Dean's Update
October 11, 2024 - Aron Sousa, MD
Dean’s (Wife’s) Weekly Update:
Aron has had one of those weeks where, if he were in a 1960s mad caper flick, the camera would zoom up from our 2008 Honda Fit and you would see a cartoon version of the Mitten with the dean dashing from East Lansing to Traverse City to East Lansing to Grand Rapids to Metro Detroit to Novi—with the occasional boring pause for construction traffic.
In other words, it’s been the kind of week where Aron has been struggling to sit down and write his weekly update. He’s done something like 4,385 weekly updates, and even though composing them often cuts into our time together, I don’t want to see him give them up. I always wanted a dean who would tell us faculty what the heck was going on in our college. So I’m glad you have that kind, and I don’t want it to end.
That said, I would like to see him for dinner tonight. Consequently, I offered to pen this week’s update. We’ll see if Reviewer #2 lets it through.
Aron told me he was planning to write about civil discourse, and as I pick campaign literature out of my morning oatmeal, I understand why. While we are not at risk of a literal hurricane like our poor, overwhelmed compatriots in the southeast, living in a swing state during a tense national election makes every day feel like we’re looking for plywood and sandbags, wondering whether we’re going to make it through.
The effectively two-party system that we have in America does something strange to us. It takes us three-dimensional beings—people who vary widely in experiences, needs, tastes, fiscal attitudes, and beliefs about reproduction, government assistance, and use of our military—and flattens us each into two-dimensions, making of us cartoon versions of either Republicans or Democrats. Social media (an oxymoron if there ever was one) then slathers those cartoon characters with a thick lacquer, ensuring we don’t try to become three-dimensional again.
As we consider civil discourse, the degree to which social media is using us to profit from our basest instincts cannot be overemphasized. A few years ago I read Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (summary here), and the scales dropped from my eyes. As Lanier explains, it’s not that the engineers at Facebook and X are evil, purposefully setting our accounts to “kill each other.” Not at all. It’s simply about capitalism and human nature.
You see, social media companies ultimately make money off steady engagement—you coming back. And it just turns out that what makes your brain stem want to come back to your account is the opportunity to feel tribal, anxious about the state of the world, and outraged. The algorithms are consequently set to maximize those feelings. You may think you’re just coming to see Maru the cat get into another tiny box. But the algorithms recognize that what will really make you come back is the hope of seeing the latest idiotic thing the other party’s candidate said and your side’s hilarious/biting/set-to-music response to it.
As your mind fills with what your chosen news and information sources tell you—and odds are good, you stick with the ones that don’t challenge your worldview (why suffer?)—your perspective seems so obviously true, real, informed. The other side seems increasingly hateful, bullying, crazy, dumb.
And then you have to meet each other IRL.
Maybe you’re standing together around a patient’s bedside during rounds. Maybe you’re working through a case study together in the basement of Radiology. Maybe you’re putting a learning module together. Without really realizing it, whether or not you personally are on social media, as you do your daily work, your ancient mind is listening intensely for clues about who shares your worldview (the true, real, informed one) and who doesn’t.
Add to this now the generally good messages you’ve gotten in your life about how taking care of others sometimes means speaking up. How you have to be on the lookout for oppression. How if you just bring evidence and reason to bear, intelligent people will see the light (i.e., your light).
And what you have is a recipe for misunderstanding, strife, and the urge to report (to someone) the person who doesn’t get it.
The central insight of Lanier’s book is that people think they are the “customers” of social media companies. But they are not. The customers are the corporations that sell adds via social media. You are simply the product being sold to those companies. The reason the social media companies poke and push and surveil you is so that they can maximize the information they obtain about you. It’s like they’re running medical tests on you, only these are tests to see what you are likely to spend money on. They then sell your information to the advertising corporations.
The reason you pay nothing for your social media account is that you are not the customer. You never were. You are the product being farmed.
When you add to this now political parties that are trying desperately to get every dollar and vote they can from you, what you have is a system where you are constantly being poked, prodded, inflamed, outraged, made anxious, and tested. The person you find yourself fighting with (for real or in your head) at rounds, at study group, at a curriculum meeting—you are fighting because you are like the chickens packed into a tiny barn to be fattened and sold for meat.
How can you free yourself? It is very difficult. Again, even if (like Aron) you are personally not on social media, the whole system is now set up for the farming of you.
But what you can do is to try to check your own attitude. Try as much as humanly possible to downplay in yourself the gratifying modes of tribalism and righteousness. Try to remind yourself that you probably don’t actually know the “enemy” very well. You don’t know how they came to this mindset—if you even really know what their mindset is. You can try to bring not just intellectual humility, but emotional humility, too.
You can also try to remind yourself of the things you share with the other person. If you’re in the College of Human Medicine, with only the rarest exception, you probably have in common beliefs in the scientific process and the importance of compassionate care. You can try to bring yourself back, always, to that recognition of shared values and common purpose.
Finally, you can check yourself for the urge to wield and grow your power. You can try to remember, as I try to do, that when you are on your deathbed, what you will probably be judging yourself by is not how much wealth and power you have accumulated, how many papers you published or how many accolades you received in your career, but by what good you did with and for others in the world. If you only manage to make yourself stand taller by digging your heels in deeper, you do not understand the strength that comes from falling over.
Listen without thinking about how you will respond. Just listen. Bend. Be grateful for falling down. Don’t be a chicken, and don’t be a bull. Be a person.
Other than that, I can report that our tomato yield was thin but tasty this year. The stone wall we had built on the north side of the backyard when I got my Guggenheim fell over in that big rain, and it’s going to get rebuilt soon. The nursing squirrel we’ve been feeding on the front porch seems to be calming down, suggesting her pups have perhaps recently matured enough to venture out and feed themselves. The Fit’s new exhaust system is holding up just fine—thank you, University Foreign Car—but we’re looking for a newer car to replace our dying 2012 Chevy Volt, so Aron has some better airbags than the Fit to dash around the state. You may soon see him driving an EV.
By the way, when he signs off “Serving the people with you,” he really means it. He loves working with you. He loves supporting you. You are good people, serving the good people of our swing state, with grace and love, science and care. It’s why I put up with you cutting into our canoeing time. Keep doing good work.
Serving the people with you and Aron,Alice Dreger, PhD