Guided Thought | William Batten

Yesterday, I spent a thousand words on a different take on the lockdowns.

While everyone debates the effectiveness of the covid countermeasures, I questioned the lack of variety.

If it’s a crisis, then we should see hundreds of countermeasures. Every week, you’d hear about some promising new drug or a new way to stop it spreading.

Just like how, every week, you hear about a new way to cope with the lockdowns. Businesses have creative ways to keep earning money. Social groups adapt so they can still keep hanging out.

We’re seeing that with the lockdowns, but not what causes them.

I put this out there to bring something into your conscious attention.

You all heard our leaders say, “lockdowns and vaccines are the only way through this!”

Some of you noticed there was something weird about that. Something off. It’s more than just noticing how this ‘solution’ puts all the burden on you and all the profits in pharma companies.

Some of you noticed that something was missing from this plan.

Right from the start, the plan was “lockdowns!” then “lockdowns and vaccines!”

It reeks of a false trichotomy. Either you’re a psychopath who wants millions to die… or you want the lockdowns to last forever… or you support the vaccine plan.

When framed like that, who’d be insane enough to question that strategy?

Well, we need to question it now. The evidence coming in is that vaccines won’t cut it, even if everyone gets them. That means we need another alternative.

I bring this up because many of you heard this false trichotomy of a plan and had your doubts. There was some niggling unease in the back of your mind. There was something wrong about the way politicians said “this virus is new but we know with full certainty that mass vaccination is the only answer!!”

Then you probably ignored that instinct. After all, some niggling feeling of yours isn’t better than science, is it?

Hmm. Except science never said the vaccines were the best way forward. There was certainly not a lick of evidence to say it was the only way forward.

Your instinct was right, in the end.

You ignored it and it was right.

Here’s the thing about your instincts: the more you trust them, the better they become. If you keep ignoring them, then they’ll stop whispering to you. If you learn to hear what they say, though, you can find yourself coming up with strange ideas, creative solutions and keen observations ‘out of nowhere’.

You have brilliant instincts. The quality of your life depends on how easily you recognise them.

Like many things, it’s a skill you can learn.

And hypnosis can accelerate that.

But I’m not here to teach you to listen to your instincts. Maybe one day, but not right now.

Instead, it’s much faster and easier to tap into your instincts regarding a specific question.

So if you have a big decision to make and you’d like to see what your instincts say…

… sign up for Threshold Coaching & Crossroads Training below:

https://guided-thought.com/appointment

How many ways are people trying to solve climate change?

There are plenty of technology swaps people are making. Like, say, replacing coal power plants with solar farms.

Some tech goes towards reducing the bad stuff, like experimental gut bacteria for cows that stops so much gas falling out of them.

Other tech reverses the bad stuff, like carbon capture.

Then there are policy solutions – things like emissions caps, carbon taxes, industry standards, tax breaks for green tech.

There are things individuals can do, like eating less meat, using less power and planting trees.

I could go on. In fact, that might be a fun project for someone: list all of the ways we, as a species, are scheming to stabilise the environment. The sheer quantity and variety of projects would have to be impressive, right?

Let’s take another example:

Because I’m studying the early days of World War 2 – around Dunkirk and the Phoney War – let’s think about all the ways the British prepared for a Nazi invasion.

They sponsored guerrilla attacks in France, studied German codes, developed radar, welcomed Poles and scrutinised Hitler’s psyche. They considered any and every method to defeat their enemy, whether militarily, psychologically, economically or logistically.

If they could starve, demoralise, deplete, redirect, harass, distract, irritate, confuse, confound or trap the enemy, they would. It would have been foolish – criminally negligent – if they only focused on killing their soldiers. War is a crisis you can fight on many fronts.

Again, there was a huge variety of approaches here. People turned their lights off at night to make it harder for German bombers – that’s one approach.

Another?

Churchill built secret oil pipes to the southern beaches of the UK. If the enemy tried to invade, they’d land right in the middle of a firestorm.

I can imagine an early draft of Churchill’s famous speech. “Actually, we won’t fight them on the beaches. We’ll just set the bloody things on fire.”

This is how societies face crises. Problems can sneak by unresolved, but a crisis invites people to think outside the box and attack the problem from every angle.

So I guess covid isn’t a crisis then.

Because I think about the so-called solutions to it and I’m not impressed.

If I were to list out vaccines, lockdowns, masks and contact tracing, my question naturally is… okay, what else? If this is a mild inconvenience, sure, we might not do much more than that. But this is a crisis, so they say.

So why aren’t they treating it like one?

I’m glad vaccines are on the list. They’re a key part of modern medicine and, in this case, they seem to help.

But I’m horrified that vaccines are the primary – really, only – solution that they use that has any long-term chance of succeeding.

Where are the non-vaccine-based pharmaceutical interventions? I heard about ivermectin months before Joe Rogan mentioned it, where a panel of doctors were discussing how it was promising but the authorities didn’t want to know about it. They refused to even research it. Ivermectin can’t be the only drug that ever showed promise. Covid and the countermeasures will cost billions, maybe even trillions, by the time this runs its course, so surely it’s justified to pursue all leads.

Most leads won’t pan out. So what? Vaccines aren’t the silver bullet and we pursued that lead anyway.

What about non-pharmaceutical-based solutions? There’s a boatload of research that shows what keeps people healthy and boosts their immune system. You know, stuff like fresh air, exercise, good sleep, sunlight and socialising. Where are the policies that support those?

And no, I don’t count enforcing lockdowns while advising people exercise as a good solution here.

Where are the other things I haven’t thought of, since I’m not a society? I couldn’t have fought the Battle of Britain on my lonesome, after all.

Want to know the funny thing?

People and businesses have responded to the lockdowns like how I’m describing here. People have been extremely creative in doing stuff virtually, hygienically or at the required distance. Society has responded to the crisis of lockdowns better than it has the crisis of covid.

Reflect on that a few times until it sinks in. If it hasn’t clicked for you that lockdowns are a crisis separate from the virus they supposedly fight, meditate on it.

Anyway…

There’s a conspiracy theory that says Big Pharma are restricting non-vaccine-based countermeasures, because this maximises their profits. Calling it a conspiracy theory immediately invalidates it if you think in terms of branding. After all, crazy people believe stupid conspiracies and you’re not crazy, so this must be wrong.

There’s no way rich and powerful people would mislead the public to become richer and more powerful.

Even though they have in the past.

But still, there’s another explanation.

Medicine is weird.

Medicine doesn’t like creative solutions. They tend to lead to snake oil and hidden side effects and irradiated babies and expensive lawsuits.

An engineer looking to fight climate change can tinker in their garage… or a sophisticated R&D lab.

A doctor looking for a new treatment can’t ‘tinker’. They have to run everything by 17 ethics boards who might get in trouble for saying ‘yes’ but will never get in trouble for saying ‘no’. Then they have to figure out what works in biology – the messiest, noisiest experimental context in the known universe.

Sloppy physicists can measure things to six decimal places in an afternoon. Biology takes decades of double-blind studies where the noise can and will swallow any signal.

So, yeah, the medical system can hardly get creative when it comes to fighting covid. They’re constrained by both policy and reality.

By design or coincidence, that puts Big Pharma in a situation where they’re offering the only answer in town.

It’s like if the British handed their soldiers guns with no ammo and torpedos but no ships.

Then spent ages arguing how guns and torpedos are proven to be effective in winning wars.

Then wondered why it’s not working.

All while the soldiers and citizens have nowhere else to turn.

Eh, I dunno. Conspiracy or not, these solutions are utterly inadequate, worth questioning and not worth sacrificing your freedoms for.

Questioning policy is never unscientific. If a policy hurts your livelihood or reduces your freedoms, then you absolutely should look deeper.

Maybe that policy really is the best way forward, but you wouldn’t take a politician’s word for that, would you?

As I get to this point in the article, I realise I have no answer here. This is a lot of words to say that maybe there’s a vast conspiracy or maybe we’re too constrained to solve this problem – either way, there’s not much you can do about it.

Except treating this as a good-vs-evil, logic-vs-insanity issue. Even if CEOs are milking this crisis for money, that doesn’t mean the everyday folks pushing for vaccination are evil.

Same with the ‘resistant’ folks – they, too, are acting on righteous and rational reasons.

So let me give you an answer that’ll help:

Rather than using this as another excuse to feel angry, smug, outraged or indignant… do better.

Show wisdom and compassion.

Consider why people believe what they believe, while you assume they have virtue and intelligence.

Unite, rather than divide.

Live better, protect you and yours, and demand more from your leaders.

Enjoy a Neural Reset or three.

https://guided-thought.com/appointment

If you take the weeks of pauses from between the messages, covid advice looks like this:

We need to lockdown for three weeks to flatten the curve.

Okay, actually, we need to lockdown until we develop vaccines.

Okay, we’ve developed vaccines, but we can’t end the lockdowns until enough people get them. And you should get them! They’ve been tested – they’re perfectly safe and highly effective.

Okay, they’re not perfectly safe, but they’re safe enough.

Okay, they’re not that effective against the current strains, let alone new ones, but you should still get them.

Oh?

What’s that?

You have concerns?

Right, I didn’t realise you were a science-hating anti-vaxxer nut job. Maybe if you weren’t such a degenerate, brainwashed moron, you’d believe whatever politicians say the science is now.

This is a disaster, start to finish. If this is an important issue, then it’s vital to communicate well.

That means not constantly contradicting yourself.

It also means responding appropriately to critics.

It’s fair enough for people to have questions, concerns and doubts. Back when the narrative was that the vaccines were perfectly safe, I questioned that. What, in medicine, is entirely safe? A new drug with a new mechanism is not going to be safer than aspirin.

People told me I was arguing against the science, yet I was right. Was that because I’m smarter than science? Ha, hardly – I just spotted science’s brand masquerading as Settled Science.

I can’t argue with science, but I sure as manure can argue with marketing and policy.

“But William, you’re being unfair. Of course the narrative changed! That’s the strength of science – it adapts as new information comes in.”

Yes, science’s superpower is humility. While others search for Truth in tradition or how intensely people feel something, science tests everything. It demands evidence for every claim. Hypotheses can’t just fit the data – they have to make bold predictions better than other hypotheses.

No belief is beyond scrutiny – although not all beliefs are equally uncertain.

Sir Fred Hoyle was a brilliant physicist, who greatly contributed to our knowledge of stars and matter. He also refused to believe in the Big Bang – not based on evidence but based on his personal beliefs. He didn’t like that it left room in physics for a creator deity – that the Big Bang stank too much like the Book of Genesis.

That was an arrogant stance to take. If he happened to be correct, it would have been by luck.

If he had approached the question with a humble mind, he would have considered the evidence and been less wrong about the whole thing.

I’ll say it again: humility is science’s superpower.

Where in these covid messages and policies has there been a scrap of humility? At every turn, it’s been, “early studies seems to weakly suggest X, although it’s all still an open question, so… X is the Truth! Full speed ahead!”

You can’t tell people they’re idiots for not believing you, then claim to be humble in your beliefs later. That’s not how logic works, let alone science.

Genuine science-based policy would look something like this:

“Based on what we know right now, vaccines might be a bet. They will almost certainly have costs that we don’t know about. The cost of inaction, though, is clearer to us. We’re questioning this advice every day, comparing it to every alternative we can think of. In the meantime, this is the plan.”

Don’t hold your breath waiting for a message like that. Scientists advance their careers through humility, but it’s poison in politics.

We’ll keep hearing the dance of “we know this is true because SCIENCE… oh, wait, that was wrong, but THIS is definitely true because SCIENCE!” for a long time yet.

This should be obvious to anyone with a lick of training or common sense. Everything that I’ve spoken about here is remedial science. If this shocks or offends you, then you don’t science at all.

Yet go onto any science-based forum or community. You’ll find a minority of folks pointing this out as they get drowned out by meme-making, anti-humble losers who love – genuinely love – science’s brand…

… but nothing else about science.

After all, real science is hard. Real science plasters the universe with shrug emoticons – some of them big and in neon, some of them small and faded.

Forget that – it’s much more gratifying to pretend you like science and laugh at people who buy crystals.

Anyway, why do I keep talking about this?

Because back in my Twitter days, I’d see this all the time. Folks would say something like, “boy, I wish hypnosis were real, that seems like it could really help with my issues.”

There are probably hundreds of scientific journals dedicated solely to exploring what hypnosis can do. Hypnosis is Settled Science – there’s no question that it’s real and it’s powerful.

But it doesn’t seem like science. It seems more like New Age nonsense, if you go by impressions and not… you know, evidence or the scientific method.

Science is 100% on hypnosis’ side, but science’s brand is square against it.

As a hypnotist, that means science is my ally and science’s brand is my enemy.

If politicians and the media want to lean the latter, then I’ll call them out on it. Same with businesses, marketers and random people on the street.

Science’s brand, divorced from science, should be a poisoned chalice. Anyone foolish enough to drink from it should suffer embarrassment. Believing something that seems scientific but has weak science to back it should be shameful and humiliating.

I genuinely wish that I found thinking stupid thoughts to be physically painful in the moment. Anyone who thought like that would become smarter over time. No information could ‘corrupt’ or ‘brainwash’ them – it would only add to their wisdom.

If everyone felt pain on thinking a stupid thought, we’d have a paradise on Earth by 2022.

I can’t make that happen. The next best thing is to shame anyone who embraces science’s brand while pretending they’ve embraced science.

Anyway, I mentioned hypnosis a while back.

Get some here:

https://guided-thought.com/appointment