TRANSCRIPT
One thing I remember from my childhood that is a positive thing I got from my parents, it’s from a very early age. They pointed out again and again that I was unusually curious. I was always asking lots and lots of questions. And fundamentally, what is curiosity to me? I consider curiosity the basis of science, the basis of asking questions and not having a predetermined answer in one’s mind.
I remember that as a kid, the people who would ask me questions often were asking me questions that they already knew the answer to. So it’s like, well, why are they asking me then? It’s like they’re asking me to find out what I mean to say, seeing if they can in some way trap me into telling something that wasn’t the truth. Or maybe they’re just testing me, like teachers all the time, grading me, finding out if I know the answer or not. And actually, I really disliked that.
When I think about it, it’s like they weren’t asking the question out of any degree of curiosity. They were asking for other motives: to grade me, to judge me, to assess me, even to manipulate me, to pressure me to answer the question in a certain way.
And I think about that also when I went to college. I studied four years of biology, and I realize the professors that I had, even though they were teaching us about science, they were teaching us about the scientific method. The scientific method being based in inquiry, being based in the main quality of curiosity. They weren’t modeling that behavior to us. They were teaching us in a way that they already knew the answer, and they were going to transmit that answer to us. But they weren’t walking alongside us on the path to figure out what this answer might be. And they also weren’t encouraging us to ask questions, to really engage our own curiosity.
I think it’s not surprising that I became disgusted with the field of biology during my four years in college. I became disgusted often with the whole field of science in general, this modern scientific world, because I realized it often was not scientific at all. I became disgusted with so many of my fellow students, my fellow science majors—really, really smart people, hyper-intelligent people—and yet not engaged in curiosity. What they were, the ones especially who did really well, who went on and got PhDs and got the best grades of all, they were the best puppets. They were the best robots who basically took whatever the professor was saying, took what the textbook was saying, and learned how to regurgitate it.
Part of the lie that I got in college while studying biology was that, oh, we’re teaching you in a different way. We’re teaching you to engage your critical facilities, your critical faculties. We’re teaching you how to think, how to assess, how to critique. But I realized that they weren’t. They were just saying that to make themselves as professors and as an institution feel good. They were also doing it to make us as students feel good, make us feel like we were really now the most clever and insightful people, the people who could really figure out how to discern truth from falsity.
Now fast forward, hmm, five years, ten years. I became a mental health professional. I became a social worker. I became a psychotherapist, and I became really deeply involved in the mental health field. I started reading scientific literature of psychology, of psychiatry, the psychology of mental illness, so-called mental illness, of diagnosis, of the use of medications. I started reading about the different scientific studies of medications, and they were written exactly in the scientific manner that they trained us to write papers in when I was back in college—with an introduction. Well, actually, they would start with an abstract, then an introduction, then they would have all their different methods for collecting data, then they would have their conclusions that they would come up with based on the data that they had collected, then they would have a discussion.
However, what I realized, especially when I really carefully read the methods that they used to collect their data and the conclusions that they drew from it, I realized so much of it was not science at all. It was full of holes. And when I really engaged my critical facilities, my critical faculties, and really thought about different possibilities, different ways of analyzing their data, I realized I didn’t believe that a lot of it simply didn’t make sense. Especially things about the different ways in which they proved that this antidepressant was effective in treating depression in this way. I read the studies, but this isn’t proving itself to me in any real scientific way.
I realized I had a curiosity that was greater than the people who were writing these papers. And then also, when I started hearing about the genetics behind mental illness, and I read the studies, and I read the different arguments that they used to show that there were genetics behind these things called schizophrenia and bipolar and other things like, oh, depression and things like this, I thought, this really isn’t good science. I had enough knowledge of what the scientific method was and enough inherent curiosity that was still alive in my life to realize, mmm, they weren’t passing my test of what science was. And I really wasn’t even an expert on these subjects that they were talking about.
And then I started questioning, well, are they experts? And then more and more and more in the mental health field, when I’ve kept my curiosity alive, when I kept asking questions, and I kept especially asking questions to myself as I read the things that I was told were true, when I heard other mental health professionals talk, and when I worked in mental health facilities, especially listening to big-shot psychiatrists and psychologists, I realized, huh, what they’re saying often does not add up.
And when I would ask critical questions, and I don’t mean in an anastomotic leak confrontational sense, simply questions in which I was allowing my curiosity free reign and I was trying to figure out if they had blind spots in their arguments, basically I was practicing good science. What I saw again and again and again was that they didn’t like it. They were threatened by it. They felt attacked by it. And it was like I realized they were beholden to their lack of curiosity. They were beholden to their lives.
I want to take a step back and go in a different direction, back to my family, back to my parents, who both, when I was very, very young, were so proud of my curiosity. Now, were they really proud of my curiosity, or were they proud of the early consequences of my curiosity? I think it’s more the latter. I don’t really think they were inherently proud of my curiosity. What they were proud of, from what I see and what I’m gonna argue right now, is they were proud that I learned to read very early. They were proud that I was very, very verbal. They were proud that I had a lot of knowledge, that I could speak in an intelligent way when I was very, very young. Oh, we have a smart boy! This is a reflection on us as parents. We must be great parents.
But the reason that I say I don’t believe they were really proud inherently of my curiosity as a quality that I had is because as I got older and as I got smarter and as my questions became more penetrating, especially more penetrating of their blind spots, of their dishonesty, they didn’t like my curiosity anymore. And suddenly, they really actually disliked it. And then I realized they disliked me. And that made me curious. Why would they treat me this way? Why would they suddenly hate this quality that supposedly they love so much and honored so much?
I realized that they weren’t so curious. They weren’t really looking at themselves in the mirror, and that caused me to want to look at myself more in the mirror and to look at other people more carefully. And I realized, wow, my curiosity is actually a dangerous thing in a social sense of the word. It’s causing me to lose relationships. It’s causing people who supposedly love me more than anyone else in the world has ever loved me to turn against me. I’m like, how strange! Who are these people? Why are they this way?
And as time went on, I asked more and more questions, and it alienated me more and more from…
My family, and it also made me respect them a lot less because I realized they didn’t want to know. They didn’t want to know who they were. And then as time went on, I realized, hmm, they don’t want to know where they came from. Because in contrast, I realized I didn’t want to know where I came from. I wanted to know what my history was.
I started looking at myself and seeing some of my own bad behavior, inappropriate social behavior, sometimes nasty behavior. I wasn’t always the best friend at all to other people. And I started looking at why am I this way and really questioning myself. And that was where I really took a leap forward in my evolution. That was to turn my curiosity toward me, to engage my self-reflective abilities.
I think that is what makes us most special as human beings. Not necessarily just to be curious about the world, because lots of different creatures can do that. Of course, humans can take it to the next level. But the really special thing about humans is that we can be curious about our own mind. We can be curious about our own thought processes. We can be curious about our own behavior, both good and bad. We can ask really where did we come from, and we can gain this curious self-reflective relationship with our own selves.
And then we can even take it a step further. While we are having this relationship between us and our own internal selves, we can step out of that, and we can even watch this process from another degree. We can watch ourselves have the self-reflective process, and we can look at ourselves and we can say, are we questioning ourselves in a really direct and honest way?
And so I did this more and more and more. And the consequence that I realized is that I became even more different. I became more different from my family members. They liked me even less. They didn’t like my curiosity at all. In fact, by this point, they hated it. They started saying things like, “he is crazy.” And I realized other people were saying this. I wasn’t making almost any friends in the mental health field with therapists because they didn’t like my line of questioning.
However, what I realized is that in my job as a therapist, my ability to question, really to be curious, and to ask questions based on my curiosity and to follow my questions with something that so many of my clients loved, they really appreciated it. Here was someone who was modeling reflection, modeling looking into them, really trying to figure out where they came from, why they were the way that they were. Not saying go on medications and do this, the science backs it up, or you have a genetic problem, therefore you have a brain problem, therefore you need to take medications and accept this diagnosis. I wasn’t saying this because I didn’t see evidence for it. It wasn’t proven to me.
However, what I had seen again and again is that when people really engaged their curiosity in looking at themselves, trying to figure out who they were, figure out their story, figure out what their relationship was with their parents once upon a time, create their own narrative, not accept the narrative that was told to them so many times along the way, what I found is that people really could change. And people could become empowered in a whole different way.
Now that’s not to say all of my clients liked that because I realized there were some people I worked with when I was a therapist who didn’t like that. They didn’t like being really asked questions. They wanted to be told what should they do. They wanted their pain to go away, and they didn’t want to have to look inside. Because what I realized is not infrequently when people really started looking inside, especially early on, it was incredibly painful.
This brings me back again to my parents. I really think the reason that they weren’t fundamentally curious is it was too painful. Because there are consequences to being curious. There’s consequences to asking questions. Real conclusions sometimes are not easy to bear. Sometimes the science field puts out, the mental health field, the biology, it’s easy to stomach. It’s comfortable. It’s comfortable to come up with the same conclusions that everyone has come up with along the way, or just maybe to tweak those conclusions a little bit to look like you have a unique perspective on life.
It’s easy to follow the rules. It’s easy sometimes to close your eyes and to not think, and so not to really have to look at yourself. I think often this is the way of the world. Curiosity is dangerous. Galileo was dangerous. Copernicus was dangerous. These people are dangerous to the establishment. And most fundamentally, I think the really curious child is dangerous to the establishment of the family system, the lies of the family system.
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