Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
I'm going to share a personal story with you.
Well, my life has been somewhat defined by a major personal tragedy, the death of my mother when I was 5 years old. It affected the way I look at the world, my relationships with people, my issues with woman, my lack of understanding of certain things that most people take for granted (ie, the things that a child learns from his or her mother).
Now, how that relates to the topic is thus - as a child, there was a person that I believed to be a family friend. A friend of my father. This man was a doctor. My sister and I referred to him as "Uncle". We would go round to his house regularly and have fun, he had kids the same age as me and my sister. I had good memories of being around this man and his family throughout my childhood and early adolescence.
I left home when I was 15. Obviously, as I began to live my own life as an individual, rather than being a child in the household of my father, I didn't see this person again. Then, when I was 16 or so, he passed away. I went to the memorial at his house and offered my condolences to his wife and children. At this point I still had fond memories of him.
But when I was 17, I learned something that destroyed all of this. Something that made me feel as if I'd been lied to, all my life. Something that made me feel bitter and resentful. Something that affected me very deeply, and threw me off course for a while, affecting my relationships, affecting my mood, my mental state, my emotional state.
It turns out, that this man, the man who I called "Uncle", was more or less completely accountable for my mothers death.
There is a problem within the medical community here in England whereby some immigrants have been allowed to operate as doctors for years despite not being qualified. It may be to do with forged documentation from universities or establishments in India that cannot be proven one way or the other. I am sure the system must be tighter now and it doesn't happen any more, but there are still many doctors who have been working as such for many years. It is impossible to disprove their background and impossible to strip them of their titles, etc. I don't know if it's present in other ethnic communities, but it certainly happened a lot with people that moved here from India.
Anyway, this man was almost certainly one of those people and since he moved here he had been working as a GP (General Practitioner) with his own doctors offices. He was the local doctor for my mother when her cancer developed. However, for over a year, he simply continued to prescribe her painkillers, treating the symptoms without any effort to look into the cause of them. He did not refer her for further check-ups. He abused his position of trust, because she did trust him. She had no reason not to.
Only when my mother and father bought a new house in a different area, and she then went to see her local doctor in that area, was it discovered that she had cancer. She underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatment, but by that time, it was too late, and she died not long after.
Now, my father obviously does not blame this person and for whatever reason, felt the need to shield me from the facts of what had happened, and encouraged friendships with this man and his family. I can't speculate on the reasons for that and I don't want to.
But the point is that my father obviously felt I would be better off not knowing. Maybe I would have been better off. I would have avoided a lot of inner turmoil. I would have been able to continue on the positive path I had been on before this happened and focused my energy of something good and productive instead of the cycle of anger and resentment that it took me a while to recover from, and in some ways I never fully recovered. All of those previously good memories from my childhood are now tainted, and it hurts.
Once you have learned the painful truth of a situation, it's easy to get on your moral high horse and convince yourself that it's better that you found out the truth. But is it worth the price you have to pay for it?
If there was hypothetically another situation that might affect you that deeply, would you still choose to want to know the truth, even knowing that you would suffer? It's a very difficult question because our human nature wants to know the truth. If you knew that there was something you didn't know, then human nature means we'll want to know. That's why I said hypothetically.
It's like The Matrix. If you were living an awesome life, and you had no idea it wasn't real, surely that's better off than knowing the truth, unplugging yourself, and spending the rest of your life on some dirty ass ship eating tasteless crap? I'm not talking about being Neo and being the chosen one, just an average guy, like that bald guy that was the traitor and went back into the Matrix and had his memory wiped because he realised that it was way better in there than the shithole ship, even though being on the ship was the "truth" of reality.
What do you guys think?
I'm going to share a personal story with you.
Well, my life has been somewhat defined by a major personal tragedy, the death of my mother when I was 5 years old. It affected the way I look at the world, my relationships with people, my issues with woman, my lack of understanding of certain things that most people take for granted (ie, the things that a child learns from his or her mother).
Now, how that relates to the topic is thus - as a child, there was a person that I believed to be a family friend. A friend of my father. This man was a doctor. My sister and I referred to him as "Uncle". We would go round to his house regularly and have fun, he had kids the same age as me and my sister. I had good memories of being around this man and his family throughout my childhood and early adolescence.
I left home when I was 15. Obviously, as I began to live my own life as an individual, rather than being a child in the household of my father, I didn't see this person again. Then, when I was 16 or so, he passed away. I went to the memorial at his house and offered my condolences to his wife and children. At this point I still had fond memories of him.
But when I was 17, I learned something that destroyed all of this. Something that made me feel as if I'd been lied to, all my life. Something that made me feel bitter and resentful. Something that affected me very deeply, and threw me off course for a while, affecting my relationships, affecting my mood, my mental state, my emotional state.
It turns out, that this man, the man who I called "Uncle", was more or less completely accountable for my mothers death.
There is a problem within the medical community here in England whereby some immigrants have been allowed to operate as doctors for years despite not being qualified. It may be to do with forged documentation from universities or establishments in India that cannot be proven one way or the other. I am sure the system must be tighter now and it doesn't happen any more, but there are still many doctors who have been working as such for many years. It is impossible to disprove their background and impossible to strip them of their titles, etc. I don't know if it's present in other ethnic communities, but it certainly happened a lot with people that moved here from India.
Anyway, this man was almost certainly one of those people and since he moved here he had been working as a GP (General Practitioner) with his own doctors offices. He was the local doctor for my mother when her cancer developed. However, for over a year, he simply continued to prescribe her painkillers, treating the symptoms without any effort to look into the cause of them. He did not refer her for further check-ups. He abused his position of trust, because she did trust him. She had no reason not to.
Only when my mother and father bought a new house in a different area, and she then went to see her local doctor in that area, was it discovered that she had cancer. She underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatment, but by that time, it was too late, and she died not long after.
Now, my father obviously does not blame this person and for whatever reason, felt the need to shield me from the facts of what had happened, and encouraged friendships with this man and his family. I can't speculate on the reasons for that and I don't want to.
But the point is that my father obviously felt I would be better off not knowing. Maybe I would have been better off. I would have avoided a lot of inner turmoil. I would have been able to continue on the positive path I had been on before this happened and focused my energy of something good and productive instead of the cycle of anger and resentment that it took me a while to recover from, and in some ways I never fully recovered. All of those previously good memories from my childhood are now tainted, and it hurts.
Once you have learned the painful truth of a situation, it's easy to get on your moral high horse and convince yourself that it's better that you found out the truth. But is it worth the price you have to pay for it?
If there was hypothetically another situation that might affect you that deeply, would you still choose to want to know the truth, even knowing that you would suffer? It's a very difficult question because our human nature wants to know the truth. If you knew that there was something you didn't know, then human nature means we'll want to know. That's why I said hypothetically.
It's like The Matrix. If you were living an awesome life, and you had no idea it wasn't real, surely that's better off than knowing the truth, unplugging yourself, and spending the rest of your life on some dirty ass ship eating tasteless crap? I'm not talking about being Neo and being the chosen one, just an average guy, like that bald guy that was the traitor and went back into the Matrix and had his memory wiped because he realised that it was way better in there than the shithole ship, even though being on the ship was the "truth" of reality.
What do you guys think?
