The responsibility of expertees, and potential consequences/ the problem with slickness

I read somewhere recently how a cancer patient was told that she might not expect to get better by her doctor, and then she considered that he might be legally bound to say that. His fear, from what I understood, was that if he instilled "too much hope" in this patient, then he might be sued for malpractice if the treatment failed.

I think this phenomenon is typical of "expert opinion". When an expert opinion is required, the expert is naturally expected to have the answers. That's his job, as the expert. The problem is that he has a reputation to uphold, so he's less likely to take the kinds of risks that he would take on the route to his becoming expert. In this respect, acquiring the status of expert can actually be self defeating. People become stale, just in the same way that anyone who's "got there" becomes stale.

This can be said of creative people as well.

The whole business of having something slickly presented can be counter productive in this way. That's the problem, I feel, with "success" and attempted perfection. Things that are too well polished have some of the important edges rubbed off, I think. It's like taking the roughage out of the food. You have a refined product, but something important's missing.

I remember one time watching the 50th anniversary of D Day, and the TV presenter was doing his bit about all the servicemen who'd lost their lives, and everything was being presented in some grand way, the way it always is on TV or special occasions, and then it went to an ordinary veteran who was addressing his comrades with his own speech.

The speech was amateurish and clumsy, and in no way what you'd expect from a TV presentation, but the heartfelt words of the veteran were priceless. The absolute sincerity was inimitable, and shone through past anything anyone else was saying on that day. But he was cut off by the presenter, and the audience were taken back to the "official" treatment of the day, by the "professional" commentators.

I don't like slickness. It seems right, but very often it misses something. Anything that's refined does, whether it's art, food, dance, society, opinion, or anything else. Nothing's perfect, least of all that which leads you to think that it might be.