Veneer

How thin is the veneer of civilization. How few layers of keratin separate humans from packs of animals. As another example of ethnicity justifying slaughter answers those questions, I can only wonder if it could happen here. Here's irony, if ever there was:

Aigulia said her house was destroyed by Uzbeks overnight and all her Kyrgyz neighbors had to run for their safety. She said the area was still unsafe, claiming Uzbek snipers were shooting at them.

A Kyrgyz man, Iskander, said he and others burned Uzbek property to avenge their attacks.

"Whatever you see over there - all the burnt restaurants and cafeterias - were owned by them and we destroyed them on purpose," he told APTN. "Why didn't they want to live in peace?"

Given the tenor of the times in the US, with death threats against legislators who voted for health care -- health care, ferchrissakes! -- with hatred and fear being stoked deliberately (and very effectively) by Fox "news" and the awful RWS™, can it really be much longer before such violence breaks out here? We're talking cafés and houses and schools in this latest example of human defectiveness; not hovels and caves.

A steady stream of propaganda, hard times with uncertainty about the future, deliberate pitting of "us" against "them," claims of threats to our very way of life, willingness to lie to a credulous people, the people unwilling and unable to separate fact from fiction, preferring easy (ie, like religious) answers: it's happened before to highly "civilized" people. We've seen what happens .

Interesting -- not to mention deeply frightening -- the similarities between the kind of regime to which those on the right compare our current government and behaviors they have taken upon themselves. While denying it. Coincidental, I suppose, that the party of deniers of evolution, of global warming, of birth certificates (can you extrapolate the other sign in the previous photo link?), of the causes of the current calamity, and of staking claim to the righteousness of the law of their god, also includes those that decorate their arms with swastikas and deny that the Holocaust ever happened.

I suppose I should say my goodbyes now, because I'll be among the first to be burned alive.

Not "IF."

WHEN.

Puzzlement

Lying within a couple of bytes of permanently fallow, my better blog, Surgeonsblog, still gets visitors. Some find it when searching for a specific surgical topic; others seem to stumble upon it from a moldering link on another site. When comments are left, questions asked, I reply. That it remains viable after I've mostly left it, still providing useful information or entertainment for people (or, quoting an email I just received, "inspiration") gives me satisfaction. Too, once in a while, it drives me nuts.

A post that gets regular traffic is this one, about gallbladder flushes. Like all "cleansing" procedures -- especially colon cleanses, a favorite among liberals for some reason, if reading the Huffington Post (which I do, regularly [no pun]) is any indicator -- such holy happenings are peddled prodigiously by the deluded or the deceptive, and carried out with commitment by the credulous. Unlike colon cleansing, which has no visible verifier except the expected effluvium, gallbladder flushes produce something tangible, something magical, something given the credence of a brickbat. It's real, it's there for the looking. It's proof positive.

It's bullshit.

And yet, I still get testimonials for the treatment, along with vigorous personal derogation for dissing it. Did so again recently, got into quite a little tête á tête. Hand in hand, such belief is accompanied by certainty that doctors are liars and thieves, and that the only reliable health care is to be received from -- you name it -- naturopaths, chiropracters, homeopaths, and chi-ters. The less evidence, the better.

What impresses them beyond recall to reality is the production of "stones" in their feces after they drink the potion. With minor variations, the flushee takes a combination of oil and something acidic and, by golly, like cottage cheese, it produces little curds in the turds that the true believer is convinced are gallstones. I've had them brung to me, with smug certainty, in little cups, a wrong thing on many levels. Without recounting the simple physiology of the gallbladder and the only slightly more complicated chemistry of bile, not to mention the geometry of bile ducts and the physical nature of gallstones, I'll assert, and the reader will accept based on my decades of care for patients and my hundreds of posts which have never deviated from factual, that there simply is no way taking that brew or anything else by mouth will cause a gallbladder to disgorge itself of stones. Believing these potions can work is like thinking you can change your spark plugs by flushing the radiator.

But them cute little curds: what more proof does a believer need? (Suggestion: pick one up and rub it between your fingers.)

Which brings me back into this blog's bailiwick: why do humans need to believe stuff that's so obviously untrue, easily disproved, completely bogus? Whether it's Obama's birth, the age of the earth, a homeopath's worth, or evolutionary dearth, people can be persuaded of the damndest things. Why? In the human brain, how can such disparate things dwell as art, music, love, engineering, architecture, invention... and... belief in gallbladder flushes, Sarah Palin, and Glenn Beck? With so much in us that strives for perfection, for understanding our world, for discovery, we remain capable of -- in need of, evidently -- self-delusion of the most remarkable and refractory sort. My latest in the thrall of flushes was absolutely convinced, while derisively dismissive of factual input. Not unlike some commenters here. So deep is the need.

Philosophers can wrestle with it, theses can be written. But to me, if it's frustrating and depressing, it's also simple: our minds have not kept pace with our ability to create. We've made the world too complex and too dangerous for the limited capacity we have to understand what we've done or, from the beginning maybe, to handle uncertainty. It's a paradox of evolution. Capable of so much, our brains have significant and perverse lacunae. Faced with inescapable reality, like the kid who spills ink on the carpet, we turn to pretense. When we can't deal with the world we've made, we make stuff up that feels good, that's easy, magical. Water memory. Death panels. Creationism. Fair and balanced. For that matter, in terms of demonstrating failures of human cerebration, I find it hard to make much distinction between believing there's a red-skinned guy with horns and a tail living in the center of the earth, that martyrdom gets you a two-month supply of virgins, and this. All evidence that in apprehension of reality we're fatally flawed. (By "fatally," I mean "fatally." And by "we" I mean "they.")

If we're going to save ourselves from ourselves, we have a hell of a long way to go, which means we better find a way to pick up the pace of evolution in a big hurry. I wonder if lemon juice and olive oil would work...

Enemy Mine

Psychological research is fuzzier than most. Exes and ohs are less rigid, numbers not easily applicable. Still, it often produces ideas worth chewing. Here's an example which, happily, comports with a central belief of mine:

A research team led by social psychologist Daniel Sullivan of the University of Kansas reports on four studies that suggest people are “motivated to create and/or perpetually maintain clear enemies to avoid psychological confrontations with an even more threatening chaotic environment.” When you place their findings in the context of the many threats (economic and otherwise) people face in today’s world, the propensity to turn ideological opponents into mighty monsters starts to make sense.

Of course I'd like to think that it doesn't apply to me: my warnings about the RWS™ are accurate, whereas their railings about Obama, as well as those of the tea bagging conspiracy theorists, are insane. Rather than giving me comfort, rather than helping me avoid angst, my feelings about those guys are deeply disturbing. Still, it's possible it's a human thing.

Deliberately or not, governments often seem to understand the need for scary enemies. Traveling in the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, I concluded as much as I observed the ubiquitous demonization of the US. (In that case, I intuited that it was because their socialist paradise was a delusion, and the only way to make it -- and its people -- work was to create an existential enemy.) In the disproportionate reaction to terrorism coming from the right side of our own political spectrum, I hear echoes. It's not unlike the response to communism a few decades ago. Diverting attention and energies from power-grabs and oppression, cranking up a perpetual enemy works wonders. Right, Dick?

I wish we had the ability to see ourselves in terms of our frailties and failings. I wish we could get a little more meta, and recognize how our fears and needs enter into, distort, and color our beliefs. If so, might we rise above, at least a little, the hyperpartisanship that is destroying us? Might we see what we are doing to ourselves in giving a platform to, and following, such damaged souls as Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly? Could we understand the unworthy -- if human -- need behind it?

Well, people might say, I'm demonizing those guys as much as they demonize me. I'm just proving the point of the study at the center of this post. Am I, though? Is it all of a piece? Is there no difference between my point of view and that of Glenn Beck? Do people who think like I do have the same blinders as those who revere Glenn? Is paranoia the same as pointing out reality? I don't think so. He's crazy. I'm not.

But maybe I'm not meta enough.