Brown is my Superpower

December 8, 2024

By NZB3

I have 2 irritated media observations for you from this weekend’s Otago Daily Times before trailing off into an esoteric discourse on macrohistory analysis. Because, after all, if economics can be broken down into micro and macroeconomics why shouldn’t I use the same terminology for long-term history trends?

Firstly then, and briefly, so I can move on to the more fun part, there is John Lewis’ front page article in the ODT for 7-8 December 2024. He writes, “COFFEE is the key. That is how Carlton Irving has managed to work 100-hour weeks as a paramedic and be a dad to his seven children, all while studying to become a doctor. ‘The 46-year-old yesterday said those long hours were worth it, as he prepares to graduate from the University of Otago today with a bachelor of medicine and a bachelor of surgery.”

We’re being told a paramedic mid-lifer has become an MD the long way around making ends meet for his 7 kids by augmenting the Student Allowance with hard work. It’s presented as if between responding to emergencies in a Dunedin CBD ambulance Carlton was able to attend lecture theaters and labs at Otago Medical School. I didn’t think the program allowed for part-timers. If it sounds hard then put it down to hard work, lots of coffee, and the neglect of his wife and large family for years. Great scoop for the front page.

Except that here is Carlton again, this time as Director of Māori Health at the The Health Quality & Safety Commission. That’s a State quango set up in 2011 by National 5.0 to serve as an extra layer of bureaucratic red tape on our already over-burdened health system. Carlton is also a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Health in another role. Whereas, the OTD makes it sound like he’s a Yellow Jacket emergency services guy with a paper run and car washing gigs on the side while he crams for those exams and saves up Studylink credits.

In fact, he’s a Wellington insider who would know backwards how to get special interest group grants and scholarships. Come to that, as a member of the PSA or at least Lanyard-wearing class he almost certainly would have his up-skilling tertiary pathway fully funded by The State. He’s not the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, he’s Carlton Banks!

“Carlton is the Chief Clinical Officer Allied Health at…Māori Health Authority….; Currently, Carlton is the Director of Māori Health and Consumer at Te Tāhū Hauora (Health Quality & Safety Commission), he previously held the position of Chief Clinical Officer Allied Health at Te Aka Whai Ora Māori Health Authority. Carlton also works as a Medical Workforce Pathway Group Member at the Ministry of Health, where he provides specialist knowledge for recommendations on short, medium, and long-term solutions to make the medical workforce sustainable. ” – 100maorileaders.com

“The establishment of the Health Quality & Safety Commission: The Health Quality & Safety Commission (the Commission) is a crown agent established in 2011 to influence, encourage, support and guide improvement in health care practice in New Zealand. In 2009 the Report of the Ministerial Review Group (‘the Horn report’) recognised that any national body designed to improve quality and safety in New Zealand health care had to be independent of government to earn the support and trust of the sector” – New Zealand Medical Journal (2015)

Secondly comes this line from the article: “Being Maori (Te Whakatohea, Te Upokorehe), he was also driven to become a doctor because he wanted to see more equity in the health system.” – John Lewis

Using the Passive Voice rather than Active Voice in editorialising isn’t just bad grammar it’s bad journalistic style. Active voice: A dog bites a boy; Passive voice: A boy is bitten by a dog. The Active voice places agency on events. They don’t passively fall out of the sky and happen to us: something is behind them. Carlton the Maori, was driven to become a doctor like one of so many cattle driven to the coral. He didn’t bite into doctoring with deliberate gusto. No, a man was called upon to be a doctor. Doctoring happened to him as if against his own will. More about that to come.

According to Lewis “Being Maori” is to have drives unlike those of other identity groups. For one, the Maori is driven to be a doctor if you can believe that, in a way that the non-Maori is not. Likewise, in this adapted Freudian Drive Theory, the Maori has a special ocular super power to “see more equity” than your usual kind of skin tone. Carlton gets an MD and a feathery cape and is special not for his own efforts but because of the pigmentation of his outer organ!?

It’s very much in accord with Auckland University who are even more explicit with the ‘Brown Is My Superpower’ idea. The Carlton Irvings and Tawa Hunters (image, left) of this world were also beneficiaries of  the The Mirror on Society Policy, introduced in 2012. It means domestic students fitting into special categories get preferential entry into Otago medical school. Somewhat glossed over in the ODT’s leader today. Ref. The 45 Year Old Junior Doctor, NZB3

There is absolutely nothing about belonging to the group ‘Maori’ rather than another group identity that determines virtues. The absurdity should be identified and explained. Being Maori does not imbue one with a “drive” to become a doctor born of special race-based equity supervision superpowers!

Auguste Comte’s Law of Three Stages

According to Auguste Comte (who Ayn Rand warned me against) there are Three Stages of mankind that we move though in a Linier Cycle sort of like a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.

One: Theological

Two: Metaphysical

Three: Positive/Scientific

In that first stage humans are in what Roussau thought of as ‘The Golden Age’ with a theological/supernatural basis. Divine beings pull your strings. Stars in the sky, cosmic beings, made things the way they are and animate you. We do ‘it’ because it’s God’s will. The sky is blue because Maui made it so. Human beings don’t really know or understand except through a relationship with the almighty. We have what Julian Jaynes called the Bicameral Mind. Part of your mind is yours, the rest is alienated from you as an invisible ‘friend’: the voice of god.

Moving on to the second stage, the Metaphysical was a step forward to viewing our world as essences, animal spirits, vital energies, forces. Not supernatural. Now our thinkers consider actions in the world as quite poetic and romantic. The language of Locke, Newton, and people of that time are full of this sort of prose. Objects in space are animated by “attractions,” people by “Manifest Destiny,” “sparks of innocence,” the “light of reason,” “disturbed humors.” It’s still the way I hear economists speaking on Radio New Zealand today.

Comte identified he was living in a new era of Scientific Progress,  hence the third and final phase. Now our sciences are empirical, measurable, quantifiable, mathematical. The operators of this sort of culture, ourselves, have been socialised with the kind of minds to compass the higher levels of measurement: Interval and Ratio. It has made terrific progress possible for all humanity. Ref. Measurement, Epistemology, Politics, NZB3

Like Comte, Rousseau also saw these stages and the two systems map on to each other quite well. However Rousseau had a 4th stage called The State which I think is a species of Stage 2. Intimidated by life at Stage 3 we regress backwards. Perhaps a Return to the Primitive. Or perhaps a new sort of Brave New World/Orwellian stage where the place once taken by God or divine worship is perceived a vacuum and taken over by The State.

Note that in the world today people are living in all 3 stages and think they’re in the right. In their state of Identity Protective Cognition they think their point of view is the only right one and scorn anyone who has strayed. For example, a Stage 1 Fundamentalist Muslim or Christian has traditinalist and nationalist views and is quite sure a Stage 3 person “worships” science the way they do God. They see thinkers like Epicurus as rank hedonists and have no other perspective on offer.

Leaving the shelter of Stage 1 and 2 represents the problem of our post-Darwinian world. Nietzsche recognised to this ‘God is dead’ problem which I frame as having to place to locus of human meaning at the individual level. You must self-author. Be a self-created character not an impression of one made by your culture, religion, family system, race, tribe, or whatever. Ayn Rand, Jordan Peterson, Epicurus, Nietzsche and others offer answers to those of us seeking to be individuals in reality rather than simulacra (aka Non-Player Characters) in simulations.

I’m on Team Stage 3. I want to help people stick with this path and keep our advanced civilisation going although it’s tough. Many become afraid. Having left the protection of Group Think and churches, tribes and enclaves, they suffer 2 typical outcomes. One, they turn nihilistic or into hedonists because instead of finding new discipline without Gods and spirits to lift the load for them they ignore the remaining problem. Or, two, they (especially the French, apparently) experience the Existential horror of having no locus of meaning and run backwards into the church again or some other top-down mind receptacle. Perhaps they start worshiping money or cars or rugby or MTV or Taylor Swift or a gang, etc. They supercharge consumerism (Amour-propre) trying to ‘Keep Up With the Kardashians’ by sporting the right accessories or Woke opinions. Filling the vacuum left by Gods.  Backwards.  It’s like going back to all-fours having been bipedal or back into the trees having become terrestrial.

While our society enjoys the vestiges of Stage 3 we are not these days populated by Stage 3 people. Those great minds are behind us and not celebrated. Carl Sagan’s Demon Haunted World is coming back. Ayn Rand’s Return of the Primitive. A great example (or 2 really) is the way both the Connemara inter-island ferry and the HMNZS Manawanui both came to grief this year. If I over-simplify this then the point still stands. Essentially my take is that both of these big ships are too valuable to be trusted to the risk of being captained by Stage 2 minds. Yet in all likelihood Stage 2 minds are the only kind there are likely to be these days and cost much less.

What to do? In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged one woman, Dagny, basically ran around at the top of her bandwidth keeping the train network from crashing. Other people who did the same in their crashing Stage 3 world were vanishing one by one. Recruited, as it turned out, to drop this crazy ball by none other than John Gault. In our non-fictional world it works a little differently. The Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) model is used.

HITL ships like Connemara and Manawanui resemble the interplanetary cruise ship Avenue 5 from the TV show of the same name. Or, the ship in WALL-E for that matter. Really, these ships were run by an autopilot that can’t really go wrong. Especially in the case of Connemara the trip from Wellington to Picton and back is pretty standardised for an algorithm to routinely perform. When Human Error is the major problem the perfect solution is to get rid of humans except in the nominal sense. Thus, Hugh Lorrie literally acted as captain of Avenue 5 but his role was totally performative.*

Lorrie’s character wasn’t made captain to run the ship at all. I suspect Blue Bridge and our Navy work the same way. The profile of the highly diverse Commander Yvonne Gray (who sunk our battleship) backs that up. Lorrie’s character was just supposed to look good to the public and the press, talk and shake hands, project Confidence and Safety Theater. Not be Captain Kirk or Horatio Hornblower. For the ferry and the navy ship the fault was “human error” but it turns out the humans were sailing in a ‘sandbox’ environment with no real ability to control their ship or get it out of autopilot mode.

How much of modern New Zealand, the world, come to that, is functioning of the fumes of Stage 3? On a Dagny Taggart autopilot setting that’s only as good as the absence of the need for a creative response?

The Idiocracy is everywhere you look but presently veiled behind systems that haven’t yet had their crash moment. They’re fronted by people posing as doctors, newspaper editors, ship captains, electricians, physiotherapists, mayors, policemen, engineers, lawyers, CEOs, teachers, scientists, judges, politicians, architects, military leaders, bankers, social workers, journalists, accountants,  public health officials, environmental consultants, HR managers, marketing executives, car mechanics, urban planners,….

It might not be Carlton Irving’s fault mind you. Maybe he’ll write to the ODT and say they got the story all wrong? Doubtful. More likely still he’ll be the next Ayesha Verrall and this is a Labour candidate announcement in disguise.

Stage 2 narrative is all over the Carlton Irving story and that’s what worries me apart from all the fairy-tale back-story.

Supernatural mythical forces are the locus of meaning and of cause-and-effect once again. Mystics at the wheel: An elite man becomes a doctor and has special powers to see our Holy MacGuffin! Equity, that is. Because of the Maoriness that animates this forked animal.

He gets an MD, a feathered cape, and the power to see more equity and prize it. You, not being a group member subject to these vaguely defined supernatural forces, get none such.

—
* Until the space ship came to danger and the captain had to step up from a Stage 2 to 3 person; A development I enjoyed in the show

Image ref. ODT photo, NZB3 mod

Image ref. Comte, Sociologylearners, Youtube (2023)

Ref. Video Short: Brown is My Superpower

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