Informed consent is the term given in law and commerce to describe the condition of a person having all relevant information known to them prior to making a decision.
There are various statutes that proscribe how this is to be applied – insurance terms and conditions, investment prospectus, health regulations, even nutrition information panels on food products.
This is to ensure that people making decisions are fully appraised of all factors, for and against, and are not blind-sided by factors that would have affected their decision if they had known them prior to making the decision.
These different pieces of legislation came about as a result of various unsavoury activities – from withholding information all the way up the scale of dishonesty to deception, lies, fraud, confidence tricks, covert attempts to harm or kill etc. Any means by which a person could be led to make a decision not in their best interests.
As we have experienced during the Great Covid Con, even governments, their agencies and medical authorities, let alone educational and medical research institutions, big Tech, big Pharma and the media have all been guilty of abusing this principle.
OK, that’s all about ’the other party’. What about you and me, the person making the decision. What’s our responsibility in this?
Well first, we have to be prepared to look at the actual facts of the situation. Not what we’d like to see, not what we hope to see, not what was there before, not what we are told is there, not what is inferred to be there, but what is actually, observably there, here and now in present time.
Only by looking at what is there can we be fully informed for our decision.
“No argument!” you say, “Makes perfect sense.”
Oh yeah, but do you do it? How well do you apply that principle of “Informed Consent” to your decision making?
Do you read the political platform statements of the representatives for whom you vote come election time?
Do you read the nutrition information panels of every food purchase you make?
Do you know the health risks of every food additive, colouring, preservative and flavour enhancer you allow in your diet from ultra-processed foods?
Do you know the 20 different names by which aspartame is called on food labels?
I don’t pose these questions to make you wrong but rather to illustrate the point that we can all do better in applying this principle in our lives. And be better off for doing so.
Now I know what most will think when reading this, that it’s all too hard. There is so much to know and I am busy enough already.
But as I have in my personal email footer:
Our most formidable enemies are:
Personal and collective ignorance,
personal and organisational out-ethics,
lack of personal integrity and
lack of self-discipline.
What we don’t know and what we know we should do but do not discipline
ourselves to do are two things that will kill us. Gradually or suddenly.
Self-discipline is a skill and just like any skill, it improves with practice.
On what are you going to practice yours today?
To your being better off!