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Ron Peters's Reviews > Charlatan
Charlatan
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“It is human nature that repeats itself, not history.” John Toland (1970) The Rising Sun
The story of John R. Brinkley – huckster extraordinaire, a psychopath who would do literally anything (to someone else) for a buck – is certainly interesting in itself. But which recently former U.S. president does this contemporary description of Brinkley remind you of?
“Obviously he was eaten with vanity and ambition and his only measure of success was in terms of dollars and influence…. It must be a terrible thing to have to keep telling the world how wonderful you are and to want so badly to achieve what is really impossible. We have much to fear from these people, but in a sense, I think, they are tragic.” (p. 210)
For me, this is not about the gullibility of the public way back when. This is a cautionary tale about how capitalists invariably behave under ideal libertarian conditions. Brinkley lived in a time when there was negligible control over who could call themselves an M.D. It was also the prehistoric era of malpractice law. Physicians were ineffective so, unsurprisingly, sick people gravitated to con men who claimed to have exactly what they needed. There was no Food and Drug Administration to stop the sales of useless or harmful nostrums. And virtually no regulations controlled advertising claims or what was communicated via the new mass medium of radio.
Nowadays, what do we see in the last unregulated Wild West of social media? Just take one look at the Wikipedia pages on the List of unproven methods against COVID-19 (https://tinyurl.com/3vy3v3s3) and COVID-19 misinformation (https://tinyurl.com/4cazdjem) and you will see that the level of public gullibility is identical to what it was more than a century ago.
We really are as dumb as ever. We need to be extremely leery of the level of deregulation we have permitted since the 1980s, at the behest of Big Money. This simply puts more profit in the pockets of those for whom money is the only measure of the good while endangering the public interest.
The story of John R. Brinkley – huckster extraordinaire, a psychopath who would do literally anything (to someone else) for a buck – is certainly interesting in itself. But which recently former U.S. president does this contemporary description of Brinkley remind you of?
“Obviously he was eaten with vanity and ambition and his only measure of success was in terms of dollars and influence…. It must be a terrible thing to have to keep telling the world how wonderful you are and to want so badly to achieve what is really impossible. We have much to fear from these people, but in a sense, I think, they are tragic.” (p. 210)
For me, this is not about the gullibility of the public way back when. This is a cautionary tale about how capitalists invariably behave under ideal libertarian conditions. Brinkley lived in a time when there was negligible control over who could call themselves an M.D. It was also the prehistoric era of malpractice law. Physicians were ineffective so, unsurprisingly, sick people gravitated to con men who claimed to have exactly what they needed. There was no Food and Drug Administration to stop the sales of useless or harmful nostrums. And virtually no regulations controlled advertising claims or what was communicated via the new mass medium of radio.
Nowadays, what do we see in the last unregulated Wild West of social media? Just take one look at the Wikipedia pages on the List of unproven methods against COVID-19 (https://tinyurl.com/3vy3v3s3) and COVID-19 misinformation (https://tinyurl.com/4cazdjem) and you will see that the level of public gullibility is identical to what it was more than a century ago.
We really are as dumb as ever. We need to be extremely leery of the level of deregulation we have permitted since the 1980s, at the behest of Big Money. This simply puts more profit in the pockets of those for whom money is the only measure of the good while endangering the public interest.
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