The last twenty months have seen an unprecedented transfer of wealth from poor to rich, and from small independent businesses to large corporations. The processes by which this has happened are now well-described; and includes the exploitation of mass testing and personal protective equipment, the profitable system of bio-surveillance with its consequent testing and monitoring systems, the pharmaceutical industry selling new products, and the stranglehold of large corporations forming monopolies as smaller competitors have been forcibly closed.
This process, which has led to an expansion of wealth of the billionaire class, is built on a societal shift in which we have all become primarily medical objects, rather than citizens living in and sharing in society together.
Rather than be ‘in partnership’ with medical decision makers, we have become objects – objects to be masked, vaccinated, tracked and traced. As objects we become a resource for financial exploitation, from which profit can be made.
The medicalised objectification of humans long precedes the start of the pandemic in 2020. The French physician Charcot in the late 19th century described an unusual syndrome in women, where those that were suffering from the syndrome had symptoms of headache, paralysis, blindness, loss of sensation, fits of crying or screaming, and other nonspecific symptoms. Charcot described the illness as hysteria. Charcot held public lectures, in which he would select from a list of patients and would induce and demonstrate the signs of hysteria, in public, to impressed crowds.
A contemporary of Charcot commented ,“[e]ndowed with the spirit of authority, [Charcot] handled his subjects as he would; and without, perhaps, taking them sufficiently into account, he suggested to them their attitudes and their gestures. … At the command of the chief of staff, or of the interns, they [patients] began to act like marionettes, or like circus horses accustomed to repeat the same evolutions”.
The historian Shorter explains that through this process of inducing hysteria, Charcot created a new way to be ill; “through his writings and his public demonstrations of hysterical patients, he then popularised this new illness and spread its template for others to follow. Charcot-style hysteria remained a common diagnosis throughout much of Europe, but after his death in 1893, the popularity of this presentation began to sharply decline.”