The ‘Expert’ Moral Academics Who Want to Use Special Mind-Control Pills to Infect You With Environmentalism

And also Covid compliance and a thoroughly lax parenting style

Recently, Chris Morrison reported on the Daily Sceptic about a pair of US academics, Professor Parker Crutchfield and Assistant Professor Blake Hereth, both of Western Michigan University, and their lunatic scheme to genetically modify a certain obscure species of tick to deliberately infect innocent Americans with an allergy to red meat and dairy-products, thereby forcibly turning them vegan to save the planet.

Dissecting their careers further, it turns out the idea of using ticks to spread the debilitating disease of veganism is not even half of it. Professor Frankenstein and Igor are qualified experts in the arena of Medical Ethics, specifically a new, little-known sub-field known as ‘moral bioenhancement’. What does that mean? Quite literally, it means the art of chemically modifying humans – in secret, without their prior permission or knowledge – to make them more agreeably Left-wing.

Moral Hazards

Blake Hereth is the junior partner in all this, and his trial will probably take up a shorter amount of the judges’ time come the forthcoming Medical Nuremberg, so let’s deal with him first. Who is he? Well, on his website, Hereth helpfully introduces himself thus: “I'm Blake. I'm proudly nonbinary (pronounsthey/them), bisexual, and disabled.” Physically or mentally? By the way, look carefully at the way he writes the words “they/them” there; now we even have coloured pronouns to remember, just in case you happen to perceive gender by synaesthetic means as well as all the other ones!

Hereth is a PhD (Phucking Dickhead), and as such thinks he knows better than you do how to raise your own children: by forcibly reprogramming your brain, like in A Clockwork Orange. Hereth proposes making parents no longer able to properly discipline their offspring without triggering an injection of drugs into their skulls, to stop adults slapping or shouting. Here is a description of a talk Hereth once gave, called ‘A Simple Argument for Compulsory Parental Neuronetting’, the word ‘neuronetting’ being an obfuscatory academic synonym for ‘chemical mind-control’:

It takes a mind truly steeped in the complex intricacies of Medical Ethics to be able to draw the conclusion that giving the State the ability to inject its citizenry’s brains with doses of cannabis in order “to prevent parents from abusing their children” (unless said abuse involves encouraging them to mutilate their own penises or vaginas in the name of the sacred trans-cult, presumably) is a good idea, in fact a morally compulsory one, rather than one of the most sinister and intrusive abuses of governmental power ever proposed.

Amongst Blake Hereth’s other academic publications are papers with titles like ‘What’s Wrong with Child Super-Soldiers?,’ and a pair of bizarre-sounding theological pieces, ‘Heavenly Overpopulation: Rethinking the Ethics of Procreation’ and ‘The Shape of Trans Afterlife Justice.’ It makes sense a man called Blake would be interested in matters relating to Heaven and Hell – but which one will he be ending up in himself personally one day?

Moral by Oral

Also destined to prove the road to Hell is paved with good intentions is Hereth’s tick-loving co-conspirator Professor Parker Crutchfield, another complete PhD by all appearances.

Crutchfield first came to general non-specialist attention during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic back in 2020, when he published a piece advocating administering so-called “morality pills” to non-compliant members of the public to compel them to wear masks and get jabbed up:

COVID-19 is a collective risk. It threatens everyone, and we all must cooperate to lower the chance that the coronavirus harms any one individual. Among other things, that means keeping safe social distances and wearing masks. But many people choose not to do these things, making spread of infection more likely. When someone chooses not to follow public health guidelines around the coronavirus, they’re defecting from the public good… To me, it seems the problem of coronavirus defectors could be solved by moral enhancement: like receiving a vaccine to beef up your immune system, people could take a substance to boost their cooperative, pro-social behaviour. Could a psychoactive pill be the solution to the pandemic?

But what, precisely, would a “psychoactive” morality pill look like? The PhD explains:

What if researchers developed and delivered a moral enhancer rather than an immunity enhancer? Moral enhancement is the use of substances to make you more moral. The psychoactive substances act on your ability to reason about what the right thing to do is, or your ability to be empathetic or altruistic or cooperative. For example, oxytocin… may cause a person to be more empathetic and altruistic, more giving and generous. The same goes for psilocybin, the active component of ‘magic mushrooms’. These substances have been shown to lower aggressive behaviour in those with antisocial personality disorder and to improve the ability of sociopaths to recognise emotion in others [perhaps you should take some, then?]. These substances interact directly with the psychological underpinnings of moral behaviour; others that make you more rational could also help. Then, perhaps, the people who choose to go maskless or flout social distancing guidelines would better understand that everyone, including them, is better off when they contribute, and rationalise that the best thing to do is cooperate.

The problem is, how to get the habitually noncooperative to swallow such drugs in the first place? Crutchfield suggests one solution “would be to make moral enhancement compulsory or administer it secretly, perhaps via the water supply”.

Or how about infecting some ticks with it, and then getting them to bite everyone and spread chemical compliance amongst the population that way?

Moral Crutch(field)

This is no aberrant one-off, but part of a consistent pattern. The blurb for Professor Crutchfield’s book Moral Enhancement and the Public Good remorsefully states that “Currently, humans lack the cognitive and moral capacities to prevent the widespread suffering associated with collective risks, like pandemics, climate change, or even asteroids.”

Therefore, he “argues for the controversial and initially counterintuitive claim that everyone should be administered a substance that makes us better people… without our knowledge”. This scheme “best promotes liberty, autonomy and equality”: equality because absolutely everyone gets the mind-control drug whether they want it or not, and liberty and autonomy because, whilst you are indeed having your brain manipulated by the government in this way, that’s still far freer than you would be if you had been killed by global warming or if a giant asteroid had just fallen on your head.

As the professor argues in his 2019 paper ‘Compulsory Moral Bioenhancement Must Be Covert’, “if moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory, then its administration is a matter of public health, and for this reason should be governed by public health ethics”.

One short year later, the COVID-19 pandemic came around, and we were all about to see what such “public health ethics” would look like in applied practice.

Moral Poser

Here is a poster advertising a talk Crutchfield once gave to lucky WMU students (those who didn’t attend had it broadcast into their ears whilst asleep anyway, without them ever knowing):

“Saving Us From Ourselves”? Who’ll save us from him? Crutchfield’s basic justification for forced public mind-control is that, as he once wrote elsewhere:

Where it used to require an extraordinarily coordinated effort to cause ultimate harm, now, or in the near future, it only takes one person. Thus, moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory for everyone… [either via imposing it upon them by stealth, or via punishment policies, including] isolation (e.g. preventing dissenters from fully participating in society), taxes or fees as penalties or, in severe cases, imprisonment.

He means that the possible future advent of nuclear terrorism, or of gene-editing advances making it feasible for nihilists to create and release deadly new plagues onto mankind, make it easier than ever before for a lone loony to destroy the planet: so let’s destroy free will instead to make this impossible.

Yet, if you also read his poster, you will see that “climate change” is listed there as one of the key future threats to humanity: so his proposed morality pills will not only stop you from selfishly nuking the Earth’s core, but also presumably from ever using a petrol-powered lawnmower or drinking a glass of cow’s milk ever again without your brain instantly being flooded with cannabis by the Environment Secretary.

This may all sound rather inhuman, but so what? Humans are deeply imperfect and messy things, and need to be replaced with a whole new model species as quickly as possible. If you examine the final part of his poster, you will see Crutchfield’s true goal is to force mankind to evolve away from its currently limited moral and intellectual capacities, in which some primitive souls will insist upon continuing to burn hydrocarbons, shun vaccines, discipline their kids, etc., and become an entire new post-human species.

New Moral Army

But what will these future post-humans look like? Uncannily like Professor Crutchfield himself, I would hazard. Here is the abstract for his 2020 paper ‘Engendering Moral Post-Persons: A Novel Self-Help Strategy’:

Humans are morally deficient in a variety of ways. Some of these deficiencies threaten the continued existence of our species. For example, we appear to be incapable of responding to climate change in ways that are likely to prevent the consequent suffering. Some people are morally better than others, but we could all be better. The price of not becoming morally better is that when those events that threaten us occur, we will suffer from them. If we can prevent this suffering from occurring, then we ought to do so. That we ought to make ourselves morally better in order to prevent very bad things from happening justifies, according to some, the development and administration of moral enhancement. I address in this paper the idea that moral enhancement could give rise to moral transhumans, or moral post-persons. Contrary to recent arguments that we shouldn’t engender moral post-persons, I argue that we should. Roughly, the reasons for this conclusion are that we can expect moral post-persons to resemble the morally best of us, our moral exemplars. Since moral exemplars promote their interests by promoting the interests of others (or they promote others’ interests at the expense of their own) we can expect moral post-persons to pursue our interests. Since we should also pursue our own interests, we should bring about moral post-persons.

This is nothing less than a new proposed form of moral eugenics, in which, when he speaks of wanting to make people “resemble the morally best of us, our moral exemplars”, he obviously means already enlightened Left-wing beings like himself and his good friend Assistant Professor Blake Hereth – and not, for example, you or I. This is precisely the same kind of logic that once made the Borg and the Cybermen – but at least they were fictional threats against all humanity, unlike this pair of Dr Mengeles.

I say Dr Mengeles – but Crutchfield and Hereth no doubt think they are more like Dr Albert Schweitzer. Truly, they appear to feel they are doing humanity some actual good, not evil. I am reminded of C.S. Lewis’ famous quote, to the effect that:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of Earth.

The one saving grace of all this, of course, is that ‘moral bioenhancers’ in the form of ‘morality pills’ or similar do not actually exist – yet. But that is hardly the point. If and when they do, Crutchfield and Hereth sincerely think we should make good use of them, and are busily drafting a complete moral public health framework to justify enabling politicians to do so. As Crutchfield once wrote:

People who volunteer for moral bioenhancement are not those about whom we should be most worried. It's those who have no interest in being better people that should worry us.

I think those who should most worry us are actually ‘good’ people like him.

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.