This could be my tilt but, considering how I've had to struggle to get by - even graduating college highest honors, even having an IQ in the 120's range, it's not that I haven't tried - it's more like I've found out how active the 'devil take the hindmost' aspect of things is. We don't really care about cultivating talent in a lot of places, likely more often we see it as a threat to our own survival if we're in that person's path to rise and so we play knowledge-keepaway games in the workplace, especially if we have our own niche software for accounting or the like that the person's college education can't prepare them to know inside out.
I've really had to take a much more Hobbesian view of life, again (had this in my early 20's when I had something like a full social relapse of high school at a place I worked), and I have to circle back to the sense that humanity lives with an underlying primal hatred that it seems like a large part of the animal kingdom shares, ie. kill anything that looks like me, wants the same food, might want the same job or same kind of partner, and that primal hatred just gets masked in this non-stop game of never-serious joking, evasion, and refusal to deal with problems (the nod-nod wink-wink in that seems to be that a lot of the problems are benefiting certain people and if they are they need to stay).
This is where I do think our current intellectual elite got so infatuated with their credentials, started rubber-stamping themselves in the Ivy League schools, and in that sort of generic elite-making machine actual talent and natural ability got lost along the way and replaced by entitlement. This is one of those areas where I do believe that current social media, for all of it's known problems, also gives the freakish natural talents, ie. the Goethe's of our generation, the ability to cut through the bureaucratic red tape and actually be heard. I really hope something does come of that, ie. superior ideas on economics and incentives or tweaks/tuning to culture should have enough impetus that, if launched right, they'll infect our way of doing things for practical reasons and anyone whose benefiting from shortfalls in the way of these things would have a difficult time stopping a change if it's coming up from the bottom.
I think one thing is urgent - unless we want the next decade to be a decade of pogroms in the west we absolutely have to untether economic success and 'right to live'. That sort of ugly stick might have worked when there were gainful jobs available for everyone (ie. jobs that they could make ends meet on) but that's rapidly becoming a thing of the past. I get a bit horrified to when my parents or close family members, if I mention UBI go 'gasp!! But that's... socialism!'. I ask em what their answer is to the notion that if we hit high enough unemployment numbers, ie. above 20% somewhere or beyond, that we'll have the worst kind of political revolution - they won't follow that line of thought and instead just say 'work hard and outrun em!'. What grieves the heck out of me is they're really decent people otherwise but it's like the Stockholm syndrome on this one goes all the way to their core and back out. This whole thing is still running on a lot of self-delusion for a lot of people and if anything it's not getting knocked out of enough people fast enough.
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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin
09 Dec 2018, 2:00 pm
