The Danger Of The Other Three Points
By
Leonard Zwelling
Perhaps it’s an apocryphal story. At this point, I cannot remember.
Supposedly, whenever I came home from school on a day I had a test, as soon as I got through the door, my mother would ask me how I did on the test. If I said I got 100, she would say the test was too easy. If I said I got a 97, she would want to know where the other three points were. In sum, whatever I did, it was never good enough.
Whether or not this actually happened is not important. I think it did; I feel like it did; I act like it did. I was never good enough.
It is my belief that this feeling of not being good enough can drive people to amazing accomplishments. I have a friend who won a Nobel Prize. When I said it was about time, meaning the work he had done was long overdue for the recognition, he said, “you sound like my mother.” You get the picture.
So, obviously, some people can channel this feeling of not being enough in such a fashion is to accomplish great things, striving to be enough in the eyes of all of the world. But some people can channel this feeling of inadequacy into megalomaniacal behavior. I believe this is exactly what we are seeing in the White House today.
A couple of things about Donald Trump are pretty clear.
He cannot get enough attention. He must be the center of all activity all the time and he will do anything to maintain that position in front of the cameras.
He must look powerful even as he sounds confused. He wants to use tough language, but his facility with English is meager at best.
Everything he does is transactional. His initial questions about all situations in which he finds himself is, “what’s in it for me? How can I benefit? How do I look more important?”
He has absolutely no empathy for anyone. People have no meaning for him other than as tools for him to manipulate for his own good or with whom he can make a deal. He will step on anyone to get the missing three points.
He cannot get enough praise. Everyone around him must begin and end all conversations by lauding the great leader. He demands a fawning group around him. Their abilities are not important to him because he only depends on his own decision making. They are there to praise him.
He holds deep prejudices against members of minority groups and fears immigrants, even those who could advance the welfare of the United States. Despite the enormous power differential between himself and these people, he has no room in his heart or his country for them.
Finally, no matter how great the praise he receives, including someone else’s Nobel Prize, he is constantly seeking the other three points.
People like Donald Trump, and as we are learning, most of those who curried favor with Jeffrey Epstein, cannot get enough praise, money, notoriety, drugs, or sex. These people are dangerous because they cannot control their desires and do not care who they will hurt pursuing the three points.
I should know. I have spent my life looking for those three points and no amount of praise is ever good enough for very long. Only a conscious effort to understand my neuroses and cerebrate past the instincts and reactions that have existed within me for over 70 years can prevent me from becoming like these people, and it is not only men, who spend their lives searching for the last three points. Academic medicine is filled with them.
Donald Trump’s father sounds like an awful man whose praise the young Donald sought. He is still seeking it though the man is dead. George W. Bush went to Iraq to finish what his father started. Goodness knows what drove John F. Kennedy to accumulate all that power and all those women.
Always look to the corner office when seeking psychopathology. When you find an organization with a well-balanced adult in the CEO chair, that may well be a good place to work. Those organizations are hard to find. Just so you know it can happen, even at MD Anderson. Dr. LeMaistre was such a well-balanced man.
MD Anderson hasn’t had such a man in the president’s chair since Dr. LeMaistre retired in 1996. That explains a lot. When the person in the presidency believes that he is the organization, and uses his position to step on others to get to those last three points, you get what MD Anderson has become—big, greedy, and no longer the site of exciting academic pursuits because the pursuit of money and power has supplanted what once was a true beacon of hope for cancer patients.
What is so interesting is that John Mendelsohn began on the right course following Dr. LeMaistre. But Dr. Mendelsohn got caught up in ethical dilemmas at Enron and ImClone and began the era of Anderson’s decline over the past 25 years.
Oh, I know, I can’t be right. OK, write me and tell me what I got wrong. Comment on this blog or email me at leonard.zwelling@gmail.com. Just don’t expect anything to change. If I have learned one thing in my 50 plus years in academia, faculty and ex-faculty are relatively powerless unless leadership values shared governance. The current leadership at MD Anderson does not share such a value.
