The Surgeon’s Attitude

Imagine that a surgeon is taught some improved medical procedure that will save many more lives. Now suppose that at the end of the training the surgeon says: “Even though I understand why these new procedures are more effective, I’m more comfortable with the old way of operating. Besides, I enjoy doing things the old way—it’s become my style!” Obviously, this would be an unprofessional attitude for the surgeon to take. In fact, it might even cause him to lose his license if a patient died. But while such an attitude is unthinkable in a surgeon, it is quite common in people who decide to do good. Most people prefer to do a good deed that they are comfortable with, rather than learn to do an unfamiliar yet strategic action that can produce more good.

Now imagine that some people take the attitude of surgeons. They would then ask themselves and each other, what the best, most loving actions would be. With mutual support, reflection, study and practice, they would choose actions that alleviate great suffering and save lives rather than other good actions. While medical surgeons take about eight years to learn to save lives, people who adopt a surgeon’s attitude can begin to save lives and reduce suffering in a matter of months, not years.

Taking a surgeon’s attitude means thinking strategically. Here’s a story:

Three Environmentalists

One environmentally-minded person tried to recycle every scrap of paper. In a year he spent approximately 15 minutes a week, for a total of about 13 hours, saving 400 pounds of paper.

A second environmentalist was walking down a sidewalk eating a sandwich with her friends. A strong wind blew away a plastic bag that she was also holding. Her friends were surprised that she made no effort to play catch-up with the bag as it raced down the block. But two minutes later, when they came within sight of a trashcan, she picked up a plastic bag, two candy wrappers and a plastic soda bottle from the sidewalk and threw them in the trashcan. She turned to her friends and said, “On balance, the world is cleaner.”

A third environmentally-minded person calculated the amount of paper that she used in a year. She did not recycle, and she produced about 500 pounds of paper waste in a year. Taking 15 minutes, she sent a $25 check to a tree-planting organization that would plant 150 trees with her money. The trees would eventually produce 100,000 pounds of paper, not to mention the tons of carbon dioxide they would absorb and the oxygen they would create.

She never had occasion to mention her annual donation, and so most of her friends thought she was a hypocrite.

The third environmentalist in the story worked half as long as the first, but produced 200 times as much paper. Her actions also produced oxygen, reduced global warming, and prevented soil erosion.

The main point of the story isn’t that you shouldn’t recycle. It’s that those who think strategically can multiply the good they do many times over.

Taking on a surgeon’s attitude means regular action and regular study—ongoing learning to do more good. Since most people who do good don’t have a surgeon’s attitude, those who wanted to practice and maintain this attitude should probably join a group of others who wished to practice this attitude. Regular ongoing support, even if it with one other person by phone, is probably essential to optimum action.

The Surgeon’s Attitude is to have the seriousness and focus of surgeons who know that lives depend on the quality of their work. Perhaps there are five parts of the attitude:

a. Commitment to the best methods. A surgeon would never be considered competent if he or she used less than the best methods.

b. Passion. Good surgeons are not totally detached and cold. The spirit of the Surgeon's Attitude is to “Act as if your child's life was on the line, and not someone else's.—Your Molly, your Jason, your Kizito, your Prajhi, your Ling. Act as if you can see their faces.”

c. Reasonable stretches. We make reasonable stretches, not “kamikaze” stretches. “Make reasonable stretches” is a useful slogan to bear in mind. Do your level best.

d. Conscious effort. We ask for conscious effort for five hours per week, but we expect that the spirit of doing the best, most loving things will pervade the rest of your life.

e. Commitment to ongoing learning. Just as a medical surgeon must keep learning, we need to keep learning because our global and personal situations keep changing.

Here’s a story that relates to the Surgeon’s Attitude:

The Gun Angel

You are home alone watching TV. A stranger comes to the door. He looks friendly enough, so you open the door to talk. He immediately pulls a gun on you, steps inside, and closes the door. He leads you to your living room and makes you sit down. He sits down too, and tells you that he is a hit man who usually kills pushers and other bad people who are his boss’ competition. So he does his job without remorse. But recently he had to kill a good person who was going to go to the police, and now he feels great guilt. To alleviate his guilt, he wants you to save 100 lives in the next six months and plant 1,000 trees, or get someone else to do these things. If you don’t, he or one of his buddies who you would never recognize will kill you or someone you love.

He says that when he leaves, you’ll realize you have two choices: Either you can put all your energy into trying to protect yourself and your loved ones—but there is no way to protect yourself and them from a bullet that can come from anywhere at any time—or you can put your energy into achieving his demands. 

Then he tells you facts about yourself: that you are a decent person who does such-and-such volunteer work. He also knows where you work, and that you are unhappy with your job. You feel terror as he describes the daily routine of someone you love. You complain that you can’t possibly do all he asks in just six months. But he says, “Learn. Ask people. Use the Internet.—Just find a way.” To make his final point, he places the barrel of his gun under your chin and forcefully pushes your chin up. As he heads for the door, he says, “And you’ve got to find a job that will make you happy.—Make that your third goal.”

After he leaves, you take a deep breath to calm yourself. You happen to look at the TV again. There’s an action drama on. Suddenly you realize that your life has become more dramatic and gripping than any TV show. You are the unwilling main character.

But for a month you are in denial. It all seemed so unreal. That is, until one day when you let your cat out and it returns drenched in cow’s blood. You know he’s out there, watching.

You begin to do research and find a tree-planting organization that plants six or more trees for a dollar. So 1,000 trees would cost only about $166 dollars. You start to feel some optimism, since that wasn’t too hard to do. You do more research and learn that children in poor countries often die for lack of inexpensive immunizations. Others need simple hydration formula for when they have severe diarrhea. These cost only a few dollars per child, which you donate. You then look for a new job, and after a couple of months of searching you find one you really like. Two months into your new job with friendlier people, you kick yourself for having put up with the job you hated for so many years.

Finally, the six months end, and nothing happens. Two more months go by. Just when you think you will never see him again, you wake up one morning to find him sitting on the edge of your bed with his gun in his hand. He makes you get up and show him the proof that you saved the lives and planted the trees. Fortunately, you have documentation from the charities you supported.

Once he is satisfied with your paperwork, he relaxes and says, “I lied when I told you I was a hit man. I’m actually an angel. I used to be the Angel of Death, and it was my job to take away people’s souls at the end of their lives.” He shakes his head sadly, saying, “You’ll never know how it feels to bear away all those children day after day. You’ll never witness what I saw: The unmitigated waste of thousands of lives, and the lacerated hearts of those left behind.” He looked down and paused. “It bothered me to know that other people, even decent people like you, could do so much more good with just a little more focus.” As he said focus he tapped the handle of his gun and winked.

After a pause, he continued. “I’m sorry that at first I made you feel fear and the hopelessness of being trapped in an awful situation. But extremely poor parents feel the same fear and hopelessness each and every day. You did a hundred times more good because your heart and your brain were in it.” Having said that, he smiled radiantly and disappeared.

Commentary

Although the person in the story probably did a hundred times as much good as before, there’s a huge difference between saving a child’s life and providing him or her with the food, education and health needs of a lifetime. There’s an even greater jump between meeting one person’s needs and stabilizing a nation’s economy. In other words, it takes more effort than a few good donations to change the world. But even a few minutes of strategic thought and effort can dramatically boost the good that you do.
      When you are inspired to perform some good deed, before you take action, ask yourself if you can act in a way that will help more people, or take less time and energy, or help in a more enduring way. When “good” people learn to do this, it will have an effect on the “mediocre” people and the “bad” people. Each upgrade over how you currently do good brings us closer to a peaceful, stable world
       If you  recall the concept of supercharity, you can see that it’s a direct application of the Surgeon’s Attitude. Both upgrades increase the good that superprograms can do. 




Here's another related story: 

The Good Woman Who Didn’t Go to Heaven

      Once there was a woman who was raised by good parents. She grew up and regularly did good deeds just like her parents and teachers taught her, and she rejoiced in the good she did. Most everyone who met her liked her. When she died, she went straight to Hell.

After many centuries of wailing and screaming in agony, she finally caught the attention of an angel passing by. She cried out, “Why am I being punished, since all I did was good all my life?”

The angel replied, “The good you did, you did naturally. It was really done because you were mimicking what your parents and teachers taught you. Had your parents been jewel thieves, you also would have been one, and you would have rejoiced in how well you stole jewels. Indeed, many of the conventionally good are not good. The truly good person is always learning how to do more good.”

The women thought for a moment. “Why didn’t my religious teachers tell me this?”

The angel replied, “Your teachers are elsewhere in Hell.”

“But then why am I being punished when no one taught me how to behave?”

“In your life, you were satisfied with some things but not with others. For instance, you weren’t satisfied with your income, so you got a better job. You weren’t satisfied with your appearance, so you learned how to dress attractively and apply makeup in order to get more attention and approval from others. You weren’t satisfied with your education, so you went back and got an extra degree. But in a world where many innocent people kept suffering and dying, you were satisfied with the level of goodness that you were taught. You wanted to learn about many things, but not about how to do more good. That is why you are in Hell.”

The woman spoke earnestly, “How I wish that someone would go and tell this to all of the people in the world like me!”

The angel smiled. “Because you have wished with all your heart, news of your fate and how to avoid it will reach Earth in the form of a story. Many will read it and understand that they are not really good people, even though they do good. Some of these will become good people by learning to do more good and by re-forming themselves. Not only will they reach Heaven, but they will make the Earth more Heaven-like. Others will dismiss this story, believing it to be a mere fable. Because they will deny the teaching about goodness as learning to do more good, their suffering will be greater than yours.”

      The woman had meanwhile realized that her wish to help the people back on Earth was the first time she did something good that hadn’t been taught to her by someone else. After all, some of the people who listened to the message of the story would go to Heaven. “What about me?” she asked hopefully.

The angel spoke. “My child, there is such a thing as too late.”

Commentary

The first person who read this story really disliked it. I can certainly understand why. The story offers quite a shock. According to the story, you can do good all your life, and still not be a good person. The story ends even more brutally. The woman at last does something profoundly good, but it is too late.

For a while, I wanted to leave off that brutal ending. While I enjoyed the unexpected final twist, it wasn’t what I wanted to emphasize in the story. To me, learning how to do more good was paramount. But after a few months it occurred to me that the second part also fit with my purpose.

Yet, I had two reservations about including the story here. First, some people might mistakenly think that I was trying to drop hints about the afterlife. This would be teaching religion, and I’m not qualified to teach religion. Second, any ethics professor will tell you that there’s something wrong with defining the good person as “someone who wants to learn to do more good.” The problem is that I haven’t really explained what goodness is. In philosophy this is called a tautology—defining something in terms of itself. It’s like saying, “To be a strong person you need to increase your strength.”—I really haven’t told you how to increase your strength, nor have I explained what strength is.

Anyway, just as I’m not qualified to teach religion, neither am I qualified to teach ethics. In fact, taken to extreme, you could say that anyone who kept wanting to learn how to do more good, might be obsessed with goodness. And if they felt that they were not okay until they were a good person, they would never feel okay or comfortable with themselves, because there’s always more to learn and more to do.

But I really think the story is appropriate for several reasons.

First, as I mentioned, there are many decent people who are committed to their style and level of goodness. They don’t want to learn any better ways to do good. These people will want to ignore my work. The problem is that, taken together, all the good that all these decent people do is not enough. It’s not an adequate response. It’s easy to prove this: a billion people are currently suffering and ten million children die each year. Case closed. Worse, it will be even less of an adequate response in the future because of increasing population, and other trends.

So the story does provide a jolt. It gives the reader a nasty shove. But just like a shove that pushes someone out of the way of a swiftly moving vehicle, this shove can save lives—not the lives of the decent people who read this, but the lives of the people they will save, if they take the story’s message to heart.

The shove is an example of being “cruel to be kind.” I sometimes make a similar cruel-to-be-kind statement. I call some kinds of goodness “kiddie goodness.” These are nice things that people do: give presents, send cards, and other things that make people feel good temporarily. I am not against such kindnesses. People need emotional strokes, so I would say that some “kiddie goodness” is necessary. But people who do these things need to consider their motivations. Often people enjoy doing nice things. It makes them feel good about themselves. It gets them the attention and approval of others.

Getting some attention from others is an important psychological need. This is well-documented. I’m not asking people to be cold to each other in order to do only strategic long-range actions. I’m just saying that the survival of many people—billions of people in this century—requires that people do more high-leverage actions.

That is why the even the brutal ending of the story is appropriate. There is such a thing as too late. I know this is not a message that people like to hear. The phrase “It’s too late” usually means that you’ve missed out on something or that you’ve failed. But I am thinking of two extreme meanings of “It’s too late.” The first meaning is that someone is going to lose their life. The second meaning is that one day it may be too late for most or all of humanity, if people don’t do enough high-leverage actions in time.

So, if you are going to do this, I am begging you to start as soon as possible. 

Past a certain point, loving is a learning experience,
and learning is a loving experience.