So Much Nonsense, So Little Time

Image by Ryan McGuire Pixabay

Soon after I started in a small emergency department, the police dragged in a handcuffed teenager.

The teen kicked, spit, and screamed slurred abuse at us. One of his eyes was swollen shut, the other red and dilated. Bloody hair stuck to his face.

Repeat offenders know they will lose a fight with two solid, sober officers. Youths with temper tantrums only know how to kick and scream. Physicians must sort out whether the screaming patient is sick or just uncivilized.

One of my colleagues, ten years my senior, walked over. The handcuffed patient started swearing (eloquently), spitting, and refusing to answer.

After attempting a history and clinical exam, my colleague said, “Buddy … you are messed up!”

trying to think in 2021

COVID19 has been a nightmare of nonsense. We need not review or downplay the carnage.

The public policy response has been brutal in Canada (see COVID Misery Index or the Lowy Institute COVID Performance Index). Get ready for a tsunami of inquiries, reviews, and calls for system change over the next year.

The pandemic has also been a blogger’s nightmare. Before COVID, it was easy enough to show how accepted thinking is often thoughtless. Nonsense abounded. Solutions were often obvious. It just took courage (or stupidity) to speak up.

Nonsense

But “challenging accepted thinking” fails when too many people lose their minds.

You cannot talk to an enraged, drunken teen in handcuffs. Barbarians do not debate governance. Informed consent becomes a charade of formalities.

You cannot reason with an enraged upper-middle-class, ivy league, sociology student. Screaming about oppression, she/he throws a Molotov cocktail at a tiny business owned by an uneducated person who just applied for citizenship.

Critical theory is the end of theory. Relativism means relativism is also relative: to give it meaning is to end meaning; to think it is to end thought.

The pandemic has offered too much nonsense to keep up. You feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony: Where do I start?

Solution

Fools remain foolish without challenge. But the crazier people become the less they are able to consider thoughts outside of their own insanity. Anything falling outside their own minds becomes a trigger, an opportunity for outrage. Debate narrows. Differential diagnoses become a differential of one.

The CPSO—the opposite of crazy—instantiated this ethos in a recent communication. Public health has spoken. Debate must end. We have truth, or near enough, to rule out dissension.

This bothered me deeply—even more so that so many supported it. This is anti-culture. But maybe that was the point all along.

See my op ed:

Patients Need Doctors to Speak Up — Regulator Wants Doctors to Shut Up.

Roots, not Blank Slate

We have to rebuild.

What can we learn from our past? What should we throw out? Radicals follow Rousseau and seek to throw out everything: “Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains.”

Government lacks capacity. It cannot manage major threats.

Society lacks capacity. Work-spend-consume does not develop deep social fabric and understanding required for citizens to lead from below.

Without the knowledge required to demand better decisions from our leaders, we will continue to suffer their ignorance which matches our own.

We need to pivot.

Instead of trying to deconstruct nonsense and offer solutions, perhaps we need to pause and ask ancient questions:

What is true?

What is good?

What is beautiful?

We need to rediscover the art of living well and how it informs civic engagement. If we do not, we all run the risk of becoming (or remaining) messed up: angry youths in handcuffs.

 

Photo credit: Ryan McGuire Pixabay

32 thoughts on “So Much Nonsense, So Little Time”

    1. Thanks for sharing this!

      I just chatted yesterday with one of the organizers of this grassroots effort. Looking forward to seeing where it goes.

      1. Is this a declaration for physicians to sign? It reads that way to me, but the signatures I recognize from my town are not physicians.

        1. I know very little about the declaration.

          I have just started exploring it myself. Having talked with one of the authors, I believe they just wanted to rally around the basics of science, inquiry, etc. As they add content and clarification to their site, I think it will become more clear.

          Cheers

    1. Great question, Gerry.

      Liberalism worked for several hundred years because it functioned on a fabric developed over several thousand years before it. The fabric included things such as logic, the scientific method, and values such as honesty, prudence, and so on.

      I am not saying people adhered to all or even any of these ideas, but they were assumed to be good things. Liberalism has drawn down on this deposit/fabric which it inherited from millenia of learning.

      Modern liberals have undermined the ideas liberalism needs to function. They have done so with such skill and thoroughness that I am not sure liberalism can survive without a renaissance of the old ideas: for example, the true, good, and beautiful (Aristotle).

      I do not see how liberalism can confront or refute postmodernism, relativism, wokeism, or the extremes of individualism and consumerism.

      Thanks for reading and posting comments!

      Cheers

  1. What is true goes Schopenhauer’s three stages:

    1) It gets ridiculed.
    2) It gets violently opposed…the stage we are at present, when all the hounds of hell are released by against those deviating from the official dogma.
    3) It is accepted as being self evident….years from now when all the studies have been sliced and diced and the truth revealed with the myths dispelled.

    Scientific proof depends on facts…our role is to try to interpret them and to understand them…the trouble is that in this woke culture a new breed of censors have appeared stifling debate, they seem to be omnipresent and are overbearing…despite the fact that the facts are nowhere close to being all in…we are expected to kow tow to the official interpretation and understanding which have their political component, and woe behold any one who deviates from the official truth….cancellation being the minimum punishment.

    1. Darn it, Andris — I always learn something from your comments. Love it. I have shared a version of those three stages without knowing they were Schopenhauer’s.

      You also capture the science-learning-facts-intolerance-cancellation arc. Brilliant.

      Thanks again for teaching me!

  2. I missed the CPSO statement.
    It is very similar to a position statement from the Alberta College, which appeared recently on the Med Post site.
    The question these two contemporaneous examples raise is that of interference by provincial governments into medical regulatory bodies, which are supposed to be independent and to act only to protect the public.
    How the censoring of healthy and civilized debate between professionals and public “protects the public” rather than protecting political operatives or their vassal medical regulators in this situation beggars comprehension

    1. “Beggars comprehension” indeed

      You raise excellent points about regulation, Mike, which I cannot possibly tackle in a short response. As the last registrar of the CPSO said, Medical self-regulation should be tossed into the dustbin of history (or something close to that). He said we are now in the era of medical regulation — self-regulation is a dead idea. I think he was just stating the reality of how the regulators function. They make laws, then they police them, arrest offenders, try them, judge them, punish, rehabilitate, and oversee … regulators are the epitome of the concentration of power. The pantomime of omnicompetence inevitably hits the hard edges of clinical reality which fall outside of the images that swirl inside the heads of those who deign to control clinical care from their committee meetings. (If I had had a second coffee, I would try to clean up that sentence.)

      Great to hear from you!

  3. The pandemic has certainly given us some interesting narratives.
    Previously hidden/blurred ideologies have become more prominent, polarization has widened, cultism deepened,and systemic control seems entrenched.
    Debate is no longer nuanced,we’re screaming at each other,and society seems ‘messed up’ ,indeed.
    Where will we end up coming out of this social experiment?
    God only knows ….. buckle up,as the ride could get bumpy.
    Signed it !

    1. My feelings exactly, Ram. Well said.

      It is as though a large mass of people around us have lived with a belief that fire is not dangerous; it’s just an obvious solution for cooking, burning brush, and making waste disappear. The pandemic offers a great opportunity to see if fire can help.

      Most people — doctors especially — just live, work, and play. They do not have time to reflect on the ideas around them. We need to find an attractive way to get people interested again. It’s the only way to avoid the bumps you mention.

      Thanks again for reading and posting a comment!

  4. Another great article.

    You taught me to “speak truth to power” during the OMA standoff with government 2014-2017.

    It has served me well.

    Keep up the good work.

    DC

    1. Wow. Darren, you are a juggernaut: championing legislative change, negotiating, leading your section … and so much more. If you found something useful in our interactions over the years, I am humbled and truly happy about it. Very cool. I hope you realize how much I have learned from you too!

      I hope you are well. Thanks so much for reading and posting.

      Cheers

  5. So true for society, government & common sense,
    “You cannot reason with an enraged upper-middle-class, ivy league, sociology student. Screaming about oppression, she/he throws a Molotov cocktail at a tiny business owned by an uneducated person who just applied for citizenship” – what a bright illustration of the paradox we live in!

    And for “Modern liberals have undermined the ideas liberalism needs to function. They have done so with such skill and thoroughness that I am not sure liberalism can survive without a renaissance of the old ideas” – those are not just “old ideas” or matters of opinion.
    As Steven Covey wrote, it’s impossible to violate the natural laws of human society for too long: they are as universal & objective as the laws of physics.
    Regardless of how passionately it’s advocated to walk on hands rather than feet, it will eventually damage & kill a person practicing it for too long… aside from all the lost advantage to those who use their legs for walking & running in the interim 🙂

    1. Love the Covey comment. Exactly on point. We need to wrestle once more with those things/ideas/patterns that seem to help use live together peacefully.

      Thanks so much! Great to hear from you.

      Best

  6. It does not help that our supposed representatives have become increasingly woke preoccupied by intersectionality , identity politics and social Justice ( as opposed to true blindfolded Justice) and the very real bread and butter issues of the membership as a whole….from those providing grass rooted fee for service to those working in government approved and subsidized settings.

    Cancellation has become the weapon of choice for the woke, I was cancelled by Medical Post several years ago because it seems that my offerings “ upset” some of the woke younger generation, who, when offended, “ran to teacher” rather than debate issues.

    I like Graucho Marx’s quote “ I refuse to be a member of a club that would have me”.

    1. All good points.

      I’ve been wondering about this for a long time now: how can you discuss anything with someone who dismisses discussion?

      The modern approach is designed to silence, not engage. For example, “You are mean. If you deny that you are mean, it proves you are mean. You can do nothing but repent of your meanness and listen silently while I try to open your biased, blinded mind to your meanness. Finally, since you are mean, it is impossible for anyone to be mean to you. All treatment you receive is, by definition, not meanness, because you epitomize meanness.”

      Cancellation denies the dignity of the one we seek to cancel (crush, deplatform, ruin their career, etc.). Denying the dignity of our neighbour legitimizes all manner of mistreatment of our neighbour.

      I find it disturbing how easily many, many educated professionals fall for ideologies which are modern reflections of atrocities from the past 100 years. Scary.

      Sorry for being so dour on such a nice weekend.

      Cheers!

      1. After a short time on social media I took some time to learn about Aristotle’s Logical Fallacies.

        “Your are mean”–argumentum ad misericordiam
        An appeal to pity is a fallacy in which someone tries to win support for an argument or idea by exploiting his or her opponent’s feelings of pity or guilt. It is a specific kind of appeal to emotion.

        1. Brilliant. Thanks for sharing this, Gerry! (Now, let’s see if I can remember it. 🙂 )

    2. Andris, you have been missed. You have wonderful thoughts and ideas and the Medical Post is poorer for your absence. Shame on them.

  7. Happy Victoria Day to all. Yet another nice, well written and thought stimulating article…but only for those who still have the capacity and use it to think more than a few layers deep. So many intelligent comments above. I would add these two comments / suggestions. The first is the question of how society has gotten to this point? The best way to understand the wokeism and cancel culture is to do a YouTube search on Yuri Bezmenov’s “lecture”. Really worth spending 40 to 60 minutes listening to it. For those that are unaware of YB, he was a Russian high level KGB propaganda operative who defected to Canada in 1970. He basically tells all about how Russia can take down any western country without a single bullet based on the 4 principles: Demoralization (15-20 years) Destabilization (2-5 years) Crisis (2-6 months) Normalization (“indefinite”) in…..wait for it ………..1984. Beside George Orwell’s 1984, another book also worth reading is Crimes of the Educators – Blumenfeld and Newman. By slowly and subtly modifying what was taught (indoctrination) to the children in stages and over the years and subsequent generations, we have gotten to this point in time. Society is only hanging on because the numbers of the baby boomer generation acts as a vanguard to push back against the advancing tide of the modern day marxist revolutionaries – most of whom when asked to provide reasons for what they believe and to provide facts and evidence for their beliefs are unable to do so. The second comment is that as a Canadian of Chinese ethnicity who grew up in Hong Kong and has talked to many who are older and many of which are elderly patients from Mainland China, now the People’s Republic of China, the stories they tell about the horrors inflicted by the CCP regime on those that would not “take the knee” is emotionally numbing. What is happening in our society now with the wokeism, cancel culture and media malfeasance is the exact same process that happened in communist China years ago that literally resulted in the deaths of millions and the collapse of the economic system. It has taken several generations to right the ship and while there is economic prosperity there remains many aspects of society that has yet to be reshaped to conform to what one could term as a civilized society based on common sensed based principles that form the foundation of a decent society. China is a complex study. Too many nuances and variables for the average non-Chinese to understand. I would need days to explain it to others to help them understand the uniqueness of the PRC/CCP “experiment. The pandemic has also given those in power the ability to stifle freedom of thought, ideas and opinion. The politicizing of medicine is horrifying and anything that counters the official dogma/narrative has been shut down. The core principle of science is to have an open mind. To have those in charge actually stifle this through bureaucratic threats defies any reason and logic. I have said to many people over nearly 15 months ago (I am convinced that both my spouse and myself got COVID-19 in mid December 2019) that the autopsy of how things were done by those in positions of leadership would be way more interesting than the pandemic itself. It may well have been possible that a lot of deaths could have been prevented had those in charge, whether politicians or medical practitioners, were more open minded instead of pushing the dogma of “we need to follow the science and we need evidence….” as if the practice of medicine has never done things “off label”. As is, the (and many of those in charge do not believe in the existence of a higher power) conduct and behaviour of these people are such that they resemble at best dictators and tyrants and at worse are acting as if they were Demi-Gods. And in the end, even if the “science” that they purport to follow proves that they were wrong, they will not be held accountable nor will they have the integrity and honour to admit that they were wrong. History repeats itself because we are a woefully inept species.

    1. Robert,

      I sure appreciate you including experience and insight from around the world. And thanks also for highlighting the YB interview — classic for sure. Please do not interpret my short response as downplaying your very thoughtful comments! Just wanted you to know that I appreciated them and will be mulling them over during the next few days.

      Thanks again!

  8. Thanks again Shawn for the brilliant insight into our crazed existence. I know all too well about bending a knee to the overlords for daring to speak out of turn in out of order…

    The recent CPSO directive reminds us that they have NOT changed to a kinder gentler organization and do not represent our profession, but rather rule it. We cannot call out that the emperor has no clothes without being barred, interred and demonized by those that support the control of the overlords.

    You know that I am a huge advocate for the “gun lobby”. I fact you can say I am the gun lobby (along with many colleagues that love and support the shooting sports. But how can we debate meritorious points when colleague block your comments, disparage your points (regardless of the facts and science behind them), all in the name of safety and security.

    In the end, those that trade freedom for safety and security deserve neither.
    Cheers my friend

    1. Good point, Ozzy. This was eating at me too: Why did they think it was appropriate to put out such a statement in the first place, and why did so many docs support them initially?

      Don’t get me started on guns. I’m a rural guy. I don’t own a gun right now (my FAC expired years ago…need to get a new credential), but I sure could use one. No matter how hard you try to protect your chickens and sheep, every few years you’ll need something more than electric fence.

      But your larger point about blocking, heckling, and silencing unpalatable ideas concerns me. Society loses patience with dignifying the airing of ideas it does not like. How can we treat others with dignity when we won’t even listen to their ideas?

      Ah, but their ideas are bad-hateful-evil-sinful! It would be bad-hateful-evil-sinful for me to even listen to them. Thus, I am righteous in keeping my ears undefiled by blocking them in the presence of people who might say things I do not like.

      This approach was the default for humans before the 17th century. It never ends well.

      Thanks again for reading and posting a comment! Great to hear from you.

      Cheers

  9. What is true goes Schopenhauer’s three stages:

    1) It gets ridiculed.
    2) It gets violently opposed…the stage we are at present, when all the hounds of hell are released by against those deviating from the official dogma.
    3) It is accepted as being self evident….years from now when all the studies have been sliced and diced and the truth revealed with the myths dispelled.

    Scientific proof depends on facts…our role is to try to interpret them and to understand them…the trouble is that in this woke culture a new breed of censors have appeared stifling debate, they seem to be omnipresent and are overbearing…despite the fact that the facts are nowhere close to being all in…we are expected to kow tow to the official interpretation which and understanding which have their political component, and woe behold any one who deviates from the official truth….cancellation being the minimum punishment.

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