Diagnosis Impossible

Learning to See the Problem

Jan 01, 2023

The idea of diagnosis doesn’t typically conjure images of violence. In theory, it shouldn’t, but diagnosis necessarily constitutes violence if it fails to account for the diagnosticians’ epistemic limitations and conflicts of interest. Without humility and transparency, the reality of diagnosis manufactures consent for pseudo-solutions. Hidden in plain sight, this pandemic of misdiagnosis violates the interests and integrity of everyone it claims to serve.

Humans don’t divide neatly into perpetrators and victims of diagnostic violence. We are all participants in this predicament, governed, in the words of W.H. Auden, by “forces we pretend to understand”. This chapter is an attempt to make this pretense conscious.

Part 1 introduces the ancient allegory of blind men and an elephant as a lens through which to examine the pandemic of reductionist misdiagnosis.
Part 2 examines the desire to hold “the perpetrators” accountable, and it points to the need for a new theory of culpability.
Part 3 examines the impossible cartography of “fractal falsehood” and the search for the devil in the details of our daily encounters with Blind Gropers (BGs).
Part 4 tackles the inescapable question about what is to be done in the cage of categories guarded by BGs.

This chapter started as a brief blog post that I published in 2020 under the title Diagnosis as Violence: Resistance to the Tyranny of ‘Blind Gropers’. I kept rewriting and expanding the blog post, in part because “resistance” felt like a misguided metaphor. Because of my own struggles with misdiagnosis, I felt powerfully tempted to resist the daily absurdities of life amid ideologically fueled reductionism, but through writing, I realized that we gain more power for the resistance by simply learning to see the sources of our oppression.

This chapter adopts a trans-contextual and interstitial perspective on the study of this oppression, staying above the fray of controversy around specific diagnostic systems and governing institutions. From this vantage point, the chapter seeks to:

Overcome the information overload attendant on context-specific critiques.
Help formulate meta-principles applicable to specific contexts.

Part 1 - Molested by Metaphors

To start, look through the lens of this ancient allegory and consider the pervasiveness and heavy cost of reductionism.

Ancient Allegory Revisited

Imagine yourself as the elephant in the allegory with blind men groping your body parts, likening your trunk to a snake, your tail to a rope, your leg to a tree and your tusks to spears. Because they can’t see you, they can’t know you, and they can’t help but reduce you to something they know. They can’t help but misdiagnose you.

Now imagine these Blind Gropers (BGs) as stand-ins for all the diagnosticians whose advice you seek out and whose judgments affect your view of everything that causes avoidable suffering in your life. They may include:

Institutional and individual participants in diagnostic and advisory arts.
Representatives of every conceivable area of expertise, every discipline and subdiscipline.
Experts and lay practitioners focused on every aspect of your wellbeing, including medical, economic, psychological, spiritual, legal, etc.
Orthodox and heterodox BGs. Depending on your orientation, the former may include licensed physicians and lawyers, large investment firms, professional standard-setting organizations, elected officials and regulators, while the latter may include fringe-dwellers such as psychics, shamans, astrologers, coaches, cult leaders and missionaries inviting you to join forces with them to effect a messianic redemption, soul retrieval, quantum healing or self-liberation.
Casual and purely transactional relationships—perhaps with salespeople, service providers or strangers on social media who “recommend” products or ideas in response to your apparent needs.
Close friends and family whose connection with you extends beyond any specific diagnosis or remedy. With these BGs, you typically engage in daily mutual “elephant groping”.

Regardless of what connects you to them, BGs typically boil down their research to a problem and a solution, a diagnosis and a recommended remedy. However, unlike the blind men in the parable, most of your diagnosticians operate as self-interested economic agents in real-world institutions with faulty (and often woeful) governance and disclosure standards.

Your professional BGs may all claim to serve your best interests and to first do no harm, but the economic system rewards them for groping and guessing. It offers much weaker incentives to study, mitigate and disclose the limits of their knowledge and possible conflicts of interest.

Outside the institutional arena, too, the informal advisers you find among friends and family are not necessarily motivated by your best interests. They may be seeking validation or attention, or they may want to maintain or disrupt an established power dynamic in the family or to prevent the disclosure of an explosive secret. Consciously or subconsciously, they too may be leading you astray.

Whether the real-life context is institutional or interpersonal, the metaphorical BGs don’t hesitate to use force or subterfuge, if necessary, to keep groping and guessing. They do what they can to sustain the self-aggrandizements, denials, fabrications and other ways of bolstering the claim that the elephant is a snake, a tree, a rope, a fan, or a spear.

This organized misrepresentation of reality normalizes violence against you, your family, your community, your country, your world, and you are probably complicit in this violence in more ways than you care to admit.

The Cost of Reductionism

This pandemic claims countless casualties every day, most of them unacknowledged or under-reported. Woven into the deep code of the culture of willful ignorance, the production and marketing of pseudo-solutions to misdiagnosed problems exacts an incalculable cost. The pandemic progressively weakens not only our immunity to this transgenerational cultural virus but also our ability to language the meaning and magnitude of our losses.

When ordinary language fails, some people find value in poetry, metaphor and allegories like the story of the gang-molested elephant. Others may prefer a mathematical and visual vocabulary to capture the cost of diagnostic malpractice. Consider the example of a three-dimensional object – a cylinder projected into two-dimensional planes. In one of the planes, the projection renders the cylinder as a square; in the other plane, the cylinder appears as a circle.

Figure 1: An illustration of reductionism. In the projection of a three-dimensional object into two-dimensional planes, the third dimension is irretrievably lost. Image credit: civilizationemerging.com

The projection illustrates not only the loss of the third dimension, but also its irretrievability, providing a mathematical dramatization of the far-reaching consequences of diagnostic malpractice. I didn’t see this layer of meaning in the image until a physicist I know introduced me to the idea of a “unique inverse”. As he explained it: “In this image, there is no unique inverse, i.e. we can’t go back from the projection to the original 3D shape.” In other words, there’s no way to tell that the circle and the square represent aspects of a cylindrical object.

With a cylinder replacing the allegorical elephant as the object of reduction, the idea of a unique inverse helps illustrate the pernicious long-term effects of reductionist misdiagnosis. This malpractice subverts the human yearnings for self-knowledge, healing and progress. Not only does reductionism propagate false but perversely defensible claims (e.g., the cylinder is a circle), but it also makes it impossible to recover the higher-dimensional theory once the reductionist distortion gains legitimacy.

Part 2 - Waiting for the Nuremberg Moment

Considering the gravity of the crime, one may shudder at the thought that we can never reach a Nuremberg Moment that would scratch the itch of our desire for justice. However, not only can we not punish the evildoers, we can’t even identify them.

Masks of Reductionism: The Ignorant “They” and the Theory of A Few Bad Apples

Even the most high-minded interpretations of the parable of the blind men and the elephant can lapse into the very sin the parable illustrates. Specifically, interpretations can reduce this illustration of reductionism by confining the story to a specific context.

Such distortions obscure the systemic epidemiology of diagnostic malpractice. They foster the “ignorance of ignorance” that the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead warned against.1 These distortions acknowledge the malignancy and say nothing about its metastatic complications. In 1872, for example, the poet John Godfrey Saxe reduced the ancient parable of reductionism by tethering it to the context of “theologic wars”.2

So oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween
Tread on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

This interpretation of the parable is high-minded in that it deciphers the elephant as a stand-in for God or ultimate reality. From this dizzying interpretive altitude, Saxe poetically projects the sin of reductionism onto the disputants in theologic wars. That means them and there; not me, not here. Here and now, I righteously bemoan the ignorance of others.

But reductionist violations of wholeness don’t just occur in the minds and hearts of religious fundamentalists wedded to absolutist doctrines in the marketplace of ideological tribalism. Assaults against reality unfold insidiously in countless day-to-day interactions in which unexamined assumptions about “problems” send relief-seekers into the arms of BGs whose epistemic limitations have not yet been exposed. This dynamic simmers imperceptibly behind numerous phenomena, including:

The appeal of demagogues, con artists, cult leaders and Ponzi schemers peddling False Hope and False Fear.
The scapegoating of minorities and the normalization of violence against them to protect the worldviews of normative majorities.
The medicalization of normal suffering and the suppression of evidence about the adverse side effects of profit-generating treatments.
Public and private companies destroyed by pseudo-solutions du jour (e.g., downsizing, empire-building acquisitions, the latest “models” evangelized by management consultancies, etc.)
Sleazy salesmen trained to sell you something even if you don’t need it, even if you can’t afford it, even if many of the claims about the product are false.
Doctors running conveyor-belt practices that make a mockery of the very idea of diagnosis and treatment.
The Sodom and Gomorrah of reductionism known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).
The fragmentation of healthcare into categories (e.g., medical, dental, vision, mental, etc.) and subcategories that create a foundation for the treatment of symptoms instead of patients.
The corporate use of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to distort asset values and to reward the wrongdoers.
The use of “GDP” to measure the wealth of nations while ignoring the wellbeing of the people.
The use of social media “metrics” to fuel pandemics of envy and sustain an “attention economy” in which the new scarce economic resource is stolen, rather than gifted or traded.
Conspiracy theories that trace complex problems to concrete points of origin.

For anyone who has thought deeply about the epidemiology of weaponized ignorance, this list of examples hardly requires elaboration. For adherents of the a-few-bad-apples theory of violence-by-diagnosis, it’s possible that no elaboration will suffice. Occupants of the liminal space between these polarities at least wouldn’t trivialize diagnostic malpractice or regard it with epistemic bravado.

Dismissive and defiant reactions to diagnostic malpractice often seek self-justification in some form of the following argument: “What’s the big deal about being told something you know is false? Where’s the violence in that? As the elephant in the parable, you know you’re not a tree or a spear.” Considering the wide-ranging examples of diagnostic malpractice, this argument sounds naïve, at best. Collectively and individually, human beings are deeply vulnerable to the charms of falsehood.

The parable of the blind men molesting an elephant understates the gravity of its real-life correlates. BGs provide upstream justifications for downstream violence ranging from the trivial to the soul-searing and encompassing all major domains of human experience, including physical, psychological, and economic.

The Impossible Indictment

Whether we think about the cost of reductionism in mathematical, allegorical, or anecdotal terms, we struggle to find an outlet for our outrage. We don’t know how to identify, indict and prosecute the responsible parties. Here, I’ll sketch out four impediments to the indictment:

The reductionists’ plausible deniability,
The challenge of “naming the devil” of second-order ignorance at the heart of diagnostic malpractice,
Our initiation into epistemic humility, and
Our discovery of the inner BG.

The Reductionist's Plausible Deniability: Hill Climbing and Valley Crossing

Reductionist harm is often shielded by plausible deniability. In the mathematical example above, the party responsible for rendering a cylinder as a circle can describe a three-dimensional object in two-dimensional terms and plausibly deny having made a false statement.

Another example comes from a philosophy course I took decades ago taught by the now-deceased Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. He guided the class through a thought experiment in which (to the best of my recollection) robots execute a program designed to get them to climb to the top of a hill. Placed in a landscape with hills of various heights, the robots easily move to the nearest hill and climb to the top, as programmed. But the program gives them no instructions for seeking out the tallest hill, only the nearest. Unless a robot is placed in the vicinity of the tallest hills, it predictably underperforms the more favorably situated peers running the same program.

Without making any explicitly false statements about the landscape, the program misleads by omission. Since the program works as advertised, the malpractice is far from self-evident.

Naming the Devil

BGs hide behind a myriad masks, and it doesn’t help to indict a mask. Still, people often resort to this understandable but largely ineffective strategy to channel their outrage at diagnostic malpractice. Misguided by masks of malevolence, survivors of misdiagnosis lapse into a logical fallacy: they equate the mask with what the mask conceals.

Depending on the context, this fallacy may provide a justification for the indictment of a fraudster, quack, cult leader, corrupt official, or a rapacious corporation, to name just a few examples. The prosecutors may appease the masses by making an example of a duly chastened wrongdoer. This way, the prosecutors don’t need to say or do anything about the pathogenic soil from which this bad apple drew its sustenance.

Sometimes, the prosecutors recognize wrongdoers as symptoms of a system of perverse incentives. With this insight, the prosecutors may start naming the systemic perversions and expanding their prosecutorial scope. Instead of targeting individuals or organizations, they may direct their outrage at abstractions, isms, and cultural phenomena. For example, depending on their ideological presuppositions, they may find the source code of falsehood woven into racism, sexism, capitalism, corruption, antisemitism, Abrahamic monotheism, or the plague of godlessness fueled by materialism, scientism and liberalism.

These indictments may provide catharsis, but they usually prove unhelpful or destructive. They compel people to abandon one falsehood only to accept an equally toxic poison. For example, people inclined to condemn modern medicine as “allopathic reductionism” may seek superior alternatives among charlatans hiding behind the mask of “medical intuitives” who channel archangels. Anger at government corruption may seek relief through the election of a con artist hiding behind the mask of a no-bullshit populist.

Reeling from ceaseless subversions, we binge endlessly on the latest snake oil to relieve anxieties we can't name. Unable to name the devil, we keep grasping at the straws extended by the latest redeemer—another internist, therapist, thought leader, career coach, meditation teacher or YouTuber pitching another construct, conspiracy theory, drug or dietary supplement.

When our redeemers disappoint or betray us, we daydream about exposing them, shaming them or suing them for malpractice. Whether they misdirected us willfully, negligently or innocently, we feel they co-opted our noblest yearning and they should pay. And we would hold them accountable if only we could identify and indict these shape-shifting devils.

Initiation into Epistemic Humility

Unable to secure an indictment, we feel an impotent rage, which we may sublimate through tweets, blog posts, lengthy essays or reveries about our appeals to justice. In these anguished polemics, both actual and imagined, we may speak or write with fiery eloquence about the willful blindness of the charlatans and apparatchiks that we failed to indict. We may accuse these perpetrators of cartographic malpractice and argue that they deserve the harshest punishment because bad maps pollute our lives in every sphere and every sense, from the inner sanctum to infinite reaches of space and time.

But, at some point, these sublimations of our rage reach a crescendo. Like a singer unable to sustain a high note, we acknowledge the glaring weakness in our indictment: we can’t ascertain the identity of the defendants, their legal status, criminal intent or competence to stand trial.

Setting aside speculative arguments and fantasies of retribution, we enter a terrain of epistemic humility where the words of W.H. Auden achieve prophetic resonance. When he wrote “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand”, he explained, at least to my satisfaction, why we can’t credibly direct the charge of cartographic malpractice at any known person, institution or ism. All of them are tangles of mysteries strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage.

This epiphany doesn’t have to spell a declaration of our helplessness in relation to the willfully blind BGs, but it does make obvious the impossibility of their indictment. Our initiation into epistemic humility also comes with heightened curiosity, and we deepen our inquiry into the powers we pretend to understand.

Discovering the Inner Blind Groper

Arguably the most important milestone in this inquiry comes when we discover the Inner BG (IBG) responsible for our complicity in the diagnostic malpractice we bemoan. With this discovery, the indictment we thought we wanted seems not only impossible but also absurd.

Like John Godfrey Saxe with his indictment of disputants in theologic wars, most consumers of diagnostic malpractice naturally direct their resentment at external manifestations of the BG syndrome. In mapping the epidemiology of blindness, they exclude the inner planes of unconscious ignorance. Thus, they create a safe harbor for what psychoanalysts call an “introject” of the ignorance they absorb through their interactions with vilified perpetrators of misdiagnosis.

Disguised as a trusted adviser, this introject serves a single mission: to keep attention focused outwardly, at the social sphere. That’s where we find all our friends and enemies, Pharaohs and messiahs, so the IBG tells us. Our job, according to the introject, is to distinguish the former from the latter. For example, we should read The New York Times and avoid Fox News, or vice versa. We should enlist the help of a licensed physician, and we should avoid the energy healer, or vice versa. We should treat our anxiety with cognitive-behavioral therapy, and we should avoid psychoanalysis, or vice versa.

In these daily choices, the introject is always eager to assist, but only on one inviolable condition: we must never turn our attention inward at our complicity in the mistreatment of the elephant in the allegory. This deal with the devil is both self-defeating and powerfully seductive, and liberation from the clutch of Mephistopheles requires us to break the deal. As Carl Jung wrote in his famous aphorism, “One who looks outside, dreams. One who looks inside, awakens.”

If we fixate on unmasking the reductionists “out there”, we can’t discover the introject. Until this discovery, we flee from the bondage of our afflictions to the Promised Land we envision, but we continually find ourselves in the wilderness of pseudo-solutions.

During my college years, the projections of my inner reductionist drew fresh fuel from my sociology curriculum. I was deeply moved, for example, by the history of Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), possibly the first diagnostic and statistical manual for disturbances of mental health. Published in 1486, the book outlined diagnostic criteria and treatment protocols for witches. Citing Exodus 22:18 — “You shall not permit a sorceress to live” — Malleus legitimized violence. It was one of the books that left me wondering “How could they [the ignorant ‘they’] go along with this insanity?”

For years after college, I habitually explained instances of such insanity as symptoms of religious fundamentalism or other isms supposedly designating the insanity’s point of origin. I felt that my disavowals of these falsehoods provided sufficient confirmation of my virtue. With my claim to virtue established, I couldn’t see what I couldn’t see — e.g., my private witch hunts and fundamentalisms.

Not in Kansas Anymore

No doubt, the psychoanalytic tradition deserves credit for incorporating the psyche into the evolving cartography of the terrain separating us from the utopian horizon. However, even with the added contributions from other giants of 20th century psychology, we are just starting to scratch the surface, and W.H. Auden’s immortal line — “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand” — stands uncontroverted, as it surely will remain.

As we traverse epistemic chaos, we do not have maps that meet the basic cartographic standard set by Alfred Korzybski.

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.

Our maps don’t even come close to matching the structure of our territory. As a result, we inhabit a balkanized epistemic landscape. In this Tower of Babel, we can’t achieve a languageable consensus either about our current coordinates or our best path forward.

Without this consensus, and without a stable and legitimate institutional order, the passage through the epistemic crucible fuels the urge to proclaim, “Never again!” Strangely, this urge co-exists with a recidivistic tendency to find another minority to scapegoat, another moral failing to project onto others, another piece of propaganda to re-describe our personal and collective depravities, another dose of opium to numb the resulting pain and, of course, another false messiah in whom to invest our yearning for redemption.

Every addict knows this struggle well, and the road to recovery is hard to find on our maps. This road begins where slogans end, where instead of proclaiming “Never again!”, we simply withdraw our consent and refuse to let another Blind Groper interpret our body parts for us.

This is where the evolution of our cartography ends. A discontinuity occurs. And we find ourselves in a hyperdimensional topology for which we have no language. Numerous mainstream and heterodox thinkers have experimented with various nomenclatures for this terra incognita, and they would probably agree that, to survive in our new homeland, we must first acknowledge that “we are not in Kansas anymore!”

Part 3 - Can Any ‘Map’ Locate the Devil in the Details?

We’re not in Kansas anymore, but the BGs are still with us. We can neither get rid of them nor find peace with the self-fragmentation they require of us. Life with BGs is a dance in the dialectic of irreconcilabilities. Below, I share observations and hypotheses about this dance, organized around:

The evolving cartography of fractal falsehood in the Age of Inversion.
What the science of semi-permeability reveals about navigating chaos.
The myth of Redemption and the most important message to BGs.
Gratitude: the second message to BGs.

Fractal Falsehood in the Age of Inversion: The First Cartographic Fix

To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, the clearest challenge stemming from diagnostic malpractice isn’t that we don’t see a solution, it’s that we don’t see the problem, certainly not its full dimensions. Our cartography is obsolete, allowing the perpetrators to hide in plain sight.

The clearest flaw in our default cartographic settings is that we haven’t updated them for the Age of Inversion that Robert Oppenheimer inaugurated in 1945 after he witnessed the first detonation of a nuclear weapon.

Oppenheimer famously turned to Hindu scripture to language the meaning of the moment. The meaning extended beyond the mere realization that “the world would not be the same”. Oppenheimer found an echo of that historic moment in verse 12 of the Bhagavad-Gita. Here, Krishna manifests as a sublime, terrifying being of many mouths and eyes, and says to Arjuna: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

In 2023, we can still turn to Hindu scripture to language the meaning of our nuclear moment as an inverted fulfillment of the yearning expressed in the Pavamana Mantra:

Om…From the unreal, lead me to the real.
From darkness, lead me to the light.
From death, lead me to immortality.
Om…Peace. Peace. Peace.

In the Age of Inversion, forces we struggle to describe have co-opted and inverted this yearning. We now flee from the real to the unreal, from light to darkness, from life everlasting to shadows and dust.

None of us freely agreed to join this death cult or to co-create a treatment-resistant anti-human culture that enshrines perverse incentives across its institutions. Yet, we can easily enumerate ways in which our institutions destroy what they promise to protect. The healthcare system destroys health; the justice system destroys justice; banks destroy wealth; journalism enables the corruption and destroys transparency.

We can’t run from this apocalypse or find shelter among trusted allies. The viral inversion of our values has breached every border, boundary, semipermeable membrane and security perimeter. It has hacked and hijacked every country and culture, institution and individual, religion and technology. Unlike a pandemic that merely envelops the entire world, the epidemiology of inversion can best be described as fractal — i.e., characterized by the ceaseless recurrence of self-similar patterns across scales and dimensions.

In the study of systemic corruption, no list of examples would be exhaustive, especially if it doesn’t incorporate the inner dimension of introjects that lead us into complicity with diagnostic malpractice. Anyone vigilantly trying to avoid the marketing funnels of shape-shifting charlatans understands that they do not represent a demographic category easily distinguishable from trustworthy practitioners. To paraphrase Solzhenitsyn, the line separating wisdom from ignorance passes through every human heart.

The Science of Semi-permeability

Along this ineffable schism, we find a semi-permeable membrane (aka discernment or, in Greek, diakrisis) that represents our best hope for health and wholeness in the cage of categories guarded by BGs. Like the membranes encasing living cells, this metaphorical membrane protects us by distinguishing the useful from the toxic. The mechanism of discernment employs a complex system of filters and sensors to:

Screen BG inputs for integrity, relevance and value.
Seek out self-aware and transparent BGs who understand the subtle politics and pitfalls of diagnosis.
Unbundle the “packaged deals” through which BGs often deliver their input. This way, the membrane allows us to metabolize the sugar-coated poisons flooding our private and public spaces.
Adjust default filter settings in response to fluctuating levels of toxicity in the environment.
Recognize shape-shifting corruptions without attempting to codify them into formal taxonomies.

These and other functions of the membrane allow us not only to resist the tyranny of BGs, but also to claim our daily redemptions from the pandemic of diagnostic violence. We aspire to daily redemptions because Hollywood-style renditions of the Hero’s Journey are losing their resonance. They don’t map to our experience. In the struggle with BG’s, there’s no final victory, no Shawshank Redemption, silver bullet, or spell to cast that will eliminate the threat, defeat or convert the adversary.

However, there is a daily call to action for anyone who relates to the elephant in the allegory. In addition to vigilant monitoring and maintenance of our epistemic security, the action entails conscious responses to inevitable security breaches. In some of its patterns, this daily labor may echo the monomyth, but the mundane cultivation of discernment offers no grand catharsis.

The membrane of discernment tasks itself with a merely binary choice. It either ingests or expels the input of diagnostic advisors. When unwanted input gets through, the membrane employs expulsive reflexes to maintain homeostasis. The membrane executes these decisions – often automatically – in its moment-to-moment encounters with diagnostic input. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace, from day to day, the quest for trustworthy diagnosis.

The Myth of Redemption and the First Message to BGs

Precisely because this monotonous quest doesn’t bring about a catharsis, it creates a void haunted by messianic hope. This space carries the charge of unfulfilled desire. The desire for redemption is the psyche’s response to the Groundhog Day battle with BGs…the samsara of psychic dismemberment.

This desire spikes during great transitions that rock the edifice of established authority. When maps of meaning misguide seekers of health and wholeness, visions of a superior cartography appear tantalizingly across the horizon of epistemic wilderness. BGs sense the desperation, and they swarm the allegorical elephant with promises to honor its wholeness.

Even though BGs can’t honor what they can’t know, the elephant can’t repress its desire to believe. The BGs validate the elephant’s concerns about reductionism; they even embrace holistic practices, celebrate the biopsychosocial model and sustainability. They tell the elephant exactly what the elephant wants to hear. Most of the time, the elephant dares to hope and trust again and follows the latest map of healing, awakening, or enlightenment.

Desperate to exit the matrix of its afflictions, the elephant can’t see that the most direct path to the Promised Land is to forgive the BGs for they know not what they do and to tell them, as Diogenes told Alexander the Great, to “stand out of my light!”

This message inverts our default setting in relation to diagnostic input. It signals a shift from epistemic trust to self-protective vigilance, from the presumption of innocence to the presumption of guilt.

Bless the Blind Gropers: The Second Message

The shift from trust to vigilance allows us to graduate from resentment to gratitude in our relationships with BGs. We reach this milestone when we realize that, without BGs, we would be hopeless in our quest for the utopian horizon.

The apparent contradiction is easily resolved if we think of BGs as computer hackers. They harm their targets, but usually by revealing vulnerabilities in the targets’ security systems. The revelations are often as valuable as the harm is deep. At the very least, the revelations create strong incentives for increased investment in cybersecurity.

Similarly, the BGs we allow into our lives teach us more about the shape of our vulnerabilities than we learn from our best teachers. By mapping our weak spots and gushing wounds, we discover the path to our Promised Land. This discovery is, in part, a gift from our BGs, which makes them our partners in cartography.

For their contribution to this partnership, BGs deserve our gratitude. I don’t mean an insincere, dismissive “Thank you”. I mean deep gratitude because, consciously or unconsciously, we organize our lives around our wounds. Whether we deny them or defy them, we want to know their shape and their coordinates in the planes of our Becoming.

Without these coordinates, we can’t name what afflicts us or construct stories that make sense of our pain. We lose connection with parts of ourselves trapped in dungeons of the mind where they scream helplessly for recognition. As we map our wounds with the help of our cartographic partners, these screams rise from the dungeons into consciousness, allowing us to reclaim what we had lost.

Two pitfalls are worth noting here. First, gratitude is a natural response to this milestone in the recovery from misplaced trust, but it’s important not to misconstrue any of the milestones as “Mission Accomplished” moments. This error can shake our vigilance. Second, the message of gratitude may seem incompatible with the first message to BGs – Stand out of my light – but such incompatibilities should not deter us because the dance with BGs is powered by paradox.

Essential Meta-skepticism: A Message for the Elephant

All diagnosis is corruptible, including all critiques of diagnostic malpractice. This genre attracts some authors whose work reaches prophetic resonance and withstands the test of rigorous scrutiny overtime, but anti-reductionism is also awash in snake oil. The merchants of this evergreen remedy exploit the rising awareness of the pitfalls of reductionism to recruit adherents to a dizzying array of reality-denying cults, conspiratorial movements, wellness brands and practices that function as sugar-coated poisons.

Echoing legitimate grievances to establish rapport, these “alternatives” re-victimize desperate relief-seekers by using friendlier masks to conceal their “ignorance of ignorance”. When reductionism co-opts the desire for non-reductionist remedies, we become what we bemoan and we nurture the seeds of meta-corruption — i.e., the corruption of our thinking about corruption.

Critiques of reductionism fail if we reduce them to anti-reductionist solutions, bumper stickers, slogans, memes, and other artifacts of ideology. To mitigate this risk in the study of diagnosis as violence, it helps to acknowledge the subversive effect of seeing false messiahs as a few bad apples in the orchard of redemptive revelation. The orchards of our post-reality Mindfuckistan are mostly toxic rot.

An ineffable feature of the human psyche is irresistibly drawn to the rot. Diagnostic stories satisfy a need so basic that we often consume them even when we know they carry a virus. Even when their corruption is obvious, we consume these stories for the same reason a shipwreck survivor stranded at sea consumes the saltwater, knowing that this pseudo-remedy will only hasten his demise. When the need is irrepressible, we favor toxic remedies over what we call inaction, failing to distinguish it from non-action.

This vulnerability of the human psyche invites exploitation, and we need a cultivated meta-skepticism on the path to wholeness. This habit of mind, combined with courage, allows us to cross the narrow bridge in the old Hasidic song Kol Ha'Olam Kulo: “The whole entire world is a very narrow bridge, and the important thing is to have no fear at all.”

Part 4 - What Is to Be Done?

As the powers we pretend to understand guide us across this narrow bridge, we can help maintain our balance in countless ways, including the following:

Do Nothing
Transcend Literalism
Transcend Taxonomic Thinking

Do Nothing

As participants in the collective drama of reductive diagnosis, we already do what the best listicles and books would recommend for the elephant in the allegory. Most importantly, we select and deselect our BGs every day in myriad micro-decisions that we typically don’t even recognize as ways of regulating our diagnostic inputs and processing protocols. Following the principle of first doing no harm, we don’t need to do anything else until we feel confident that the action at least makes us more conscious of this daily work.

Transcend Literalism

In the dance with BGs, literalism is a promise of clarity that leads to confusion. This form of fundamentalism often dons the cloak of science and journalism, and it fetishizes factuality. Instead of making us more conscious of our pretenses in relation to the ineffable powers guiding our daily lives, literalism seeks to deny or trivialize the pretenses.

Aversion to metaphorical language is one of the stumbling blocks on the path to adequate descriptions of our experience. Consider the case study of James Fallows at The Atlantic triumphantly debunking the boiling-frog myth in 2006.3

He started by dutifully describing the meme and succinctly explaining its resonance:

Everyone who has heard a political speech knows this story: You put a frog into a pot of boiling water, and it jumps right out. But if you put it in a pot of nice comfortable water and then turn on the heat, the frog will complacently let himself be boiled…The reason it's so popular in politics is that it's an easy way to warn about the slow erosion of liberties or any other slow threat you want to talk about.

Fallows set the record straight:

Here's the problem. It just isn't true. If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will (unfortunately) be hurt pretty badly before it manages to get out -- if it can. And if you put it into a pot of tepid water and then turn on the heat, it will scramble out as soon as it gets uncomfortably warm.

He then cited a Fast Company article which had busted the boiling-frog myth a decade earlier. The article included a colorful quote from a source with impressive and indisputably relevant credentials: Curator of Reptiles and Amphibians at the National Museum of Natural History.

Fallows also helpfully included a link to a Google Answers string of replies to a request for a "biologically sound" example of animal behavior that would illustrate the same point. Then, after politely shaming the Canadian Medical Association Journal for using the parable of the frog in an editorial, Fallows concluded:

Frogs have a hard enough time as it is, what with diminishing swampland and polluted waters. Political rhetoric has its problems too. For the frogs' sake, and that of less-idiotic public discourse, let's retire this stupid canard, or grenouille.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, many readers in 2023 may read the essay by Fallows as an example of opinion journalism done right. However, such well-intended but anthropologically unsophisticated critiques waste fact-checking resources on metaphorical truths. In this case, the fact-checking revealed that frogs don’t like boiling water. This kind of fact-checking scores illusory victories by suppressing truths that warrant amplification.

Now, about 17 years after the publication of the Atlantic article, the boiling-frog allegory seems respectably prophetic in hindsight—and precisely for the reasons that Fallows himself anticipated in explaining the virality of the meme. The imagined death of the slowly boiled frog pointed to the insidious threat of normalization blinding people to multiple existential threats. With desperate urgency, the collectively imagined boiling frog pointed to the human capacity for self-defeating denials of in-your-face reality. Rather than amplify this truth, Fallows tried to fact-check it into irrelevance.

Next, this line of inquiry might fact-check the story about the frog that agreed to carry a scorpion across a river. This story illustrates the wisdom of withdrawing compassion from beings constitutionally driven to poison us. This probably isn’t a “biologically valid” illustration, but this objection not only misses the moral of the story, it shows a lack of fluency in the language of the story. Without this language, we remain trapped in the cage of a petty literalism, impotent in our confrontations with the forces we pretend to understand.

Transcend Taxonomic Thinking

No one knows the name for the devil behind violence through diagnosis. In context-specific critiques, we may identify a culprit, and we may even punish or decapitate the culprit, but the dragon will always grow another head. The culprit isn’t the criminal mastermind. Even when we adopt a trans-contextual perspective, we can’t identify the mastermind, not with a non-metaphorical name.

We may not know the name of the devil, but we know the devil’s methods. We know, for example, that the devil corrupts our language and exploits the limits of taxonomic thinking to imprison us in a cage of false categories. As citizens of this cage, we inevitably cathect the categories, donning diagnostic labels and ideologies as marks of distinction and belonging.

Inside this cage, only the devil wins. The nameless shapeshifter convinces us to misname our experience and misdirect our energy. The crime is fundamentally taxonomic and nomenclatural, enabled by woefully inadequate accounting standards and attentional habits. Ironically, these unappealing concepts are the perfect place for the root of second-order ignorance to hide in plain sight.

In societies amusing themselves to death4, taxonomy rarely appears on the list of trending topics. As a result, our public sphere and inner reaches of outer space are continually flooded with false classifications. No individual or institution has the incentive to account for the daily harms of this unacknowledged pandemic.

In a 1990 essay on Taxonomy as Politics5, Stephen Jay Gould illustrated the incalculable but undeniable harm of false classification with a joke (possibly an anecdote) from the McCarthy era:

An old joke— perhaps it even happened—from the bad old days of McCarthyism tells of a leftist rally in Philadelphia, viciously broken up by the police. A passerby gets caught in the melee and, as the cops are beating him, he pleads: “Stop, stop, I’m an anticommunist.” “I don’t care what kind of communist you are,” says the cop, as he continues his pummeling.

Most of Gould’s essay focuses on the effect of false classification on two ongoing controversies – drug legalization and nature vs. nurture – but he opens the inquiry in the trans-contextual vein.

We set up our categories, often by arbitrary division based on tiny differences; then, mistaking names for moral principles, and using banners and slogans as substitutes for reason, we vow to live or die for one or the other side of a false dichotomy.

In more than 30 years since Gould decried the human tragedy abetted by the senselessness of patently false classifications, the tragedy has gained in breadth and depth, all without rising to a new prominence as a subject of public concern.

While the tragedy described by Gould was always aided by willful blindness, the manufacture of this blindness is now an AI-powered, super-personalized, SEO-optimized hegemon snatching minds through addictive devices and advertising-supported media. This is the most advanced meaning-scrambling BG known in human history. It responds to any name we assign to it, but it has no name.

Conclusion: Don’t Get Mad as Hell

In this epistemic climate, the dance with BGs often lapses into confrontations, protests and expressions of impotent rage. During these lapses, we give voice to our inner Howard Beale, the protagonist of Network6, the 1976 film about the howling void at the heart of the media culture that entrances us. Beale responds to this culture by exclaiming what his audience feels: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!”

Some of the other characters in the story regard Mr. Beale as an angry prophet, imbued with a special spirit, denouncing the hypocrisies of his time. Others see Beale as a madman desperately plucking messages from the chasm of his devastated psyche. When Beale’s message frustrates the profit motive of his corporate overlord, it doesn’t seem to matter whether Beale is a mystic or a madman.

The overlord imperiously defines Beale’s sin—“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature”—and exhorts him to atone for this transgression. The overlord has chosen Mr. Beale to preach the Evangel of a College of Corporations governed by the immutable bylaws of business in the service of the “one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars…” This post-ideological system, says the overlord, has suffused every dimension of our existence, and it calls Mr. Beale to a messianic vision:

And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world, in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality – one vast ecumenical holding company for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock – all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

The overlord’s monologue matches the prophetic tone of Mr. Beale’s sermons, but unlike Beale, the overlord doesn’t faint while speaking his truth. Ablaze but unconsumed by prophetic fire, the overlord co-opts Mr. Beale. With hardly any resistance, Mr. Beale agrees to the dance with the Devil and steps to the new rhythm until the choreography reaches the predictable end: Mr. Beale’s death.

In this way, the film points to an important truth about getting mad as hell and refusing to “take this anymore”: this coping strategy represents a naïve heroism in confrontations with our archons. Easily co-opted, the strategy changes nothing, and it engulfs its adherents in the flame of their own grandiosity.

What Every Elephant Needs

For the elephant in the allegory, the path to wholeness is not a Hero’s Journey. It’s an adventure in humility without the promise of messianic redemption. It eschews grand narratives in which the protagonist, once called to action, ceases to be ordinary.

The elephant continues the dance in the dialectic of irreconcilabilities because he can’t suppress his need to be seen. He needs what his blind molesters can’t give him. They can’t bear witness to the fullness of his experience. Getting mad as hell will not bestow the gift of sight upon the blind.

M2D

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