A SHOT-IN-THE-ARM

 

“Marami ng galit sa akin na bbms sa dati kong friends.” (FB netizen’s comment)

The writer who narrated the following story either could have been just wisecracking -- being a former minion of ex-President GMA -- or he could have been really serious considering the severity of the PTSD as a psychiatric disorder.

“Last week, my doctor reported to me he recommended several patients (all Leni supporters) to seek professional help for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I asked him what the symptoms of that disorder might be. Extreme anxiety, he said.

“That very evening, I had dinner with an old friend who was a passionate Leni supporter. She repeatedly asked if the country would be fine, now that BBM will be president. As the long dinner ended, I told her she had PTSD and must seek help.”

The American Psychiatric Association describes Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as “a psychiatric disorder that may occur in people who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event such as a natural disaster, a serious accident, a terrorist act, war/combat, or rape or who have been threatened with death, sexual violence or serious injury. PTSD has been known by many names in the past, such as ‘shell shock’ during the years of World War I and ‘combat fatigue’ after World War II…”

If the writer was just wisecracking, the put down, for sure, could further get on the nerves of those who have been already going through a lot, like losing friends, brought about by the animosity of the recent elections.

Amid such a psycho-emotional tinderbox, here’s a shot-in-the-arm courtesy of a high-performance expert Paul Rulkens who has postulated boldly in his TEDx Talk that “the majority is always wrong” as excerpted below:

“[W]hat I’m going to explain today is when it comes to high performance, why the majority is always wrong, and how you can use that to get everything you can, out of everything you’ve got.

“When people, teams, and organizations, whenever they hit a wall, they tend to do one of two things: they either do more… or they do less of the same things…if you look at the data, approximately 3% of people are inclined to even do different things. The remaining 97% continues to smash into the wall…”

Why? It’s because of the thinking process – difficult and effortful -- inducing laziness built deep into our human nature -- which reminds me of the Philippine folklore character: Juan Tamad. Dr. M. Scott Peck spelled out:

“Thinking is difficult…complex…process with a course or direction, a lapse of time, and a series of steps or stages that lead to some result. To think well is a laborious, often painstaking process…”

Consequently, Rulkens explained that “whenever we think, we try to think as short as possible and then we return to automatic pilot.” He stressed that “over 95% of our life, we run on automatic pilot.” In the same manner, Daniel Kahneman in his book “Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow” wrote about our “fast thinking” as a near-instantaneous process that happens intuitively with little effort driven by instinct and experiences. Rulkens asserted that if our brain is on "fast thinking” automatic pilot (Dr. Peck called it “simplistic thinking”), this leads to what scientists call “mental myopia,” also known as “tunnel vision.”

There is a striking episode in the Bible (Mt. 27:15-22) that has revealed a monumental human weakness of “simplistic thinking” or not thinking at all.

“It was customary for the governor to release any prisoner the people asked for on the occasion of the Passover. Now there was a well-known prisoner called Barabbas. As the people had gathered, Pilate asked them, ‘Whom do you want me to set free: Barabbas, or Jesus called the Christ?’ For he realized that Jesus had been handed over to him out of envy.

“When the governor asked them again, ‘Which of the two do you want me to set free?’ they answered, ‘Barabbas.’ Pilate said to them, ‘And what shall I do with Jesus called the Christ? All answered, ‘Crucify him!’”

Stirred up by no less than the chief priests and the elders, all the crowd, above and beyond the majority, were stricken with “mental myopia” or “tunnel vision.”

Talking about the “crowd,” Winston Churchill once said that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others we’ve tried.” Such a least-among-evils option is rationalized by the so-called Condorcet’s Jury Theorem or the Wisdom of the Crowd. It theorizes that when deciding as a group, the chance that the majority vote is correct increases as the number of voters increases.

Caveat: The Wisdom of the Crowd only works if each voter’s thinking is independent of each other, thereby, putting up an “epistemic” democratic process leading to a correct majority decision. On the flip side, however, a dire problem rears its ugly head if the thinking errors of individual voters turn out to be “systematic” -- cooked up, to a large extent, by disinformation, vote-buying, and bandwagon effect, among others. This sets off a “systematic bias” which as one writer said, will turn democracy’s epistemic superpower into an “idiocy.”

“Majority is always wrong” hypothesizes that in our post-truth digital age, sad to say, no election system devoid of weaknesses exists that fosters individual independent thinking among a “crowd” during a democratic decision-making process.

During the recent elections, if you voted as a result of critical thinking, if you voted independent of what the world revolves around you was propagandizing, if you voted for what is right, then, you are good for democracy. More of your tribe – critical thinkers – our country gravely needs today.

“Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.’ (William Penn, English writer, and religious thinker)

To Kakampinks, you might have lost the election battle, but you have won the war -- right vs. wrong, good vs. evil – deep down inside you. Sit back. Put your feet up. Then, look forward to the next war – the War against Poverty – aboard VP Leni’s starship: Angat Buhay.

Meantime, let’s shy away from raining on the victors’ parade. Chill.