Health and the "Cult" Label: Interview with Sylvie Simon (2012)

Sylvie Simon, who was born in 1927 and died in 2013, gave this interview to CICNS; the video’s title dates it to November 2012. In it she describes how, in her account, the “cult” accusation is deployed in the debates surrounding non-conventional medicine, reaching the government, the Ministry of Health, the Ordre des médecins and the media. Her statements are her own testimony and are presented as such.

CICNS interview. (English translation of the interview published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 22 January 2013 and dated November 2012 in the video’s title. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation; passages the machine could not reliably hear are marked [inaudible].)

[Interviewer]: Born in 1927, Sylvie Simon is an essayist, writer and journalist, and has published some twenty books on particularly sensitive health subjects. She fights against received ideas and every form of dogmatism in matters of health, and here denounces the growing influence of the actors and the dialectic of the anti-cult movement in the debates surrounding non-conventional medicine.

[Simon]: In a book I published some time ago, I show how much these people have meddled in things that are none of their business. If someone wants to treat themselves even by prayer, that is the patient’s business. Everyone has seen the damage done by conventional medicines at the moment; it is not surprising that people turn to other medicines, and that — that drives them mad. And since they have no argument, well, immediately the argument is: you belong to a cult.

That influences the government, it influences the Ministry of Health, and above all it influences the Ordre des médecins, since the Ordre des médecins is infiltrated by the MIVILUDES. They have been working with the MIVILUDES for 12 years, and now it is taking on enormous proportions. In the course of the inquiry carried out by the Ordre des médecins, there are the testimonies of all the patients who say: we were asked the question, did Doctor So-and-so have Buddhas in his home, was there incense burning, and so on. And even if a doctor wants to have incense at home, it is hardly a crime.

The therapists — they were called “patamedicines”, but these are not patamedicines: these are medicines that were discovered by researchers, by people who are very capable, who are far more learned than many doctors who merely repeat like parrots what they were taught at medical school. When they appear before the council of the Ordre, they are told: you saved So-and-so, that is true, but you had no right to do it with the molecules you used. I once attended the trial of a doctor who said: listen, short of tying up my patient and carting her to the institute like a sausage, I could not — she refused. She came to see me because she knew I treated differently, but there was no question of taking her back to an institute that had sent her home to die. I would point out that ten years later, she is still in good health.

Rumour is very, very important, because people do not even know. You know, as soon as it is said that they belong to a cult… One day, I was invited to give a talk at the home of a woman who, indeed — I do not know her name — treated people by magnetism, and she had brushed aside a small association; there were people, and it met once a month, and they would invite a speaker. I was invited to give her talk; she was just starting out. I said to myself: why not, it was not very far from Paris. I went, and there was a rumour going around saying that she belonged to a cult. There was one person who had come to the talk, because the others said: we dare not come, because if we go, we will be regarded as belonging to a cult too. And this woman who had come had gone through another part of the village so that she would not be seen arriving at this poor woman’s house. This woman, who had only just settled there, was forced to leave the village because there was the rumour — there was only the rumour; she had no trouble. But from the moment people said: but you know, she belongs to a cult, it was as if she had the plague.

Myself, one day, I remember, I was invited to give a talk in a maison de la culture, and the Ordre des médecins had sent word to the person who had invited me — and it was, after all, a somewhat State-linked body — had said: there is no question of you inviting people whose ideas do not conform to those of our government. And that is called plurality, is it, that is called democracy? We are not in a democracy at all, we are in totalitarianism, only we do not know it — that is the only thing. We are in a banana republic.

You know that denunciation works very, very well in France. In the Nazi era, it worked very well; in the Vichy era, all the people who could be accused and who were not guilty — but they were accused because someone wanted to get hold of their flat, they were accused of being Jewish for this or that reason — it is truly lamentable, and we are coming back to that period. A man wants to regain custody of his child, or conversely a woman: she often accuses her partner, whether man or woman, of belonging to a cult.

Journalists censor themselves to please the governments in place, and that is well known. Nowadays they take up the AFP dispatches and they do not go looking for the origin of the rumours going around. So obviously, you cannot be forbidden from publishing books, you cannot be forbidden from advertising those books, but you can be forbidden… the State television channels are completely closed; they will never have you on. And when they invite people onto what they call adversarial debates, the opposing speakers are always incompetents whom they choose, because they are incapable of finding the arguments. There are any number of people who could put very solid arguments to them; they are never invited, because they are too afraid of them. When I am invited onto television once, I am not invited a second time.

I have any number of friends who are biologists, who are researchers, who are not clowns, who are not mentally ill. And these people were interviewed by French television for 3 hours, 4 hours, 5 hours; they were filmed and everything, and at the last moment, the film was not broadcast. It was cut, because when it reached the upper spheres, they were told: wait, if we put people like that on air, they will cut off the advertising that is paid for by all those lobbies. You know very well that the newspapers belong to big groups, and that all the groups have grouped together, and that the pharmaceutical lobby is far more powerful than the arms lobby was in the past. It has become the most powerful force in the world.

So it is obvious that as soon as you oppose that, you run up against big, big, big bad wolves. Myself, I do not put myself on their vibrations, I do not attack them, I am willing to talk with them. Every time I was told: you will have an interlocutor who will be against you, I said: fine, I am quite willing to discuss with them. I am not like Mr Fenech, saying: those people, we do not speak to them. On the contrary, I want to know whether they are really sincere or not. And I have met some who were very sincere, and they were totally misinformed. And the number — you cannot imagine the number of people who worked in the pharmaceutical industry, who came to see me, who telephoned me, or who said to me: I am glad to meet you, because I worked in the pharmaceutical industry, and I am ashamed of what I did. There are any number of them. Do you believe those people belong to that cult? This business of dragging cults into everything is the only argument they have. It proves they have no scientific argument of any real value.

I believe the thing that has been most abandoned in the world is common sense. And very often, the more studies you do, the more you lose your common sense. There is a kind of general brainwashing, and people no longer think. That is what I tell them: think about the problem a little, and you will see that you will find solutions. But people say to you: ah, but it is true, you tell me that, but I had not thought of it. I had not thought of it at all, indeed. So people do not think; they no longer think. We no longer have the freedom to think. We are too conditioned by everyday life; everyone is busy — métro, boulot, dodo (commute, work, sleep), you know, that is really it. And people no longer have time to read, no longer have time to listen to anything other than what they are served on television, at home, and they swallow it all, and then afterwards they repeat it. And when you ask them for proof, they tell you: ah, I do not know, but we saw it on television. But television is not gospel truth, for goodness’ sake.

The Éducation nationale — the state education system — does not teach you to think. Now, there are certain teachers who are truly very, very, very fine people, precisely, who try to form their pupils, but very often the Éducation nationale brings them back into line. It tells them: you are giving lectures of your own that are not in the books; you are there to teach the lessons that are in the books. So you see, even education is completely directed — we are under total dirigisme. The certificat d’études of former times, which was somewhat looked down on by all the people who went on to higher study, is well above, as a level of culture now, the baccalauréat that is taken today. People’s instruction is being reduced more and more, and then parents are reproached for wanting to do the schooling themselves? Well, I understand them very well. Me, if I had grandchildren, I would tell them: do not go to school, and I will teach you things myself. And that does not mean one belongs to a cult. And it is normal that there should be several people — one of them will be the maths teacher, for example, and another is very strong in literature — it is normal that they should join together to make a little school with 5 or 6 pupils, and then afterwards it grows.

I would not go in for belonging to a group of people, because groups irritate me; I find that each of us is a free electron, and that we should all think for ourselves. But if there are people who want to belong to cults, to say prayers together every month, that is their business, for goodness’ sake. That is what matters. So let us stop talking about three people who get together to pray under the pretext that it is mental manipulation. People are in any case responsible enough; we really must give people their responsibilities, teach them to think. You are not taught to think, since you are told: if you do not think like the people who govern us, you are a dissident. Well then, why should we not be dissidents? There you are.