Conventional Wisdom is not Always Wise

 

Are there phrases that cause you pain whenever you hear them?  All my life I have heard phrases taken as conventional wisdom that are blunt instruments used to beat people, to push conformity on people who actually want to think.  

In her new and very thoughtful podcast "Kelly Corrigan Wonders," Corrigan begins with four episodes that show the dark side of supposed truisms many people take for granted.  I find each of the phrases wrong as generalities and hurtful when thoughtlessly pushed on others.

The first episode is the best and the most painful.  Corrigan, a cancer survivor, interviews a woman currently dealing with cancer. Both have been told "Everything happens for a reason" by people who are healthy, thoughtless and willing to cause pain simply to have something to say or to spread their own shallow beliefs.  

Both women are believers in God, which means they have people in their lives who are more apt to say "Everything happens for a reason" or "It's all God's plan for your life" or another variant of an uncomfortable phrase that comforts only the speaker.  

The relationship of Chance, Fate, Luck, and Free Will is complex in any but the worst lives, where poverty and disease and war have so limited free will and chance that bad luck and ill fate are all one has. I have thought about fate and free will a lot in the context of war. 

After listening to this episode, I don't think anyone could say "Everything happens for a reason" without embarrassment.

The next phrase, "Never Give Up" is more sympathetic for me than the other three, but only for myself. I have pushed myself not to give up knowing how much I will suffer for my obsession.  I don't often recommend others do the same.

Over the three decades I have raced bicycles, people have told me they want to race but don't want to crash. I tell them not to race.  I have enlisted four different times over more than four decades, but I have not encouraged more than a few people to enlist. As with bicycle racing, when helmets are mandatory, the activity is dangerous. I only encourage people to race or enlist, who clearly want to do something dangerous.  

Giving up is always an option. And a good option. Someone who says "Never give up" has not lain in a ditch on the side of a road seeing inside their knees or hear the crunch and felt the agony of their own splintered bones.

In "What you don't know won't hurt you" Dani Shapiro finds out in her 50s, after her parents have passed away, that she is not her father's biological daughter. It was something she sensed all of her life, but only found out with a DNA test. She was devastated. She wanted to know from her parents.  The phrase is crazy in so many other contexts. More than a century ago, my grandfather did not listen to the news and almost died by being drafted into the Russian Army--not a good place for Jews. What he did not know--that World War I had begun--almost killed him 

In the fourth episode, Google Executive Annie Jean Baptiste talks about the pitfalls and problems of trusting your gut.  She makes an excellent case of how trusting your gut means trusting that what you already know is enough for any situation--that our own limited experience is sufficient for any whatever we might confront. The wider our world the more likely our gut will be deceived. 

The public figures famous for trusting their guts are among the more arrogant Americans who every lived:  the former President, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, to name a deplorable few.  

Of course, anyone with expertise can trust their gut within the area in which they are expert: pilots in aircraft, sailors in ships, chemists in labs, etc.  But put the sailor in a plane, the chemist in a ship, or a failed reality star in the White House, and the problems happen as fast as storm lightning.  

All four episodes were fascinating for me. I am going to listen to them again.  And go further in the series.