The Doors of Perception

I was shuttling between concourses at O'Hare Airport in Chicago with Duff Anderson, our Vice President of Research & Development. A man seated in front of us happened to be speaking about a Canadian airport he had flown through and was lauding its modern facilities and beautiful architecture. The woman beside him quipped that the airport in question was nationalized and that things worked better in a state-planned system. She drew the parallel to health care, contrasting the Canadian system, where the federal government maintains an insurance monopoly on most procedures, with her American system, where "billions of dollars" (her words) are thrown down the drain and inequalities of care abound.

I thought to myself: another disgruntled person looking for a utopia. Had it ever occurred to this person that every health care system had its own endemic flaws? And she shouldn't have been complaining, because the American health care model is surely better than, say, Uganda's. But later, when I reflected on that scene, I formed another theory. Perhaps people can never wholly be satisfied. Perhaps satisfaction is not a destination, but rather a discourse, an unending progression toward some ineffable and unattainable "perfect experience." There seems to be a part of human nature that strives terminally to reject the comfortable, reinvigorate the routine, and deconstruct the obvious. Likewise, there will always be the malcontents who won't be satisfied with what is good enough and will want to kick in the doors of perception to show us the way forward.

Duff interpreted the story differently. According to him, the woman was talking about the mismanagement of the Canadian health care system, not the American. Perhaps she was, but now we're talking about perceptions of perceptions ...