Living With Ambiguity and Being Dependent on Others

I had a meltdown last weekend. I'm not proud of the fact, but I want to acknowledge it. I've been trying to work my way through a government website to get something done that is profoundly important to me. I won't go into details because they aren't really important for this blog post. Probably thousands, if not millions, of people all over Canada are going through something similar. The "triggering" details were an insistence that I should apply on line, plus the fact that there is a software bug on the website that has made this impossible for me to do. I spent hours and hours over weeks trying to do something that was impossible because no one was willing to admit to me that it is impossible. I'd still probably be trying if a person on the government computer help desk hadn't taken pity on me and admitted that they know about the bug, have told the relevant people in the bureaucracy a year ago, and yet nothing has been fixed.

I lost my temper with the poor woman on the telephone. She was the only person in this sorry experience (other than a staffer in Lloyd Longfield's constituency office) that actually talked to me like a real human being instead of just repeating talking points and throwing things like FAQ lists at me. I'm not proud of this fact but I vented all over her simply because she was the first person who was open and honest enough to talk to me as a real human being. I am stating that this happened because I have to as part of trying to get a handle on my vicious, violent temper.

I do have a bad temper. I always have. It's just one part of a whole suite of symptoms that come with my PTSD. Incidentally, I suppose that what has happened with me in this incident is what you would call a "triggering" situation:  when I feel I or anyone else is being treated unfairly, I have a tendency to lose my marbles and explode. I've tried to "work around" my "issues" most of my life and generally keep it under control. For example, I've always tried to work at jobs where I could avoid interacting with other people. But sometimes I get stuck in a situation that I cannot avoid and the stress builds up beyond the point where I can control it, and then something in me snaps, like it did the other day.

via GIPHY

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I'm always humbled when people toss some money my way. But right now, it's even more so because there are so many other places to put spare cash. (Thanks Charles for being so awesome!) But if you can, think about subscribing or sending me a tip. It's easy to do with Patreon or PayPal. 

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One of the things I've learned over the years is the importance of trying to understand something instead of ignoring it. My outburst is an example. I've come to the conclusion that part of what sent me "over the top" was my inability to "fix" the problem. This is a major problem for men especially. Men of a certain age with a blue collar background have tended to be been socialized to "get the job done", and if we don't, we are often told in no uncertain terms that we are failures if we don't. If we try to explain why we couldn't get it done, we are "whiners".

I don't think that most young people have had the same message pounded into their heads that I did, so hopefully they aren't stuck in the same bind of feeling like losers if they can't "get the job done". But I still see a lot of evidence in our society that people are desperate to be "in control" of their lives.

To a certain extent, I think that the "do it yourself" and "prepper" movements are symptoms of the illusion of control. When I figured out how to change the battery on my wife's I-Phone for a fraction of how much it would have cost to hire an Apple rep to do it, I did felt incrementally more in control of my life. I suspect people that have stockpiled army rations, guns and ammo, first aid equipment, built fallout shelters, etc, may also feel somewhat insulated from catastrophes that they have no control over.

When you pull on the thread a little more, you can see how deep this impulse goes. For example, how much of the anti-vaxxer movement comes from people's anxieties about being at the mercy of a science they know nothing about, and, government agencies that they feel that they have no control over?

How about our privacy concerns? Most people---including me---have only the shakiest grasp of how much corporations like Google and FaceBook know about us. Indeed, when I wrote my article about the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the Brexit campaign, I was horrified how fine-grained it really is. Again, there's the whole issue of how much the government is spying on us too---after the Edward Snowden revelations. How about that for creating a sense of powerlessness?

Another example. People fight tooth and nail against any attempt to intensify their neighbourhoods. How much of this comes from a feeling---rooted in people's past experience---that once you let the city move a new business or development into your neighbourhood you lose any future influence on how it affects everyone who lives near it? Again, that fear of losing control.

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Recently a non-entity Conservative MP by the name of Derek Sloan decided to "power up" his flagging leadership bid by impugning Canada's Chief Public Health Officer, Theresa Tam. Specifically, he suggested that the World Health Organization is totally dominated by China, and that when Tam followed its recommendations she was being more loyal to China than Canada.

In addition to the above video, he sent out a letter to supporters that said things like the following:

Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada's Chief Public Health Officer, has prioritized the World Health Organization over the health of Canadians. 

and

The truth is that the WHO serves the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China (PPC). 

and

Our Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, has continually cited the WHO as an authority.  

Dr. Tam said face masks don't work, not true.

She said closing the boarders to travelers arriving from virus hotspots wouldn't work. Not true.

and

Canada's Chief Public Health Officer needs to work for Canada. Not the WHO or any other foreign entity. 

I'm under no illusions about what Sloan really thinks. He's either profoundly stupid or quite cynical. I suspect that he realized that his campaign is going nowhere and he wants to rally the "yahoo vote" in the Conservative party---which I suspect is quite large. And, my read is that people swim in that sea really want to be in control and are driven absolutely crazy by the feeling that they are dependent on others or that there is very little certainty in life.

(Just in case you don't know where the word "yahoo" comes from, it was a term coined by
Jonathan Swift in his book Gulliver's Travels. They were a degenerate race of dirty, disgusting
humans who were enslaved by the race of intelligent horses, the "Houyhnhnms" that Gulliver met in the last of his travels. Woodcut is so old that it's public domain, c/o Wikimedia Commons. It's odd that they all appear to be Vulcans---.)

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The problem with a thing like an emerging pandemic is that it is absolutely rife with ambiguity. We literally don't know what is going on, and people in authority---like Theresa Tam and Justin Trudeau---have to make important decisions based on the "best guess" at one particular moment in time. Sloan and his followers think that Tam could easily have known about and followed a better course of action---yet didn't because the Politbureau in Beijing picked up the phone and told her to do something else.

That's absurd.

I found the WHO website where doctors, local health officers, etc, can see any information that others may have had about infectious diseases.  All you have to do is click on the hypertext link to see what is going on at any given time around the world.

Here's a screen shot of the first two weeks of January. 

The problem is that people like Dr. Tam really don't have the benefit from Mr. Sloan's 20/20 hind-sight. She has to just do the best she can based on her education and experience with what evidence she has been given.

Dr. Theresa Tam, not a Communist stooge, just a doctor who only knows
what the science finds out, when it finds it out.  Photo c/o her Twitter account.

This is the thing. We all labour under the illusion that we have some control over our lives. But the fact of the matter is that we are all dependent on other people using technology that we don't even begin to understand. And some of these people don't look like us and don't see the world the way we do. But that's just the way it is. Every important thing about science and the current pandemic is a question of percentages, grey instead of black and white, and, ambiguity. It's not easy to live in ambiguity land---but it's a whole lot better than the world of anger and prejudice. 

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Furthermore I say unto you, we have to deal with the Climate Emergency!