The Bureaucratic Mind and Your Health
Kenneth Smith
The bureaucratic mind is characterized by rigid, categorical thinking and behavior. It can also be reflective of accepted norms. The status quo is formed and promulgated by healthcare, educational, and other institutions. Amidst this, science has become a guiding influence in the formation of prefabricated reality.
In practical terms, what matters to most people is the maintenance of this mindset as it provides meaning and a sense of belonging. On the good side, this mindset gives us advances in healthcare, corporations able to provide trustworthy products no matter where you are in the world, models of education that serve to elevate one and all, and the protocols of science that usher us to new learning. We also find, however, that practices of healthcare lead to injury, corporate life shuns the individual, standardized education dampens innovative thinking, and what is considered to be not scientific is cast aside with prejudice.
Even with these few examples, we’re looking at a dynamic that speaks directly to how humans organize their perception of reality, and live their lives. For this presentation, the placebo effect serves to illustrate the interplay of the bureaucratic mind in healthcare and science. And the connecting link for all aspects of bureaucratic-related behavior is education, the how and what of learning.
Even those who see themselves as being not of the crowd may be unwittingly part of consensus reality. The next understanding of life beyond the bureaucratic mind may not be relief from its influence, but living a more complex level of the same. The first step in managing the inescapable bureaucratic mind is awareness that it exists and how it influences all spheres of life.
Kenneth Smith serves as the executive director of The Institute for Therapeutic Discovery (www.tiftd.org), a non-profit organization focused on bridging biochemistry and biophysics, and as the communications director of Beech Tree Labs, Inc. (www.beechtreelabs.com), a discovery and early-stage-development biopharmaceutical company.
Recorded at the 34th annual SSE Conference in 2015 at the Hilton Washington DC/Rockville hotel.
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Published on November 20, 2018
