R E S P E C T

What and who deserve your respect?

A post in which I find a roundabout way to some book reviews

I had yet another little run-in with the Canadian health-care system. After years of not even having a check-up, I called my doctor to ask for one. First available appointment was in six weeks. If it’s an emergency, I should go to the hospital. If I need to see a specialist, I will have to ask my family doctor for a referral. The role of my doctor, above anything else, is to be a gatekeeper to the system.
When I finally got to see her, our meeting lasted maybe five, definitely less than ten minutes. I got my requisition, went for the blood test.

Two days later, I got a call from the nurse in the doctor’s office. She sounded seriously alarmed. “the doctor said that your cholesterol levels are dangerously high. They are like that of a teenager”
“What’s wrong with that?”, I asked.
“Seriously, you have to start taking some statins. Should I call it in to your pharmacy?”
No, I said, I still have a full bottle, but I will take a look at the test results.
“You should start taking it immediately”, she said then we hung up.

She actually scared me. She sounded soooooo concerned. I jumped onto the lab’s website and downloaded the results. Then I got angry with myself for falling for the scare-mongering. The results were just fine. I have all my lab-test results going ten years back. I won’t bore you with the details, you should just trust me when I say that I am not suicidal and I know what I am talking about.
The real reason for the call was to put another check-mark in the ledger to show how good a drug pusher she is and that ticked me off. The disrespect in it and my stupidity to fall for it.

“I just lost the last bit of respect for the medical profession” I said to my wife, who said “I didn’t know that you had any, for anybody”. That made me think.

It is true, it’s not easy to impress me, but it is far from being impossible.
I just do not respect what most people do. I have no respect for status, position, recognitions, credentials, awards, titles, privileges and money. I do not respect authority, royalty and celebrity.

I respect achievement, competence, simplicity, common sense, inquisitiveness, adherence to logic, morals and principles.
I respect people with integrity; I respect those who stand up for their beliefs even if it comes with great personal costs. I respect bravery, I like articulate people and those with a mastery of language.

But above all, I respect, even admire those who are pushing the boundaries. The adventurers and discoverers in both the physical and the mental realm; the inventors and the paradigm shifters.  I respect those who expand the boundaries of our existence. I detest those, who are trying to constrain it.

As I was thinking this through, I realized that I can best illustrate it with five short book reviews.
I realized that my favourite books represent a pattern of trailblazing ideas.
The latest addition to the list is Ruppert Sheldrake’s The Science Delusion. When I recommend it to others, I refer to it as one of the five most important books I ever read.
The picture above is of those five books. 

The model method

The Book of András Kocsondi was published by the publishing house of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Company in 1976.

The model method – The role and place of modeling in the scientific discovery process.
Some could call it dry, but to me, it was a revelation, opening a whole new direction in my thinking about modeling beyond the sciences. It is a systemizing book showing the promises and (just as importantly) the limitations of modeling as a tool. It was and is foundational to my understanding of the world.
It was a small print run and has never been translated as far as I know. Like with the others, its most important benefit wasn’t just what it actually said, but the general applicability of the principles he laid out about the process of discovery in search of gaining knowledge.

Losing ground

After discovering libertarianism and eventually even becoming a party member and a candidate in an election, I was asked several times what was I before I became a libertarian? My answer was: an anti-communist, but being against something isn’t exactly a political philosophy.

I have read Ayn Rand, but I could not make myself seeing selfishness as a virtue.
What turned me to Libertarianism was Charles Murray’s
Losing Ground -  American social policy 1950-1980; published in 1984.
Ayn Rand’s objectivism and Murray Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism are focusing on the individual’s conflict with the state, while Murray emphasized the third, and in my opinion, the most important element: civil society. Way before I encountered Losing Ground, I was enthralled by the idea of trinities.
How every cultural, philosophical, religious and political system is using it.

Charles Murray made libertarianism whole for me.  Losing ground has my favorite book closing last sentence:

“When reforms finally do occur, they will happen not because stingy people have won, but because generous people stopped kidding themselves”

Conflict of Visions

A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles by Thomas Sowell (1987) was one of the first attempts to offer a systematic analysis of the foundation of our political/ideological thinking, trying to illustrate the existence of underlying principles.
Despite its relatively narrow focus of Western civilization from the enlightenment to the recent past, it gives perfect illustrations of our ideological differences. In the nearly 40 years since its publication, my views on the subject evolved in two ways. Even as I was reading it, I realized that the problem is not unique to modern Western civilization. We could say that Plato and Confucious represented an unconstrained vision, while Aristoteles and Lao Tze exemplified the constrained vision.  

The Selfish Gene

 “The Selfish Gene” (1976) is probably the most important theoretical work on biology since The Origin of Species.
The proposition is very simple, positing genes as the basic units of evolution instead of autonomous individual specimens of a species. The implications are tremendous, as is the explanatory power of the theory. The novel idea that seems perfectly obvious the moment you hear it.

Genetics, is still a new science. What we don’t know is far more than what we believe we do. Still, this is a seminal work showing a new direction in the field.  

The Science Delusion

The best of all is Ruppert Sheldrake’s
The Science Delusion – freeing the spirit of enquiry

Watching this video will give you the idea
Exposing Scientific Dogmas - Banned TED Talk - Rupert Sheldrake

…reading the book will ground it all. The point is not any particular theory, but the idea that it should all be questioned. The idea that without an absolute freedom to question everything, all have left is sets of competing dogmas.

I could, of course mention at least a dozen other books that helped me to understand our world, but these are the ones I got the most out of.

These are the people; these are the ideas that I respect.
The rebels, the consensus breakers, the paradigm shifters, the intellectual risk-takers, the dogma-busters, the inquisitive minds.  

I don’t like the selfish, corrupt bureaucrats hiding behind the power enforced consensus.
I have nothing but contempt for the enforcers of dogma.
I detest the doctors who no longer have any idea about healing but happily profit from peddling drugs that are useless at best, murderous at worst.
I am revolted by the profit driven ‘standard of care’ models foisted on medical institutions.
I am disgusted by the murderers and butchers masquerading as doctors.

What do you respect? What do you detest?
If you have read any of the books mentioned above, please comment.