Initiation-transformation versus training in habits

During my work years (and looking back a few of decades) I saw a great change in the conceptualization of a doctor.

The original idea was a scheme by which a doctor was "made" by transforming a suitable young Man via early apprenticeship (at medical school) that implicitly led to initiation as A Doctor. One the doctor had been made, he was essentially left to his own devices. 

By the time I retired, this conceptualization has almost vanished, and A Doctor was seen as somebody who did a particular job, and was subject to particular regulatory procedures. The implication was that what made a doctor was a training process, intended to develop and maintain particular desired habits.

So the doctor went from an initiated and transformed person who was self-motivated to do the right things from then-onwards; into a generic employee with the right habits - habits that were generated and sustained by an externally-devised and -controlled system of training and regulation. 

Most of this change was motivated by evil: by the Ahrimanic desire for a totalitarian, dehumanised world; in which behaviour controls thinking, and thinking is controlled by system. 

But part of the change came from an inner recognition that people were not (or not any more) genuinely transformed positively and lastingly (if not "permanently") by initiatory procedures: that modern people were not genuinely self-motivated, but were in fact externally controlled (especially by the mass media and propaganda). 

This was evidenced by the irrationality and rapid changeability of fashions in "everything"; fashions that were simultaneously dysfunctional yet (somehow, at-the-time) irresistible at the mass level. 

What happened could be (and was) explained in terms of what "worked" in a stable society, and was appropriate for that; was unsuited to an unstable and rapidly changeable society. 

But that did not really make sense; because the actual outcome was simply to convert medicine to generic-bureaucracy linked to the totalitarian ideology - which situation is utterly dysfunctional and without even an incentive for functionality. 

Totalitarianism aims at surveillance and control and Man as a generic unit; and its total-nature means that dysfunctionality can be and is denied, hidden, and inverted into pseudo-desired outcomes. This happens by a vast range of monopolistic propaganda, public relations, advertising, "education", and by psychological manipulations.   

Yet, the pervasive and apparently irresistible nature of these changes is consistent with an underlying development in human consciousness. What used to be genuinely lastingly transformative and a true "initiation", progressively lost its effectiveness.  

People changed - so that what once worked, no longer worked. 

I am not suggesting a socio-political solution or answer to the current evil dysfunctionality; because in current socio-political terms there is none. 

So long as we live in a system (and ours is vast, multi-national, and includes all major institutions and corporations) - then we are inhabiting an essentially totalitarian world view; an ideology by which any genuinely self-motivated (and/or God-motivated) individuality is regarded as a danger to be ignored, suppressed, or eliminated.

But conscious, explicit, understanding of what is - is a necessary first step towards its transcendence. 

And, after all, in ultimate terms we are not alive-and-here in order to make a "better" (ie. more prosperous, comfortable, enjoyable) world. 

We are alive-and-here in order to learn from our personal experiences - and to learn in ways that may not be transformative initiations in terms of this earthly and mortal life; but may well be just exactly that when it comes to resurrected eternal life.