because they are not perfect, which leaves you stuck with the old ones which are worse. For example, many of environmentalists oppose fossil fuels, nuclear power and hydroelectric dams, which together make up about 90% of world energy supply and almost 100% of that of many Western nations. Or they are against modern agricultural technology and deforestation, although rejection of the former will inevitably lead to the latter. They will often oppose sea fishing, but also fish farms. They oppose wealth growth, even though this has been shown to be the best way to stop population growth. They just want to stop the world, because it is dangerous, so they end up opposing each step that could make it less dangerous.

In his story The Fable of the Steak Knives, previously mentioned Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales describes how absurd the mentality of the Neo-Luddites really is. If one were to launch the world’s first steak restaurant today and suggest that people should be provided (armed) with knives at the table, the precautionary principle would probably require diners to be shielded in cages to avoid bloodshed.

Wales could also have used the slippery slope argument here. What is the next step, if we really let people use arms in restaurants? Samurai swords? Guns? No, it’s a slippery slope!

We started this chapter with a discussion of toxins, so let’s end it with a little more about them - this time with a focus on how they may stimulate cancer. One of the world’s leading researchers into the relationship between toxins and cancer is Bruce Ames of the University of California, who invented the famous Ames Test to get a swift indication of whether a substance is carcinogenic (cancer stimulating). Based on several decades of research in the field, he and his staff concluded:

Approximately 99.9% of the foods modern humans eat is natural; the remaining 0.1% is artificial.

Similarly, 99.9% of all the pesticides that humans eat are natural toxins produced by plants to defend themselves against fungi, insects and other animal predators such as ourselves. So only 0.1% of the pesticides we eat are artificial.⁴⁴⁷

This means that natural and artificial food contains approximately equal proportions of toxins, but because 99.9% of what we eat is natural, 99.9% of the toxins we eat are also natural. And even though we spray plants with artificial toxins (and organic farmers do it with insect-killing bacteria, copper, etc.) artificial toxins (but not cobber) sprayed on the plants typically degrade before or after harvest (but before we eat the plants). The plants, on the other hand, produce their own pesticides constantly until the time when they are harvested.

So what do these numbers mean for us? Ames illustrated this with an example: a single cup of coffee contains as many natural pesticides as an average American consumes in artificial pesticides during an entire year. Put in another way, just 80 cups of coffee gives us as much poison as all the artificial toxins we will consume throughout our entire life. And yet, despite this, most studies show that moderate daily intake of coffee is quite healthy for most people. So if we get cancer, it is extremely unlikely that it came from anything produced with modern technology.

How unlikely? Studies by Richard Doll and Richard Peto concluded in the 1980s, that just 2% of all cancers could be attributed to artificial compounds in food and elsewhere; the rest came from smoking, unbalanced diets, infections and hormonal imbalances. In fact, tobacco and unbalanced diets alone accounted for two-thirds of all cancers.⁴⁴⁸

Moderation is the key word here. The body likes a balanced diet and lifestyle, but it can actually also benefit from hard work, mental stress, infections and even many toxins and increased nuclear radiation, as long as everything is moderate. Not too much, but (and this is the important part) not too little either. And yes, even steak, coffee and red wine seem to be healthy when consumed in moderation

Luddism, irrationality, panic and refusal to weigh costs against benefits are all elements of the same story. It’s about excessive self-taming that inhibits innovation, and the slippery slope argument plus the precautionary principle can, in themselves, pretty much destroy it. As Robert Bailey of Reason Magazine wrote aptly in 2003, you can describe thee precautionary principle as this: “Never do anything for the first time.”

China became static when its inhabitants were prevented from sailing out to sea, and the Ottomans lost their dynamism when they forbade the search for new knowledge in printed books. Many in the West have now become intellectually autoimmune, allergic to innovation, enemies of science, and instinctive opponents to doing something for the first time. This irrational longing for a static society costs society billions and leads to unnecessary loss of animal and human life. The problem is, as Franklin D. Roosevelt put it in his inaugural address in 1933:

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”⁴⁴⁹