The Doctor and the Donut Seller

Imagine you’re a doctor: all you want is to heal the patients in your care.

Your place of work, your hospital, in a drive for profitability (forced by a withdrawal of government support) is taken over, first partially but then as a majority share, by a company that makes donuts and sugary soft drinks.

At first nothing much changes: you can carry on with your work as you were and have always been, except the canteen now stocks donuts and sugary soft drinks.

But then at some point requests are made, from on high, to include more recommendations for donuts and sugary drinks in your treatments. When you don’t do this, questions start to be asked about why there aren’t more donuts and sugary drinks in your treatments. After a while, it becomes mandatory for donuts and sugary drinks to be included in all treatment plans. Your performance is held accountable according to these plans. There are statistics regarding how many donuts and sugary drinks your patients go on to buy over the course of their lifetime, and the value of your treatment of them is determined by this measure.

If you, as a doctor, continue with this and go along with it, soon you will come to realise that you aren’t what you once were. You are no longer a doctor: you are a donut seller.

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That is how I felt when I left the university. All I wanted to be was as if a doctor, attending to the life of the mind, treating philosophical problems, diagnosing them and giving them all due care, nurturing them to better health. I wanted to treat others, as it were, regarding these problems, for their sake and benefit. Socrates would have said it was attending to the health of the soul.

Instead I sold the donuts of skills and the sugary soft drinks of ‘interesting thoughts’ that teenagers typically enjoy hearing about.

Guided by the measures of ‘employability’ and ‘student satisfaction’, philosophy became unrecognisable to itself. In times past we would’ve called it ‘sophistry’, but that was a long time ago.

As a doctor becomes a donut seller, if their place of work’s business is to sell donuts, so a philosopher becomes a ‘professional’ if their place of work’s business is to sell a university education: and a bad professional at that because it’s not as if they make much money. If the goal of a university education is to get a job to make more money then there is only one thing to say to the professional philosopher: ‘Physician, heal thyself!’

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I like donuts but I have no serious interest in selling them. Although I might enjoy one once in a while, it’s a trivial pleasure and not worthy of a life’s work.

Even so, because of the pleasure they bring, donuts are big business, and some people make a lot of money from selling them. That will not stop any time soon. But it’s very clear to anyone with the slightest understanding that if you want to be healthy then you should not make donuts the basis for your life’s nutrition.