I’ve had varied work experiences. I did the typical fast food and retail stuff as a teenager. I also spent time at an atypical job for a teen. I worked about eight months in a machine shop and after hours built my first car from the shell of a ‘67 Beetle. A guy that raced sprint cars took me under his wing and that time was a blast. At the end of it I had a little VW bug that beat enough muscle cars to make guys want to fight me a few times.
After school I went to work at a psychiatric hospital as a direct care worker for over nine years. I loved that work and enrolled in college to get my nursing degree. I didn’t get it though. After my first semester of nursing courses the department chair called me in and congratulated me on my scores. She also took that meeting as a time to advise me not to get too confident because nursing was typically a woman’s field and, in the end, most of their male students don’t make it.
I can take a hint.
I immediately changed my major to criminal justice and minor to political science. I took a job at the local jail until I could get my degree and get a real job. One of the things I noticed off the bat was that my experience in the psych hospital helped me in my job. I had to learn how to deal with upset, delusional or psychotic people without the assistance of any weapon while at the hospital. That taught me to use my head and my mouth to talk people down. It stayed with me.
A few years into my career there I was a deputy and during my Field Training (FTO) final evaluation, we had to get a particularly belligerent fellow to take his dog to be quarantined. His adamant refusal slowly turned to understanding and ended with, “Can I take him while you follow me to make sure we go there?” I said that was fine. I got in the car and my FTO evaluator asked me, “How did you do that?” I asked what he meant. He replied that he would have ended up spraying the guy and taking him to jail the way he had acted when we first got there. I said, “I didn’t have anything needing done so I just talked to him.” He acted like he’d just seen real magic.
It also helped me with report writing. Being raised in a Christian home and being taught, incorrectly I now think, that taking God’s name in vain meant saying God and damn as a compound word, I had written that a patient said, “Give me a GD cigarette.” A psychiatrist gave me a well-intended and appropriate chewing out that I had to write facts only and not let my beliefs or values muddle my charting. She more gently told me at other times to avoid jargon and abbreviations unless I explained them the first time. My reports at the Sheriff’s Office were rarely returned for correction.
I retired as the Chief Deputy for that agency even though I wasn’t really ready. A lot of things went into it, and I found myself back at the same psychiatric facility I had left 22 years earlier but as the Director of Security. I quickly learned that my time in law enforcement had changed me. Some might say it made me harder; I think it made me more open to experiencing reality as it really is.
So, what does this all have to do with trusting experts? My experience is that our career shapes us more than we shape the culture of the organization and field we are in. This effect seems even stronger in people who don’t consciously watch for that affect in their life. I’ve met lifelong cops who can’t trust anyone who is not a cop. I’ve met lifelong mental health professionals who can’t see the criminal mindset a person has because it has a mental health aspect to it. I’ve met lifelong ministers who can’t comprehend a real-world problem because it involves aspects of society they are totally ignorant of.
I’ve observed that hobbies can ameliorate the issue of seeing everything through one single lens. But if you’re talking about an expert who has dedicated their existence to one particular field or area, they can’t think properly about anything outside of that field and sometimes, they can’t let their assumptions be challenged enough to make a course correction when needed. Every time I’ve been applauded for a creative solution or outside the box thinking, it’s been by what I refer to in my head as a one-tracker. That’s someone who graduated high-school and went directly into whatever field they have spent their entire life in.
Anyway, that’s why I don’t trust the experts. Even when it seems like they are talking about an area they have expertise in, it always interacts with the real world and that occurs in ways they don’t understand.
