Not that the markets are enjoying a particularly prosperous day. Once again reality threatens to reassert itself, causing the hindmost to lose their shirts!
Which also provides an excellent segue into today’s topic du juor! “Where’s the smart?”
While the linked article explores how ‘classroom training’ tends to ‘cripple’ the ‘liberal activist’, I choose to cast the net much wider and ask, with the most educated populace the world has ever known, WHERE THE FUCK IS THE ‘SMART’?
Seriously, good citizen, we have more ‘degree’d professionals’ than we’ve ever had…are we truly suffering from a case of ‘too many cooks?’
Um, not a chance in hell…because that’s not how ‘the system’ works!
Let’s put a ‘finer point’ on this shall we? Did the infamous ‘they’ listen to ‘The smartest man who ever lived’ when they had the chance?
No.
Because?
That’s not how ‘the system’ works!
To make matters worse, we are still ‘ignorant‘. As Einstein liked to point out, we KNOW one millionth of one percent of NOTHING!
Let’s pause in the larger discussion for a moment and examine [excerpts of ] what 'our intellectual’ has to tell us:
Originality doesn't matter
In the academy, original thought that adds to the body of human knowledge is the most prized commodity there is. That, and only that, is what they hand out PhDs for. It’s also what gets you an A in most classrooms. Your professor doesn’t want warmed-over ideas pulled from the book or your classmates or the kids back at the dorm. She wants you to think for yourself — to exercise your brain, do some original analysis and synthesis, and come up with some fresh insights on the subject. Cribbing ideas from somewhere else is lazy at best; at worst, it’s plagiarism and it’ll get you kicked out of school.
Grab 'em by the guts
One of the things our professors beat into our little puddin-heads back at the U was that appeals to personal experience or emotion are unwelcome in classroom arguments. What you feel passionately in your heart, what you believe to be a moral imperative, or what you’ve been through in your own life simply don’t qualify as evidence in the classroom. The rules are clear: Emotion is out of bounds. Experience is merely anecdote. You must argue from the facts; and those facts must come from well-executed research or well-regarded authorities. If you can’t document it in a footnote, it has no place in your classroom debate or thesis paper.
Call out the bad guys: our story needs them
In a college classroom, we are taught that it’s always wrong to personalize an argument. There is no place for ad hominem attacks, name-calling, or impugning someone’s intentions. According to the laws of reason, that’s just not fighting fair. We’re supposed to be congenial colleagues debating tough issues on their factual merits. There are no good guys or bad guys; there’s just a mutually respectful search for the truth in which everybody’s good faith is assumed and protected.
I omitted one of her ‘bullet points’ for brevity, you can read the whole article by following the link…
She is, correct in her keen insight and clever use of logic but we are still left scratching our collective noggins (or backsides if you must!) regarding the puzzle of why, in a world that has never seen a higher level of ‘educated individuals’, there is so much ‘stupid’?
And it’s not just a random bit here and an odd slip there. Much of the ‘stupid’ is generated by these highly educated individuals themselves!
Which leads us use ‘deductive reasoning’ (after you’ve eliminated everything it can’t be, what’s left is ‘the answer’.)
I chalk up a huge amount of the ‘stupid overflow’ to the, er, ‘over-estimation’ of just how stupid the average individual is…n’t.
As our ‘futurist’ tells us in her article, college ‘teaches’ YOU that YOU are ‘special’…and it looks like the more literal bastards out there took this message to heart!
Understand, this goes ‘double’ for the ‘silver spoon’ crowd (especially those on the cusp, which includes those with the money but not the ‘lineage’ and those with the lineage but, for whatever the reason, who no longer have enough money…)
They is SPECIAL (which, in their view, means NOBODY else is!)
Thus do they, er, ‘treat’ the rest of us like a bunch of morons! (Ugh! Me Tarzan, You ‘hired help!’)
So Bubba, ‘where’s the smart’?
And here comes the irony (again!)
You looking for ‘smart’? Look at the political arena and how the chiselers sold globalization (now universally reviled as a bad idea…except by the highly paid liars that draw their paychecks from the ‘monopolists’.)
First they secretly merged their media empires, then they bought the political parties, this allowed them to ‘pick’ the politicians and with that they were handed control of ‘the justice system’!
After they seized nominal control of the electoral system, they used their new ‘legislative clout’ to seize control of the media…the rest of it.
Talk about busy, while they were ‘dismantling’ our constitutional freedoms, they were also tearing down the barriers that financed the whole shebang, and they exported our economy…creating a HUGE economic desert.
Ironically, these ‘economic deserts’ have been popping up around the world, in tandem with the ‘global race to the bottom’.
A race where there can only be ONE winner…and it won’t be YOU!
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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