The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back

Howard Wetsman MD
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read

I wrote a story a while back on hospital administrators that saw their people as the source of bad morale in the hospital. In that story I said that they always blamed the straw that broke the camel’s back, but never looked at the policy that overloaded the camel in the first place. This isn’t a phenomenon limited to hospital administrators.

Humans like a good story, a good narrative. When we hear a narrative that sums up the situation it makes us happy. Literally, it makes us happy. When we hear a narrative that explains everything we get a squirt of dopamine at our pleasure centers, and we feel better. When we have details left hanging and phenomena unexplained, we have to think about it. And thinking is work. Yuck. So, humans like a good story.

It’s no wonder then, when we hear of a school shooting that we’d focus on bullets and guns. It’s natural that we’d think of the last possible place in the series of events to keep the final event from happening. A shooting happens, and we start to examine it. We first ask, why was that victim there? If the victim is killed in a drug deal, we can blame him for being in that dark alley with those bad people and, happy, happy, we have an explanatory narrative. If the victim is a kid at school, we are forced to look deeper.

We immediately ask, “Why was there a gun in the school?” Well, someone brought it. How’d he get it, etc, etc, and we come to the conclusion that there shouldn’t be so many guns lying around that angry kids who want to kill people should be able to get their hands on them. We’re always looking for the easiest way out, that last event, the one that made the whole thing unavoidable.

It’s like we’re driving towards a cliff and someone keeps telling us to stop. We don’t stop, and at some point, the center of gravity of the car is over the edge. At that point we can’t stop; the car is going to fall. We keep looking at that last moment and saying, “Why didn’t we stop just then?” Well, why didn’t we stop in the 50,000 moments we had before then?

Instead of asking why a gun was available to an alienated kid, let’s ask some more difficult questions. Why are there alienated kids? Why is school so cliquish? Why are teachers today more focused on test scores than on teaching kids to get along with one another? Why are there more families that require two people to work than just one than there were when I was young? The list could go on and on.

I’m not suggesting we have quick answers to these. That’s my point. We always go for the quick answer, the fix that doesn’t require us to look at ourselves. Let’s not get the quick answer. Let’s get the right answer. It’s easy to find someone or something to blame quickly when a bad thing happens. It takes more time and more thought to analyze a situation and find the real cause. I wish I could say we’d never allow such thinking in our criminal justice system, but having served on a jury, I can’t. This isn’t the fault of the laws or the system. It’s us, we humans. It’s the way we’re designed, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

We don’t have to default to the easy way; it’s just our first choice. Next time you see a problem and know the answer right away, practice stopping. Tell yourself to wait. Sure it feels good to know, but just wait. Ask yourself how likely it is that you always know quickly exactly what’s wrong? Ask yourself how likely it is that you are really right this much of the time and not a billionaire from stock trading? Ask yourself how much it would cost you to take 5 min to think? Then take the five minutes. Your life and the lives around you will get better. I promise.

Howard Wetsman MD

Written by

Addictionologist, scientist, author. Working to educate the world at GenEdSystems.com. Solves problems with TOC. Writes occasionally at TOCDr.com

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