This week’s issue was a bit challenging for me, as a couple of the articles this week are about not accepting prevailing wisdom and always being willing to challenge orthodoxy, whether it be in cultural or scientific norms.  And while I agree to some extent, my own experience has me rather acutely aware of the dangers behind the attitude of “challenge everything” or “reject all changes”  It’s these exact attitudes that have lead to fairly widespread rejection of vaccination, and not just COVID-19 vaccination, but even to such vaccinations such as polio, thus leading to a resurgance of the disease in the US.

It’s this idea that we should “challenge everything” that leads to stories told by my mother and associated family about a school losing a court case for refusing to have a cat litter box available to “accommodate” a child that identified as a cat.  The story is obviously false, as any such case would lead to news in pretty much every outlet in Western society, especially given the 24 hour news-cycle. Plus, you can look for any such court case in the public records and you won’t find any.  Most tellingly, however, is that there are no TikToks or Instagrams that show any litter pan ever, and given how much access school-age teens have to the internet, does anybody really think such a thing wouldn’t have been photo-documented thousands of times by now?  Still, that didn’t stop the gleeful retelling at a recent gathering, with appropriate tut-tutting about the state of our school system and the problems of wokeness.  Perhaps it would have been better had I stayed and insisted on the truth, but I’ve enough problems with family that I didn’t think it worth it.  I just stayed long enough for it to be considered social and got the hell out.

Still, it’s all the fashion these days saying that we should be willing to challenge authority, with some pointing to figures like Gallileo or Semmelweis who challenged the status quo and were derided for it, even though they eventually turned out to be correct.  Or they argue that the experts or even the entirety of academia is biased and unwilling to consider theories too far beyong the accepted norms.  And there’s some truth to both of these.  But far more often, the person who’s yelling on the street corner isn’t a prophet—just some distressed person who’s suffering some sort of chemical imbalance in the brain.

Of course, this doesn’t mean accept everything the consensus offers blindly. At one time that would mean accepting slavery as reasonable, or that biological sex should trump the gender experience. But it does mean we shouldn’t be willing to take up something that challenges what is “known” without first applying significant critical thought.  We may be each our own person, but what makes all of us stronger and has enabled our society to advance so far is, well, all of us and our society. We discard that at our own peril.  One of the worst problems of the concept of individualism, to my mind, is that so many people believe it is the opposite of conformity.  But I believe it’s valid for an individual to choose to conform.  What makes an individual isn’t whether they conform with society or not, but simply whether they thoughtfully chose to do so.  Blindly rejecting conformity is, in essence, just as conformist as one who blindly accepts it, it’s just the other side of the coin. Or at least, that’s what I think. You’ll have to make up your own mind—just don’t take my word for it.

Meanwhile, student interviews, scholarships, party-hosting, festival hosting, recipes, events, thoughtful articles (even if I don’t agree), and more await you in this week’s issue of The Voice Magazine!  Enjoy the read!