I believe one of the biggest issues in modern medicine is that patients often don’t get the opportunity to establish a genuine relationship with their physician and hence often lack the critical voice which is necessary for a therapeutic doctor-patient relationship. Because of this, my goal here was always to be able to correspond with everyone who reached out to me. Unfortunately, due to the traffic I now receive, it’s not possible to do that. For that reason, I decided the best solution was to have a monthly open thread (where people could ask any question they wanted) and link that to a topic I’d wanted to write about but didn’t quite feel merited its own article. In this month’s open thread, I will cover a topic I feel is extremely important but is largely neglected by our society—balanced intelligence.
Types of Intelligence
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Throughout history, many different types of intelligence have been recognized (e.g., physical intelligence and coordination or emotional intelligence). In contrast, our society worships a very specific type of intellectual intelligence that as far as I know has never previously been so highly valued by a society.
In my own experience, I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve interacted with who I know are much smarter than me (as they can do things I simply can’t), yet when I compare and contrast our ability to get things done, to correctly interpret the data we are exposed to, help patients, or the general capacity to lead a happy life, I come out far ahead of them. Likewise, I’ve lost count of how smart people I’ve met who simply don’t “get it” and frequently are misled by something quite obvious—an experience I am sure many of you can relate to.
Years ago, when I discussed these experiences with a spiritual teacher (as I was frustrated with how easily many of my medical colleagues were being misled), I was told to stop getting upset because “intelligence does not equate to being resistant to mind control.”
The Transformation of Education
Throughout my life, I’ve noticed that individuals who go through the educational system typically build up a very specific type of intelligence and reciprocally lose a variety of other ones. In my own case, when I went through school, I noticed that the more I was there and did what I was told to, I notice that initially it would refine or develop me, but I would then pass a point where it felt as though I was losing the ability to think and access to the deeper capacities of my mind.
Because of this, I ended up having a rather similar progression at each level of my education.
In high school, I initially did very well, and then became very disillusioned with what I was learning and largely switched to self-study in areas outside the curriculum and just barely passing my classes.
In college, I decided to try to do better academically, but quickly noticed I was running into the same issue (a loss of my cognitive faculties in school—e.g., I would frequently get penalized for coming up with unorthodox but correct solutions to science and math problems). In the face of this, I decided to teach myself how to efficiently memorize information (i.e., I used a variety of non-standard processes, many of which were based off what I’d figured out on my own about the sleep cycle) and try to do an accelerated course load so I could graduate as quickly as possible and hence minimize the total damage to my mind.
After going back and forth on it (I had serious disagreements with many of the existing medical practices), I then decided to go to medical school as I felt becoming a doctor would give me the ability to make things better (rather than just complain about them) and would also give me the chance to have the rigorous and transformative academic experience I’d always yearned for.
Note: that motivation to somehow improve things is also why I’ve put a lot of time into projects like this publication throughout my life.
Once in medical school, I realized that a lot of the academic experience I’d hoped for simply wasn’t there (e.g., the majority of professors were hostile towards debating the ambiguity within the facts you were told to memorize) and that since I’d taught myself how to effectively memorize information in college, I actually had a lot of free time. Because of this, I hence decided to spend a lot of time studying medical subjects outside the standard curriculum and to investigate the contradictions and ambiguities within what I was being taught rather than focus on getting the highest grades possible.
Finally, when I went to residency, I made a point to learn the things I felt were essential for patient care as quickly as possible so I could then be put into a position where I had the autonomy to teach myself as much as I could—which my program in turn was supportive of since most residents didn’t show a strong desire to teach themselves and instead constantly needed to be be policed to study.
Note: numerous medical school deans and medical residency directors I’ve spoken to over the years have lamented that the newer crops of medical school graduates lack the critical thinking which is needed for them to effectively function as doctors during their medical residency. In my eyes, this is due to the fact medical schools harshly reprimand students who demonstrate critical thinking (by thinking outside of the box or questioning an orthodoxy) and that the pipeline to medical school (our colleges), has continually reduced the critical thinking within their curriculums. Remarkably, while those in medicine I’ve spoken to recognize this issue, they still “punish” unorthodox students who display critical thinking.
From my journey, a few key lessons jumped out I wish to share:
1. It’s critical to recognize during the educational process when you’ve hit a point of diminishing returns. For example, there were a large number of subjects I learned well enough to get a general understanding of what under lied them and what the key lessons the discipline had to share were, but I simultaneously felt offered minimal value if I learned them to a high level of detail. In contrast, many people I knew who reached the same degree of familiarity I had with the subject became attached to it and identified with it, and hence spent years learning a lot of extraneous details on the subject which offered minimal value to their life.
2. In contrast, it’s also important to recognize which things actually offer an immense degree of value to spend years if not decades developing mastery in, and hence should be prioritized with your time.
Note: when this is your goal, you have to also shift your focus to being fully present to the subject you are studying, going as deep as you can into it, and unravelling the contradictions and mysteries you encounter.
3. As you start to understand the fundamental processes that underlie the things you study, you’ll begin to notice seeming unrelated things are in reality quite similar (sometimes termed “isomorphisms”). In addition to this being something that allowed me to integrate large bodies of information quite quickly, it also characterizes my writing as I try to show how the same process people can understand in one domain applies to many of the other difficult areas we are also struggling with.
4. The previous three points are important because you will never have enough time to learn everything you want to learn. Rather, you need to have an effective strategy in place for learning as much of it as you can with the time that is available.
5. Many people assume that if they follow the path laid out for them that they will eventually arrive at what they are hoping for. For example, many people I know who went into medicine were not sure what they wanted to specialize in, and eventually chose something a variety of events in their life pushed them to settle on. In turn, many of those people spent years if not decades bouncing from one physician job to another they didn’t really like, and at the end of all of it, weren’t particularly wealthy or happy (despite having some of the highest paying and most prestigious jobs our society had to offer). In my own case, I am certain that if had I allowed myself to have been swept into many of the currents presented to me, I would have never learned much of what I had, I would have made a variety of bad decisions (e.g., taking the COVID vaccine), and I likely would not be a particularly happy person.
6. Much of the current situation we face is a result of the systematic dismantling of the educational system, as it was transformed from something designed to foster critical thinking and a highly functional electorate, to one designed to create subservient citizens who only existed to fill pre-designated roles for them within the society. In my eyes, the strongest pieces of evidence for this contention were:
•In 1903 John D. Rockefeller founded the General Education Board, which over the decades (in partnership with Andrew Carnegie’s foundation) gave billions to schools around the country until in 1973, the Department of Education was created. These foundations and their money reshaped education in America, transforming it from a locally managed process to a centrally controlled one that all children were required to attend, and one where the cultivation of creativity and a child’s own natural development was replaced with a rigid framework which trained the children to become docile subjects who could easily be molded into compliant members of the workforce.
Note: The director of Rockefeller’s “charity” admitted their goal was to have this new model of education train the populace to be compliant slaves who lacked critical thinking.
•In the 1960s, one of my relatives was given documents which detailed a global plan (by a group that preceded the World Economic Forum) to impoverish America so that everyone would willing submit to low paying and backbreaking corporate jobs to get by (e.g., consider Corporate America’s recent vaccine mandates), and hence ensure the American people were compliant and did whatever the ruling clash wished (which I covered in more detail here). I learned about these documents when I was a child and have been astonished to see how every single thing they predicted has subsequently come true as the decades passed. Amongst other things, I was told from the start that a decision had been made to remove critical thinking from our educational system as critical thinking would allow the populace to resist the coming era of corporate economic feudalism.
•Individuals I know who have gone to the elite schools the ruling class sends their children to have repeatedly shared to me that the educational process there is very different (and in many cases I found out the approach I considered to be optimal was utilized for the students at those schools).
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•One award-winning teacher, John Gatto, extensively wrote about how American education had been transformed so that when children were in the prime of their life to learn and develop their own identities, they were instead locked into a rigid and sterile environment which disconnected them from all the interactions and experiences of life that allowed them to develop their own identities and become highly functional members of society. Likewise, Ivan Illich, in his book Deschooling Society made the salient observation that once people are “taught” within a rigid framework, they lose much of their inherent ability to “learn.” Sadly, while their points were spot on, they are now mostly forgotten and we now spend dramatically more money (and years of schooling) on education, yet have worse and worse outcomes.
In turn, I believe much of my success as a student came from a desire to develop my mind and the recognition the schooling processes was frequently counterproductive to that—which in turn led me to inadvertently following the style of education individuals like Gatto and Illich advocated for (despite me having no knowledge of them at the time).
Note: recently I completed an article on the immense damage vaccination has done to the health of our society. One of the least appreciated harms of vaccination is that the inflammation and microstrokes they create within the brain will frequently lead to significant cognitive and behavioral impairment. The original pertussis vaccine (DTwP) was the most notorious for doing this, and as discussed in that article, an almost unimaginable wave of issues rippled throughout the society (and hence the schools) as that vaccine was deployed upon America which could be seen as the first generation who received it grew up. In turn, I believe a case can be made that the degradation of American education we witnessed was in part due to teachers no longer being able to teach the way they had previously to these neurologically damaged children.
