Now I'm no genius, I deeply admire those who are, our great engineers, physicists, cosmologists etc. Unfortunately most of us are stupid and I'm not exaggerating. I bought a pair of flip flops yesterday, from Walmart, cost me a mere $5 and I was pretty pleased with myself I can tell you. As I was sitting out later, relaxing with a cold beer I had a closer look at them and noticed that the was an "L" stamped on the bottom of (coincidently) the left one. I mused over what this might mean until I wondered, it couldn't possibly stand for left could it? It was almost with trepidation that I turned over the next one and sure enough it had an "R" it wasn't a coincidence it was a set of instructions!
Now call me elitist, but if you need your shoes labeled then perhaps you don't need to be out alone. I am seriously worried that the human race is getting dumber. All the wrong people are having too many children and the gene pool is getting dangerously shallow in some parts. Take a look around, no, I mean it, take a look around, see what I mean? Politicians know this of course, and it suits them, economics is a tricky subject who has time to study all that stuff? so they simmer a complex interrelated soup down to a few basic catchphrases and bingo, everyone's an expert.
The corporate world plays this game well, in the US at least, the golden triangle is formed between corporate, politics and religion, you want your business to make obscene profits so you need a friendly legislature to pass corporate friendly laws (tax exemptions etc) unfortunately for big business we live in a democracy so you need to convince a sizable chunk of the population to vote for big business which is inherently against their own interests, the way you do that is to align your party of choice with the church. This bits easy, you make life easy and profitable for your churches, using the same legislature, then you tie your party to religion by running with one or two basic religious messages, "Pro life" anyone?
Most of us are intellectual misers, we need to be, there is far too much general information to absorb which is why we go to third parties for most of our information. If you want to get the gist of a subject you go to an expert on that subject and that is the important bit. Too many people go to the wrong source for their information and they are encouraged to do that by the very people the information will directly benefit. It's not your fault if you are given wrong information that leads you to a wrong conclusion, but it most definitely is your fault if you don't go to the right source or at least make some effort to validate the source. This argument from authority technique is widely used in advertising, celebrities regularly endorse products from completely unrelated fields.
So, you take a poorly informed large swathe of the population all of whom have one thing in common, the church. You then align your party to that church, and sit back as the preachers do the job of selling your party to the great unwashed, simple. Now it's actually illegal to preach politics from the pulpit but don't tell me it doesn't go on, indeed I had the misfortune to witness a Baptist service (it was a work thing) and what did the pastor call those who didn't believe the miracles of the bible? Non believers? Atheists? nope, he called them "liberals" and I'm not kidding. If you want to know about climate change, ask a climatologist, economics? Try an economist, Bill O'Reilly is neither but millions of Americans form their opinions on these subjects by listening to this man, why not? We buy grills from a boxer!
So the depressing education figures that we are constantly bombarded with are music to the ears of the corporate world, they get enough decently educated graduates to run their businesses and make enough money so that they vote corporate anyway and a poorly educated mass who live paycheck to paycheck and still vote for them because "It's what Jesus would do" What I can't work out is why the education stats are so bad, I can only put it down to low expectations, generations of stupid are breeding stupid, which brings me back to instructions on flip flops. By the way, I tried them on the wrong feet and it was pretty obviously wrong, so I am smarter than the average idiot, but if instructions on flip flops are a test, then the bar is set pretty low.
Rant Over.
No comments:
Post a Comment