don's report archive
Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)
Saturday April 21, 2001
Grant Donovan, the Australian polymath interviewed elsewhere at this site, invented the expression cerebralitis incarceratus righteousness for a special occasion at a national wellness conference in 1994. The occasion was a seminar on political correctness, liberty, and wellness.
Donovan used the phrase to illustrate a closed and frightened mind, a perspective or worldview that inhibits personal development and team performance. Donovan characterized cerebralitis incarceratus righteousness (henceforth CIR) as a form of thinking that is restricted and dogmatic. He identified many symptoms, including an absolute conviction that some aspects of public speech should be forbidden. He gave as examples policies such as withholding, even banning information about birth control in "abstinence only" sex education programs.
Donovan sparked a lot of discussion by asking if it serves a free society to hold religious beliefs, traditions, policies, and officials as somehow sacred and above critique, challenge, or criticism. His position, like my own, is that nothing is, or ever should be, sacred or out-of-range of free inquiry.
Such inquiry can be respectful in the sense that people treat each other with civility and courtesy, even while savaging ideas some find ludicrous or worse. The keys to a wellness mindset in a true democracy are norms and customs that enable comfort and personal security in open discussions on any topic, however unpopular. What do you think? Does that point of view seem attractive, or somehow radical or unappealing to you?
Donovan argued that it is not coincidental that the United States and other democracies are experiencing ever-increasing poverty, crime, racial tension, gender conflict, and a myriad of social ills as more and more restrictions are placed on individual freedoms of expression and participation in the governance of the society.
Putting the lid on thought and freedom has the paradoxical effect of causing more problems than it ever solves. Donovan cited a study by David Suzuki of Canada to support this conclusion.
Suzuke researchers visited Toronto, New York, Amsterdam, and Liverpool to explore the sharply different ways that societies deal with drug use and users. He compared HIV infection rates among IV drug users and level of street crime. There were startling differences between two cities, namely, New York and Liverpool.
New York authorities treat heroin use as a crime, ban needle exchange programs, and basically blame victims and treat them as scum. This approach has witnessed a 60 percent HIV infection rate amongst IV users. This is considered a dangerously high level and is acknowledged as a key factor in rising street crimes, particularly robbery and prostitution.
By comparison, Liverpool authorities promote needle exchanges. Both needles and exchange services are free and, more importantly, users are able to obtain heroin or like substances as part of health care. Suzuki found that Liverpool has had a one percent HIV infection rate amongst users and a 12 percent decrease in street crime each year since the inception of this approach.
The public officials in Liverpool saw drug use as a health issue and worked to minimize individual and community harm by processes of freedom and self-management. New York chose control, repression, victimization, moral superiority, and other traditional bans on freedom. But New York has a greater problem, which seems to have been caused by the expert-driven cure it chose.
The wellness movement is also expert-driven, Donovan claimed. Its leaders want to control people's freedom to smoke, drink and, as in the case of abstinence only education for juveniles, education as well. This is usually done with laws and formulas that don't work now, have never worked in the past, and will not work in the future.
We would do well to consider the possibility, as Donovan suggested, that real wellness enabling self-management by people at all levels of society, will only take root in an atmosphere of maximum freedom, knowledge, choice, open expression, and fun. We will all do better in an environment where freedom of thought and expression can be shared. Donovan's concern was that those with the syndrome of CIR (cerebralitis incarceratus righteousness, in case you forgot) will, if unopposed, come to control the wellness movement the way authorities in New York manage the drug problem.
The short-term personal strategy Donovan recommended then and I still support now? Choose freedom at every opportunity. Choose not to be threatened by opinions different from your own. Stay open to possibilities. Be considerate and courteous. And, of course, don't take yourself or anyone else, including me, too seriously.
Donovan surely would not. Be well.
(Ed. Note: Views expressed in this and other columns are those of the author and not necessarily those of the SeekWellness Editorial Board.)
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