House of Eratosthenes

I’ll do an update about the boring technical details later. We had a failed database restore this weekend, which for most of yesterday “exposed” this 2012 post as the apparent most-recent-one. As a consequence of that, the two-year-old essay caught a link from Linkiest…and so, while waiting for my teenager to free up the bathroom I decided to review. It’s always an educational experience reviewing things you wrote years ago. It is one of the most critical benefits, and I do mean “critical,” of having a blog.

The dusty old piece catalogs the observations made about the Warren/Obama “You Didn’t Build That” credo. It is more about the enthusiasm among agenda-driven leftists, that react to that credo, than about the credo itself. It inspects the social phenomenon of people wildly cheering for the idea that no one anywhere actually builds anything that matters.

Yes, of course it is inconsistent, incoherent, dishonest — clearly it’s alright for Barack Obama to build big, important things — and, probably paid for. Anyway, after meandering through an assortment of run-on sentences, pointing out some things about how creative individuals work together with committees who later hog all the credit, the older post closes with:

I think the motivation is denial. This is the only viable explanation for the enthusiasm: Somebody designed the light bulb, or a part of that rocket, and that means there is an individual doing remarkable things — we are individuals, but we’re not doing remarkable things as individuals, so we don’t want anybody else doing anything remarkable either.

Not unless they are part of a big, big group. So that we can take all the human effort that goes into something noticeable, and safely anonymize it. So that no one single person can put his name next to something that is good, and receive credit for it, on an individual basis. We’re opposed to that.

Two years on, I still find this to be the most solid explanation. After all, we haven’t long to wait in our everyday lives, if we hang around the wrong crowd, to see this: Oh, there’s a gap between the objective we had at the outset, and what we have managed to accomplish since engaging the effort; so rather than upping our game, let’s re-define the goals downward.

THAT way, we don’t have to…you know, get up off this couch, or anything inconvenient like that.

Oh wait, someone else did it the other way? They said “I’m not happy with the outcome, so I’m going to change the methods” and they improved? Well SHAME on them. Let’s get all butt-hurt hatey hate on them. They didn’t build that.

Obama, along with luminaries like Him, gets a pass. He’s in a different social circle, therefore doesn’t have to function as a dangerous role model. So He accomplishes wonderful things all the time — if only someone could recall what exactly those are. Committees are anonymous, they get a pass. Government is anonymous; it gets a pass. “They” can build things. But “Bob” — he cannot build a better mousetrap, for if ever it is acknowledged that he did, then that starts a terrible conversation that frightens many: Bob did it, I wonder if I can do something like what Bob did. What would that take. What would I have to change to be more like Bob, and do some of the things Bob did.

“…Oh wait, someone else did it the other way? They said “I’m not happy with the outcome, so I’m going to change the methods” and they improved? Well SHAME on them….”
SO, I was working “overhire” (apparently the long term members riding the bench down at “the hall” didn’t have the actual skills in a big city Union (stage scenery) Shop, and NOT doing things in such a manner so as to take the absolute longest amount of time, the least amount of people, and ZERO overtime.
You BET I went along to get along. If nothing else, these folks could certainly “lift heavy things”, and had a “reputation”.
- CaptDMO | 07/14/2014 @ 16:12
*crap*
…the actual skills)
- CaptDMO | 07/14/2014 @ 16:13
We humans have the ability to lie to themselves. Liberals seem to be slightly more developed in certain parts of that but the perpetually outraged crowd does not have a lock on that behavior. It sometimes shocks me to be listening to (or reading) someone who makes sense and have them come out with a piece of data that is obviously at odds with what they are saying.

In the late sixties I had one of those moments that told me I was (way) off base. Unpleasant realization. I was forced (by myself) to change lifestyle behavior.

It seems the more sure we are of something the more likely we are to filter data. To change behavior necessitates a little humility. We speak well of humility but do not like the practice of it.

The worst part of this is that people are intelligent. We can be correct enough of the time that it is easy to convince ourselves the percentage of the times we are in the right is much higher than it really is. This is even more pronounced when we are close to having the right idea ourselves. Being close to the truth can isolate us from the full truth way too much of the time.
- Theo | 07/15/2014 @ 11:15

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