Medical Associations – Victimhood and False Hope in Structure

Medical associations only work if members agree to work together. It takes more than great structure to hold us together.

If members get drunk on victimhood, then associations will crumble. Thinking that everything-is-about-power guarantees ruin.

We must value each other, without resentment or fear of someone else’s apparent power or privilege. Not to be polite or cuddly; we need to value how differences further a common cause.

Feeling the Hate

The only truly awkward presentation I had to make as president was a welcome and update for a sub-group of the Ontario Medical Association.

Everyone was a doctor. Everyone was an OMA member. And almost everyone appeared to hold deep resentment—even spite—for my physical presence.

I have faced many rooms full of angry doctors. Individuals who yell or curse care enough to get mad. You can work with them. But frowns, scowls, and icy silence rule out conversation. (Bested only by morons chanting in unison.)

Diverse vs Toxic

Promoting toxic division in the name of diversity will destroy consensus.

The Saskatchewan Section of Scottish Surgeons is harmless, if everyone proceeds with light heart and humour.

But when the Scots get serious and fearsome about unatoned sin inflicted on them by some other group, association becomes impossible. It is a war of all against all.

Associations survive on the attitudes that bind us together and on what we will not tolerate. You cannot build a strong association while believing that a particular sub-group or identity is difficult, toxic, privileged, victimized, or otherwise special.

How to Split Hairs

We can hazard a look at a few examples, in order to highlight the attitude to avoid. Attitude matters, not the division per se.

For example, it remains popular to pick on a few high paid specialities. Every so often, members will move to cut their colleagues. And despite fee cuts, incomes of the envied continue to increase. This warrants more envy and attacks on unearned ‘privilege.’

Many divisions or ‘intersections’ remain invisible, until one righteous soul tries to force everyone else to support his vision for unilateral change. Associations tear themselves apart by allowing it to happen.

Fault lines exist for all kinds of reasons. We cannot even mention most popular divisions without wails and gnashing of teeth from the aggrieved.

And again, divisions do not destroy on their own. It is the desire to denounce the Other as toxic, oppressive, or in some way less worthy, which guarantees ruin.

Consensus or Die

Medical associations must coalesce around what they support. They can buy peace, for a time, by sorting and ignoring. They can ignore hot issues and try to silence the hot heads who raise them.

But this soon fails. People will refuse to shut up about their pet project, especially if they feel righteous about their cause. They will demand that their victimhood be heard.

Victimhood rarely coexists with good will, rationalism, and logic, in the same individual.

What is worse, values that promote civil discourse are often no longer shared or valued. Modern agitators see shared values through the conjunctivitis discharge of post-modern relativism. Only oppression and power matter. Ideas are just tools to advance the advantages of undeserving historic oppressors.

Association Survival

Given the extent of exudate caused by post-modern anti-thought, associations need to simplify to survive:

Patients need care. Doctors want to care for them. Problems arise that make it hard for doctors to provide care. Ergo, doctors need medical associations to help solve problems that doctors cannot solve by themselves.

Do doctors need anything more?

If doctors want a group to fight colonialism, promote environmentalism, or address any other popular “-ism,” they should form their own association.

Unless doctors can associate around shared goals, their associations either fall apart or become weak and ineffective.

Is this heartless and cruel? Yes, it is. Just like every other effective and enjoyable endeavour.

We can only enjoy soccer, if we exclude footballs and baseballs. We cannot consume Bach’s Mass in B-minor with Beyoncé playing in the background. We love soup precisely because it is not salad, not because we hate salad.

Structure Cannot Save Us

Associations are not civil society. They are not a staging area for the moral theatre of civil drama. Associations can never be movements. They should avoid the waves of wokeness that flow through society. Associations need more humble goals.

Modern society has rejected equal opportunity based on effort. It wants to rebalance the cosmic scales of justice. Many people support reverse discrimination as redress. It encourages everyone to view her neighbour as a potential thief of her happiness, or of the happiness she might have had right now, if her neighbour had less. It makes association impossible.

Foucault and Derrida do not create strong associations. They can fuel revolutions and outrage, but they cannot unite voluntary collectives based on diversity, debate, and fair play. Post-modern nonsense machines tear things apart and create nothing of their own.

Associations need more than structure. We need culture and character, shared vision and values. These take decades to build and moments to destroy.

We need to shun -isms and the attitudes they foment. And we need to see value beyond structure. Or we will pursue unending review and reorganization without much change in performance.

Photo credit: Pixabay