A book offers an excuse for everything. You must start one soon.
Is it your turn to drive the kids? Sorry, I’m working on my book.
Can you fix the washing machine? Sorry, I’m editing.
Did you mow Mom’s lawn yet? Not yet. Book.
Most things pass in pretend deafness: absorbed, lost in thought. Actually, this happens without pretending.
I emerge from the office having sat for six hours. Family life rushes back. What did I miss? (Not much, it seems. Teens and twenty-year-olds rise at noon.)
But I cannot catch up with the world. It has gone mad — upside down — and I am nonplussed.
Nonplussed and Afraid
nonplussed
adjective
(of a person) surprised and confused so much that they are unsure how to react.
INFORMAL · NORTH AMERICAN (of a person) non disconcerted; unperturbed.
Even nonplussed now means its opposite.
Counterfactuals can help us analyze what might have occurred given the opposite prior. They also create fun for college kids over campfire marshmallows.
DC Comics created Bizarro World, in 1960, a cube-shaped planet. They called it Htrae — Earth spelled backwards.
Bizarro savings bonds were “Guaranteed to lose money for you.”
Bizarro No. 1 got the job, “Because you are stupider than the entire Bizarro police force put together.”
“Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness!”
Some people lack the gene for irony. They do not know when a joke ended. Long after the campfire goes out, some kids continue saying Yes when they mean No. So tricky!
A mob of these people found their soulmates on social media. They revived Rousseau, even if they never heard of him: “Man is born free but he is everywhere in chains.”
Our state of nature is pure. It is not solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It is full of fraternal pity and love: liberty, equality, fraternity!
Inversion Therapy
Rousseau inspired a whole genre of inversion: Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Sartre, Adorno, Horkheimer, Gramsci, and so on, down to Foucault, Marcuse and Derrida. Politicians from Napoleon to Mao have used these ideas to great effect.
Everything mom taught you is wrong:
Sticks and stones work better than words.
Do not stop screaming; silence is violence.
Virtue is to see beyond virtue; pity is pitiless.
Love humanity but hate humans.
Tolerance is repressive. Equality unequal.
To help is to hate. Success is failure.
Merit is theft. Explanation ignorance.
You are guilty; arguing otherwise proves that you are. Logic is relative. You should make up stories; tell your own truth. Truth is a social construct based on patriarchal oppression.
The beast slouched towards Bethlehem after WWII and kept slouching all through the 60s and 70s. After many stillbirths, it spawned and flourished. Now it fills the hegemonic halls of higher learning.
Critical theory has matured and determines to eat the lecterns that birthed and nursed it. It demands a fair and reasonable hearing, while removing the fair branch of reason upon which it stands.
A post-modern drunkenness has swollen our livers and rotted our brains. We will swallow any pill — red, blue, yellow — just so long as we wake up from this orthogonal nightmare of prosperity!
Boring Offensive Medicine
Medicine can only exist on reason and thoughtful dialogue in an environment of courage and courtesy. Medicine can only exist in a culture that transcends ethnicity and social grievance.
Call out specific behaviour. Challenge specific statements. Discuss. Debate.
Post-modern pharmacists do not exist. Telling your truth about dosage causes harm.
Disease has a politically incorrect way of embarrassing incorrect diagnoses. Cancer responds to treatment, not the identity of the one who treats.
Dying patients want the most-skilled surgeon. Competence is not just a social construct.
Instances of failure to promote the best and brightest do not mean that the best and brightest do not exist. Address the failures. Give everyone a chance. But please stop the post-modern critical theorizing that there is no such thing as ability or effort.
Messy Salvage?
I am afraid for medicine and afraid to know how to say it.
Of course medicine needs to improve. Medicine is morally messy like every other human institution. But that does not mean we should invert it as the critical theorists advise.
Medicine needs to figure it out fast. Using critical theory to assign collectivist labels to colleagues sets us back centuries. It returns us to tribalism of a nasty kind.
In the face of name-calling, anger, and yelling matches, moms all say the same thing: “Use your words.” We need to figure out how to do the same.
Now, back to my book… (sorry if I don’t respond promptly to comments!)
Photo credit: Pixabay images
Not enough ‘common-sensical’ retorts. Too many keeping their head down and staying quiet while science gets adulterated. ‘Karen’ and her husband both in masks, at the grocery store, hysterically argumentative yelling through the very large plexiglass sheet at the cashier to put her mask on because “…I have 5 children at home and I need to protect them”. Yes, she’s misinformed but somebody misinformed her to such a level of reactionary fear. There is no where to turn for wisdom and reason. In Canada, there has been one unfortunate under-20y soul that has died due to covid yet having kids return to class is terribly controversial – huh?
Thanks Rick.
Good to see you point out the misinformation/paradox as well as the reaction.
On the one hand, we can understand people getting worked up when they are scared. On the other, we need calm, open dialogue even more when times are heated. It seems that the lockdown has almost fuelled those of a particular political bent to lash out at everything.
Everything feels black and white — people who disagree feel too scared to speak up.
Thanks for reading and taking time to post!
Cheers
There is politics at play…more so south of the border.
There are those who want to go into November with as much “ sturm und drang” as possible…keeping children out of school whilst demanding more money resulting in parents not being able to return to work leading to stress with mass unemployment social upheaval….”the devil finds mischief for idle hands”.
In COVID isolation I also intend ( have long intended) to write , or rather dictate ,a book ( three books in mind)…am looking at Pages on my iPad…stuck at formatting , presently waiting for my daughter in law to help me out…not being a hightechie I may have to turn to my grandchildren.
The post modernist educational system has indoctrinated and corrupted several generations in the western world, unfortunately including the medical profession…the resulting educational product is increasingly ” ideologically possessed and impervious to logic and resistant to reason”.
Jordan Peterson is interesting reading ( a bit mystical on occasion for my taste) and for watching on You tube in particular in his battle to preserve free speech…as he would put it, free speech is how people of different opinions settle their differences in a free society.
Free speech is the mechanism that allows society to organize and function, including keeping our own psyches organized…free speech being the alternative to violence.
Even in medicine there is an attempt to force others to speak their language…Orwellian “ Newspeak” language , that is designed to restrict the freedom of expression.
Rousseau is , in particular, a malignant bête noir where I’m concerned , a hypocrite speaking of compassion , of defending the weak against the strong while, at the same time, who abandoned his five children in orphanages indifferent to their fate.
Anyway it looks as if the resulting ideologically possessed educational product , despite living in the land of “ milk and honey” when compared to much of the world, has little tolerance for peace, tranquility and prosperity achieved over generations with much pain and suffering…is resentful and envious…and is bent on blind destruction of what is with no idea as to what to be done with the ashes.
Love that last line, Andris! “…bent on blind destruction of what is with no ideas as to what to be done with the ashes.”
Great to hear you are putting your words down. It is a huge job. Smart to get help.
Good point: Rousseau treated his family like dirt, even by the standards of his own time.
I just saw a study by the CATO institute, out this month, showing that 62% of people — across the political spectrum — feel scared to speak lest they invite political retaliation. If this is so, free speech is truly dead and so is our democracy.
Thanks again for reading and posting a comment!
Simply Sublime.
“Hats off, gentlemen !”
Gordon Friesen,
euthanasiediscussion.net
Thanks!
A reflection from about 2700 years ago seems fitting: “Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands far away; for truth has stumbled in the public squares, and uprightness cannot enter.
Truth is lacking, and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey.” Isaiah 59:14,15
Brilliant. “truth has stumbled in public…makes himself a prey.”
Thanks so much!