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Kevin Pezzi, MD

I developed technology to instantly
stop school shooters and other criminals,
such as rapists, robbers, home invaders,
and shoplifters. I also created ways to block
airborne germ transmission. Read more >

Iconoclastic views on economics, politics, technology, science, and life.

Disagree with something I wrote? So do I! Read more

“To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”

— Elbert Hubbard, American editor, publisher, and writer (1856–1915)

Trivia: He and his wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, the noted feminist and writer, died aboard the RMS Lusitania, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine on May 7, 1915, when they were heading to Europe to cover the war and interview Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

If you disagree with something I wrote, feel free to challenge it. Some of my viewpoints are the antithesis (exact opposite) of what they once were. That isn't flip-flopping; that is changing opinions with scant evidence to support them into convictions with a firmer foundation of facts.

My political philosophy is an amalgamation of libertarian, conservative, and liberal principles. My opinions have changed so significantly that my conservative friends might be horrified by how I strongly believe that liberals are correct on certain issues. I've previously written about some of them, but to make this more fun, I will present others as challenges in which I offer $100,000 to the first person who can refute the logic I used in forming that opinion. Please note that due to my limited time and difficulty using my hands after I broke my neck, I cannot quickly update my previously published opinions. However, now that I am balancing the promptings of head and heart, I strongly disagree with many opinions I expressed in my writings.

I like finding people who make me think, not necessarily those who agree with me. Genius Robert Heinlein said, “I never learned from a man who agreed with me.” If you can educate me, I'm all ears.

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”
— Albert Einstein

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
— Albert Einstein

“What I would like to see more often in this nation is an open and intelligent conversation, not people just casting aspersions at each other … it's unbelievable to me the way people act like third graders. And if somebody doesn't agree with them, they're this and they're that … it comes from both sides. And it's just so infantile.”
— Dr. Ben Carson, neurosurgeon

“The ultimate ignorance is the rejection of something you know nothing about and refuse to investigate.”
— Dr. Wayne Dyer

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
— General George Patton

“Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

“A lot of people risk their lives in a brief act of heroism, which is kind of cool, but Jill has what I call slow heroism. She is risking her professional life on something that her own calculations show may not work for a thousand years—may not ever. So I like to support people that are risking their lives.”
— ex-Microsoft billionaire brainiac Nathan Myhrvold speaking about Jill Tarter, who inspired the character played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact. It takes a brilliant person to see that others who go against the grain of conventional wisdom may be sages although lesser minds often ridicule their ideas.

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
— Oscar Wilde

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
— Winston Churchill

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
— Euripides, Greek tragic dramatist (484 BC - 406 BC)

“It is socially unacceptable to be right too early.”
— Robert Heinlein

“I'd rather stand alone on the truth than with millions on a lie.”

“The most distinctive mark of a cultured mind is the ability to take another's point of view; to put one's self in another's place, and see life and its problems from a point of view different from one's own. To be willing to test a new idea; to be able to live on the edge of difference in all matters intellectually; to examine without heat the burning question of the day; to have imaginative sympathy, openness and flexibility of mind, steadiness and poise of feeling, cool calmness of judgment, is to have culture.”
— Arthur H. R. Fairchild

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
— Abraham Lincoln

This reminds me of something stressed by one of my psychology professors, who said that society imposes rigid boundaries for what behavior is acceptable, and applies tremendous pressure trying to force people to conform to the behavioral expectations. Some of the most brilliant and productive outside-the-box thinkers led unconventional lives. One of the side effects of forcing people to think inside the box is that by lopping off outside-the-box behavior, potentially great outside-the-box ideas are lost, too.

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.”
— Edward R. Murrow, American journalist (1908-1965)

“You will not do incredible things without an incredible dream.”
— John Eliot

The Archie Bunker experiment

I conducted a simple but illuminating experiment: post Archie Bunker-type comments and analyze the reactions to see if anyone knew the simple secret to instantly eradicating racism.

Result? No one did. That wasn't attributable to a small exposure pool (the number who read the Archie-like comments) because, thanks to national media outlets such as Media Matters, the Huffington Post, and MSNBC's Martin Bashir along with their devoted followers, they temporarily forgot about bashing O'Reilly, Limbaugh, and their usual targets to focus on me, evidently thinking I was a Republican. Not exactly; I'm highly disappointed by politicians on the Left and the Right. They create more problems than they solve, and the last time they solved anything major was long ago.

I'm part Native American, part black, and more than a bit miffed by what I've seen working as an ER doc in which the red carpet was rolled out for rich and well-connected white folks while black patients could be intentionally murdered by healthcare workers waging a race war that I reported years ago in my then-popular (#1 on Google for years) ER site and not one person responded or mentioned it. I contacted the NAACP, thinking they'd be outraged, but never received a reply.

This makes me wonder: does anyone really care about racism? Or only when it is a convenient political hammer with which to bash opponents?

Just as Michael Jackson's surgery may have been motivated by how his father reportedly “taunted him about his "fat nose",” I paid a plastic surgeon to give me “whiter” features after years of being called “nigger nose” and “nigger lips.”

Those comments made me empathize with others disparaged or mistreated because of their appearance or race, but as painful as they were, they were trivial in comparison to hate crimes such as the murder of my great-grandfather, who was killed in a shockingly horrific way because of his ethnicity at a time when some viewed Italian immigrants as dogs who stole jobs from “real Americans.”

The roots of racism are perfectly understandable because part of our genetic heritage is xenophobia, which conferred a survival advantage earlier in human evolution—that's why it persisted. Genes predisposing us to xenophobia are still in us. We can deal with that fact intelligently, or we can sweep it under the rug as we are doing, and pretend we're better and more refined that we really are. Yet as Project Implicit found, “three-quarters of whites have an implicit pro-white/anti-black bias,” and even one of the professors involved in that project harbors that bias.

Bias serves a dual role by also helping people feel better about themselves by putting others down. Attractive, successful, or otherwise advantaged people commonly disparage others who are less fortunate. Appearing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, President Obama said, “It's like, it was like the Special Olympics or something” in referring to his low bowling score. In spite of his gifted intellect and Ivy League education, he evidently thought his comment was very funny, and what we see from politicians is heavily filtered as their brains work overtime to say just the right things.

The simple solution to racism—evidently not taught at Harvard—could have immunized Mr. Obama from such low humor. Here it is:

“President Obama, you are Hollywood-handsome, in great shape, and athletic—a hunk, to put it colloquially. How would you feel if you weren't, and someone who was cracked a joke at your expense?”

The compliments are optional; the core of the solution to racism and countless other problems is asking “how would you feel?” That works quickly in almost everyone because while humans are wired for xenophobia and bias, we're also wired for fairness. The “put yourself in their shoes” fix works in everyone except sociopaths, children before empathy matures, and mentally disabled people. Everyone else—bam!—instant cure. Research demonstrated that when healthcare workers were taught to put themselves in the shoes of their patients, they instantly give better care.

Doctors could harmonize better with nurses (and vice-versa) if they put themselves in the shoes of nurses, seeing things from their perspective. Ditto for husbands and wives, siblings, friends, co-workers, bosses and employees, and on and on. The “put yourself in their shoes; how would you feel?” solution is simple, effective, and so quick to teach there's no excuse for not imparting it.

Though simple, the Archie Bunker experiment and myriad similar cases prove that when people see racism or just political incorrectness, they either ignore it or bash it. When it is the latter, they often go way overboard, expending considerably more time and energy than is required to convey the “put yourself in their shoes” solution. Spend hours or even days lambasting others and doing no good in the process, or spend seconds and help someone become a better person—it's not a difficult choice.

So let's do what our politicians and other leaders haven't done in ages: solve a persistent problem. Then we will all feel better and deserve a pat on the back.

Notes:

Hours after I posted this article, CEO Steve Faktor mocked the ones who blast others in a brilliant LinkedIn article, Intolerance We Trust.
Fighting racism: Teaching kids to identify individual black people can reduce racial bias
Excerpt: “Many times, those who hold racially biased views of other people see them as all the same. Instead of thinking of them as specific individuals, they lump them into a group - seeing them as "those people."”
If We're Being Candid Here, There's a Good Chance Your Company Is Sorority Racist, Too
Comment: Superb article.
Excerpt: “Sorority racism is when the majority group uses its privilege and power to other (yes, that's a verb) those who are not members of the privileged and powerful group.”
Tracking prejudices in the brain
Do I like you? Opinion set in milliseconds
New study finds our desire for 'like-minded others' is hard-wired
York U research finds children show implicit racial bias from a young age
Study: minority children develop implicit racial bias in early childhood
UCLA Diversity Chancellor Jerry Kang discusses implicit biases at TEDxSanDiego 2013
Comment: Today's hip youngsters haven't overcome racism and bias as much as they think they have; they're just better at camouflaging it, cognizant of the cultural penalty for admitting it. Nothin' like sweeping a problem under the rug to perpetuate it …
Implicit social biases made to drop away during sleep
Implicit attitudes can change over the long term
Pervasive implicit hierarchies for race, religion, age revealed by study
Psychologists find unintentional racial biases may affect economic and trust decisions
You may not be able to say how you feel about your race
Implicit race bias increases the differences in the neural representations of black and white faces
New perspective diminishes racial bias in pain treatment

The views expressed on this page may or may not reflect my current opinions, nor do they necessarily represent my past ones. After reading a slice of what I wrote in my various websites and books, you may conclude that I am a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican. Wrong; there is a better alternative. Just as the primary benefit from debate classes results when students present and defend opinions contrary to their own, I use a similar strategy as a creative writing tool to expand my brainpower—and yours. Mystified? Stay tuned for an explanation. PS: The wheels in your head are already turning a bit faster, aren't they?

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Reference: Imagining dialogue can boost critical thinking: Excerpt: “Examining an issue as a debate or dialogue between two sides helps people apply deeper, more sophisticated reasoning …”

Kevin Pezzi, MD

The Archie Bunker experiment

Notes:

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