How We Know What Isn't So (A Psychological Study on Logic)

by Thomas Gilovich

of an influential textbook on holistic nursing who states that “Illness occurs when people don’t grow and develop their potentials.”25 Similarly, New Age faith healer Elizabeth Stratton argues that “disease is merely a symptom of a deep psychological problem that the person probably isn’t even aware of…. What I look for is why they created the illness and why they’re hanging on to it.”26 Finally, Eileen Gardner, who served for a brief period in the Reagan administration as an aide to Education Secretary William Bennett, once wrote that handicapped individuals “… falsely assume that the lottery of life has penalized them at random. This is not so. Nothing comes to an individual that he has not, at some point in his development, summoned.” She also claimed that, “As unfair as it may seem, a person’s external circumstances do fit his level of inner spiritual development.”27 This is not exactly the philosophy that one would want in the upper reaches of the Department of Education, the department that is responsible for overseeing educational opportunities for the handicapped.