I finished Our Malady. All screenshots are from the Kindle edition.
Our Malady book opens with Yale professor Timothy Snyder (who you all know is one of my favorite scholars) in a hospital after a series of medical mistakes almost killed him.
Flannery O’Connor, in Mystery and Manners, says that facing death is the “most significant position life offers . . .” While facing death—and feeling rage and trying to regain full consciousness—Snyder begins writing this book.
He talks about three maladies, and how they are connected:
- His own malady
- The malady in our healthcare system
- The political malady that made commercialized medicine possible.
He ties this all back to individual freedom, and concludes that:
In the US, the privileged get better healthcare, which makes them feel good because what they get is better than those lower on the hierarchy:
Snyder compares Vienna’s high-quality healthcare (and childcare) to ours. What ordinary workers in Vienna get is better than the quality of healthcare that privileged and wealthy in American receive. He argues that when medicine is commercialized, as it is in the US, profits matter, not health, so health suffers.
When healthcare is only available to the wealthy or those who work, we are all living in a kind of gulag:
Commercialized healthcare often reduces medicine to a choice: pain v. pills. It’s the limited pain v. pills option that created the opioid crisis (the pills let us deny our pain) and made us less free.
Someone profits from the pills. Other options may be better, but they are less profitable:
Snyder notes that in 2016, Trump won the places with the most opioid addiction. The pills masked the pain and thus created rage by failing to solve the underlying problem, and by increasing the isolation.
This explains why authoritarians have no incentive to halt a pandemic: They can harness and manipulate fear.
Snyder talks about why Trump didn’t want to test for the virus:
Elsewhere, when asked why Trump let the virus rage when it was hitting blue states, Snyder said: “A virus is a lazy man’s ethnic cleansing.”
He gives an example of how profit-driven hospitals kill people:
Doctors too often are driven by profit-creating algorithms, and put in a subordinate position. Snyder wants to put doctors back in charge.
How many people are stuck in a job they don’t like and can’t seek other opportunities because they need health insurance? Now having unequal access to health care, he argues, makes each of us less free.
The book succeeds as a
🔹memoir
🔹scathing critique of our healthcare system
🔹manifesto for becoming free
The premise is this: When a government tries to create fairness instead of maintaining a hierarchy, we are all healthier and happier.
