IATROGENIC -- ANOTHER EXCHANGE! "HABITS, THE HEART, AND TOO MUCH, TOO MANY, TOO SOON!"

IATROGENIC – ANOTHER EXCHANGE

“HABITS, THE HEART, AND TOO MUCH, TOO MANY, TOO SOON!”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 23, 2009

“Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation: Prince,
Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinkes he hath got
To be a Phoenix, and that then can bee
None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.”

John Doone

“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

John Milton

* * *

A WRITER FROM GERMANY WRITES:

Jim,

To implement change is always difficult, because:

1) People want to keep what they are used to instead of doing it differently;

2) They are afraid of what they might get and don't see the advantage to them as sure (safety issue);

3) They need to learn how to get on track and are not sure whether they can do it or left behind;

4) Change mostly also means a change of the ranking order and last but not least:

5) Too many different opinions what kind of change would be best suited to fix the problem.

Change is like a revolution: there are losers and there are winners. But who wants to become a loser?

There are still quite a few people, which we call establishment, who benefit from the actual situation and in some cases they get helped out for their failures. So why should they promote change?

Take care and never mind,

Manfred

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Manfred,

I can't dispute your points. The part to change seemingly always left out, though, is the reprogramming necessary for change. I grew up in an era when it was "cool" to smoke. Now it is "uncool" and banned practically everywhere in the United States. In fact, I read an editorial today that a foundation wants to sue all CEOs of cigarette companies beyond what they have already been sued as corporations.

How did that happen?

The American Cancer Society launched a national campaign. It lobbied against movies showing people smoking in them or on television. It had a campaign for high school students. But where it really hit home, and this follows your outline, was when it was implicitly shown that the poor, the disadvantaged, the ignorant, and the left out were most likely to smoke. The rich and famous, the educated and sophisticated no longer smoked. It was a psychologically groupie thing, which indicated how superficial we are. But it worked!

On the other hand, it has become "cool" to have tattoos. In my youth, there was nothing less "cool." Outsiders had tattoos, now everyone is a groupie with them.

Society changes when it is to its advantage to change. Its preferred image, through education and indoctrination, is modified by public pressure to change to warrant inclusion. One of the ironies of a society of supposed individualism such as ours is that very few have the actual courage to be individualistic. We are careful to dress, walk, talk, and behave the same; to want, value and believe the same; and to seek the same rewards.

You are right about change, but remember Barak Obama won on a campaign platform of change. Were your five points less valid? Of course not. Then how did he manage being elected? Like the American Cancer Society, Obama’s appeals was to the “in” crowd and made it “cool” to want what he wanted, and the “forgotten crowd” of young people savvy using the Internet. If anything, our new president is a maestro manipulating the media. At the same time, he made it “uncool” not to want the same for those earlier excluded, such as African Americans like himself. As Kennedy used religion by not using it to get elected, Obama used race by not using it to get elected. Kennedy reminded Americans of the Declaration of Independence; Obama reminded Americans of the Emancipation Proclamation.

You say “never mind,” implying that there is no point to mind, but I do mind, and I think a writer of descriptive truth, as I put it, is more needed now than ever before because prescriptive truth is worn out, and as you indicate, people will buy into a solution if they see themselves as winners. I am not interested in either winners or losers, but in people understanding why they are the way they are. I am not interested in them changing. If I were, I’d own their problems. But I am interested in explaining why choosing to change or not change is a problem. For that reason I share a couple excerpts with you.

I wrote this in THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996) in a chapter titled "Too Much, Too Many, Too Soon":

"Change is not amendable to miracles, but to painful struggle with no guarantees that the new direction will provide absolution to old sins. There is no way to avoid paying for past excesses. Retribution is not personal, only a given. Better to acknowledge this and deal with it then to prolong the agony and exacerbate the consequences.

“As the mysteries of nature are revealed through science and launched into consciousness with technology, we find ourselves submerged in complexity, a complexity far beyond our capacity of a single individual to manage. Many heads must work as one to resolve the mysteries of life – at home, in school, in the workplace and in government. Cooperation is no longer simply a sufficient but necessary condition.

“A total reprogramming from dependent to interdependent behavior is often mentioned as an answer to this challenge, but without the necessary radical cultural change required. We prefer to do things as painlessly as possible, or one-step-at-a-time. Chronological change or incremental change is not the answer. The foundation of our cultures is all wrong for the requirements.

“Change cannot be superimposed on a quicksand foundation. This strategy, however, is now receiving wide acceptance, and a strategy, I might add, which continues to fail. Only psychological change, like being reborn a cooperative individual, has any chance of success. In essence, this requires going against the grain of conventional wisdom. This would not be proposed if complexity could be handled otherwise. Change demands consensus movement in the same direction. This is not easy to accomplish, so we avoid it. History tells us radical change seldom occurs before disaster is reached. Disaster as catalyst is always costly. Can we still manage such costs?” (pp 232 – 233)

In this same book, I write in a chapter titled “Habits and the Heart” about psychological time. I can sit here writing for six to eight hours and think nothing of it, but BB gets on my case reminding me of the chronological time I have spent without taking a break. I’ve never been one committed to chronological time, or I probably wouldn’t be working harder now than I did when I was young, and I worked pretty damned hard then.

Early on, after my da died at 49, never receiving any relief from pushing the Sisyphus rock up the hill, I decided I was going to live the life God denied him, to live in psychological time. I was 22 at the time. I’ve never been imprisoned in chronological time since, as my many careers attest. I’ve never planned for the future. I haven’t had to because I’ve never joined the “in”club. Psychological time is living in the moment, and I was doing that before I read existential philosophy. I mention this because I’m going to quote from this chapter:

THE TABOO – "HABITS AND THE HEART"

“It is habits and the heart that dictate behavior. The heart, not the head, drives habits. Habits are formed so that behavior can be largely unconscious. It takes six weeks to form a habit, twice as long to change one. This is because feelings, not thinking drive behavior. Moreover, conscious behavior is driven by our psychological clock, whereas our chronological clock drives habitual behavior.

“Take the much accomplished athlete Peter Maher, 35, a dozen years ago he weighed 256 pounds and smoked three packs of cigarettes and drank a case of beer a day. “And to really get drunk,” he states, “I’d down some really hard liquor like Jack Daniel’s or Southern Comfort.”

“A Canadian transplant living in St. Petersburg, Florida, he has made a complete metamorphosis. He carries 150 pounds on his 6-foot-5-frame, and only 3 percent body fat. The two-time Olympian owns the world’s best time in 25 kilometers (1:14:29) and the Canadian record in the half marathon, with a career best of 2:11:47 in an eighth place finish at the London Marathon in 1991.

“Maher, who never drank a drop of alcohol or smoked a cigarette until age 18, says running is bookends to his life. He decided to reform because he had the feeling he wouldn’t be around long. Now he doesn’t eat fatty foods, and figures exactly what his body needs to run 140 miles a week, 25 miles on Sundays. “He can’t do things half-measure,” says a friend. “When it comes to Peter, it’s full blast. He goes into things headfirst. He lives and dies with his racing ability.”

“The young man, well intended as he is, has given up one addiction for another. There is little balance in his life, only a new obsession. He made the psychological commitment to change “cold turkey,” but his addictive personality was still not mastered. He still measures his progress in terms of a chronological clock. “The thing about running is it is like a big stick over your head. It challenges you every day; it does not let you hide. You can’t run away from it.” But you can run away from yourself, and we do, when we fail to make peace with ourselves.

“People addicted to cigarettes are fooling themselves who try to quit one-step-at-a-time. The same is true if they wear a nicotine patch to ease their craving for cigarettes, or submit to methadone treatment in the case of drug addiction. Chronological commitment does not cure the addiction, but rather prolongs the pain and is therefore seldom successful.

"Ninety percent of those who use this approach eventually revert back to their former addiction. This is because the euphoria of drinking binges, the calming satisfaction of a cigarette, the incredible highs of a gambling spree, the passionate love-making after a knock-down-drag-out-fight with one’s spouse, the wild episodes of philandering, or whatever the addiction, more often than not has a perverse way of being remembered fondly.

“The behavior may be temporarily halted, but the mind refuses to let go. It may be a year, five years or more, but in a moment of psychological or physical anguish, the itch returns and the behavior follows. This is so because the person’s psychology has not changed. When there is psychological change, the addicted person is fully AWARE of his addiction, fully ACCEPTS his responsibility for the state of addiction, then takes ACTION by choosing to end the addiction, realizing full well that it will be with him all his days, only now under control.

“There are no good or bad habits, only behaviors, which can become with repetition unconscious, and therefore potential hazards to life and happiness.” (pp 186-188)

Manfred, another reason I offer these excerpts is to show my writing is “descriptive truth” and not “prescriptive truth.” I am not in the solution business.

THE TABOO only has one review on www.amazon.com and she blasts the book because obviously she was looking for solutions and I am not a solution writer, as you can see from these excerpts. In many ways I am still a chemist, impersonal and stoichiometrically focused on the mole fractions of the equations. Here they are “habits and the heart,” and “chronological and psychological time.”

Be always well,

Jim