Тег: Prejudices

Doctor Semmelweis: Freedom of Thought Against Conservative Dogmas

Imagine a doctor who literally demands that his colleagues wash their hands—and becomes an outcast for it. It sounds anecdotal, but this is exactly what happened to the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis in the mid-19th century.

Vienna, 1840s: in one maternity ward, male doctors stubbornly follow the tradition of going straight from an autopsy to delivering babies without any hygiene. Meanwhile, there is a nearby midwives’ ward where this does not happen. The result shocked Semmelweis: the mortality rate of women in the first case reached 18%, while with the midwives, it was about 2%. The difference was like that between hell and heaven, and the young doctor wondered why.

Puzzled, Semmelweis began his investigation and went through every version, from overcrowded wards to even the position of the moon—until a tragic incident led him to the answer. One of the doctors cut himself with a scalpel during an autopsy and soon died from the same symptoms as puerperal fever. Eureka! Semmelweis realized that an invisible killer was being carried on the doctors’ hands from corpses directly to the mothers. The solution was dauntingly simple: wash hands and instruments with chlorinated water. By today’s standards, this is a banality, but back then, it was a revolution of clean hands.

Now imagine: Semmelweis stands at the head of the ward with a basin of chlorinated lime, demanding that the respected doctors scrub death off their fingers. One would think his colleagues should carry him on their (clean!) hands for saving hundreds of lives. After all, mortality plummeted to the level of the midwives’ ward. But instead of awards and honors, the innovator was met with ridicule and anger. The medical luminaries of the time took the idea as a personal insult: it implied that their own hands were killing patients. Pride and dogma prevailed over logic. Instead of admitting a mistake, the hospital administration preferred to fire the uncompromising doctor and stick to the familiar theory of miasmas—invisible “vapors” supposedly causing the fever. Simply put, Semmelweis’s colleagues rejected his discovery out of fear of the new, and the doctor’s free-thinking was considered dangerous audacity.

The story of Semmelweis is a clear example of how conservative thinking and fear of fresh ideas hinder progress. There is even a concept called the “Semmelweis reflex”—the automatic rejection of new knowledge simply because it contradicts established norms. In the case of the doctor from Vienna, this reflex cost many lives. His tragic fate (he ended his days in an asylum for the insane, never seeing recognition) shows the price society pays for stubborn dogmas.

Unfortunately, such fear of the new is not a relic of the past. Even today, dogmas and bureaucracy often stand like a concrete wall in the path of innovation. Examples are not hard to find: the denial that Helicobacter pylori bacteria cause stomach ulcers rather than stress and spicy food; the denial of the greater safety of NPPs compared to other power generation technologies; the denial of the benefits of psilocybin in treating PTSD and depression; the denial of a patient’s right to try experimental treatment.

Stories like the one that happened to Semmelweis show that progress is born from the freedom to think differently. New ideas often look frightening or heretical to those accustomed to old paradigms. Of course, skepticism is a healthy quality, but blinded dogmatism is dangerous. It can make rational people reject facts that are literally right in front of them (in Semmelweis’s case, literally on unwashed hands). Every new hypothesis deserves a fair test, not immediate execution just because it contradicts textbooks.

Remembering Doctor Semmelweis, one should ask: is there someone like that truth-teller among us today, whose ideas are ahead of their time but are drowning in the swamp of bureaucracy and prejudice? History teaches us to be bolder and to open the door to the new, even if it means facing rejection. After all, it is the freedom to seek truth and challenge dogmas that ultimately drives humanity forward.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Where racist prejudices grow from and what liberals should actually pay attention to

Voluntarist, Bitarch

There is one fact: the vast majority of people do not commit and take no part in violent crime. Despite the prejudices that some people hold toward representatives of other ethnic and linguistic groups, peoples, races, sexual and other minorities, it is pointless to argue with this fact even in their case. However, why do such prejudices arise in the first place, who is to blame for them, and whom should liberals seeking to eradicate them focus on first?

The proportion of people involved in violent crime is very small relative to society as a whole, but through their actions, they cause a great deal of harm and thereby attract an enormous amount of attention. With such behavior, a minority of violent offenders ruins the reputation of entire groups of people to which they themselves belong, in the eyes of representatives of other groups and society in general. Therefore, liberals dreaming of building a harmonious multicultural society should first and foremost pay attention to these violent offenders, since their presence only creates problems and hinders the achievement of an open, tolerant society with a normal attitude toward the peaceful representatives of minorities, who constitute the vast majority among them. Mere accusations of others of racism and other vices can do little to help them in reality, as long as the real root of the problem they wish to solve is simply ignored.

In considering this problem, we cannot do without an understanding of the theory of the violence inhibition mechanism, according to which individuals capable of committing violent attacks simply suffer from a disorder that prevents them from experiencing aversion and resistance to causing harm to other people. Of course, such a disorder requires the development and application of an effective therapy that restores inhibitory control over aggression. But until such therapy exists, it is at least worth separating violent individuals from everyone else. For example, societies that freely accept migrants should, both for their own good and for the good of the majority of the migrants themselves, test them for malfunctions in the violence inhibitor and the capacity to commit violence, and not admit that smaller portion of them in whom such issues are discovered.

There are no “bad peoples,” “criminal peoples,” “violent peoples,” or other such nonsense that can be heard from people with racist views. But in any people, unfortunately, a minority of people capable of easily committing violence is still present in one quantity or another. And it is this minority that attracts the most attention and most severely damages the reputation of their own peoples. Therefore, liberals should begin to solve the problem of prejudice toward minorities precisely with them. And, of course, it would also be helpful to communicate to everyone the fact that the vast majority of people do not commit violence and that the problem lies only in a small number of violent offenders.