House of Eratosthenes

This is The Blog That Nobody Reads…it has five thousand posts now…and I don’t suppose it has ever done a post-about-a-post. Actually it has now that I think of it; they connect to each other like lattice-work all the time. But this is a post, about public response, with regard to a previous post. And on that note, I just gotta say something. I have never seen the like of this before.

The response about this post is split cleanly down the middle. Half of the readership thinks it is crystal clear, and a marginal fringe of it — plus myself, now and then — condemns it as a muddled mess. I myself am not in a position of advantage for judging my own work, I’m afraid. I receive some of my most widespread and exclamatory praise with a befuddled “huh, you kiddin’?” I lack empathy. My sense of what requires mentioning word-for-word, and what will suffice with a mere implication, has always been substandard.

But in the last few days I’ve had to come around and join the majority viewpoint. It occurs to me that the question of whether a post, any post, but in this particular case One Hundred Things That Do Not Make You a Wonderful Person is clearly written — is a matter to be settled by consensus. And it can only be settled by consensus. Whether you say it works or you say it does not, if you are outnumbered, your argument crumbles under its own weight because it is an exercise in speaking for others. When a clear majority of the “others” explicitly overrule you, then…well, what were you sayin’?

A Hundred Things That Don't Make You Wonderful And the votes are in. It is impossible to have any kind of affection for this particular post if you do not “get it”; and although other posts have flung more traffic down upon The Blog That Nobody Reads, I struggle to recall another that has been linked from as many referring sites, in so short of a time.

So it is settled. The meaning is clear. That is not to say there has not been debate about it; I will also confess that many among those who misunderstand, seem to draw a common mistaken inference about what the meaning could have been. That is to say, they disagree with me, the author; but they agree with each other in their wrongness. Writers, generally, shudder at seeing such a thing. But with the addition of more and more voices who got it right, I look back on the ones who got it wrong and it seems to me they got it wrong because they wanted to get it wrong.

The piece is called — let us copy-and-paste, letter for letter, to make sure we’re quoting ourselves correctly — “One Hundred Things That Don’t Make You a Better Person.” It is not called “One Hundred Things That Make You an Ass.” It is not called “One Hundred Things I Wish People Would Not Do.” Or “One Hundred Types of People I Wish Would Get Struck by Lightning.”

And yet, the mistaken people…let us call them that, to help save space, from here on in. “Mistaken people.” The mistaken people have it in common with each other that they write of my work as if that were the point of it. Wow, I’m glad that isn’t true. That would make me the jerk. I’ll be the first to say so. People who recycle are #25; people who go to church are #40; people who vote for or hire ethnic minorites & women are #58. I’m condemning those people? That’s not what the piece says. It says doing these things doesn’t make you a wonderful person. I do not regard it as an exercise in hair-splitting, to point out the obvious that this is not the same thing. It’s quite different.

Of course we do live in a three-dimensional universe and there is such a thing as perspective. When you lack perspective, objects that are in fact quite distant can appear very close together — and I speak here figuratively as well as literally. Our “Mistaken People,” I’m thinking, lack perspective. This has been scientifically proven. A plurality of people have now responded to the piece…with charm and wit, in their minds…with some variant of “#101. Making a senseless list of things other people do that you don’t like (doesn’t make you a wonderful person).” This is a confession. To borrow a few spaces from Obama Speech Bingo, I just think for far too long we have been accepting a false choice and we can’t keep doing that thinking Europe is going to say it’s okay.

And here’s my point; this is where I think the trolley has really come off the tracks.

People do things, and this has to prove they’re wonderful, or — since I have specifically rejected this — we have to take this as proof that they’re s.o.b.’s. That’s the false choice. We are losing our collective ability to look at each other doing things, and say to ourselves “eh, whatever.” This is a bad, bad thing. It is the loss of a valuable and irreplaceable national resource, as precious as any animal species.

You walk up to me and say “Hey, Freeberg. Blogging doesn’t make you a wonderful person.” Or “Hey, watching Dukes of Hazzard reruns doesn’t make you a wonderful person” or “Drinking coffee, extra bold, black, from a 15-oz mug doesn’t make you a wonderful person” and my reaction will be rather mundane. Probably cock an eyebrow at you and go something like “duh.”

I think the non-mistaken people would react the same way. I suspect we are part of a common community. And there is something significant and understated separating us from the mistaken people who missed the point (probably deliberately) of that original piece; there is a major disconnect here. We do what we do. We are not trying to buck a trend, nor are we trying to conform to one. We just want our damn coffee. And we do not give a hang what it “proves” about whether we’re cool people or whether we’re jerks.

This false-choice dichotomy, I must say, bugs me. It bugs me more than any of the hundred items on the list. Maybe our society has become too cushy and comfortable, or maybe the Agent Orange is seeping into our brains. Myself, I think it’s just a natural consequence of the world shrinking, of information traveling more and more quickly. People evidently can’t just do things anymore. Whatever we do is just making statements about ourselves. Some smartass blogger comes along and says “here’s a list of a hundred things you can do that don’t make you a wonderful person in spite of what you might think,” and it’s automatically presumed that he’s talking some smack. Well, I’m not. I’m just saying if you think these things prove you’re wonderful, you’re wrong.

That’s incendiary?

All that tells me is, I made a mistake waiting this long to point it out.

Let’s think this through logically. I did include a short list of things you can do that would, and do, make you a wonderful person. Now if this process works (to such an extent that I agree that it does), how can it work? I have personally conceived of three ways:

1. By completing this physical or mental feat, you have pressed the envelope of your capabilities, increased your endurance and/or resolve, and now you have confidence in your capacity that you did not have — could not have had — before.

2. You have altered the outcome of the world, or some stateful thing within it, for the better. You have eased the burden of another of God’s children, lightened a heavy load, made light work by adding another hand.

3. You have excluded from logical consideration, the possibility that you might lack positive attributes that it has now been proven that you have. Some miserable sonofabitch could not possibly have done what you just did.

I viscerally disagree with Option #3. Name the “wonderful” thing you think only “wonderful” people can do. I can pretty much guarantee that with the time and resources, I can go out and find the miserable motherfucker who will be ready, willing and able to go out and do it. Especially if he perceives an opportunity to “prove” to some more suckers that he isn’t a miserable motherfucker. And you know I’m right. You know I can find him.

So that leaves us with the first two options. You can literally make yourself a better person by embracing a personal ability to do what you could not do before; or, you can do a genuinely good thing that someone else can experience, touch and feel. All the rest is bullshit.

You might be wondering, now, why is it important to have a list of things that do not make you a wonderful person…if I’m not willing to step up and say these things make you a miserable bastard either? What’s the point?

The point is clear: Some of the worst, most wretched, reprehensible policies we have ever had in human history — particularly recent human history — have been policies designed specifically for the purpose of demonstrating that the people in charge are, or have been…yeah, you got it. Wonderful. Expanded welfare state. More expensive labor. Exorbitant public debts. The much-talked-about “vaginization of America,” with its lowered pain threshold, pussy males, kids-wearing-foam-rubber-elbow-pads-on-the-seesaws, litigation, litigation and more litigation. Our modern, super-anesthetized, super-sanitized, “Who The Hell Wants To Live In A World Like This” culture, buried hip-deep in warning labels. This ice may be cold. This is not a toy. Do not take this medication orally. Remove foil wrapper before inserting suppository. Glass not allowed in pool area. Ladder, when fully extended, is very tall. Do not use this hair dryer in the shower.

This gets into the Freeberg Theory of Village Evolution. I’ll tell you how this works…

Much has been talked about the Theory of Evolution, but it is seldom discussed how long it takes evolution to work. “Millions of years of evolution” is a common catchphrase, but humans have not been around that long, and humans have evolved many times. So how long does it take evolution to work, really? Not long. We have hard evidence that a few hundred years ago — which is the blink of an eye, comparitively speaking — humans were significantly shorter than they are now. Height is not exactly a subtle characteristic of the human genome. So we evolve quickly. It doesn’t take millions of years.

But think about the world in which we now live; the fact that it is industrial. We do not make our way in the world by milking cows, harvesting vegetables, slaughtering pigs, et al. How long have we been out of this mold? Not long. About a century and a half. That is not long enough to evolve. So we are agricultural creatures. In 500 years maybe we’ll evolve to exist in this technological enclave we have constructed for ourselves; but we are not George Jetson yet. We are agricultural, we are built to milk cows. We are built to plow fields. Men my age know this instinctively. We consume calories, primarily meat-based, and this is primarily in fulfillment of a savage, masculine impulse, it all heads straight to the gut so that we can store up the energy in case we go on some wild boar hunting spree like those skinny sinewy young boys at the beginning of Apocalypto.

And then we go sit in cubicles to toil away on a keyboard and a mouse. And get heavier and heavier. See what I mean? Our workload is at odds with our evolutionary molding.

The Freeberg Theory of Village Evolution is based on this…and most of what has been scribbled in The Blog That Nobody Reads, that which deals with human nature (which is probably the bulk of it), is based on this theory. It’s high time I jotted it down.

Picture a ancient village. It could be of any race, on any continent, in any age so long as it is prior to the industrial revolution…or for that matter, before urbanization. In whatever pocket of geography in which it exists, so this could be at any time until about a century ago, give or take. The village is inhabited by members of a common tribe.

We have spoken, before, about the historical custom of shunning, which is ostracism to point of fatality; that a person is prohibited, by virtue of his individual identity, from practicing even the most basic transactions of commerce fundamental to survival, to such an extent that he naturally dies from starvation, exposure to the elements, or something of the like. This has been documented in some pre-industrial cultures. I submit that it has been, whether documented or not, a common practice among all of them. I submit that it is the natural brutal ancestor of bankruptcy protection. Think about it. Envision it from the point of view of someone who is in the profession of dispensing a staple, such as food and shelter, and you are approached by a person not in the good graces of the community. The pottage may be clothing, a roof over his head, or a bowl of porridge. If you consent in exchange for credit, you expose yourself because you would be falling in line behind all of his other creditors, apt to be hung out high & dry. You would decline. If you consent in exchange for cash, you are committing a moral transgression because you know your patron must be short-changing his other creditors in order to do right by you. It’s a case of last-in first-out. This is ethically wrong, and it is probably detrimental to your own survival because you are diminishing whatever far-fetched likelihood might have remaind for the creditors, who are your own colleagues, to be compensated for their investments.

So you would shun. You would have to. There must, logically, be some mechanism for the miscreant to be dismissed from the ranks of those who can bargain in good faith. If the community desires to remain compassionate, then he could become a regular recipient of charity. But for the sake of maintaining some working economic model, be it based on cash or on barter, there would have to be a dissolution between the self-sustaining and the indigent. There would have to be a barrier. There would have to be a custom of ostracism. It is logically unavoidable.

Such societies were not purely capitalistic. And among the ones that were not, there would have to be a risk shared among all, during the lean times. If all are sharing in the risk, then all must share in the cost; lean times, by definition, mean there is more cost than there is benefit.

And so if the famine drags on for too long, a situation arises in which the mediocre amongst the village becomes indigent…or could be interpreted to be that way. This is key. The shunning is not the conclusion of an objective, mathematical exercise. It is, rather, an opinionated consensus. The majority votes that Henry is to be put out to pasture. Or…the village elders proclaim it to be so. Or, the Chief of the tribe picks up the vibe. The Oracle infers it to be divine will, Vox Dei. The poor sap is to shut out of the mighty village gates, to perish in the winter.

It definitely happened. Where it was written down — as well as where it was not.

This is where I think we picked up the primal impulse. We engage in these empty rituals…in the aforementioned post, I specifically used the phrase “empty rituals”…to demonstrate that we are wonderful. Not to demonstrate it to God. Not to demonstrate it to the ghost of George Washington, or to President Barack Obama. Not to your mother-in-law, or to any one specific individual. But to “The People.”

I am saying we are wired, down in the marrow of our bones, through a natural evolutionary process, to show off for each other like circus animals. We are wired, right down in our genetic “motherboards,” to engage in these empty rituals. That is why this whole thing looks so much like a brutal, primal instict: Because it is one.

Let us pause here to remember and to remark one more time, since it is worthy of repetition: To engage in this effort, and then fail at it, is fatal. You would be shut out of the gates. You would freeze. You would starve. This is a critical point, because it throws the Freeberg Village Evolution Theory ahead of that mighty rocket nozzle that is Darwinism. It says that among all those who were exposed to the challenge, everyone must have succeeded or else they were thrown into oblivion. The genome was refined, on pain of death, to meet the challenge. We are the descendants of those who succeeded. This is what etched the design upon the motherboard. Whoever didn’t have what it took, fell away and their strains died out…leaving us.

And so here we are. We are stained, just like the Bible says. This pinpoints exactly what The Apple was, what Eve did, what Adam did, who the snake was. We have been evolutionarily sculpted and chiseled into fawning, preening sycophants; it is our central nature, and we are left with our intellect which we may optionally engage for the purpose of rising above it. Without that, we endure the full disgrace of Man’s Fall. The message we end up sending to each other is: “During the lean times, make sure I am among the last to be shut out of the heavy village gates. Dispense with that other guy instead.” We are the guy in the fancy BMW, parking overnight in a bad neighborhood with a club on the steering wheel — carefully parked next to the other BMW that does not have a club on the steering wheel. Fuck with that other guy instead, leave me alone.

I am…comparatively speaking…wonderful.

That is the Freeberg Theory of Village Evolution. That is, I would argue, also what modern liberalism is. Surely you’ve noticed how incredibly confused our liberals are nowadays on this one question: Am I a wonderful person on an absolute basis, or on a relative one? Am I trying to show I have risen above some measurable hash mark in my wonderfulness…or is there some other dirty-rotten-creepy-bastard somewhere, and I’m just trying to show I’m better than that other guy? This is why I said a complete victory here would ruin them. They want to hold us “all” up to a higher standard of humanity, decency, civility; but this isn’t really what they want, because it would cancel out every meaningful thing about themselves, if they ever got it. You can’t be part of an elite club if you don’t make sure someone is left out of it. Our liberals are acting upon their internal motherboard-wiring, to be a Freeberg-Village fawning preening priss, laboring to convince some ethereal, undefined “consensus” that the other guy is the one who should be shut out of the village gates. So they can continue to live within, where it’s all cozy and warm.

It’s like the joke about the two lawyers being chased by the hungry bear. One of them says to the other, “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you!”

This is why it’s so important to identify the one hundred — there are many, many more — things people do on a regular basis to show how wonderful they are, that don’t really make them wonderful. It is to defeat modern liberalism. Which is nothing more than self-interest dressed up as altruism; the lawyer outrunning the other lawyer; the villager trying to indict the other villager, so the ostracism will fall on one head and not the other. This is also why, when a modern liberal politician gives a speech about a vexing problem that doesn’t really involve a bad guy…like a horrible sexually transmitted disease, or a ruptured oil pipe at the bottom of the ocean, or a hurricane…the politician keeps injecting some horrible villain into the situation anyway.

It’s an ancient, primal-instinct message that has reverberated among the human species for millenia. “I’m wonderful, so don’t shut me out of the village. Take that other guy. Over there.”

It is wired into our hardware. Liberalism, as we know it today, is all about succumbing to it. It is all about forgetting that we’re all in this fight for survival together…and then, just to see if you can get away with it, acting like you’re among the very few who can still remember that very thing.

It is the ultimate adventure in self-deception.

No, it doesn’t make you a wonderful person.

“Never explain. Never apologize.”

But you can put on a skimpy little Nazi costume and belt out,

“I’M JUST A SOUL WHOSE INTENTIONS ARE GOOOOOOOOOD.
OH LORD, PLEASE DON’T LET ME BE MISUNDERSTOOD!”

Short form via my Comments motto:

“IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SPEAK IN SUCH A WAY THAT YOU CANNOT BE MISUNDERSTOOD.” — KARL POPPER
- vanderleun | 06/07/2010 @ 21:49
Hmm, yeah I don’t think anyone wants to see me in a skimy li’l anything about now.
- mkfreeberg | 06/08/2010 @ 03:04
People were upset by that amusing-but-true list?

It was just a bit of commonsense observation, Morgan.

The outraged must have been among the delusional offenders and you, my friend, struck one of their superficial nerves.
- Daphne | 06/08/2010 @ 05:51
Not so much upset. I had left things a bit unclear in my writing. By “unclear” what I really mean to say is: Possible, albeit only trivially, to misinterpret if you really, really, really wanted to misinterpret it.

For the reasons given above, I have gradually concluded they wanted to misinterpret. Wanted it like the dickens. With the exception of our mutual friend in New Mexico, who was just being his usual pedantic self.
- mkfreeberg | 06/08/2010 @ 08:05
You weren’t unclear in the least, Morgan.

But if some asshat chooses to get bent out of shape because real people know that carting your groceries home in cloth or drinking free trade coffee doesn’t mean squat at the end of the day, well… fuck ’em sideways with a spork.

**Buck just enjoys sparring with you on occasion.

Aren’t you still on vacation?
- Daphne | 06/08/2010 @ 10:00
For the record, when bees get into the house I heard them out. It’s for personal greed.
When they’re done with their interspecies sex acts with my fruit trees they seem to return to my neighbors place and make especially good honey, which I can get for FAR cheaper than “USDA inspected and approved” stuff at the “store”.

Other LARGE country bugs get a chance to heed a cursory waft toward the door with whatever I happen to have in hand, mostly because I know that I’LL have to clean the skid marks off the window.

Flies, ‘skeeters, (and roaches when I lived in the city) in the house get it… point blank.
Large, fuzzy, cute, four legged garden pests get it in situ, but I generally need to use a scope.

Most spiders are welcome, (at least in my conservatory) as they trap and eat other unwanted guests, and I DON’T CARE if there’s webs in the nooks and crannies.
- CaptDMO | 06/08/2010 @ 14:22
Unclear, or as I playfully labeled it, “foggy” it was. But not in that it was particularly ambiguous or confusing. Rather in one very important, very ridiculous way: It was simply left open enough for misinterpretation that someone who – like you mentioned – really wanted to misinterpret it intentionally could do so without being particularly incorrect. It offered up an outlet for the compulsively contrarian to do their thing. It’s how the comments devolved into the Wasp Grenade discussion: There are those who will simply not walk past an open door without ripping it off its hinges and throwing it in the river. Like you said, their “meh, whatever” reflex is completely kaput.
- Andy | 06/08/2010 @ 14:23
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- House of Eratosthenes | 06/13/2010 @ 07:08
[…] you think it’s wise, and instead you’re advocating a certain course of action because you think it makes people all better & wonderful, it has an intoxicating effect. People start to embark on this “ends justify the means” […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 06/15/2010 @ 06:19
[…] speaking here of the Freeberg Village Theory, discussed here and here and here and here and here and here. The process by which, in a season a famine, one or […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 09/23/2010 @ 06:36
[…] are to go-along-to-get-along…and in so doing, prove what a wonderful person you are. The results are not favorable, we’ve learned; in fact, much of the time they’re quite […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 07/21/2013 @ 13:21

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