Iatrogenic and Politigenic Harms

These harms result from mistakes make by physicians and politicians.

Words have power to influence human behaviour

Medicine has a term for health conditions that result from errors made by physicians- “iatrogenic”. (etymology:  Greek iātro-, combining form of iātrós "physician, healer").

Likewise, harms resulting from errors made by politicians and pubic officials can be classified as “politicogenic”. This term was coined in 2017 by retired German Climatologist Dr. Werner Kirstein when he took to  “blasting the politicization of climate science and taking issue on how data are (mis)handled and deceitfully presented to the public.”

I prefer a  shorter version of this term - “politigenic”.

Modern Western societies are rife with politigenic problems. 

The Climate Change Crisis is just one of many. It would be in the best interests of all Canadians to systematically identify and root out the underlying causes of politigenic harms wherever we find them. If Dr. Kirstein’s assessment was correct, politically motivated propaganda is one of those roots and much of it is endemic to many public institutions.

In The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Dr. Mattias Desmet says that four conditions must exist in a society before large numbers of people are receptive to the kind of mass hypnosis that characterizes a mass formation psychosis. The most powerful of these is fear. If you stop to think about it, I don’t doubt that you will we agree with me that ‘the state’ (and all of the institutions it controls, especially the media) as the most effective progenitor of fear in modern society.

Consider all of the bad consequences of government policies

Books have been written about the politigenic harms from policies like carbon taxes and experimental Covid injections. Every public policy that inadvertently puts some innocent person in jail, fines someone for an idiotic reason, causes someone to become sick, or freezes a personal bank account for political reasons - these are just a few examples of politigenic harms.

If we all begin to use this word, it will give us a little more leverage to deal with stupid government actions and the careless politicians and bureaucrats who thoughtlessly inflict those harms. They will wince every time they hear the word spoken in public and, hopefully, think twice before they pass new politigenic statutes.