House of Eratosthenes

Go back and read that headline again. Think about informal, small-group human politics. Imagine you’re in a group of people, perhaps a work/office environment, and you want to bully everyone else into doing things your way.

If you’re the work-a-holic, it isn’t going to work out. You’ll be seen as what you are, which is a buttinski meanie-cow.

But the goof-offs, as you’ll see in the video below, manage to make this work for them just fine. They get to point their goof-off fingers in the air, make some kind of proclamation, and start waggling that lazy finger in the faces of people who’ve managed to get a whole lot more work done, and tell them what to do.

In fact, how many little kids movies have you seen in which the moral of the parable, realized in the last fifteen minutes of the film, has something to do with not working so hard. How many doofus-dad movies have you seen that are doofus-dad movies because doofus-dad barely manages to figure out “Hey! I spend too many hours at the office! I need to spend more of my life trying to figure out what my (step)kids want, and making sure they get it!”

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Know what I think? I think the desire to boss around total strangers comes first. The desire for more vacation time is simply an outgrowth of that, because you can afford to be a control-freak if you’re for more leisure but you can’t afford to be one if you want more work to get done.

Most of the “revolutions” arriving in our sterilized, pasteurized, overly-mature, overripe, metastasizing society lately adhere to this central theme: Things aren’t cushy enough, and we gots ta have a new law. And the motivation? Very rarely does anyone say now that I see things work a certain way from my experience building something, we’ve got to do x x and x. No, as you can see in the video above, it so often comes from consensus. The “aw gee Ma, everybody else is doing it” argument.

This is the kind of thing that achieves momentum with people, when they’re bored. How is it that we’re so stressed out about our economic situation, and at the same time, we’re bored? That’s the other problem. We don’t see our economic wherewithal, or lack thereof, as a consequence of our actions. Here’s this differential between the way things are and the way we want them to be, and — nobody grabs a hammer & nails. Nobody goes looking for firewood. Nobody talks to anybody else about bartering something, or “Where’s the best place to buy a (fill in the blank).” Our national character has changed; now, the energy is immediately, automatically, channeled into that new law we need to have.

And then everything will really be perfect.

But since only goof-offs can get away with such bullying, the new law never, ever, ever has to do with getting more work done or more business transacted. That won’t happen. And yet this frenzied, chaotic construction of the out-of-control nanny state, will continue.

Hat tip to Boortz.

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If You’re a Goof-Off, You Can Afford to Bully PeopleTuesday, June 1st, 2010

If You’re a Goof-Off, You Can Afford to Bully People
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010