You hear the phrase all the time that goes something such as, “We need outside the box thinking on this problem.” But how far out of the box can one really think, and how much are we just trapped in our own societal thinking? And how many truly original thoughts are there? Are we forever doomed in our own lifetimes to be sealed within the cultural zeitgeist of where we presently live in the timeline of history?
Let’s take a deep dive into that…
On December 13, 1799, Our first president, George Washington was feeling quite under the weather one evening. He rode around his ranch and finished his typical management chores for that cold and wet winter day. Not typical at all for the proudly punctual Washington, he came in late for dinner that evening and did not change out of his damp clothes. Early the next morning he could hardly breathe and his wife Martha wanted to ride out into the cold, damp night to summon doctors for her seriously ill husband. Concerned for Martha’s safety, one of Washington’s aides instead rode off and brought back his personal physician, Dr. James Craik. Attending to our nation’s Founding Father at that time were his personal doctor of 40 years, other physicians and 2 other medically trained aides.
You might tend to think Washington, considered one of the most important persons in the founding of our nation, would have access to the best medical care and doctors available in the United States at the time. As Washington lay on his deathbed on December 14th of 1799, he had what were thought to be the nation’s top physicians and medical assistants assembled by his bedside and within his residence. They worked tirelessly to try to save the first president of this new nation.
Unfortunately, every single treatment these learned medical experts used on Washington made his condition worse. Had they done absolutely nothing, he probably would have lived a few days to weeks longer.
The latest theory as to exactly what killed George Washington is acute bacterial epiglottitis. The epiglottis is the flap of skin at the base of the tongue which covers the windpipe during swallowing. In layman’s terms, Washington had a severely infected sore throat. There have been several theories to go around on what the specific ailment that Washington had, but he was most certainly weakened considerably by the fact that doctors and blood letting “experts” had drained as much as 40 percent of Washington’s blood in a 21 hour period. As the infection ravaged his body, Washington simply did not have the necessary white blood count, or enough blood, period, to let his immune system do the job it was designed for.
Thus was the state of medical knowledge at the time of the founding of our nation some 245 years ago. The supposedly most knowledgeable medical experts at the time, working on one of the most important persons in America at the end of the 18th century, simply had no idea what they were doing. All their attempts to save an aging American hero were completely and utterly in vain. In fact, had Washington’s kind of medical treatment, bloodletting of up to 5 pints, still been in use today, it would bring enough malpractice suits to easily bankrupt an entire hospital.
Though these medical experts had little understanding of the function and importance of the proper amount of blood the human body needs, terrible things can happen when individuals go along with the collective thinking of the day. And unfortunately, no one at the time understood just how bad the practice of bloodletting was, despite the collective medical thinking it was an acceptable practice.
Even though we are well into the scientific age complete with very advanced technology, you would think we have become immune from such backward thinking. However, no one at the time would have considered the practice of bloodletting a backward treatment. After all, it was a treatment which had been used for some 3,000 years, how could there possibly be something wrong with it?
Maybe it is because even in this day of far superior technology, much of our educational systems from grade school to college have been designed to indoctrinate students with ideals instead of teaching the processes of critical thinking and discernment. We teach the student what to think instead of how to approach the problems and mechanisms of thinking. This is not a modern day issue, as humanity has experienced some kind of a collective mindthink throughout most of our recorded existence.
History is replete with example after example of a unified way of thinking from age to age leading to numerous instances of war, famine, ethnic cleansing, political upheaval, scientific fraud, religious persecution, grotesque medical mistakes and human abuses from isolated incidents to monumental history changing movements. The Zeitgeist or “spirit of the age” is present in all epochs, in all cultures, and in all locations around the globe. While we are somewhat trapped in our present day thinking, this has been the story of human history for millennia.
Doctors used to think smoking cigarettes would help clear up the lungs and ease irritation of the nose and throat. And they could not have been further from the truth. Doctors started recommending cigarettes in the 1930s and earlier in the late 1920s cigarettes were marketed to women during women’s rights rallies as “Torches of freedom” or “Freedom sticks.” These 2 marketing techniques, and the resulting false narratives surrounding cigarettes as something of a positive thing, moved smoking into the mainstream and the rest is history.
It was also once thought that the Milky Way galaxy was the only galaxy that existed, until spiral nebulae were discovered, which later were named “island universes” and then their name later changed to galaxies, when it was discovered they were just as the Milky Way was. It is now known that the largest galaxy yet discovered, known as IC 1101, contains 100 trillion stars, one thousand times the number of stars in our own galaxy. This was absolutely inconceivable to astronomers before the 1920s.
All this makes one think, what could we be thinking and living through today that nearly everyone believes is just fine, but has no idea it is actually harmful? What will society historians from 100 or 200 years from now look back on and think, “Wow, those people from the 2020s sure were backwards”?
With many examples throughout history of what was once considered mainstream thinking, turning out to be wrong, or even dangerous, what does it really mean to be able to think outside of the box? Or, how far out of the box are we really even able to think? And how much of what we believe have we been lead to believe? Cigarettes were never good for people to smoke. Their popularity was strictly a marketing campaign via the tobacco companies paying doctors to be in ads or write articles about their benefits, or they simply were marketed to women by Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, as a way to express their freedom.
This article could go on forever about the times society has been manipulated to believe something that was completely manufactured, or how we, just by default, have believed things that simply are not true. Hopefully, at least the examples here might make you take stock of what you really think. And instead of pointing one’s finger backwards into the annals of history at the dummies that lived, “back in the olden days,” maybe let’s just examine each of our own ways of thinking and ask if what we unquestionably believe, is actually true.