I can’t speak to op’s emotional well being, but he is spot on with his reasoning. In the rarified air that most of us here inhabit, it’s easy to forget that for every college professor there is someone for whom tying their shoes is a significant cognitive challenge. For every really smart person, there is someone who lacks the cognition to participate meaningfully in society. For every brilliant individual, there is someone whose mental capacity puts them in need of lifelong care.
The bell curve is a bitch.
The average person just gets by and doesn’t think all that much about anything outside of their immediate surroundings. For most, politics and such is a team sport, not an intellectual pursuit.
It’s an uncomfortable fact of life, and those that have talents and gifts above the norm are by default responsible for guiding and advancing society. We ignore that burden at the peril of all.
The only thing either response to your original reply have done is provide uncontroversial and non-conspiratorial reasons why Mondragons are extremely rare. Calling that Social Darwinism is like calling you a Stalinist, a slander based entirely on a superficial similarity of your rhetoric.
The bell curve explains why most people can't do difficult things. It does not explain why most of those who can do the difficult things end up working for someone else (rather than e.g. start a co-op). If stupidity was the entire answer, the smart bosses would be unable to find employees smart enough to work in their companies.
Some businesses only require simple work, so you could argue that they have one smart boss and many stupid employees. But there are many businesses that require highly qualified professionals. And those professionals have mostly been taught that their proper place in life is working for someone else. This is practically what school trains you to do for decades -- there is the teacher who gives commands, and the students who obey. And then you transition to a job where it is the boss who gives commands, and the employees who obey. I wonder whether a different kind of education would result in a different kind of a society.
Yeah, we take a lot of things for granted. Intelligence is relative, and so we do find a normal distribution when defining IQ with a target median and mode of 100. However, we don't have to construct a society where thriving requires a median intelligence! That's a choice made by those who, as you say, benefit more from the system.
It's not so simple to measure intelligence, anyway. I marvel at some of the things a below-average person does every day such as drive a car at high speeds on the interstate, or navigating political bureaucracy. Meanwhile, I'm two standard deviations above the mean but have ADHD and sometimes struggle with basic tasks that even people of below-average intelligence have mastered.
The contrast is so much at times that I can see the confusion and concern in the faces of those around me whenever I have an ADHD moment. Yet, I'm an expert in multiple subjects, a quick learner and have a well-developed sense of intuition. People are multi-faceted, and we're not going to get very far with over-simplistic models of intelligence.
I can’t speak to op’s emotional well being, but he is spot on with his reasoning. In the rarified air that most of us here inhabit, it’s easy to forget that for every college professor there is someone for whom tying their shoes is a significant cognitive challenge. For every really smart person, there is someone who lacks the cognition to participate meaningfully in society. For every brilliant individual, there is someone whose mental capacity puts them in need of lifelong care.
The bell curve is a bitch.
The average person just gets by and doesn’t think all that much about anything outside of their immediate surroundings. For most, politics and such is a team sport, not an intellectual pursuit.
It’s an uncomfortable fact of life, and those that have talents and gifts above the norm are by default responsible for guiding and advancing society. We ignore that burden at the peril of all.
Your view is called Social Darwinism and it’s really dangerous/dystopian. Also collapses under scrutiny.
> Your view is called Social Darwinism
The only thing either response to your original reply have done is provide uncontroversial and non-conspiratorial reasons why Mondragons are extremely rare. Calling that Social Darwinism is like calling you a Stalinist, a slander based entirely on a superficial similarity of your rhetoric.
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The bell curve explains why most people can't do difficult things. It does not explain why most of those who can do the difficult things end up working for someone else (rather than e.g. start a co-op). If stupidity was the entire answer, the smart bosses would be unable to find employees smart enough to work in their companies.
Some businesses only require simple work, so you could argue that they have one smart boss and many stupid employees. But there are many businesses that require highly qualified professionals. And those professionals have mostly been taught that their proper place in life is working for someone else. This is practically what school trains you to do for decades -- there is the teacher who gives commands, and the students who obey. And then you transition to a job where it is the boss who gives commands, and the employees who obey. I wonder whether a different kind of education would result in a different kind of a society.
Yeah, we take a lot of things for granted. Intelligence is relative, and so we do find a normal distribution when defining IQ with a target median and mode of 100. However, we don't have to construct a society where thriving requires a median intelligence! That's a choice made by those who, as you say, benefit more from the system.
It's not so simple to measure intelligence, anyway. I marvel at some of the things a below-average person does every day such as drive a car at high speeds on the interstate, or navigating political bureaucracy. Meanwhile, I'm two standard deviations above the mean but have ADHD and sometimes struggle with basic tasks that even people of below-average intelligence have mastered.
The contrast is so much at times that I can see the confusion and concern in the faces of those around me whenever I have an ADHD moment. Yet, I'm an expert in multiple subjects, a quick learner and have a well-developed sense of intuition. People are multi-faceted, and we're not going to get very far with over-simplistic models of intelligence.