Sickology vs. Penology

We begin this post with a mention of the reason for the use of the word "Sickology" in the title.

Admittedly that word comes downstream from the impact of the popular documentary "Sicko" by Michael Moore.

But Sickology goes beyond those Health Care Debates/Wars into a much broader notion of Sickoness, applying the notion of pathology to civilization itself.

Yes, Sickology goes further than mere individual health issues to encompass the study of the health of the fundamental behavior of current civilization itself.

We Sickologists have even captured, with words and ideas, a workable vision for the societal dynamic that is the subject of our study.

We have isolated the motherly educational source for the fundamental behavior to a realm we tag for discussion purposes by the use of the acronym "MOMCOM".

And finally, for treatment purposes, we have isolated the resultant behavior engendered by that motherly education with the notion that MOMCOM, in essence, is the source for the infection of the hyperactive amygdala of current civilization.

We now continue this post with a quote used by blogger Randy in comments yesterday:

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”

(Aldous Huxley, emphasis added). I doubt that Huxley really understood how that would happen, since he used a traditional pharmacological mechanism to articulate his vision.

Even though as it turns out he was correct in principle, it is just that he did not understand that the mega-drug would be oil.

Oil is the drug of choice that fits the bill for "a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude", it is just that the "pharmacological method", as it turns out, is not addiction to something you buy at the local traditional drug store.

Instead, we buy the big drug at the local gas station (the "service station" in 1950's parlance), the Quick Stop, the Seven Eleven, or "the convenience store" (in post-peak-of-sanity civilization's parlance).

And we love it, like Huxley said we would.

The other word used in the title of this post, "Penology", needs to be addressed because it sounds less poetic, but in context it waxes a bit poetic as well:

pe·nol·o·gy:


1. the study of the punishment of crime, in both its deterrent and its reformatory aspects.


2. the study of the management of prisons

(Dictionary). Imprisonment is the subject of penology, traditionally the study of confinement in a traditional prison, but that is a minor issue when compared to the big league imprisonment studied by Sickology.

In Sickology there is by necessity the study of a crosscurrent, a study of the removal of freedom, the removal of democracy, because in our study we can't help but notice that increasingly the people of civilization are having to make choices based upon a partial, incomplete, rather than a full exposure of relevant factors that will bring about their demise or to the contrary their longevity as a civilization.

We see the manifestation of the disease increasingly showing up clearly since the people increasingly cannot make the choices that have traditionally been promised to them, because the neurological election systems within democracies have become spastic.

Finally, there is a poetic meaning to the word penology if you believe in the metonymic adage "the pen is mightier than the sword".

Regular readers of Dredd Blog know we got our pens workin' in this new realm of Penology because we hope to "spring you" in more ways than one.

Happy Spring ...