Heroes Not Zombies

Rules, rules, rules……..

When I look at people, animals, plants, when I think about experiences and events, one thing is clear.

Uniqueness.

Not only is every person unique, but every experience is unique. As Heroditus said, you can’t step into the same river twice.

Today has never happened before. This moment, here and now, is unique.

Yet we create systems in society which ignore this reality. We create schools, health services, whole economies on the basis of imposing uniformity and conformity.

Uniformity and conformity might work well when you are running a factory to produce a product. Mass production and mass consumption seem to fit well with uniformity and conformity. You don’t want an individual factory worker to bring their uniqueness and creativity to the manufacture of the computer component your factory produces.

But in situations where the focus of activity is human – for example, education or health care – then uniformity and conformity don’t make sense.

But what about standards you ask? Doesn’t every patient deserve to have the best care?

Ah, yes, but is the best care that which denies the individual’s uniqueness?

Throughout my working life as a doctor I believed the way to deliver the best care was firstly to give a damn…….to genuinely care about the patient, to put aside personal preferences in order to empathically understand what was important to this person. Secondly, to deliver the best care you need to be constantly reflective.

How was that? How did it go? Why did things go the way they went?

The counter to uniqueness and freedom is uniformity and conformity.

Sadly, these are the values we see increasingly in management and society. There are massive attempts to deny individuality and to impose conformity.

We’ve always had these competing forces. Thomas Berry refers to them as discipline and wildness. Iain McGilchrist describes them in the context of the distinct approaches to reality delivered by the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

What I especially like about Berry and McGichrist is their understanding of the inevitability of these opposing forces, and of how they work together to produce the whole.

We do need to use both halves of our brains.

We do need both discipline and wildness.

And we need to be able to stand back and reflect and see when and where we need to focus on the one rather than the other.

Right now, it feels to me, we’re concentrating too much on uniformity and conformity. We could do with increasing diversity, supporting uniqueness, and freedom.

If human beings really are unique then we might do well to create our systems around that core fact of reality.