Illogically Logical: The Ills of Society and the Best Treatment

Copyright © 2018 by Dr. R. Asokan

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 978-1-54394-626-0

eBook ISBN: 978-1-54394-627-7

All proceeds go to College of Central Florida

I would like to acknowledge and thank

Barbara Weglarz and Kristen Weber for their help.

Contents

Chapter 1

History Lessons—Irony and Stupidity

Chapter 2

Rules

Chapter 3

Health Care

Chapter 4

Drugs

Chapter 5

Taxes and Economy

Chapter 6

Education

Chapter 7

Climate Change and Energy Policy

Chapter 8

War and Foreign Policy

Introduction

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald’s quotation serves as a good explanation for the odd and seemingly contradictory title of this book. How can something be illogically logical, after all? Isn’t that a contradiction? In fact, no. The idea behind this book is to get the reader to rethink and reevaluate most of the accepted views and so-called facts we take for granted. The logical should be reassessed. We hear what we want to hear and we believe what we want to believe. We are inherently lazy, and as a result, this will not be easy for us. We may not even want to do it. We behave because of the rules that have been put in place by government, religion, etc. We are complacent. But as people, as a country, and as the world we must constantly reevaluate and rethink everything we do and consider whether our decisions and behaviors are in the best interests of the majority. Many times, our actions do not bear this out and yet we are told there are good reasons; we are doing illogical things for logical reasons. As a result, we are in trouble. Over and over again, we do the things the same way and hope for a different outcome. But as Albert Einstein is said to have said, Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. But we do these things because we are lazy and we don’t want to change. Change is hard; it is work. It’s easier for us not to change. But we must.

We forget the lessons of history and we are forced to learn them again and again. Examples abound in nearly every aspect of our lives. We show great concern for what we claim were the intentions of our founding fathers but we stop short of heeding their warnings. President Jefferson warned us about banks and corporations; we rescinded banking regulations and witnessed colossal banking and financial disasters. We thought prohibition was the solution but we are still fighting the drug war. We tried to stop gambling and now we have state-run lotteries. Our country began with paternal colonization based on religious views and now we are beset with political arguments of those fighting for religious freedom. We fought for freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Now we live in a consumer society that cannot accept delayed gratification. Television and media are our new religion.

Our dictum is Hindsight is twenty-twenty. But our sight may be flawed due to our perception or message. Our reaction and radical corrective actions of the past with insufficient information and forethought led to massive, expensive debacles like the Afghan war, which has gone on for fifteen years with no end in sight.

American government is intended to be of the people, by the people, and for the people. Initially, government was run by people who wanted to serve. Now, branches of government are run by lobbyists, fund-raisers, and the media. On average, every dollar spent on lobbying is worth $220,000 in influence. This money subsidizes corporations that turn around and spend it on more lobbying. Money is also given to legislators who spend 60 percent of their time fund-raising; their main job is dialing for dollars or convincing people to continue to give them money. Work attendance is not mandatory but salary and perks are guaranteed!

We get our news in thirty-second sound bites from the corporate news media presenting their one-sided political views. The news is manipulated to fit an agenda and is fed to us in a twenty-four-hour cycle by the highly paid talking heads. Now newscasters sit on the graves of the Mayflower Doctrine of 1941 and the Fairness Doctrine of 1949. Gone are the days of fair and balanced news reporting that gave us both sides of the news presented by real journalists. Instead, we are fed stories about absurd conspiracy theories and political infighting. But we eat it up.

We’re human, and humans process information based on our preconceived opinions and personal biases. As a country, we have attention deficit disorder, unable to focus on one topic for more than a few moments. The media exploits this and gives us more information than we can handle; we’re buried under it. It becomes a snow job. Most of us are happy with beer and spectator sports. The Super Bowl means more to us than any other right we have. But eventually, spectator sports and religion will not keep us distracted if there is a lack of food. Corporations want an indentured labor force. TV often helps with this. We have to remember the quote from Jess C. Scott: People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.

Our life, our body, and our planet are controlled by luck, randomness, chaos, marching time, deterioration, and eventual demise. Randomness and chaos can bring on sudden death and destruction. The planet does not care what happens; our concern is confined to us. Events and tragedies become progressively more abstract beyond us and our circle. We judge, interfere, and act on people who are affected by chaos without understanding or trying to understand. They may be our family, neighbors, or fellow humans here or abroad, and we may be the bearer of chaos.

Anyone can be burned once. You can learn from it and use it as an education. But twice is stupidity. History holds many important lessons, but we don’t learn; instead, we repeat the same mistakes. Wars, foreign policy based on antiquated notions of geopolitics, and disastrous domestic policies have not gone away. We live on crisis management rather than taking preventive measures for health care, banking, or social issues. We need to rethink and reassess health care reforms, the war on drugs, our educational system, the environment, taxes, crime and punishment, abortion, and gun control to name just a few. This book discusses each of these issues and the ways we can change our thought processes. We’re all in this together; it’s going to take a global change.

We are arrogant; we think we know what’s best for others. We justify our inadequacies and failures by claiming unfortunate circumstances but we do allow others to use the same excuses. If this is truly a country full of brilliant, well-educated, hardworking people who treat others fairly, would we find ourselves in this current turmoil? We are judgmental of others, and if we don’t agree with them, we label them. We do not change our views; we only rearrange our prejudices. We are all for varying degrees of laziness, greed, and lack of self-awareness. We are kept under control by rules from the government, religion, societal constraints, and our need for rewards and the approval of others.

If you are born into a rich or educated family, you have a societal advantage. But that does not give you the right to criticize someone born into an uneducated or poor family. But the man with the gold makes the rules.

This book’s first chapter is about history; we will look at past mistakes and successes. It is easy to be critical about a problem; it is harder to offer solutions. But these solutions should have the following guidelines:

If something has not been tried before, we should explore every solution to the problem. We should not try the same things over and over again, expecting a different result. But if something has been tried and has shown a modicum of success, we should apply the lessons learned. When it comes to breakthroughs in social policy, we should do the best we can to improve the situation and leave something for subsequent generations to build on.

Any solution must be based on the principle expressed by writer Richard Dawkins: Value the future on a time scale longer than our own; by philosopher and political theorist Thomas Paine: If there must be trouble, let it be on my day that my child may have peace; and President Abraham Lincoln: We cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today. We must heed the words of these great men. We cannot keep postponing the solutions for the next generation.

Solutions will have flaws.

Good solutions will hurt some but will help the majority. Everything we do has a consequence, side effect, or drawback. To think otherwise is fallacy.

Recognize that humans do not react to probability in a rational way. Due to the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the sexualization of the news—with newscasters presenting the news as though they were acting in a Viagra ad intending to distract viewers from the substance of the news—we have an altered view. News reporters no longer need to get facts right; all they need are the right words and the right looks. Author Robert Crais said, Vocabulary is a Trojan horse that smuggles a lie. We should consider the risk-benefit ratio as well as the cost before we offer any solution. For example, our chance of dying in a terrorist attack in the United States is one in 35 million over the past five years, but we spent one trillion dollars on unsuccessful counterterrorism measures. We could have improved millions of lives if we had invested that money in infrastructure instead of increased TSA screenings. We spent all that money and we didn’t make ourselves any safer.

This book builds on the work of earlier thinkers and foreign news services like the BBC. We should start with lessons from our history and examine the irony and stupidity of our actions. We need to look critically at why we did what we did and what resulted from our actions. When we evoke God, the Constitution, and the founding fathers, we tend not to use the critical eye; this is a problem.

We don’t consider personal responsibility to be a virtue; we always blame one side of the equation for all the bad things that happen. We blame our teachers for our children’s poor education and upbringing, republicans and democrats blame each other, conservatives and liberals blame each other, and we blame the government for everything else.

Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam indicate that you cannot do things alone but must accept help from others. We all railed against our president for saying that we got help from the government, but we must accept the reality. No person or business can function as an island in society and succeed. To that end, I’ll explore the problems and solutions for many issues facing this country today.

The contents of this book are as follows:

Chapter 1: History Lessons—Irony and Stupidity

Chapter 2: Rules

Chapter 3: Health Care

Chapter 4: Drugs

Chapter 5: Taxes and Economy

Chapter 6: Education

Chapter 7: Climate Change and Energy Policy

Chapter 8: War and Foreign Policy

Lee Child said, At death, we take with us a lifetime of private hopes and dreams and experiences. We leave behind a trace of ourselves in our living descendants. We hope our descendants live a life of peace, prosperity, and plenty but simultaneously know they will not. We cannot live like this any longer. The time for hope is over; the time for action has come.

I am a physician. I have learned that my patient will die if I keep trying a treatment that doesn’t work. Whenever there’s an issue, I should consider all possibilities so that I don’t miss something. If one solution doesn’t work, I want to change the treatment and try something else. That is what led me to write this book. The country is sick and complicated. We make up 5 percent of the world’s population but have 20 percent of the world’s prison population and the highest health care spending in the world, and we rank twenty-ninth in life expectancy. Infants born in the United States have three times as great a chance of dying as those born in Finland. We are blind to the fact that the private free market enterprise created the present health care mess. The things we’ve tried have not worked. We need to try something new. This is my prescription.

Chapter 1

History Lessons—Irony and Stupidity

For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

—John F. Kennedy

The only thing new in the world is the history that you do not know.

—Harry S Truman

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

—Mark Twain

We look at our country and it is not a stretch to say that it is sick. It shows all the symptoms. Yet we are often unwilling to admit this, particularly if we find ourselves on the winning side of