Lecturer: One of the most important reasons people come to see psychiatrists is because of relationship difficulties. We usually conceptualize this in terms of dyadic relationships, but one of the most important relationships - that between a child and their parents - is usually a triadic relationship. In other cases we may encounter relationships that are tetradic, pentadic…um…
Other student: Sexadic?
Lecturer: If you’re sexadic, you should definitely see a psychiatrist.
Today I was working with my colleague Dr. Khan…
(this would be a good time to mention that I work on a team with two doctors named Dr. Rath and Dr. Khan, and it takes most of my willpower for the day to avoid making terrible and probably racially insensitive Star Trek jokes at them)
…and we got in an argument because he said that another one of our coworkers used to do lobotomies, and I said no way people who used to do that are still alive and practicing, that was banned a long time ago. So I tell him to Google it, he searches “can psychiatrists still legally lobotomize people?” and Google tells him that it hasn’t really been done since the 70s.
Then I left and did some other work and he saw some patients in his office.
I come back and he’s seen a couple of patients, and he didn’t realize that his clearly visible computer screen still has “can psychiatrists still legally lobotomize people” on it.
I doubt anyone really noticed, but then again, people were unusually cooperative today.
My boss is the only person I know who unironically uses the phrase “H-E-double hockey sticks”.
He also works with acutely psychotic patients day in and day out. So I get to hear phrases like “WHY THE H-E-DOUBLE-HOCKEY-STICKS WOULD YOU COVER YOUR HANDS IN FECES AND THEN ATTACK SOMEONE?”. I don’t think this will get any less weird no matter how many times I hear it.
(sitting in the doctors’ work room when a bubbly woman wearing a jacket with the hospital logo on it comes up to me)
Her: Do you have a moment to hear about our new “Due To” campaign?
Me: Uh…
Her: Great! The “Due To” campaign is about improving the quality of our medical records by listing what problems are due to! So we don’t just write a diagnosis of “pneumonia”, we write “pneumonia due to streptococcal infection”!
Me: Okay, but…
Her: We don’t just write “acute blood loss”, we write “acute blood loss due to gastrointestinal haemorrhage.” We don’t just write “stroke”, we write “stroke due to occlusion of the left middle cerebral artery.”
Me: Okay, but I’m a psychiatrist.
Her: Oh.
Me: Tell you what, if anyone ever discovers what anything I treat is due to, you’ll be the first to know.
Boss: Tell me what’s the most common cause of Parkinson’s disease in young people?
Me: Genetic factors.
Boss: Okay, what’s the most common cause of Parkinson’s disease in drug users?
Me: Drugs laced with MPTP.
Boss: (narrows eyes). Fine, what’s the most common cause of Parkinson’s disease among the native people of Guam?
Me: …okay, I am totally stumped.
Boss: That would be Lytico-Bodig Disease.
Me: …
Boss: The inhabitants of Guam eat a rare bat, which itself eats a rare plant, which carries a rare neurotoxin in its seeds, and that causes Parkinson’s.
Me: I guess that’s…not too surprising. They traced Ebola to people eating bat meat too
Boss: Really? You know what? I’m going to say it. Eating bat is a bad idea.
Me: (in my head) That depends if we’re talking about saturated bat or unsaturated bat.
BOSS: Scott, you’ve been selected as our representative to the hospital committee.
SCOTT: What? I didn’t even know there was a hospital committee. Why?
BOSS: Because you’re well-respected in the department and your peers have confidence in your leadership abilities.
SCOTT: …it’s because I’m on night shift, so I’m the only person who didn’t attend the department meeting where we chose a representative, isn’t it?
BOSS: Okay, yeah, it was that.
Tagging @funereal-disease and @slatestarscratchpad because I reference their writing in this and that seems only fair if they want to respond.
This is a dodge.
Any non-strawman model of individualism has room for…voluntary engagement with other humans. No one – actually no one – is saying “individualism, therefore you’re not allowed to form communities of interest.” Or “individualism, therefore you’re not allowed to find emotional satisfaction in closeness to other people.” Or “individualism, therefore you’re not allowed to be invested in your awesome summer camp.”
(OK, hypothetically, you might just be taking a shot at the sort of small-minded hyperconformist morons who look at anything other than nuclear-family-centric suburban anomie and say OMG THAT IS A CULT!. But if so, uh, that’s a pretty damn soft target and no one gives a shit.)
The individualist society is a society of voluntary communities of interest.
But voluntary communities of interest do have their limits. Most importantly on the macro scale, your kids aren’t likely to stick around to be part of them. Also, well, even when people love each other a lot, they do in fact change and get into fights and generally make decisions that put a strain on community cohesion. (I am very familiar with the internal dynamics of Awesome Voluntary Communities Full of Love Where Everyone Is Super Invested. I have seen them self-destroy hideously. I’d be surprised if this weren’t also true of you.)
And these limits…have consequences. A community where anyone could just up and leave, if he gets sufficiently steamed – even if you’re pretty sure he won’t – is a community where you’re probably going to be wary about just handing over lots of your resources. A community that isn’t likely to contain your kids is a community that isn’t going to absorb the entirety of your attention and your wealth. Etc.
You can get around those limits. Most human societies do. You get around them with coercive power, of the temporal and social varieties. You get around them by ensuring that people actually can’t leave, or that they will pay a huge penalty if they do. You get around them by ensuring that your kids are vastly more comfortable in the community than they can ever be outside it.
(The “constant fanatical enthusiasm” thing is kind of a strawman in and of itself, on the part of your interlocutors. No one seriously thinks that you can run a tribal society on that engine, which is why no one has ever seriously tried. But many dyed-in-the-wool individualists aren’t great at grappling with social structures like “if you walk out you will have zero money and zero skills and no one you know will ever speak to you again.” Which is funny, because presumably most of them grew up in modern Western nuclear families, which are mini-tribes that employ all the usual coercive tactics.)
There are concrete advantages to tribalism, although I am firmly convinced that they are really really really really not worth it. But if you want to defend tribalism, start by talking about tribalism, not about some kind of magic inhuman society that has all the freedoms of atomic individualism but it doesn’t matter because you can count on no one ever using them.