Madness and the Evaporation of Authority (Part I)

What is going on? We are surrounded by insanity. The Western world is riddled with irrational beliefs, absurd policies, dysfunctional organisations and fanatical advocates of monomanias in medicine, climatology, education and sexual politics. Amid this lunacy single-minded corporations are making outrageous profits regardless of the collateral damages of their actions.

The mad, like the poor, are always with us. Is there more madness today? Or is it simply more visible? Maybe we have, as I suggested earlier, run out of sufficient sane people? Whether this an increase in insanity or a redistribution matters not. What does matter is that it is a real, present affliction in everyday life.

THE DEEP CAUSE

Why is this folly almost everywhere? There are of course many, many causes but I propose that beneath many of them lies one factor:

The default prioritisation of abstract ideas in lieu of context-based solutions.

More specifically it is the promotion of ideologies, policies, reductionist measurements and narrow, overarching targets regardless of circumstances. This prioritisation is very rarely a decision, rather it is built in to the thinking of many modern people.

Understanding a situation in terms of abstractions leads to the idea that the best response to a problem is a policy: a new law, a protocol, standards, measurements, oversight and compliance. This is not only untrue, but it leads to an accumulation of policies which has become a massive waste of time and money.

Below are a few real examples from hundreds of thousands of possibilities, of the inappropriate use of abstractions. Click the links for the full details.

GENDER

Whereas genitalia are visible and chromosomes are identifiable physical realities ‘gender’ is an abstraction. It is not observable. You can’t put it in a wheelbarrow. It is an abstract construct, famously the plaything of a delinquent philosopher, and latterly a springboard for trendy, dubious ‘science’. In the real world the policy of eager affirmation of an adolescent’s fantasy of this abstract notion and unwillingness to explore the trauma that may have promoted it have dire consequences.

CLIMATE

Destructive on an international scale is the myopic, staggeringly expensive obsession with controlling CO2. Here the abstractions are model-based, inaccurate predictions. They fail to engage the real world context which offers the far cheaper, far easier possibility of adaption to temperature change. Net Zero policies are not compared with the real, immediate benefits of health and wealth that could be achieved for the same expenditure. Further, the externalities, that is to say the full cost and physical limitations of Net Zero, are simply ignored.

COVID

In COVID times lockdowns were justified by a concatenation of ludicrously narrow, unreliable abstract models and measurements. They were continued even in the face of clear evidence of their inefficacy and dangers.

VACCINES

Similarly, the advocates of vaccines pursued their abstract targets even in the face of clear evidence of inefficacy. They refused to consider personal variables such as religious concerns and immunity arising from previous infection. Further harms of that programme continue to manifest every day, and the dangers persist.

HEALTH

The Midwestern Doctor comments “Corporatized medicine has inflicted upon the doctor-patient relationship [a loss of connection which] has led to doctors abandoning their traditional way of practicing medicine (a detailed physical exam and history which allows each patient to teach the doctor) and instead replacing it with a rapid standardized protocol which can fit into a 15-minute office visit.”

EMPLOYMENT

In employment the attempt to enforce “equity” and stamp out “racial discrimination” – both abstractions – leads to inequitable discrimination.

MEDIA

In media the idolisation of the twin abstractions of safety and misinformation threatens the possibility of any UK citizen speaking truth to power.

GOVERNMENT

Abstraction is the language of officialdom. It permits clever theorising but limits understanding of concrete reality. The reliance on abstract analysis provides the justification for a ridiculous number of costly, obstructionist and dysfunctional  quangos in situations better served by direct, positive solutions. When I was contracted by the UK Government, we would frequently report to civil servants and ministers who were unwilling or unable to take on board the findings from the research they themselves had commissioned. More than ten years ago, when presented with unequivocal evidence of universal hostility to a project to house asylum seekers in rural areas, a civil servant told us, “Ministers have decided to take a lead on this issue.” One year and fourteen million pounds later the project was abandoned.

There are thousands upon thousands of such stories of malign consequences arising from valuing abstract analysis above practical solutions.  Abstractions are inherently unlimited. They make it easy to assume large-scale benefits will outweigh individual downsides. When downsides are diverse and dispersed (as in the case of Covid vaccinations) they are easily ignored because they are not measurable on the narrow criteria of the initial project.

I have written elsewhere about the origins of this default to abstract thinking, and also how abstractions have such a fierce grip over the minds of otherwise sane people. Briefly it is a long-term consequence of changes brought about by the earliest technology, literacy. Initially these changes delivered enormous social and technological advantages. Now, after more than three centuries of progress, diminishing returns have set in.

Ideologies, quintessentially abstract, were first conceived at the end of the eighteenth century when literacy began to spread rapidly. Marxism, with first mover advantage, become the first ideology to have a worldwide impact. Gradually the inappropriate dominance of abstract thinking leads to ideology trumping reality, policy replacing principles and protocols replacing personal relationship.

Abstract thinking has brought us countless benefits. It is the basis of modern science and hence the ground of the magnificent technological progress of the last four hundred years. Abstract thinking is in itself neither good nor bad. The critical issue is how we use it.

We win when we use abstractions as tools.

We lose when we use abstractions as rules.

 

The concluding Part II will be published tomorrow.

 

Dr Hugh Willbourn is a psychotherapist. You can find his website here.

 

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