What Everybody Needs to Know About Our Actions

In 1851, American physician, Samuel A. Cartwright presented a medical paper on a disease called drapetomania. This ‘illness’ was, according to Cartwright, the reason slaves tried to escape captivity.

He believed drapetomania was mainly a result of masters who, …made themselves too familiar with [slaves], treating them as equals.(1)

Cartwright contended that with, …proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many Negroes have of running away can be almost entirely prevented.(2)

In the case of slaves, …sulky and dissatisfied without cause — a warning sign of imminent flight according to Cartwright – he prescribed whipping the devil out of them as a preventative measure. (3)

Just like Samuel Cartwright we generally see the world through a lens of what we believe to be true rather than a factual lens.  As physicist David Bohm describes it,

…our theoretical insights provide the main source of organization of our factual knowledge. (4)

What everybody needs to know about our actions is that we often, genuinely, don’t realise this, so when we take our beliefs and, considering them facts, act on them – we need to be careful.

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(1) Baynton, Douglas C. “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History”. The New Disability History: American Perspectives, 2001.

(2) Cartwright, Samuel A. (1851). “Report on the Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race”. DeBow’s Review XI. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h3106t.html. Retrieved 2007-10-04.

(3) Arthur L. Caplan, James J. McCartney, and Dominic A. Sisti (2004). Health, Disease, and Illness: Concepts in Medicine. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. p. 35 ISBN 1589010140.

(4) David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge Classics, 2004, p. 5

3 Comments

  1. “…considering them facts, act on them–we need to be careful…” need some examples for “facts” –surely not all facts are harmful/open to misinterpretation?

    1. You are, of course, absolutely right -some facts really are facts. The issue isn’t with the facts per se but with the ‘fact’ (or so it seems!!) that we inevitably perceive things through lenses – conditioning, experience, education(or lack thereof). There are countless examples – even in science – of how in the face of loads of evidence to the contrary we have persisted with our belief that certain things were facts.

      The geocentric versus heliocentric understanding of the planets is an example – it took us a long, long time to come to terms with that! And the thing about that protracted carry-on was that instead of allowing the new ‘facts’ to change understanding as they came to light, new explanations were created to shore up the existing belief/understanding/theories. I’m not much of an astronomer but as far as I understand it, Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe was used for over a thousand years and not because people didn’t see that the sun was at the centre of the universe but because the lenses they were using to examine the facts blinded them to the actual facts – if that makes sense as a sentence!

  2. Humans are perpetually logically, and by this I mean we will continue to draw conclusions from constructed propositions even in the absence of any facts–although the Earth is flat was once a fact, so facts in themselves are not proof against error. But given the interference of belief, All women’s bathrooms have urinals; this bathroom has a urinal, therefore it is a women’s bathroom, so why is it called a men’s room???????????? This is in fact what most of us do, or many others do, since I do not like to include myself in larger groups, all large groups have the tendency to become mobs, and we know the logic of mobs.

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