Preamble: I touched upon this same theme in my first writings for Islamica Magazine. This article was republished in my latest book “Understanding Life: Insights Spiritual and Worldly” available from Amazon in a chapter called “The Modern Institution as Obsessional Personality” So I have been interested in this problem for a long time. If your interest is piqued here you can look up the chapter in the book via Amazon or your local library or order it online at this same blogsite. Happy reading!

in C.J. Jung in an article entitled “Psychology and the East” made the following profound statement: “Many scientific-minded persons have even sacrificed their religious and philosophical leanings for fear of uncontrolled subjectivism.(i.e. they have succumbed to the modernist disease of Empiricism).. By way of compensation for the loss of a world that pulsed with our blood and breathed with our breath (i.e. had a spiritual dimension to it!), we have developed an enthusiasm for facts-mountains of facts far beyond any single individual’s (or group for that matter)power to survey. We have the pious(hardly pious lol) hope that this incidental accumulation of facts will form a meaningful whole” Spot on! Although this was written more than fifty years ago, the intellectual élite of our times, let alone the common people, have still not caught on?!

So, whenever there is a serious problem, our institutions launch a “study”! That is going to solve the problem ,they believe. But does it? Look at the last 50 years of history and see if that hypothesis  is true. Most of us have heard of Einstein’s definition of insanity lol: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result” lol. By that definition, all of our modern institutions are insane! What else is new?

Let me give you a couple of examples close to home. I got my medical licence in 1972! At that same time the Canadian government introduced socialized medicine-Medicare if you wish. In Quebec we now call it the RAMQ -Régie de L’Assurance Maladie de Québec. Since 1972 when I first graduated ,each year has seen a decrement in service. From when I started, I could go to the E.R. and be seen in less than an hour each time (no,n ot as a doctor, as an ordinary citizen)No one waited more than an hour in a clinic and doctors were easy to find in every specialty. Now the waiting time in an E.R. in Montreal can easily go to 18 hours! Many specialties are almost totally unavailable and if you don’t call the walk-in clinic at the moment their reception services open and not a minute later, you don’t get an appointment.

But we have the solution, no? .A good study?! Studies have been done ad nauseum. Experts have been convened ,committees have ben formed over and over again by governments on all sides of the political spectrum, data -piles and piles of data -just as Jung described have been amassed. Commissions of Enquiry, even a Royal Commission(the queen of all studies) on a Federal level .Has that helped?! Not at all.

So what is going on? Are these people running these studies and Commissions just stupid?! I don’t think so. Are they simply corrupt and greedy?! May be but still doesn’t explain the phenomenon. Something is awry. The paradigm is wrong. T he M.O. of problem-solving is ineffective. Before we get into analyzing why that may be, let me give you another telling example.

In the 80’s I was still working in a large institution -the Douglas Hospital-a teaching hospital connected with McGill University. A position had been vacated and a new administrative doctor was required to fill it. It was a high-status position. And we had an ambitious candidate from the Western part of Canada who was eager to take it on and make it into a world-class research center. He came to the hospital for 1 day, met with some of the nursing and medical staff from various departments and gave us his report the next day. In that brief time he had identified most of the major problems at the hospital and had some ideas as to how we could correct them!

But the hospital was run at the time by an MBA type who was not satisfied with such a subjective approach?! So he hired a comsultation firm. After 6 months and $300,000 fees (approximately) they handed in their report-full of data ,graphs charts, demographics etc,,etc. I didn’t recognize our institution in that report! For all it said, they could have been studying any company or even the city administration. The heart of the matter had been totally missed! So what is going on here?

This  entire approach to problem-solving is defective and wrong! Reams of data ,statistical analysis and “management science” theoretical formulae will never get to the core of the matter. And this is true whether it is about the functioning of a medical institution, controlling a pandemic or countering climate change. Simply put ,it doesn’t work. We have enough evidence by now for that conclusion.

So what is the alternative?! If we go back to some of my writings on Epistemology, we will see that we need inner vision, proper ,as opposed to biased and self-interested,  hearing, insight and intuition. That is what the visiting doctor brought to the table without formulating it as such and that is what the management consultants missed.

Now ,sometimes the solution is right in front of us. Let us go back to the first example-that of the medical system. There are medical systems that work far better than the Canadian one. The last time I looked ,Canada was second to last in the performance of our medical system. Only our neighbours to the south (remember, the exceptional ones lol) ranked lower than us! But if one looks into the U.N. reports ,the same countries are always near the top of the list-the Scandinavian ones. Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Occasionally you will see a country like Switzerland or France?! near the top but they are outliers,

So why do we not learn from them?Are our politicians with all their studies not aware of this? A public servant I once treated told me confidentially that they have all this information .Are we simply too proud?! I think that may well be part of it. Are the political calculations getting in the way? Could be. Our Prime Minister  Legault once mentioned that the Medical Syndicates were more powerful than the mafias?! So are they intimidated by them? Are they afraid it would be too expensive? Actually the Scandinavian countries are spending LESS/capita than Canada on their medical services.

Not an easy puzzle to figure out why none of this is happening. But one thing for sure. The people who are leading us are not looking at the Reality square in the face. They are not being transparent. And they often, in fact, seem confused. Their hold on reality is tenuous at best. Their only solution seems to be to throw more money at the problem.

One more anecdote from my experience with the medical system -just to show you how perverse it can be. By the 80’s when I was working as a teaching psychiatrist in one of the Douglas Hospital’s satellite clinics ,it was already obvious that there was a serious problem in our E.R,s. The Minister of Health at the time was the respected psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Camille Laurin. He decided to visit ta select group of  E.R.s in  Montreal to see what was happening. I couldn’t believe what happened next. The hospitals designated for inspection were given 48 hours notice! By the time Dr. Laurin got there, they had cleaned up the mess and there were very few people in the waiting room. Dr. Laurin concluded that everything was fine.

“There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark”‘.Dr. Laurin was no simpleton. People who worked with him said he was brilliant. So he must have known what was going on !Now we need to change the name in the famous Shakespearian quote  from Denmark to Canada lol! Something rotten in the state of Canada-or at least Quebec! Denmark has it’s medical situation more or less under control by now.

So what is the bottom line? We need to change our paradigm of problem-solving. It has to be simpler, it has to involve people and their front-line experiences, we need politicians who are courageous and visionary -real leaders not bureaucrats and manipulators and people-pleasers. We need a totally new approach! Otherwise, these problems will just increase and increase as they are doing right now and condemn us to self-destruction on a global sc ale.But I am not by any means sure that this is in the Divine plan. Especially since none of our current leaders believe in the Divine planÉ! .Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary they still believe they are in control. Witness the World Economic Forum and the Great Reset if you need more proof! May God make it easy on us because our leaders surely won’t!