Subscribe to The Slatest to receive the most insightful analysis, reviews and advice available, delivered to your inbox daily.
Donald Trump has promised to allow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “run wild” in his new role as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The environmental lawyer, anti-tax conspiratorAnd brain worm survivor created an oddly shaped coalition of COVID deniers and almond moms on his path to the White House, all of whom were successfully integrated into the Trump platform in the final months of the campaign. It’s hard to know exactly what Kennedy is planning for public health, or whether some of his more radical ideas (like, say, remove fluoride from the water supply) will one day go beyond the purgatory of “advisory councils”. But we have at least one clue as to how the man plans to structure his wing of the executive branch: a test apparently designed to locate potential employees for RFK’s reign at HHS. Among other things, Kennedy would like to know if you have ever experienced clairvoyance.
The entire assessment, first reported by Puck and whose reality was confirmed by the Trump transition team, is accessible to all. Unlike more concrete tests of fitness to serve in a public health system – such as, say, any tangible experience in medicine or health policy – the test turns out to be an associative chimera free of IQ-like logic puzzles and the kind of discredited Meyers-Briggs queries that you followed in the computer laboratory. This would be a hilarious prank if his intentions weren’t apparently very serious.
As an American, I decided to determine my own suitability for a role in RFK Jr.’s cabinet of horrors. It was a disturbing experience. The first 17 (17!) The test questions are all pattern recognition, in which you are asked to insert a geometric graph in a row of three without breaking the order. After that, you are taken to some good old-fashioned word association and asked to determine, through multiple choice, the closest definition of a particular article of speech. (Like, say, associating “envy” with “jealousy.”)
Remember those standardized tests you took in college? Where everyone was stuck in the basketball gym for six hours on a Monday afternoon? It’s a bit like that, except with, you know, the fate of the entire American medical system hanging in the balance.
Things get even stranger once you get to the second half of the test, which in form and function is a MySpace-style personality quiz. I was asked to rank a series of attributes, from 1 to 5, based on how they combine with my psychic makeup. And given how disparate and detached these attributes were, this proved to be an impossible task. Do I “put people at ease” more than I “spend time thinking”? Do I feel like I am “neglecting my duties” more than either of these forces? What? What kind of question is this! The whole thing reeked of neo-psychological quackery, in the Gladwell tradition, where the vast gradient of human experience can be neatly organized into three smooth categories.
And yet, after this first phase of personality unraveling, RFK’s assessment becomes much more precise and, somehow,even weirder. The quiz presented me with a long list of strange personal insecurities and asked me to highlight the five that I most identified with. It seems simple enough, but the available choices coalesced into a seriously ill person. We read: “I tend to maintain unstable and intense personal relationships, in which I alternate between the extremes of idealization and devaluation of the other. Another adds, “I don’t have much interest in having sexual experiences with another person,” which I choose to interpret as a smart way to manage an incel coalition. For my part, I was self-aware enough to check “I need excessive admiration,” but I made sure to leave out “I don’t feel much empathy for others.” » to ensure that the next regime does not consider me as an individual. a sociopath. (This is also where the issue of “having clairvoyance” surfaces, but honestly, compared to the other options, it might be among the least painful of the bunch.)
And there you have it, the test was over. I was not presented with any rating or review, just a brief “thank you” and the end of the line. I suppose I have to live with the fact that the government now has a record of my darkest inclinations – an RFK investigation into my morality – but I don’t feel like they have much insight into my ability to do it. or not for health and social services. Perhaps this shouldn’t be too surprising, because when journalist Timothy Burke sought to find out who, exactly, is responsible for this deeply strange audithe learned that the publishing company is called ExamCorp. The president of ExamCorp? None other than Jordan Peterson, the psychologist has become a right-wing gadfly.
I know we’ve all become desensitized to the outrageous stupidity of this political climate, but I don’t think we can stress this point loud enough. Robert F. Kennedy…a guy who threw a bear carcass in Central Park…is called upon to play a vital role in the health policy of this country. Help him complete his team? Peterson, who is closer than ever to the levers of power. What a horrible timeline. This MAGA scam carnival will continue to run until it blocks out the sun. The situation can and will get worse from now on. Hey, maybe I’m clairvoyant after all.
Sign up for Slate’s evening newsletter.