House of Eratosthenes

The Occupy Wall Street kids claim to have been inspired by the Arab Spring revolutions earlier this year, which toppled many regimes in the Middle East. The Occupy Wall Street kids are nothing like those who participated in the Arab Spring revolutions. Unlike the revolutions in the Middle East, the Occupy Wall Street kids don’t have common stated goal .. the overthrow of the government for instance. Instead, their general purpose to gather together to whine. What are they whining about? They are whining because they want the government to seize the wealth from the people who are earning it and give it to them, among other things. They are whining because they want a Command economy, whereby the government controls prices, dictates wages and directs which industries will succeed and which ones will fail. They want this type of economy, because they themselves have failed to thrive in a capitalist economy, whereby their abilities dictate how much they earn, not the government. These kids do not want more freedom, like those who were protesting in Egypt, Tunisia, etc. These kids want LESS freedom and MORE government. Ironic .. isn’t it?

The incomparable Mark Steyn has some insight into what is going on here.

In the old days, the tribunes of the masses demanded an honest wage for honest work. Today, the tribunes of America’s leisured varsity class demand a world that puts “people before profits.” If the specifics of their “program” are somewhat contradictory, the general vibe is consistent: They wish to enjoy an advanced Western lifestyle without earning an advanced Western living. The pampered, elderly children of a fin de civilisation overdeveloped world, they appear to regard life as an unending vacation whose bill never comes due …

Ah, but the great advantage of mass moronization is that it leaves you too dumb to figure out who to be mad at.

I like that: Mass moronization. But Mark Steyn is exactly right. This is what happens when you raise a generation that knows nothing about hard work or sacrifice. This is a generation where kids played soccer because their mommies were afraid of them getting hurt in other sports where people throw balls and hit each other. Their mommies wanted to make sure that everyone got a trophy just for participating because everyone is “special.” This is a generation that was told to shoot for their dreams, without any sense of reality – “How will I pay the bills as an artist if no one wants to buy my stuff” or “how will I pay my $80,000 in student loans with a degree in Women’s Studies?” Their whole lives, mommy and daddy had protected them from the painful realities of a real world driven by competition. Until now … and now that their mommies and daddies are also out of work, they have no one to turn to.

Someone over on the Hello Kitty of Blogging made the observation that a part of the frustration that is driving the protests, by no means a small one, is the fresh-faced college grad emerging into the world of work to find out his or her degree is worthless. Paraphrasing what he observed next: A degree, classically, has been inferred to mean you are at the very least least trainable. And it seems in our present time that is no longer the case, that can no longer be inferred.

Well I have my own observations about this. “A degree means you’re trainable” is, in itself, a dwindling and a shriveling from the way it was explained to me last time I was counseled to go back to school, which was not that long ago. So there is evidence that the business/academic trust conduit is going through a decades-long softening, in stages, here: First off, a high school diploma meant you knew some generalized things, and a degree meant you knew some specialized things. At some point, the high school diploma showed that you were trainable, not that you knew anything, and the degree showed you used that training to learn some things. Then we entered a period where both of them showed you were trainable, not necessarily that you knew much of anything, but the high school diploma showed you were enrolled into the system and your parents didn’t keep your existence secret while you lived in a cave somewhere, you had all your immunizations, from a thirteen-year experience someone managed to come up with a GPA number that nobody would ever see…the degree meant that you, or your parents, were willing to part with some loot to entertain ambitions that you’d be the boss of something someday.

And then the high school diploma meant nothing and the degree meant you were trainable.

Now the degree means jack squat. And it costs a goddamn fortune.

How come it isn’t an “Occupy Dean’s Office” protest? Maybe it should be the “Occupy the Beltway” protest. As a Hotmail user, whenever I check my e-mail at certain times of the day I’ll see these cartoon women in the right sidebar with a lot of propaganda lettering exhorting me — Microsoft has been convinced for a long time I’m female, for some reason, I imagine my first name is loaded into some database table that way somewhere — to go back to school and Barack Obama will pay for it. See, that’s one thing that’s been left out of the discussions entirely. Whenever government subsidizes something, the producers of that thing lose any & all incentive to try to keep their prices competitive. Why bother? Obama will pay for it. And so the cost of the thing shoots out of sight. Anybody else out there who wants to pay for it out of their own wallet, now must compete with the government in a bidding war. Corn, borrowed money, apartment leases, oil products…and college tuition & textbooks.

Add to that the problem that President Obama thinks, for the good of the country, we need to increase the number of college graduates. Seems like a swell idea, at first, if you don’t understand the laws of supply and demand. The situation in which this places a college upperclassman, is something I would not wish on my worst enemy. More college graduates! Great, so after my parents take out that second- or third-mortgage, I’m going to enter the workforce with this impressive piece of paper to hang on the wall…that…everyone else…also has. Aw, that’s just spiffy. Thanks a bunch, Barack.

Mass Moronization. Good term. But the moronization has started to hurt us, long before it became mass…

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“Mass Moronization”Monday, October 10th, 2011

“Mass Moronization”
Monday, October 10th, 2011