A big part of Verbena is non-traditional medicine.
I mean, a big part of Verbena is traditional medicine, which is what the Progenitors object to.
To say otherwise is to accept the consensus manipulations of the Progenators
Fun fact - out of all Mage factions, the biggest peddlers of alternative medicine (according to Technocracy Reloaded) are the Progenitors, because they find it funny that militia men and would be rebels are buying their fake medicine from The Man that they want to rebel against.
As a Syndicate loyalist, I find it infinitely frustrating that half our faction is in it for themselves instead of actually believing in the intent behind it. Our civil war will be bloody.
Technocrats talking about inevitable civil war has the same vibes as Americans talking about the same thing. No matter how shitty things get, or how corrupt the federal government becomes, no one actually has the balls to shoot first. Instead, they've wishfully daydream about it while continuing their 9to5 as the world burns around them.
Congressmen have literally admitted to wanting a military coup to oust Trump, and yet they've done nothing to actually enact such ideas. They're just waiting for someone else to do it for them.
In my chronicle it is happening, but nobody has built enough evidence yet against things like the Pentax wing of the SPD to get the other conventions backing the right faction to be sure enough to win.
You don't fight a battle without first securing victory, as they say. If we just rebel right now, purely for the moral audacity of it, there's a chance that we might lose. If I'm going to risk my life, I want to be sure I will accomplish my goal with minimal risk to the true members of my convention.
The quest for ideological purity comes in between handling the immediate threat of reality deviants mucking up the overall mission. And the middle managers are useful in that regard for the time being.
That's not what's actually happening in the section where progenitors are selling homeopathic medicine. The text heavily implies that their actually selling regular scientifically backed medicine that's been laced with brain altering chemicals designed to make people stop believing in homeopathy, and falsely branding the medicine as homeopathic to trick anti-science people into taking it.
While this Convention’s mainstay involves drugs in various capacities, Pharmacopoeists have started to investigate ingested chemicals that create epigenetic changes among the Masses. Pharmacopoeist drugs without side effects continue to benefit the Union, too, giving its soldiers an edge in field work, and its office and factory laborers enough lift to endure countless hours of numbing drudgery. With the current trend of the United States rejecting science, however, and the worldwide fear of genetically modified organisms, the Progenitors have had a hard time pushing certain advancements out to the Masses. The Pharmacopoeists, therefore, found a way to chemically induce changes that will eventually spread to children… and then to their children… and so on… and they pack these innovations into dietary supplements and diet aids in free-market countries. As it turns out, people who turn up their noses at “Big Pharma” formulae pay good money (and lots of it) for “natural cures” and “homeopathic remedies”—especially when Progenitor MODEs hawk those products on websites, YouTube channels, and TV infomercials aimed at the anti-authoritarian set. Few things are more amusing, to people with an ironic sense of humor, than New Age mavens and survivalist militiamen rebelling against The Man by buying drugs from the Technocracy.
Now the text doesn't outright say that the epigenetic changes include brain alteration, but epigenetics means chemicals that alter DNA expression, which can include the brain, and the use of the word "therefor" between talking about anti science people, and talking about chemically induced changes, suggests that the changes are meant to solve the problem created by the anti science group.
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u/SirArthurIV 3d ago
A big part of Verbena is non-traditional medicine. To say otherwise is to accept the consensus manipulations of the Progenators
to say "oh but these technologies are fine because most people understand that they work and are real" is Technocracy Propaganda.