WOKE. An Anesthesiologist’s View is a rigorous and entertaining critique of how we think about our world. In this book I seek to offer a solution to navigating an increasingly divergent set of narratives coming from our media sources. Rather than adding to the noise I instead suggest that we have forgotten or ignored a fundamental ability we each possess to discern fact from fiction. This ability can be considered our intuition. The confusion we find ourselves in today is due to the fact that we are too quick to believe someone else’s narrative before ridding ourselves of our impediments to clarity. These impediments are our biases. As long as we continue to interpret our world through bias we will never access our innate wisdom: intuition. Here I am not asserting that intuition will lead us unequivocally to “the truth”. Instead it more often leads us to a much more dynamic perspective, one of uncertainty, an aspect of reality we have become uncomfortable in embracing.

Once we realize that our understanding of the world and how it works is based on some degree of uncertainty, we can then take an honest look at very big ideas that we subscribe to individually and collectively. History has shown us again and again that when we are inflexible in our opinions and understanding we are thrown into periods of stagnation that can last for a very long time. Could we be in a “Dark Age” right now? How “certain” can we be that we aren’t? Have we been misconceiving reality because we have grown comfortable letting other people tell us where to place our attention?