About a month ago I learned about Dr. Jim Yong Kim. A week after that I listened to him speak in the Morrison Center on Boise State campus. He was chosen as the inaugural speaker for what the College of Health Sciences hopes will become a series of lectures, hosted by Carl and Jean Grosz and Boise State University. A few of Dr. Kim’s past accolades include:
President of the World Bank Group
President of Dartmouth College
Director of World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department
MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship
Recognized as one of America’s “25 Best Leaders”, TIME Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World, and Forbes’ list of the “World’s Most Powerful People”
The honor of hearing Dr. Kim speak came as a condolence, after his friend, Harvard Medical School classmate, and long-time collaborator, Dr. Paul Farmer—originally slated to begin the lecture series—tragically died of a cardiac event while stationed in Rwanda.
Alongside Ophelia Dahl, a healthcare advocate, the trio founded Partners in Health, a global organization dedicated to restructuring the traditional healthcare model in order to provide better care to the poorest individuals on Earth. Their innovative method—focused around the “liberation theology” notion of a “preferential option for the poor”—is presented in the documentary Bending the Arc.
The three were young—none of them yet thirty years of age—and guided by a recurring question posed by Dr. Farmer:
Given the nature of our ridiculous education, what is our responsibility to the world?
I took the word “ridiculous” to mean extensive or vast, an education of more substance than 99.9% of humans will ever receive.
As someone of privilege, growing up with a healthy dose of financial literacy, this is a question I’ve contemplated frequently in recent years. It’s a question that propelled me to the field of Public Health, rather than pursuing interests in topics a bit more esoteric, such as philosophy or religious studies. To me, the field I find myself in provides direct and immediate opportunities to improve my community, and hopefully someday—like the aforementioned trio—the world.
I tend to believe there exists a spectrum or gradient of moral responsibility, largely influenced by the fortune or deprivation of an individual’s life experience. The more you are afforded at birth—whether it be skin color, money, geographic location, or physical ability—the more you ought to give back, ideally to those who’ve started with less.
This is where my philosophy currently stands, yet one ideological barrier clashes with this reasoning. In a tangent to my point, I need to talk about China for a brief moment.
We criticize China for a lot of things, but lifting 800 million people out of poverty seems to go overlooked in the States. Their secret, according to Dr. Kim—apparently “old friends” with the leader of China due to a shared connection to Muscatine, Iowa, Dr. Kim’s hometown—sounds surprisingly simple:
Infrastructure
Education
Health
With these three vital foundations in place and the patience of time, President Xi Jinping wagered more prosperous opportunities for the masses would result. Now I’m certainly skimming over a very complicated and decades-long process, but the results—and perhaps the collectivist nature of the People’s Republic of China—are worth considering.
Along with Dr. Kim’s keynote address, earlier that day I also attended a graduate student luncheon with him, other grad students, and the top brass of the College of Health Sciences. This was the opportunity for up-and-coming public health professionals to share a dialogue and ask questions of someone who’s worked at the upper echelons of world health.
The discussion varied, but Dr. Kim often returned to the ideas of interconnectedness and “sharing of tasks”, specifically in the medical field. In the social services, providers are short-staffed and over-burdened, doing among the most important jobs for a mere pittance. This issue of siloing—barriers to effective communication and cooperation among coworkers, or between different organizations entirely—is among the most prevalent and repeated issues discussed in my nascent, yet drinking-from-a-fire-hose experience in the world of Public Health.
I sat in my chair, gnawing on the free tacos provided, and strained to articulate to myself the question I had brewing inside. But sadly the room was booked for a 12:30 meeting and our time ran out. Throughout the day and into Dr. Kim’s lecture, the question took on a more lucid form:
Does the United States of America face a unique challenge on the path to connectedness, given our ingrained mythos of individuality?
That old and apparently unchangeable piece of parchment stands in our way, forever declaring our INDEPENDENCE and FREEDOM in a land that’s been inhabited by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years.
Ideas even remotely akin to socialism—hell, even the word socialism—aren’t taken kindly ‘round these parts. Upon closer examination, siloing seems more like an inevitable result of being raised in the name of personal autonomy and getting things done yourself.
Transition management is a governance concept refering to societal change as the ongoing interaction between actor and societal landscape. Within this framework of moving away from an established “regime” toward a newer, more “niche” understanding or acceptance, there appears a recognizable pattern.
In order for a new paradigm to enter, an old one must be ushered away. This most often happens naturally and gradually, encouraged by various actors asynchronously, but can also result from a more forceful effort, by human actors or otherwise. The Covid pandemic is an example of such a force which caused us to think about creative policy alternatives.
With force comes disruption of the status quo, a destabilizing chaos. Those in power likely want to keep their advantage and will push against attempts toward a more just future. A key to the successful emergence of new ideas is bringing together actors from both sides of the aisle, willing to challenge their constituents.
As an example of disruption in the public health, Dr. Kim discussed the Mayo Clinic, a revered medical institution that reversed who the system should be convenient for—from medical provider to the patients themselves. Rather than visiting every distant hospital wing for tests or treatment, the needs of the patient are put first and specialists come to them.
Mayo was the first to create and utilize a standardized patient medical record and also chose to place physicians on salary, a radical choice for the time. Their results speak for themselves.
Leaving Dr. Kim’s lecture I felt a profound inspiration and motivation to pursue the large health problems swirling around my head. Or maybe that was the Morrison Center’s stiff Moscow Mule.
I do believe and have hope in the opportunity to create bonds between like-minded people—like the Partners in Health trio—working to create ripples in a much larger pond. But how does one even begin to contemplate the idea of disrupting individualism within the Western hemisphere, particularly the United States? On the path to sustainability and a future world that doesn’t end in environmental degradation and/or human conflict, the false pillar of individualism seems to appear as a roadblock to so many transitions.
From self-driven internal combustion engines to electric ride-sharing
From rampant consumerism to sufficiency and contentment
Preventing drug addiction through community engagement and connection
I’m clearly biased in my stance toward connectedness, but I’m curious to hear where you all believe individuality still holds an advantage? Can the notion of individual accountability designed for the whole find a place in America?
"The expansion of consciousness your generation underwent or at least sought to undergo at the end of the sixties ended in complete and utter failure because it was still rooted in the individual. That is, the attempt to expand consciousness alone, without any quantitative or qualitative change in the individual, was ultimately doomed.” — Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
some deep thoughts for sure.... another aspect to your question to ponder.... How can we retain the art and soul of individualism while transitioning to a shared connectedness? How can we impart the idea that to be individual is to celebrate all the coolness and uniqueness about a person including thoughts and personalities; but that it's meant to work as a puzzle piece to connect us all rather than separate us to live on our own little islands gobbling up resources for ourselves?