Oneupmanship is the art or practice of successively outdoing a rival, staying one step ahead by proving superiority. It is straightforward competition, whether playful in tone, as in friends verbally sparring, or deadly serious. Presidential candidate Donald Trump employs oneupmanship incessantly, pointing out that he is richer, more successful, and more popular than his rivals […]
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As we grow into adulthood, each of us develops a personal comfort zone located on the continuum between paranoia and gullibility. A few of us are highly suspicious by nature, a few are unwitting dupes; most of us are in between. Mental health professionals are no exception, and it shows in our work. Is a […] It’s a blessing and a curse that we humans are such adept conceptualizers and heuristic thinkers. We continually compare our perceptions about the world to paradigms in our head, performing quick, unconscious goodness-of-fit assessments. We instantly sense danger when a large furry beast rapidly advances. We don’t waste time discerning whether it’s a lion or […] George S. Patton, Jr. commanded the Seventh United States Army, and later the Third Army, in the European Theater of World War II. General Patton, a brilliant strategist as well as larger-than-life fount of harsh words and strong opinions, was also infamous for confronting two soldiers diagnosed with “combat fatigue” — now known as post-traumatic […] Lucia Sommers of the Department of Family and Community Medicine at UC San Francisco commented on my last post, noting that clinical uncertainty among primary care physicians (PCPs) is usually regarded as tolerable at best. She was delighted that I called such uncertainty intellectually attractive, and something to embrace in psychiatry. Sommers and her coauthor […] Edward Bernays (1891-1995) It may have been a patient (I can’t recall) who suggested I search online for the 2002 BBC documentary by Adam Curtis called Century of the Self. It turns out the video is freely available at several sites; the full four-hour documentary can be viewed or downloaded here, or each […] In my last post, I outlined the fundamental problem facing advocates of nonviolence: Despite nearly universal conceptual agreement with this goal, human psychology conspires to make peace elusive and strife apparently unavoidable. Our emotions trump our rationality, biasing assessments of real-world evidence and leading to post-hoc justification of whatever our “gut” feels. Unfortunately, and rightly […] |
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