One evening some 50 years ago, a mother showed up at the hospital with her 3-year-old son, who had a large white turban on his head, made of a bathroom towel.
Every so often, the mom would start muttering under her breath.
And then she’d smack the boy, hard, on the back of the large white lump on his head.
They were admitted to see the doctor.
”What seems to be the problem?”
The mom sighed. She started unwrapping the towel. And there it was:
A bright yellow potty on the boy’s head.
“He jammed his head into it when we weren’t looking,” the mom said. “It’s on so tight that we can’t get it off. We tried everything. Can you help, doctor?”
The point of this story is:
I’ve had doctors in my family.
My mom was a doctor. My grandma was a doctor. In fact, she was the doctor in the story above. (In the end, she sawed the potty off the boy’s head.)
And yet, in spite of this family connection to honest, hardworking, helpful doctors… my knee-jerk, perhaps shocking reaction today is:
You can’t trust what doctors say. Especially as an organized group.
Look at that scandal I wrote about yesterday. Not so long ago, doctors endorsed a specific brand of cigarettes.
And things haven’t changed since. Doctors today might not endorse cigarettes. But as a bunch, the medical industry remains self-serving… short-sighted… and open to corruption.
Again, that’s my knee-jerk reaction. I’m not saying it’s well-reasoned. And I’m not trying to convince you.
I just want to share an interesting idea I read recently:
The US is quickly splintering into two groups, and it’s not the two groups you might think. It’s not Left vs Right, atheist vs religious, Democrat vs. Republicans, vaccinated vs unvaccinated, or even COVID-cautious vs COVID-so-damn-over-it.
The divide between the two groups is this: people whose default setting is to trust institutional narratives, and people whose default setting is to be skeptical of them; people who believe them unless/until proven otherwise and people who disbelieve them to equal measure.
Maybe this idea is not new to you. But it was new to me.
I kept going back to it over and over in conversations with friends. I found it much more telling than talking about political views.
That’s why I wanted to share it with you. This “new divide” idea might be valuable to you as a kind of personality test for your audience, market, or niche. Or for yourself.
Anyways, I read this idea in an article by a writer who calls herself Holly Math Nerd.
Holly goes into much more detail and explanation of her theory, and gives some interesting predictions, as well as more examples in attitudes to medicine, education, and media.
So if this idea resonates with you — or if you’re skeptical of it — you can investigate more for yourself here:
https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/on-default-settings-and-the-real