I Think, Therefore I May Be Dangerous

I Think, Therefore I May Be Dangerous

The term “thinking outside the box” has become popular with business and government gurus and consultants. I can’t remember the source (probably Gilbert in the comic strips), but I saw a cartoon displaying hundreds of tiny office cubicles in a huge room with the caption balloon above the office manager stating: “Can’t anyone in here think outside the box?”

I can think of the stockholders of General Motors yelling at their CEO: “You know gas is going to go to $4 a gallon. Why are you building Hummers, gas-guzzling pickups, and 8 mpg SUVs that never see gravel or a river bottom?”

Perhaps some mechanic at GM actually “thought outside the box” about building hybrids and electric small cars that could get 50 to 100 miles per gallon. The management hierarchy of GM certainly didn’t.

We used to call “thinking outside of the box” creative thinking but the nine dots puzzle changed all that. No one has concrete evidence of where the puzzle came from. Some say it came out of the Walt Disney Company when writers were trying to come up with ideas for movie cartoons and short subjects.

In the nine dots puzzle. one starts with nine dots equally distributed within a square. The puzzle is to connect all nine dots by using only four straight lines without lifting your pencil--or tracing over any of the lines you already have. The lines may cross. To solve the puzzle one must go outside the box created by the dots.

Professor Daniel Kies

of the College of DuPage explains the puzzle: “When most of us look at the field of nine dots, we imagine a boundary around the edge of the dot array. In doing so, we limit ourselves to trying solutions to the puzzle that only link the dots inside the imaginary border. The result is futility. We can solve solve the puzzle if we realize there is no border.”

One can see why this may be a popular puzzle to promote creative thinking at a business or shrink conference. I thought it would be fun to use facts from our fascinating world to see if the authors or thinkers were really thinking outside of the box.

Adolf Hitler,

who devised a plan where his Third Reich would last a thousand of years, was a meglomaniac of historic proportions. He left plans for the city of Berlin, renamed Germania, to be rebuilt from marble and granite. A scale model of his city still exists in Berlin. One of his buildings, the Hall of the People, was designed to hold 180,000 people. Pretty good “out-of-the-box” thinking for 1940.

Thomas Beatie

is an expectant transgender dad, due to give birth in July, according to an article in the July/August Atlantic. Well, that birth will certainly raise traditional hell in the hospital nursery, won’t it? It seems that when Thomas went through a sex-change operation ten years she/he decided to keep all of her/his female organs. He and his wife Nancy wanted a child but she had undergone a hysterectomy some time past. So Thomas is going to be the child-bearer of the family. It may be easier to follow this by preparing a wall chart.

Will this transgender birth give the opponents of same-sex marriage something else to think about? I wonder if the Bible thumpers will need “out-of-the-box” thinking to sort this out. Psalm 139, often cited by anti-abortion groups, reads: “For Thou didst form my inward parts. For you created my inmost being, you knit me together in my my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful. I know that full well.”

I wonder if they will stretch their minds enough to include Thomas in the wonderful descriptions of how God has created us--and has thoroughly checked us out while we were in the womb, whether we were in Thomas’s womb or Thomasina’s. Is there a puzzle in Psalm 139?

Sharon Begley,

a biologist of note, writes in the latest Newsweek that we should actually pay more attention to the 238 species of spiders, clams, moths, and isopods that are on the Endangered Species list than polar bears, although they are the headline-grabbing glamour boys. Dung beetles, as an example, are much more important than polar bears in the scheme of things. Dung beetles roll up and bury animal droppings so that millions of flies do not turn crap into condos.

When carrying the dung, beetles spread seeds over large expanses of soil. They spread nutrients at the same time.
Those little mollusks that stick on ships, grates, and rocks with great tenacity often have to be hammered and chiseled to remove them. While filtering water they are creating an epoxy-like glue that is often better than superglue. Biologists are now cloning mussel proteins to duplicate the glue.

The American burying beetle is on the list. It can smell a dead mouse two miles away and can hustle to it in an hour. It feeds its offspring on the mouse. This is a bit grisly for a family newspaper, but Quentin Wheeler of the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University says: “Think of the potential if we could mimic that for finding earthquake victims.” With hundreds of thousands of victims buried in the latest China earthquake, we could put millions of burying beetles to work.

Something else to think about. An adult oyster routinely filters 60 gallons of water per day.

Josh,

a victim of Body-Integrity Identity Disorder, may represent real “out-of-the-box” thinking. BIID is a rare disorder which makes a victim have a powerful desire to amptutate a healthy limb. Josh had been tormented since middle school about the “fact” his body was not right. Josh did not feel good about himself until he amputated his own hand with a power tool when he was an adult. There are enough BIID victims to form small communities on the Internet, where they lobby for safe and legal surgery, according to a June 9 article in Newsweek. Sufferers agree: only surgery seems to work.

Sean O’Connor, another victim of BIID, says, “Clearly, surgery has helped some people more than anything else. Psychiatry doesn’t work. Medication doesn’t work. Nothing touches it other than surgery.” Evidently the nine-dot puzzle only confounds some people.

George Cohen,

professor of law at George Mason University, is constantly thinking outside-of-the-box. He has been arguing for over 20 years that he should have the right to sell off his organs if he wants to--or buy one from another right-minded capitalist.

In the May 26 Newsweek, Jerry Adler reported that at 5:44 p.m. on May 19 there were 76,629 people awaiting kidney transplants in the U.S. In the next 12 months about 10,000 will receive used kidneys from the dead, 6,000 will get a kidney from a living donor, and 5,000 will die for lack of a transplant.

Cohen’s point: “If you pay people for something, they will provide more of it.” In his will he forbids donation of an organ (except to a close relative) but his inheritors will happily provide an organ under contract to an insurance company or a private citizen. Such contracts are now against the law. Cohen says a billionaire is a poor man if he can’t buy a kidney at any price.

George Mason is a university known for its very conservative teachers, but is this teaching way, way out of the box?

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld

I wonder if they are capable of thinking out-of-the-box? These guys wonder why enlistments into the armed services are so slow.

The per day salary for a U.S. Army sergeant in Iraq is $71.53. The per day salary for a Blackwater private contractor “protective security specialist” is $1,221.62. General David Petraeus of Central Command, the commander of all forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, makes $493.15 per day. If you can make sense out of that, please e-mail me with your logic--and how you solved it with out-of-the-box thinking.

IMS Health,

a unit which deals with drug utilization figures, reported that in 2007, 233 million prescriptions for antidepressants were written for Americans, close to 10 percent of the total population.

The tap water of 41 million Americans is contaminated with prescription drugs, many of them psychiatric drugs. Philadelphia tap water has traces of 56 pharmaceuticals including Prozac, Valium, and Risperdal, a drug used to treat schizophrenia.

If our waters are getting loaded with all kinds of drugs, aren’t citizens without any prescriptions getting loaded at the same time? Just thinking outside of the box for a moment.

Pope John Paul II

tried to invoke papal infallibility in closing off theological arguments about women’s ordination to the priesthood, in 1994.
He based his decison on three major premises: (1) Through most of history women had not been priests (Of course, they hadn’t owned property either!), (2) If Jesus had wanted women priests he would have ordained his mother (Nepotism rears its infallible ugly head!), (3) Although the Romans often excluded women on the basis of culture, Pope John expressed the opinion that the exclusion was theological, not cultural (I think he’s saying that male theologians did not want female theologians!).

In 1976 the Pontifical Biblical Commission had advised Paul VI by a vote of 12-5 that the ordination of women was “not against scripture.” In other words 12 theologians couldn’t find anything on a scrap of sheepskin, papyrus, bond paper, or carvings on a rock wall to indicate that God was against the ordination of women. Evidently Pope John Paul II ignored this evidence. Was he in the infallible box or outside of it? Inquiring logicians want to know.

Rene Descartes’

phrase, “I think, therefore I am” has dominated philosophy for over 400 years. If you wonder if you exist, that is in itself proof that you do. At least it sounds as if this kind of thinking is really way out of the box.