House of Eratosthenes

Nothing’s changed. God provides all that is needed, but wrapped up in summers too hot, winters freezing, rocky terrain and lots of danger. The rough-and-tumble types come in to do the hard work, the laying down of the bedrock of the highways and the foundations of the buildings, but before that happens the swamps have to be drained and the serpents and arachnids and coyotes and wolves and ticks and rats and fleas have to be driven out or killed.

Then civilization’s asphalt and stucco and carpeting are installed and that’s when the real ugliness starts. Suddenly, all of the jobs have something to do with moving stacks of file folders from this cabinet over here, to that cabinet over there, and explaining to someone over the phone how impossible it is to do something. Yesterday’s thankfulness to God and careful measure-twice-cut-once decision-making, are replaced with today’s snooty condescension, and bloated retirement plans funded at someone else’s expense.

End result is always the same: An economy on life-support, and a new culture of guilt. Guilt, can’t-do-it, it’s-too-hard, process-over-outcome, blame blame blame, and a prevailing sentiment that the past should be bulldozed. It’s funny how the people walking around in the air-conditioned buildings with the comfy furniture and the plushy carpets can’t seem to appreciate the rough-and-tumbles who drained the swamps, killed the snakes and laid the bedrock. It’s rather like the candle failing to appreciate the table, or a painting failing to appreciate the wall on which it hangs. The candle needs the table and the painting needs the wall, but the table would get along quite well without the candle, and the wall has all the purpose it had without the artwork.

When I was in school, many decades ago, work was defined as moving a weight through a distance. I don’t think the physicists were talking about shuffling file folders or entering data. I know through personal experience there are many ills that can be cured by rolling up ones shirt sleeves and putting in a day of physical labor. Mao had that same notion in mind when he sent the professors and intellectuals (among others) into the fields to participate in the glorious work of feeding the nation. There was some merit in that notion. Military service provides some of that for many but there are legions of “workers” who have never moved much weight through any distance. Perhaps a stint on a road crew, roofing crew, fence team, lumber jacking squad etc. might stand an individual in better shape for contributing to the future than another course in __________studies.
- Open other end | 06/05/2015 @ 04:45
On an individual level we’ve recognized this phenomenon nearly forever, born of envy and shame. The current expression “Born on third base, thinks he hit a triple” just about describes it.

Children rarely understand their parents’ relative unsophistication and the hard work it takes to start them off well, even though it’s motivated by the determination for “something better” for the selfsame child. That should grow to appreciation when the child gets old enough. If all goes well, the child appreciates the parents even if they could never have gone on to college, and will recognize their worth despite it being of a different quality from his own.

I see that appreciation a lot more in people who are themselves go-getters in their own fields – to cite one well-known example from the top of my head, Robert Herjovec of Shark Tank fame, whose on-show bio makes a point of saying he’s “the son of an immigrant factory worker.” There’s no indication whatsoever that Herjovec is ashamed of this, or that he is anything other than proud of his dad, humbled (and motivated) by his work ethic to be the same kind of man.

I see that less and less, and more and more I see resentment instead – as if the adult-sized children know on some level that they don’t have that work ethic, and blame others for making them look bad in comparison. They think all the tangible work done up until this point was the necessary lot of lesser beings, they look down upon those whose continued care and effort maintain it all, and they think that making noise about “infrastructure” makes up for how they treat the everyday lunchpail set in every daily interaction they have. They’re ashamed that they could possibly have been raised by people with dirt under their fingernails.

The question is why… and I think the answer is that this generation is the first never to have to go get summer jobs, working weekends and after school to mow lawns, deliver papers, babysit, flip burgers, haul bricks, whatever it takes. So they think only their kind of work is worth doing, but they don’t have the work ethic to get any of it done. Writing, for example – a hobby of mine, and one that requires a hell of a lot more than sitting and waiting for the muse to deliver perfected prose to one’s email box. It ain’t laying a barbed-wire fence in the August sun, but laying that fence would teach a lot about putting in the effort even when the effort is mental rather than physical. Books don’t write themselves, any more than fences mend themselves. And it teaches everything you might need to know about results and testing to see if they’re acceptable – the fence falls down, you do it over.

On top of this, they were sheltered their whole lives from the consequences of performing poorly. Their behavioral problems were society’s fault, and fixed with drugs; their poor grammar was “authentic cultural expression”; their inability to run or throw was papered over with participation ribbons so nobody felt left out; they were never given the blessing of failure to learn how to lose graciously and find their own excellence. They never had to achieve and they barely even had to try – and now we wonder why society’s in the crapper when they’re in charge of things.

Could be wrong, of course, but the observed facts seem to fit this theory uncomfortably well. All the folks in our government, for example, seem to be quite unable to stick to a principle or a deadline or a budget, never bother to learn about any of the things they pass laws and regulations to “manage,” and they’re heavily-insulated from the consequences. People writing and performing our popular fiction seem to count it more important to be the right sort of person rather than a good storyteller – and they will in fact turn savagely upon actual good storytellers if they seem to be wrongthinking. They get awards for any ink blottings they manage to dribble onto the page, or else they whine that their readers are too stupid to appreciate them. Our reporters think that merely making stuff up is an acceptable substitute for wearing out shoe leather and phone lines – and why should they when their favored sources give them what they want without effort, and repay them with government jobs later on… a repayment given quid-pro-quo by the journos when the sources “retire” to private life? All the while, actual builders and doers grow resentful of being ordered to do their best for no reward except to be bankrupted, belittled, and treated with contempt.
- nightfly | 06/05/2015 @ 09:01
[…] the difference between now, and the age of “rugged fellas”? The most obvious two things are: Natural predators, and the discernible need for stuff getting […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 07/16/2015 @ 05:35

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“Thanks God, We’ll Take It From Here”Friday, June 5th, 2015

“Thanks God, We’ll Take It From Here”
Friday, June 5th, 2015