Luck follows the prepared mind.
My generation learned not to trust the government (in first grade I was intelligent enough to know hiding under a desk would not help in a nuclear attack). The Cold War gave people a sense of get all you can because tomorrow you may die corporate owners seem to take that very seriously and stopped caring about their employees and the quality of their product.
Each generation basement to want to shock the last one and we’ve gotten to a point where that requires more and more outrageous behavior. Good people get taken advantage of so give up.
Ignorance is the source of most of the world’s ills. The second part of the problem is that despite unprecedented access to information, people don’t have the mental ability to process it.
Although, ignorance is independent of intellect. Under the banner of some of history’s smartest, most intellectual, yet ignorant people is Neville Chamberlain.
Yep, people who be shocked at the absolute stupidity even top Ivy League grads believe. We laugh at them all the time in the board room after interviews. Too many are basically walking talking points who clearly have not researched or processed multiple sources of disparate information because they all say the same things, thinking they are smart. It is funny to watch, but kind of sad too though.
What is to blame for America’s problems? Have you looked around lately? The place is chock full of human beings, behaving exactly like human beings. That leads to breathtaking accomplishments, unfathomable generosity, and a lot of other stuff.
Can we even agree what America’s problems are?
From the early 1940s, the very words of the the very man who saved Europe, and possibly western civilization, as a whole.
Winston Churchill said this of the intellectuals of his day:
But, seriously, is this not same nonsense being offered by the supposed intellectual people, while promising their loser followers to use other people’s money to do it? Specifically, "defeatist doctrines…vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible Utopias? Yep, sounds all too familiar. 1940s, oh so long ago, but yet so close. The self-annoted intellectuals seems to not have leaned too much in the interim.
Agreed.
The irony of the article though is that it is the supposed intellectuals who think they know and only they know America’s problems are and their (the problems) nexus and how to solve.
The irony is rich because if they are so intellectual and smart how come all they can come up with is whining in an article? As usual, they complain and complain, but rarely actually solve jack.
The same intellectual people have been saying and promising the same things of my entire lifetime, over a half a century. And this is why places, such as ghettoes and various war zones, will never go away. The intellectuals are on the case to solve and to eliminate them, to the detriment of the people therein. Sad that the people are waiting around for the intellectuals, but the one bright lining is excellent intellectual employment prospects throughout the endless process.
@awcntdb I would agree with your WC statement, but interestingly enough despite making some of the best decision in history he also has a couple of chapters in a book I just read called “History’s Worst Decisions and the Men Who Made Them”. His decisions in WW 1 regarding the Dardanelles were almost criminal. I guess by WW II he had learned a few hard lessons.
How about “all of us”?
They’re not completely exclusive.
@MomofJandL Yep. It’s the “other stuff” we can do without.
50 years ago an intellectual professor at Stanford wrote a best-seller telling us that by now there would be wars over food due to overpopulation. 40 years ago a psuedo-intellectual weekly magazine ran a cover showing a great ice age coming. Intellectuals in the 30’s and 40’s embraced Communism as the ‘right’ way to go for society. This article is FOC.
People found solutions to crop yield. As for your coming ice age article, I’m sure you’ve heard that one shouldn’t believe everything they read.
Finally, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to simply assume that solutions for all problems will be found. Take selfishness and greed, for example. Have we found a solution to that?
Re Post #30 - Agreed.
@awcntb:
Your post highlights the anti intellectualism that we are talking about, you are quoting Churchill out of context to prove the Fox News view of the world, that the ‘common people’ know everything and those d*** intellectuals are to blame.
First of all, Churchill was an intellectual, the man wrote more books than most people read. What Churchill was talking about were the intellectuals who instead of looking at reality, created frameworks of rationalizations for absolute folly.
He was talking about Neville Chamberlain and the conservatives, who like many in Europe and the US, convinced themselves that Hitler could be dealt with rationally, and the reason wasn’t as portrayed, it wasn’t weakness, it wasn’t fear of Germany, it was fear of the USSR. They saw Germany as this bulwark against the USSR, which was quite common, the Catholic Church’s accedence to the demands of the Nazis was in large part based in Germany being a ‘Christian’ nation fighting the darkness, and so forth. He was not talking intellectuals in general, he was talking those who refused to use their minds to think things through, denude themselves.
And yes, there are a lot of people like that, on right and left.
One of the biggest fallacies out there is that different mechanisms achieve the same results. Those who say that for example a poor kid from appalachia has the same chances as the kid from an upper middle income family whose parents went to Ivy league schools does. The whole myth that conservatives especially love to promote, the rugged individualists who pull themselves up by their bootstraps, is not only wrong, it is dangerous, it is assuming those equal outcomes. David McCullough, the historian, said that show him a self made man and he’ll show you at least 10 people who helped that person, Malcolm Gladwell will point out that if Bill Gates was not born in the time he was, and in the circumstances he was, he would not have been involved in the computer revolution the way he was (he might have done something else as great). With any company, luck does play a factor, being in the right place at the right time is critical, all the hard work in the world doesn’t guarantee success either, most entrepeneurs have many failures before they hit it right.
Understanding that process is important, because it does a couple of things. If you know how success truly happens, you can put things into place to help that, putting the tools and such there, the mentors, that allow things to happen. On other other hand, it also stops some of the hero worship of ‘success’, when we realize that the successful are not necessarily successful entirely because of how great they were, and stop using them necessarily as good examples (for example, the kid who inherits the family business that is already succesful, and maintains success, is a lot less to be admired then someone who founded something new).
The danger is when we allow mythology rather than reality guide us, and I see a lot of that. The idea that if we just would cut taxes on companies would bring a golden age is one of the, the idea that foreign trade deals create new jobs in numbers is not that simple, the idea that if we just returned the US to 1950’s values, that if we just recreated unions, if we just did xxxxx, on right and left, often is based on mythology, not reality. Taxing the rich will not solve all our financial problems, raising the minimum wage alone will do little to help the plight of the very poor, and so forth.
What do I think the worse thing is? There always has been greed in this country, there always has been self interest. Politically, there were disagreements, but there always was a common ground, compromise, today we have “you win or that is it”. “I am going to deny anything the other side does, stop it, so I can elected”, leaving things undone, and that is a major, major threat, we aren’t solving budget items, we aren’t fixing infrastructure, and we are giving up on the future. Carnegie was a capitalist who did more than a few shady things, but the man felt a duty to other people, he left behind a legacy that is still bearing fruit, he said the money he earned came from the community, and should go back to it, do you think that is true today, with some exceptions like Gates and Buffett? You think the wall street fund managers, the private equity honchos, give a crap about anyone else? You think the snot nosed idiots with ivy league educations who end up as stock analysts care that their evaluations lead to the loss of a lot of jobs, because they hate labor costs? Or the management consultants from McKimsey and Booz Hamilton who tell companies their future wealth is in sending jobs overseas, not asking who will buy the company’s goods?
Want the most scary piece of information? That huge majorities of people now don’t believe the future will be better for their kids, the pessimism has taken over, it is worse then it was in the 1930’s, when people still had hope. One of the things that kept people going in this country was the hope the future would be better, it kept us from a social revolt in the 1930’s, and I think politicians and business leaders who think that doesn’t matter are fools.
I can’t recall a period in my lifetime where we were more divided than we are currently. We are pitted against each other by race, gender, sexuality, socio-economic status religion or lack thereof , political leanings. We are not even close to being united as a nation.
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.”
- Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
“. I doubt there are many multi-millionaires who started poor but managed to get into “top schools” and then parlayed that education into acceptance in the Good Ol’ Boy network that is WS and Hedge Funds.”
This is the kind of stuff that drives me crazy on CC. Why on earth would grown adults not realize that there are plenty of wealthy people who didn’t get that way through WS/hedge funds? Like really, you’re that naive that you don’t realize that there are people who own and run trucking companies, chains of restaurants, retail stores, t-shirt companies that supply major retailers, whatever who are worth tens of millions of dollars? Where does this naïveté come from?
Maybe because when the media focuses on illegitimacy of wealth, they tend to talk about the financial sector.