The cost of a lie.

What I learned from Elizabeth Holmes

Sorry I haven’t been updating as often as I should, sometimes I get overwhelmed by the gender nonsense and just can’t look anymore. When that happens I like to look at documentaries, podcasts or books about something that interests me. What interests me unfortunately is anomalies that pop up in the cultural landscape. I’ve been looking at the Elizabeth Holmes story as an example of something that can go wrong in an economy trying out progressive ideology.

Modern progressivism is an ideology of dreaming big and working hard, the ideology of equity and fairness for all, the ideology that technology will continue to expand and innovate at alarming rates, an ideology that the people with all the money have all the best ideas and all the best morals.

Elizabeth Holmes was the darling of the progressive world when her start-up Theranos was imagined to have ground breaking technology, dreamed up by a beautiful university dropout from American white bread entrepreneurial royalty. Before dropping out of Stanford, Holmes took her medical technology idea to Stanford medical professor Phyllis Gardner. Gardner told her that her idea would never work simply because of the way the human bodies are. Those of us who have lived on the planet a longer time, can assure young people that the realities of the human body will not be fundamentally changed with vision and youthful energy.

Progressive ideology is so powerful in California, and Holmes was so well trained in its rules, that she ran a multi-billion dollar company with no working product for over ten years in the heart of silicon valley. The real product of the business, the thing that a lot of wealthy, powerful rich old white men paid for (including Henry Kissinger and Rupert Murdoch), was the promise of a future where money and vision can defy the realities of the human body.

One of the YouTube investigations I watched on this issue was from a woman who got interested in the issue ten years ago, while working in a lab. The woman’s boss, a pathologist, said that she knew for a fact the company was “bullshit” because it could never do what it said it was doing. Homes was claiming to defy the nature of blood and the known rules about the way blood behaves after leaving the body, and the conditions under which blood will allow us to extract its information.

When questioned about the shortcomings of the machine she was producing, Homes came out with a range of equity ideology, about the democratisation of healthcare and that somehow people had a human right to, and that people should be able to get a cancer diagnosis without drawing vials and vials of blood. But there is no such human right and inventing one does not change the rules of the human body and the way blood provides information on sickness.

This little rabbit hole has highlighted to me that the great gender deception in our society, is part of a larger error in the worldwide adoption of American progressive ideology in areas where progressive ideology is going to lead to bad outcomes.

We can’t build good things on lies. A lot of money, mixed with ill placed faith will build a façade, a narrative, a marketing story, but ultimately it will all end in tears.