I never knew how far my disillusionment with established institutions would take me. I want to tell you about the latest example of this I’ve discovered, but let me give the broader context first.
The Politics Compartment
My gateway into all this was global politics, which I teach for a living at a small private college. Following actual global politics, it turns out, requires a near wholesale dismissal of most everything you read or watch in the major (i.e. establishment, commercial, corporate, mainstream, legacy) news media. You learn the history of US military interventions in Latin America, for instance, and then realize that the New York Times supported every one of those that it decided to weigh in on. You hear from people in those countries, you hear from independent journalists, you hear from foreign leaders, and you hear from your own conscience, the same thing: that these were wars of imperialism, of domination, of profit. But you see that the New York Times, which is now critical of these wars of the past, supported them with the noblest intentions at the time.
And you wonder: if they supported these acts of naked American aggression and domination in the past, well, then if there happened to be similar acts of naked American aggression going on right now, then they would probably be supporting those as well, with all the same moral fervor. And you lose your faith in the Grey Lady, and in other major news outlets. You no longer think they’re giving you “all the news that’s fit to print.” And when you see the same pattern with wars in the Middle East, and elsewhere on the globe, your suspicions are confirmed, time after time after time. Iraq. Libya. Syria. Ukraine.
You see simplistic stories of evil bogeymen and heroic American saviors. Saddam. Qadafi. Assad. Putin. Can they all be this straightforwardly evil? You realize that no, this is not reality but a comic book. And reality starts to look different after you’ve taken the comic-book glasses off. You start to see the American empire for what it is. You read Caitlin Johnstone and start to see the narrative of the establishment media for what it is:
“The argument, when you boil it right down, is that if America wasn’t constantly starting wars, invading sovereign nations, staging coups, sponsoring proxy conflicts, arming terrorists, bombing civilians, torturing people, implementing starvation sanctions on impoverished populations, pointing nuclear weapons everywhere, spying on us all with a globe-spanning Orwellian surveillance network, interfering in foreign elections, and patrolling the skies with flying death robots, the Bad Guys might win.”
You wake up and realize that the Bad Guys are not who you thought, and that somehow they have control over the media itself.
You realize you can’t trust our media institutions or our political institutions to tell us the truth about world affairs. Too corrupted by empire, by power, by profit.
Many people will get this far, and then plug the dam right there. But if you let the reality of institutional rot and corruption seep in past the barricade, it will naturally leak outside of the foreign policy compartment, and outside the politics compartment. It starts to bleed into other parts of reality.
Spilling out
I was mildly suspicious of medical authorities to begin with. I didn’t trust pharmaceutical companies, and I knew about regulatory corruption in the FDA, for instance. But after COVID I see a much fuller picture of rot in the healthcare system. I’ll never look at doctors the same way. The refusal to treat patients until it was too late, intubating patients who needed ventilation, mandating experimental injections, enforcing mask-wearing and the arbitrary six-foot rule: most doctors went along with all of these. And all of these have by now been proven to be useless or worse.
How could so many smart people get it all so wrong? That’s when I started seeing the parallels between medical professionals and my own profession. American scholars of global politics would rarely talk about US foreign policy in simple terms of imperialism, power, and profit. Even if you personally saw it in those terms, your career prospects were far better if you didn’t oppose the consensus that the US were the good guys, and the bad guys were those who opposed us. Better to keep your head down, despite your own beliefs. Is there a similarly oppressive consensus governing the statements and conduct of medical professionals? Are they incentivized not to speak out against this consensus?
Of course there is, and of course they are. COVID made these things undeniable.
COVID was just like any other propaganda blitz from foreign policy. David Edwards and David Cromwell, in their book Propaganda Blitz, use this term to describe what happens when the media “attacks and discredits ‘Official Enemies,’ preparing the way for action or intervention”. A propaganda blitz typically includes the following features, all of which COVID carried in spades: “allegations of dramatic new evidence, emotional intensity and moral outrage, perceived consensus among experts, and condemnation of those who question the consensus” (p. 1, Cromwell and Edwards, Propaganda Blitz, Pluto Press, 2018). It was tempting to just leave COVID there, as a strangely medical case of a propaganda blitz.
Seeing further
But what if this system of consensus formation among professionals and institutions is the norm, and not the exception? What if all sorts of professionals are systematically taught to follow the herd, and even if they don’t want to follow it, are incentivized to at least keep their mouth shut? What if the shame of being branded a ‘conspiracy theorist’ is just as effective at silencing debate in all sorts of other professions?
If that’s true then whole industries could be built on lies. The medical industry. The food industry. Neither would the nonprofit industry nor political activism be off limits.
With this realization I started seeing the world more clearly. I could recognize corruption, careerism, and self-censorship in all sorts of distant places, and not just in those two things (foreign policy and COVID) that had landed close enough to home for me to take notice. I had been short-sighted in my vision of the extent to which our expert class is twisted by incentives to deceive us and to deceive even themselves.
Not seeing further
You might say I was near-sighted. I was no stranger to myopia: I can only see clearly within 9 or 10 inches of my face, and then from there on out it’s blurry. I have worn glasses since 2nd grade.
I am not alone in this. In fact, more people have myopia than ever. According to the World Health Organization, in 2020, 33% of the world population was myopic. This is up from 22.9% in 2000, and is expected to hit 40% by 2030.
Yet, most optometrists will tell you that myopia is mostly genetic. But just look at the numbers: if this were just a genetic disease, how could it possibly double in the population in the space of 35 years? Myopia was incredibly rare just a couple centuries ago. Are nearsighted people really that much better at reproducing? The very idea is ridiculous.
There may be some genetic component to myopia, but clearly that is not the main driver here. In other words, your optometrist is not telling you the truth. He may not be knowingly lying to you, but he’s almost certainly wrong if he tells you your myopia is a genetic defect.
Believing it to be just part of my own genetic makeup, I often asked myself how I would survive in the wild. I mean, this is pretty bad vision we’re talking here—I can’t even make out the E at the top of an eye chart from ten feet away. I would not be able to hunt prey or recognize a member of my clan from twenty feet. I would have been dead weight to my band of hunter-gatherers, and in all probability a genetic dead end.
I have kids. Their mother and I are both near-sighted and need glasses to function in everyday life. How is it that they still have good vision as teenagers? How is it that my parents didn’t need glasses until much later in life? Genetics cannot explain all this. But then what can? And why would experts in the field maintain this fiction of genetic myopia?
In second grade, my mom noticed me squinting to see things in the distance. We went to the optometrist and I got glasses, which allowed me to see much more clearly. They felt weird at first, but I adapted. In fact I adapted so much that I kept needing stronger lenses as the years went by. By the time I was in my thirties I had a prescription of -4.5 diopters in both eyes, with some cylinder correction for astigmatism on top of that. What all of that meant is that I couldn’t see clearly any further than 22 centimeters from my face.
Creeping myopia
Here’s how it this all happened. I had good vision as a kid. But I had been reading a lot of books and playing a lot of videogames as a second grader (okay, probably more videogames), and those close-up activities put strain on my eyes. When you focus on close-up objects, the ciliary muscle in your eye contracts. This is the muscle that focuses your eye, and it only relaxes when you look into the distance. Our eyes are meant to be looking in the distance most of the time. (I loved learning that and pondering the significance of it—that we are meant to be looking out into the distance, and it is a strain for us to focus too close for too long.)
But when looking at close-up range most of the time instead, the ciliary muscle stays contracted in a spasm and has a hard time releasing to relax. This ciliary spasm is experienced as blurred vision for distant objects. This is known as pseudomyopia. Try this little experiment: stare at a small screen for ten minutes (ha, I bet you have been already!), then look up and try to focus on something 20 feet away or further. You’ll notice it takes some time, maybe even several minutes, for your eyes to be able to focus on distant objects, because your ciliary muscle needs time to relax out of the contracted position it has been held in while looking at the close-up screen. This is pseudomyopia, and if you never spend significant lengths of time outside using your distance vision, your ciliary muscle will be in constant spasm and you will have this blurred vision pretty much all of the time.
At some point you’ll probably go to the optometrist, as I did. They will examine your eyes, while they are still in ciliary spasm (and under artificial lighting, no less), and the eye test will tell you that you are nearsighted. They will then offer you glasses as a way to fix the problem. And although glasses are a letdown and a bit of a hassle, you will likely be excited to see clearly again.
But this is when the real myopia starts to set in. Remember how my glasses took some getting used to, but eventually my eyes adapted? That adaptation took the form of my eyeball lengthening, to compensate for the lenses I had in front of them virtually all the time. The lenses bring the focal point further back to the retina (at the back of the eyeball). If the lenses are overcorrecting (as is usually the case), the focal point will be behind the retina. The eyeball will lengthen to bring the retina back, closer to the new focal point. This lengthened eyeball is actual myopia, and the vast majority of cases of myopia are lens-induced. (Yes, I’m citing scholarly search results pages—in case you’re like me and need to see it for yourself to believe it.)
Your eye shape has always been adapting to your focal point, even if you don’t have glasses. When you were a baby you were farsighted because your eyes were too small to capture the focal point, which was behind your retina. As your eyes grew in length, your vision became clearer until the focal point landed just right on the retina, and you had more or less perfect vision. Your eye, having developed to the right length, then homeostatically kept that shape, even if ciliary spasm sometimes temporarily kept you from seeing clearly in the distance.
So here’s the good news: it turns out there’s nothing wrong with my eyes, and, fellow nearsighted reader, there’s probably nothing wrong with yours! My eyes were just adapting to the lenses I had put in front of them, and those lenses were typically overcorrections based on temporary ciliary spasm.
Back to the big picture
The bad news is, of course, that my eyesight sucks now, even if my eyes have been behaving exactly as healthy eyes should. I’ve trained them into myopia through constant use of lenses. But in the meantime, who has benefited?
This question brings us back to the experts. The optometrist’s bills have been paid, that’s for sure. And not just from appointments and tests. Optometrists also sell you lenses. And they make much more money if you buy lenses than if you walk away with a clean bill of optical health. And to add insult to injury, the lens industry is one of the most overpriced and monopolized industries on the planet. Both the lenses and the frames cost just a few bucks to produce at this point.
In fact, if an optometrist kept up with the science of lens-induced myopia, and started telling kids with ciliary spasm to just get outside for longer stretches of time (as the WHO suggests) and see if their vision clears up, she would have a hard time staying in business. Not only would customers looking for a quick fix look elsewhere, but that optical shop wouldn’t have many lifetime subscribers. They wouldn’t be putting anyone on the path to permanent corrective lenses.
But a customer like me—I’ve been sold a permanent subscription to corrective lenses. Even though optometrists use the language of prescription, eyeglasses are really more of a subscription. The whole model is that I am a dependent customer who can’t live my life without the services provided by lens manufacturers.
But is there any way to cancel my subscription? If there’s nothing wrong with my eyes, maybe they could be shortened by reversing the lens-induced process by which they were lengthened.
How to Unsubscribe
Now that is an exciting idea. Just the thought that I actually might be able to wake up and see clearly without putting on my glasses seems miraculous, especially after spending all my life thinking there could be no going back. Well it turns out a whole lot of people have gone back, many of whom had vision that was even worse than mine.
But how? See, there’s the rub. It’s a very gradual process that takes time, and it isn’t all that easy. The basic idea is that you make your environment and your habits such that your eyes shorten by the same adaptive process by which they lengthened to where they are now. You put the process into reverse.
There are several components to this. The first is to reduce close-up eye strain. Less time on screens and books is good, and when using screens and books, you use a weaker pair of glasses so you can see only as far as you need to. So I now have reading glasses (some call them differential lenses). This will avoid ciliary spasm, which otherwise will prevent any progress.
The second component is the pair of glasses I use the rest of the time. These are just slightly weaker than my old prescription glasses—one notch down, basically (some call them normalized lenses). Things in the distance are slightly blurry because the focal point from these lenses lands just a tiny bit in front of my retina. So, when I wear these glasses, my eyes think they are little bit too long and will, over time, adapt by shortening so that the retina meets that focal point. Over the course of a few months, my eyes will have shortened to adapt to that level of correction, and I will see clearly through those weaker lenses. I will then be able to jump down to the next level of weaker correction, and so on down the line. This is the same process as lens-induced myopia, but in reverse. I’m simply ratcheting down the need for correction instead of ratcheting it up.
That’s the central idea, but a couple other pieces need to be in place for this to go smoothly. One is that I have to spend time outdoors: at least an hour a day, and ideally 2-3 hours. The point here is that I have to use my distance vision if I want to improve it. The other is that I have to discipline my eyes to actively focus as far out as I can. This is something my eyes haven’t had to do as much as they should, since the lenses have overcompensated and made it unnecessary. But this is exactly what stimulates my eyes to adapt back to the shape they should be in.
This is how people have been able to correct their vision: by changing their habits, taking their time, and purchasing quite a few pairs of glasses along the way. (Fortunately, you can order glasses online for much less than you might expect, since the monopoly optical shops charge you around a full order of magnitude more than they should. I’ve been using Zenni Optical online. Expect to pay around $30 per pair.)
Distance vision
It is a miraculous idea that I can fix my vision, but in reality it will take years. I’m at -4.25 diopters, and the next notch will be -4.00. It’ll take 3-4 months for each notch. This means it will take probably at least four years until I no longer need glasses (and apparently the last bit is the most challenging bit). I’m a couple months into the first notch, and I have most definitely noticed improvement, even if I haven’t been as disciplined as I should be. These weak glasses are not as weak as they first appeared to me. The world has gradually gotten clearer.
So even once I had convinced myself that this could work, there was still the significant question of “is it really worth it?” I’ll need to change my habits by using screens less, and getting outside more. I’ll have to carry around my reading glasses, and ultimately spend about $500 on 16 different pairs of glasses. I’ll have to consciously use my distance vision and challenge my eyes to clear up blur in the distance to provide the stimulus for them to shorten back to 20/20 vision. It will take some long-term discipline.
I decided that yes, it’s worth it. For one thing, it really would be awesome to liberate myself from glasses. For another, I already know how rewarding it is to improve my health, so how much more rewarding will it be to improve something I never thought I even could? And of course, as a contrarian I would love nothing more than to prove wrong a whole industry, and to prove wrong the dominant narrative about eyesight that industry has made us all swallow in the name of a business model. And to prove that I’m in charge of my eyes after all.
So I’ve got my reading glasses and my just-slightly-weaker normal glasses, and I use my phone less. I take walks and otherwise get outside every day, I try to find places where I can gaze over vast stretches (Dubuque is great for that, it turns out!), and I try to challenge my vision and actively focus into the distance. Minimizing screen time and getting outside more were already things I wanted to do, and now I have a more concrete reason to do them, and some real results to aim for.
It will take discipline, yes, but in the end, that only strengthens the appeal. I have been myopic my whole life, in more than one sense. It’s poetic that in order to gain back my eyes’ long-range vision, I must commit to a long-range plan. I’m not very good at long-range plans, to be honest. And that makes this all the more worthwhile: it is a quest to overcome both my near-sighted eyes and my near-sighted mind.
Additional Resources for the curious:
An excellent beginner’s guide in video form.
This is the most comprehensive set of resources out there on how to reverse myopia. I’ve especially appreciated the podcast, which is basically interviews with people who have reversed their myopia to varying degrees. Jake Steiner deserves more credit than anyone for bringing this whole thing together. I’ll just echo his advice to read up all you can on this before you dive in. You want to avoid a lot of the more common mistakes, and you want to embark on this lengthy journey from a position of fully-informed confidence.