Compliance is Not Consent

To consent is to express willingness, to give permission. To comply is to yield assent; to accord; agree, or acquiesce; to adapt one’s self; to consent or conform.

WikiDiff

Compliance is not the same thing as consent. These days do you give your consent or do you find yourself complying with health mandates? At 100 Year Lifestyle, we want to support you in making informed decisions about your health. Obviously, we want you to have options and make choices. Clearly, we don’t want anyone to be made to do something they don’t want to do, for any reason. It’s your health. They are your rights. Accordingly, we know that you know and accept your responsibilities.

Coercion

Recently, in a Jerusalem Post article the author stated that “Compliance is not consent. A person’s right to clear and informed consent does not end where crises, wars or diseases begin. Compliance in its extreme form—coercion— has been studied in context running from domestic abuse to the manipulative methods used by religious cults to disarm their followers and render them submissive, to the physical and psychological torture used against prisoners of war. ”

The Biderman Chart of Coercion, created by American psychologist Albert Biderman in the late 1950s, was originally created around the methods used by Communist regimes to elicit false confessions from US POW’s. The eight methods of the chart summarized are:  

1. Isolation
2. Monopolization of a perception
3. Induced debilitation and exhaustion
4. Threats 
5. Demonstration of omnipotence and omniscience
6. Enforcing of trivial demands
7. Exhaustion
8. Occasional indulgences

Mandated Public Health Measures

Surprisingly or not, public health measures during COVID were mandated by using every method in Biderman’s chart.  Firstly, entire populations were isolated. Secondly, people focused their attention on COVID to the exclusion of everything else. Thirdly, people’s basic activities were controlled including freedom of movement with consequences for non-compliance.  Fourthly, we experienced that showing resistance is futile during times of government control. Clearly, mental and emotional exhaustion was created through lengthy and unrelenting periods of control. Finally, positive motivation was provided for conforming to demands.

Coercive Compliance

Furthermore, as society was going through the stages outlined, our civil rights were replaced with coercive compliance. We were told that we all must bow without question to perceived greater social good.

In her opinion piece in the Jerusalem Post the author, Mary Dawood Catlin, goes on to say:

Questioning, doubt and skepticism has been replaced by a new era of scientific absolutism, a world of pseudoscience disguised as academia and rendered dangerously infallible where the statistical margin for error is enormous; a new era where the God complex prevails and is sustained by the notion that “non-experts” – the mere mortals of this world – have no right to educate themselves, ask questions, get answers, object, protest, refuse to comply under coercion, or to choose for themselves. 

The coronavirus has given way to a world where freedom of thought, freedom of knowledge and the power of decision is somehow only bestowed unto the anointed few, a new ruling class: the public health official. Everyone else need not question, or think, or choose, or exist, or decide beyond the measures of compliance imposed by that new ruling class and its collaborators. The “non-essentials” need not apply.

Dangerous Precedent

Obviously, the handling of COVID set a dangerous precedent to violate people’s lives and free will. Indeed, if every war, every crisis of any kind, creates a reason to remove people’s ability to have informed consent, then we are forever allowing manipulating coercive compliance to control our fate. 

Without a doubt, informed consent—our ability to make choices for ourselves in our own best interest—is crucial for our physical, emotional, and mental health. Undeniably, it is our free will and our right to informed consent that has served us throughout history to achieve great things as individuals and collectively. So, by respecting each other’s rights we have solved the greatest problems that have affected our planet. Only by continuing to honor each other’s right to informed consent will we continue to accomplish great things.

Therefore, starting today look at the choices in your life. Above all, make sure that you are the one making them. If you aren’t, educate yourself, speak up, and make whatever changes are necessary to make sure that you are always consenting, not complying, in all areas of your life.

To that end, at 100 Year Lifestyle, we want to help you achieve your health goals. Also, we encourage you to educate yourself and make the decisions that serve you regarding your healthcare. Are you looking to create a supportive health care team? Contact a local provider today!