1993 comic predicts US Capitol "Coup"

Now that I've gotten your attention, I get to share with you one of my all time favourite comic, Calvin and Hobbes. I love it so much that my good friend got me the complete set from the comic strip’s eleven year history (1985 to 1996) for my birthday.

Growing up as a precocious kid, I only ever wanted to sit at the "Adults" table and listen to the chats about life, business and politics. So this comic's ability to capture a level of sophisticated philosophical inquiry really appealed to me as a child. It is this predictable element of human nature that the comic explored that continues to intrigue me till today.

This particular comic strip on Calvin's adventures with the traffic safety poster was drawn in May 1993. You can click on the hyperlink to get the full backstory if you're interested. Up until Trump's presidency, you may have looked at it and not given it much of a second thought. However, in the context of Trump, it surprised me how familiar the tone and behaviour of the Commander-in-Chief was captured in the fictional six-year old boy, Calvin.

Coming to the point that Trump has become the first US President to be impeached twice because of the immaturity and danger of his actions, with the second count for inciting an insurrection. Oh, how naive we were to hope that 2021 would be less turbulent than 2020. To think that the storming of the US Capitol building happened on 6 January 2021 and we're only 2 weeks into the year.

This comic is a commentary on a very relatable emotional response to loss aversion that we see more frequently in children. Trust me though as a paediatric doctor, I often get to see it in the parents too in varying degrees. To quote Bill Watterson (author of Calvin and Hobbes), "I suspect that most of us get old without growing up, and that inside every adult (sometimes not very far inside) is a bratty kid who wants everything his own way." However in most cases, by the time we are adults, we have been taught how to control our baser instincts.

That's because in order for society to function in any sort of stable cohesive manner, we had to deliberately design systems and social norms that anticipate this dark descent into self-indulgence. It is only when we let slide these thinly veiled moral and ethical code of conduct that we face very real consequences, in this case the preventable loss of 5 individual's lives.

The saddest thing about it all is how unsurprised everyone has been. All the people I spoke to said they could see it coming from a mile away, but when it was all said and done, no meaningful change was ever instituted to prevent it from escalating to this point. This wasn't a spontaneous licking of madness in a small group of people. This was 74.2 million voters choosing to buy into 4 more years of this rhetoric. A demonstrable example of how fragile democracy could be, when systematically destroyed by the spreading of unfounded electoral lies and conspiracy theories over a period of 4 years. The implications of what happens when we allow the warping of reality, to the point that we no longer have a common set of facts that we can agree and compromise upon for the greater good. #FakeNews

Ok, enough of the doom and gloom. I do believe there is hope that the teachings that are indoctrinated into us does still work. Is no one else fascinated by the orderly march inside red velvet rope dividers after the rioters broke into the Capitol building? I almost got confused and thought it was a tourist US Capitol tour happening at the same time! Clearly, some of the lessons we learn in life do stick. The challenge is to then design systems that accounts for human nature and therefore make the positive behaviour stick without too much effort or thinking required.

An example of a system that is deliberately designed to trigger your dopamine-driven reward feedback loop is infinite scroll on your [insert social media of choice] news feed. Or how Instagram’s notification algorithms will sometimes withhold “likes” initially on your photos only to deliver them later in larger bursts. So after you posted, you may be initially disappointed to find less responses than you expected, this is the social media platform deliberately priming your brain with those initial negative outcomes. Then when you get that influx of "likes", this sudden boost of social approval powerfully taps into a basic human need of ours to be validated. Systems that incorporate a variable reward schedule as described utilizes a key component for habit forming and addictive behaviours. That's why you find yourself mindlessly scrolling through your news feed when you are bored or checking your post every 5 minutes to see if you received more likes, none of these behaviours are by accident.

Homo sapiens emerged from the African Savannah more than 300,000 years ago, yet in many ways, we have not evolved from instinctive human behaviours that promote our survival in an evolutionary sense. As the world we live in continues to change rapidly and get more complex, masses of people will find it comforting to default to easy to understand information. That is why conspiracy theories are so compelling, they explain away the incredibly interconnected social, political, and economical levers that has resulted in the stark inequality we see across the globe, in which there are no easy answers for and no one single person could change.

 "The best way to predict the future is to create it." - Abraham Lincoln

The examples I gave earlier were of the negative impacts of social media exploiting human behaviour, but what I continue to believe in is the tremendous value in understanding the basic principles of human nature to design systems for good.

It is these principles that we take the time to observe and design into the Clearhead platform. I can't solve all the world's problems but I am choosing to meaningfully tackle one that touches every single person in the world, (mental) healthcare. The stigma of mental health means that we continue to be surprised by suicides from individuals who seemed happy or are perceived to have "everything" (fame and fortune) they should ever want. By accounting for human nature to not want to display any vulnerability, in order to maintain social status, it has led us to design a judgement-free user experience on Clearhead.

I'm not sitting here helpless on the sideline bemoaning the problems I see every day, instead I take the time to understand what drives society and envision solutions that directly tackles them. I believe that in 10 years time, the value of Clearhead would be that we have designed systems that completely flip the way healthcare is currently delivered upside down. Empowering consumers to make informed decisions about their healthcare early, ensuring the process of seeking care is convenient, and enabling individuals to take better care of their health themselves.

I'm excited about what Clearhead is going to achieve in 2021 to get us one step closer to our 10 year vision. On that note, I wish you a Happy New Year and hopefully have provided you some food for thought on how you too can do your part to design systems for good and create the type of future you want to see in the world.