Stuart’s Thoughts, 1/1/2019

Enigma

Most of us have great difficulty in dealing with an enigma.  In fact, the very definition of the word predicts such a problem.  An enigma is defined as a person or thing that is mysterious, puzzling or difficult to understand.  It would seem that as we age, gain knowledge and experience, we would become less likely to encounter enigmas.  We should become increasingly able to understand situations that, on the surface, seem to make little sense.  Having gained better insight into human nature simply by experiencing many years of life, we should be able to recognize most trends in human nature and analyze what might appear to be significant aberrations or deviations from typical behavior.  But curiously, I find just the opposite to be true.  In fact, I believe that most of us vastly over simplify many things, events and behaviors in order to avoid having to deal with enigmas. We find it much more convenient to accept a cursory judgement as an explanation rather than challenging our intellect for a thorough analysis of what we do know and, most importantly, admission of the vast amount that we don’t know.

Considering the above introduction, I thought it might be interesting to explore several of the most intriguing enigmas that I recognize today, January 1, 2019. After reading my thoughts on these matters, you my wish to conduct your own exercise, either on the enigmas I present or others that are of particular interest to you.  Now, I do recognize that there are certain people who would deny being faced with enigmas.  They are so certain that what they believe about anything, person, thing or event, is all that needs to be said.  They are so intelligent that nothing escapes them. They understand everything and, thus, their opinion is the last word.  I assure you that I am not one of these people.

The first enigma that I will mention has a personal element and is one that has been with us for many years, i.e., has our planet been visited by aliens from other worlds? In other words, are alien piloted flying saucers real.  The reason this is a true enigma in my mind is that I actually observed and tracked flying objects that were, at the time  (late 1950s), seen by many others, including the ground observer corps, airline personnel and military officials.  The incident was reported in newspapers and the objects were officially designated as “unidentified flying objects”.  On the other hand, in spite of the large number of other such sightings, some by airline pilots, military personnel, astronauts and other trained observers, nothing so far has been positively identified as coming from an extraterrestrial location.  Top cosmologists, space scientists and rocketry experts point out the vast distances between earth and other planets that would make practical travel for advanced living beings between them essentially impossible , or at least highly unlikely, for many reasons. The scientist in me makes me want to go along with the experts but, because I witnessed a formation of unidentified flying objects that both the commercial air traffic people and the military categorically denied were theirs, I was presented with a true enigma 60 years ago that I still, to this day, am unable to fully resolve.

I would like to now turn to an enigma currently faced by our society, our nation and, in fact the whole world.  How can the best possible level of medical care be provided to all who need it?  Perhaps I should frame the question differently.  Can the best possible medical care be provided to all who need it?  Obviously, the answer to this question is no.  Some populated locations are simply too remote to have the availability of the necessary highly specialized equipment and medical personnel. There may be no practical way of performing heart or other organ transplants deep in the Amazon or in a mountain village high in the Himalayas.  But even for people living in close proximity to major medical centers, high cost often precludes many from having access to advanced therapies and procedures.  As much as we might say that high cost should never prevent someone from receiving critical, life-saving, medical care, the fact of the matter is that it does and far more frequently than we may think.  Herein lies the basic enigma.  As medical care advances to address the greatest challenges to health and human longevity, the cost of delivering such care increases exponentially.  Highly sophisticated and technically robust equipment along with extensive and costly medical training make this so.  An inevitable consequence of progress in solving the most difficult challenges in medicine is an ever increasing restriction on the number who can afford it.  Group insurance can help by spreading risk and its associated cost over many policy holders but even this may soon become unaffordable for many.  

My third example of an enigma is well known to most of us and that enigma is our President,Donald Trump.  He represents a classic enigma.  He is loved by many and in fact some of his supporters have called him the greatest U.S.President of all time.  Conversely, he is disliked, even hated, by many and some have called him the worst U.S. President of all time.  In an attempt to rationally assess this enigma, it might be suggested that those who dislike (hate) President Trump dislike the man himself, his enormous, obscene, ego, his morality or lack there of, his character, inappropriate things he says and the distasteful way that he treats certain other people, particularly those who disagree with him.  He is the kind of person that most of those who dislike him would never care to associate with.  On the other hand those who like him, basically like his actions, i.e., what he does and what he has accomplished as President.  They pay little attention to the “noise” of what he says.  They pay attention to his many accomplishments and the fact that he arguably can be called the hardest working President in history.  Regardless of whether you love him or hate him, it’s impossible to deny his impressive work ethic and his tenacity in pursuing his goals.  Thus, how each of us resolves the Trump enigma probably depends on which aspect of the man we regard as most important, his character and what he says or his job performance and what he does.  Now, I am sure that a number of his greatest critics would claim to dislike both his character and his job performance.  However, those are likely to also be his staunchest political foes and would rather “die and go to hell” than to admit that he has ever accomplished anything good for our country.  For them, Donald Trump does not represent an enigma.  He is simply a horrible political enemy that must be defeated at any cost, regardless of whether this helps or hurts the nation as a whole.

Thinking about and intellectually dealing with enigmas can be extremely challenging.  We not only must resist the temptation to make  “snap” judgements which are often emotionally based, but we need to shed all personal bias and begin a true, intellectual, analysis from ground zero with a “clean slate” free of pre-conceived thoughts and ideas.  I’m not sure that I can actually do this and I wonder if most others also share this concern.