How the Redefinition of Life Made Industrial Chemistry Possible The Wöhler letter is a joke

[00:00:00]Pick up a stone and put it on the table and leave it there for a week. When you come back, what's happened? Nothing.

[00:00:07]Stone has done nothing. It has not grown, it has not healed, it has not organized itself into something else.

[00:00:14]Now, cut your finger and come back in a week. Your hand has already knitted itself back together and you might only have some vague scar tissue left. Your body detected the damage, routed resources to the site, grew new tissue, and closed the wound before you even thought about it. You did not have to decide to do this. Your body just does it. When you're cold, your body shivers.

[00:00:37]When you're hot, your body sweats. None of this is your choice. Your body just does it. It manages itself. It is responding, working to keep you alive. A rock does not respond, it does not organize itself, it does not heal. If you put a rock on the table and you leave it alone, it will stay exactly where it is. Leave a living thing alone and it will either thrive, adapt, or die, but it is always doing something.

[00:01:03]That's groundbreaking observation that living things behave differently from non-living things. It's called vitalism.

[00:01:11]Vitalism is a word you've probably not heard of. It is not taught in schools, it does not come up on the news, you will not see it in mainstream health conversations. You definitely won't see it in chemistry textbooks. This principle is described as a special fluid or spirit that animates living bodies, a pervasive substance or organizing principle that gives life and structure to organisms. This is a basic idea that appeared first in classical philosophy. In plain terms, vitalism is a field of science that once existed that properly studied the fact that you have a life force. Across hundreds of cultures and thousands of years, people kept noticing that a live body acts different to a a one. And they asked, what is doing that?" Different cultures gave this different names. In China, they call it your chi. The word means breath or air. Ancient Chinese doctors said that this moves through the body along set paths. When your chi can flow freely, your body is doing well. When it gets stuck or runs out, the body gets sick. Practices like acupuncture, chi gong, and tai chi are all built on this idea. In India, the word pran also means life or breath. Ancient Indian texts like the Vedas and the Upanishads describe pran as a force that runs through everything alive. In the body, it moves along channels. The whole system of yoga and breathing exercises exist to work with pran to move it, clear it, build it. In Japan, it's called ki.

[00:02:46]Same root idea. There is a force that animates a living person, an animal, a tree. This shows up in martial arts, in Zen, and in Shinto. Ki is the old Japanese sense that the natural world is alive and full of this force. Even in ancient Greece, the word was pneuma, again meaning breath or spirit. Greek doctors divided it into three kinds. One made in the liver and carried by the blood, one made in the heart that gave heart and life, and one made in the brain that drove thought, feeling, and movement. These three were the basis of Greek and later Arabic medicine for thousands of years. Every one of these traditions says that the body is not just flesh and bones. You are not just chemistry. The Holy Spirit moves through you, with you, in you, etc. And that is a force that can be strengthened or weakened, freed or blocked, well-fed or depleted. That is the core of vitalism.

[00:03:46]The suppression of vitalism happened in the West between 1828 and 1860, when a small number of chemists from France and Germany changed the definition of the word organic.

[00:04:00]Vitalism was never disproven. It was linguistically removed from Western science. And this redefinition was materially useful to specific industries. This suppression is still ongoing. I'm sure there are at least a handful of you who already think this is woo-woo. So, let me get to the evidence.

[00:04:22]In 1827, the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius wrote the first textbook definition of organic chemistry. Organic chemistry, he wrote, is the chemistry of plant and animal substances or of the substances formed under the influence of the life force. Life force. In German, Lebenskraft. In the founding sentence of the field, his definition held for the next 33 years. And from 1827 until the 1850s, chemistry was a science that took for granted that living matter was doing something non-living matter was not. And the whole point of the word organic was to name that difference. But today, if you look up organic chemistry, go now.

[00:05:10]Look up organic chemistry. You will not find the words life force anywhere.

[00:05:16]Organic chemistry is the scientific study of the structure, properties, and reactions of organic compounds and materials, which are primarily composed of carbon atoms. Today, organic chemistry has been redefined as the chemistry of carbon compounds. In my next video, I will explain to you who changed that name and why, and then what got built on top of that change. Because everything that the American Chemistry Council is defending today was made possible by one textbook written in 1860. The reason it matters so much which definition is in the textbook is because the new definition is what made the industry morally possible. If living things kept their life force in the science, it makes it harder to commit genocide while still calling yourself a neutral practitioner of a technical discipline. If this definition was not changed, the scientists would have had to argue the philos ophical on every decision that was made later. Changing what organic chemistry meant spared them the argument. The world is alive, that is not a mystical position. It is what standard science up until 1850 already knew before it was legislated out of the curriculum. The chemistry that has been sold to us as an objective study of matter is the chemistry that got permission to first treat living matter as if it were inert. This was the permission slip, and it was signed by the French Ministry of Public Instruction in 1886.