Everything is Shit

I recently wrote about listening to a radio talk show in New York where the host would call his former teachers and pull a gag on them. I don’t remember what the show was (I’m not from that part of the country) but a few months later I was listening to the same show where they stirred up a debate about a kid who used his extraordinary I.Q. to finish school early and begin his career young, with the goal of curing a major disease and retiring while he was still young.

I don’t think I ever heard quite so much reaction to any other radio talk show. One after another, the listeners mounted an impromptu guilt campaign to bully the child and his parents to repent and allow the child to, “Be a kid”, or he would never “fit in” and would likely grow up to be an “evil genius”. You would not believe how many times I heard that phrase: “evil genius”, over and over, I had to wonder where had these people — each of them remarkably average — absorbed their fear of intelligence? It was as if forcing the child to be less than what he obviously was could ameliorate the caller’s fear that somewhere, someone might outwit them at pinochle.

The problem of course, is that a child like this will never fit into a world designed for the average. Look at a child who has an I.Q. of 60, which is 40 points below the mean (average) of 100. The difference is obvious — fair or unfair, they stand out. The same is true of children with I.Q.s 40 points above the norm: they stand out from the crowd and serve as targets for violence, at least until they can find their way into a world of people like themselves, and be among people who can understand what they are talking about, people who don’t fear them.

The child on the radio show had an I.Q. over 70 points above the norm. How can anyone expect him to fit in? If you put him on a construction site do you think he would be just one of the guys? There are some things even the best actors can’t fake day in and day out, and this kid was no actor.

You want to make an evil genius? You want something to really be afraid of? Take a kid like that, a kid with a seething intellectual curiosity, and force him to learn something he already knows — far better than his teachers ever will — day after day, year after year, for twelve years. Do this to him while excluding him from all social interaction, all while being insulted and getting the tar beaten out of him, and knowing he will have to work years later in life than he otherwise would have just to achieve the same goals he could have many years earlier. Do you really think he will feel any loyalty to the home team team after such abuse?

Let that kid go, let him become what he can be, let him populate the intellectual world he was meant for, and be kind to him and teach him to be kind in return — free him to cure cancer and ease the suffering of the people he will remember, long after they have forgotten him.

Its not just the vile dishonesty that I despise, its the banal stupidity I encounter everywhere. It’s as if I live in a medieval global village filled with illiterate knaves who know nothing. Nothing! Nothing at all!

Within the last two years I have been challenged by no less than three people who objected to my “theory” that the Earth goes around the Sun. Two of these geocentric advocates were certain I had been led astray by my odd views and would therefore burn in Hell. The other simply didn’t know where the Sun went after dark. I encountered these people in America, where each had spent at least eight years of their lives in a “school”, ostensibly receiving an “education”.

Any institution that takes your parents money and eight to twelve years of your life — at gunpoint — and then releases you to the world fit only to be feasted upon by the corrupt, the cruel and the criminal, is an institution that needs to come to an end. Yet all people can talk about is school reform. Fix this, fix that — NO! END IT! End school, bring it down and stop this mass stupidity machine now. How anyone can think an institution this destructive needs to fixed, bolstered, reconstructed and otherwise assisted is beyond me. Its wicked, so stop doing this to our children.

The only thing I ever learned in school was how to roll a, ah, cigarette, and how to respond like a Pavlovian automaton when a bell rang. I also learned the most important lesson school is intended to teach: that stupid, artificial status structures that exclude most people are normal and natural — and that we are expected to defend them, and to be grateful for the privilege.

I say this as someone who got to share in the benefits of being part of the included group, so I’m not just bitching about what I couldn’t have. So why am I not more grateful for the pleasant experience high school admittedly was? Because popularity is a trap. To fit in, you shape yourself to someone else’s mold, you must become someone else’s idea of a life well lived, you must become something alien to what you were meant to be. School is a soul eater, as much for those who loved it as those who didn’t.

Worse, after all the years of your life that they take from you, they leave you helpless, ripe to fall victim to everything from simple con men, to murderous ideologies, to churches that have whored themselves and teach their flock to be unthinking, unknowledgeable, and downright vicious.

My Mom made me skip school to take care of my grandmother, and in turn I got to learn history at the knee of a master — and how to care for the weak. My friends wound up skipping school to help. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything (and most of us went to college and turned out fine.)

One of those friends was a cheerleader I admired from afar. One day when she left my Grandmother said, “You like her, don’t you?” When I blushed she started telling me how to wage a virtual campaign of romance on the girl of my dreams — and it worked!

When my little brother got out of school he and his friends took over and I went to work. My mom would fix up her house (my mom knew plumbing — go figure.) None of this has much to do with convenience or go getting, but it was a much richer life, in my opinion, than watching “different strokes” or football on tv — or making money.

As long as I’m bitching about the shitty state of the American mind, lets not let the press get a free pass, eh?

Ever heard of Mars Direct? Mars Direct is a plan that NASA put together in the early 1990s which could have not only sent people to Mars, but would have built a permanent settlement as well, and could have been accomplished for the same amount of money NASA is already getting (0.5% of the total government budget.) It was the safest plan ever devised for getting to Mars, it would have allowed the longest visits of any mission plan proposed to date, and it could have been done with a combination of 1960s and 1840s technology. It could have been put together and flown in six years. Nothing had to be invented.

The press refused to talk about it. The questions that were asked by the press ignored Mars Direct (or for that matter any plan that cost less than 700 billion.)

Its as if every discussion on the news was a measured, scholarly, informed and respectable debate about whether or not the Moon is made of blue, rather than green cheese. In this environment a suggestion of lunar regolith made of silica and aluminum oxides would earn you an embarrassed silence. You could spend hours — no weeks — explaining the chemical composition of the lunar regolith, its geological origin, the role the solar wind plays as a depositor of helium 3 . . . the list of fascinating topics on this one subject is endless. When you were done the person you spent precious moments of your life trying to persuade would look at you as if you were mad and say, “No bro, its not green cheese, its blue, I saw it on TV!”

The most highly paid broadcasters are no better. I watched Chris Matthews of MSNBC sneeringly ask whether or not there were any “useful minerals” on Mars — nobody mentioned helium3 — only to watch the question get dodged by a female commentator, who said that the whole thing was a silly male fantasy and that today’s young people had no real interest in non-terrestrial matters (I’m pretty sure limitless clean energy might qualify as a “terrestrial matter”, but hey, that’s just me.)

I could almost subscribe to conspiracy theories were not for the question asked at one of the Mars “Spirit” conferences by a reporter from KTLA: “Sir, are the radio signals you uploaded to your rover traveling at the speed of light, or some other speed?”

Why do we allow ourselves to be informed by anyone this uninformed? Why do we tolerate this level of stupidity in our opinion makers? What the hell is wrong with us? Why don’t we just ignore these overpaid parasites and leave them to rot? How long will we allow these no nothings to fill our minds with shit?

Here is what Bertrand Russell had to say on the subject:

Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology…. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called ‘education.’ Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part…. It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.

Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.

- Bertrand Russell, ”The Impact of Science on Society”, 1953