I had a friend who was a psychologist, with a PHD adding the title “doctor” to his name. He was disgusted with what his compatriots had done to the business, not to mention the kind of people it attracted as practitioners of the head shrinking industry.
Jim was an artist, a craftsman dedicated to figuring out what was going on inside troubled minds, helping them understand it themselves and enabling them to work their way out of their particular muddle. It was hard work, quite draining, but rewarding to a man of rare talent.
He was quite bothered to see the takeover by lazy, immoral, pompous drug pushers. They expanded the book on individuality to label darn-near everything a “syndrome” or “disorder” and attach a corresponding psychotropic pharmaceutical as the proper prescription to “normalize” distinctiveness.
Side effects? Responsibility for failures of the prescriptions? Radicalizaton of slightly unusual people? None of these results were owned by the Doctor Drug Pushers. They were just following recipes from the book their leaders and Big Pharma cooked up.
This is all background for what I was really thinking of this morning: one of their more popular non-abnormal diseases we know as “O-C-D”. Individuals of this type would be more appropriately understood as Methodical, Meticulous, Detail-oriented … I’ll call them “MMD” for convenience.
Their talent lies not in seeing the big picture as much as seeing all of the details therein. Viewing a device made of 100 welds with 40 perfect ones and 59 very-good ones, the one flawed weld jumps up and screams at the MMD guy. He can’t see past it. They cannot overlook the flaw. It bothers them like fingers on the chalkboard does to many audio-focused people.
This is exactly the type of person you want as your machinist, aircraft mechanic, gunsmith and so on. Playing improvisational jazz on a slide trombone would be as natural to them as swimming across the English Channel underwater. But making sure critical parts are assembled perfectly according to engineered drawings comes to them like breathing.
In a sane world, crew chiefs, equipment maintenance management and machine shop executives would deliberately staff with as many MMD-types as they could get their hands on … but that would be discriminatory, wouldn’t it?
The real might of the human species IS its diversity. The tribe is all the more powerful because the combination of strengths each individual brings to the whole. Making bows and arrows that actually work is neither more nor less important than that oddball explorer finding the next water source or hunting ground.
The child labelled “ADD” in the shrink cookbook because he is bored by Common Core droning from the front of the classroom would be the one who discovers free energy from hybridized algae if they don’t dope him down and fry his brain with psychotropics first.
I have had several MMD friends. I seem to get along with them very well. While darn-near as opposite as we can be, we understand each other, though I cannot speak for sure as to why they tolerate me. Perhaps my productivity, ability to solve for the unusual, willingness to plunge into the unknown … or maybe as I crash, bang, and ricochet through life, I’m just fun to watch. 😉
I liken MMDs to A ROCK:
solid, reliable, comprehensible, steady, consistent
and every bit as versatile.