What I don't know

I am struck by the similarities of two otherwise very dissimilar movies which I saw this week.  One, “Take your pill” is a documentary describing the way ADHD medicines have insidiously ingrained themselves into all aspects of our society, so that not only children, but college students, professional athletes, and even those bastions of white male America, Wall street stock brokers, are all taking Ritalin or Adderall just to get through their day.

The other film, also a documentary, was called “A Social Problem.”  In it were many Silicon Valley tech execs blowing the whistle on how social media is destroying the lives of young people because of it’s very intentionally addictive nature.

Besides the obvious similarity in that both films are documentaries which blow the lid off very relevant and heart-breaking issues in America, there was another, more profound difference.   Some of the people who were speaking out in their interviews in both films had been in their industry (pediatric medicine or the tech industry) for many decades.   These people had been the ones who were in on it from the very nascent stages. 

In both films, those professionals who had been in on it from the very nascent stages of social media or of medicating children for ADD said that they had no idea what they were creating when they first got started.  One Facebook executive said that they created the ‘like’ button on Facebook because it seemed very positive and friendly, never realizing that there would be teenagers and pre-teens who would commit suicide because they didn’t get enough affirmation on their social media account.     One doctor said in “Take Your Pill” that he had been in on the original creation and decision to prescribe Ritalin, which is an amphetamine.   He, too said that he had no idea that prescriptions of this ‘upper’ would be so rampant a few decades later, and that it would be commonly prescribed to adults to help them get through their day.  

These documentaries although they discuss radically different subject matter, have a similarity.   The people who created social media and who created ADHD medicines thought they were doing something either good for society (in the case of Adderall and Ritalin) or at least anodyne (in the case of social media). But both of them, similar to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, created what would soon become a destructive monster.   

This shook me to my core, because I myself do many things with good intentions.   Who is to say whether what I’m doing today will or won’t end up wreaking havoc for someone else later on?   How many things have I done unwittingly which will cause problems for someone else (or for myself)  later on?  Watching these two documentaries back-to-back made me question, “What do I not know?”  

I’m in good company.  I remember hearing a preacher, Tim Keller, say that about 80% of what the thought (about how the world works) when he was 30 years old was wrong!  He said that now that he was 60 years old he hoped his percentages had improved!   

I take refuge in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Germany pastor and theologian during World War II.  He took part in a failed plot to kill Hitler, and as a result, he was sentenced to death by hanging.   Before his death he was struggling with the ramifications of his actions, that because of his part in the plot he would now be killed, leaving his students and the rest of the German Resistance movement without his considerable skills and talents.  Equally, as a Christian, one could argue that he should not have been involved in a plot to kill anyone, even such a reviled and murderous dictator as Hitler. 

He said, “In the end, we do what we think is best, and when we die and stand before God we throw ourselves on His grace and mercy.”  

It is to this thought that I cling.  I cling to God’s grace.