Untethered Genericism

Letting a two year old eat a snack in your bed seems pretty harmless as long as your talking about the usual crackers, granola, even cheese but WATCH OUT FOR THE DEHYDRATED STRAWBERRIES!!!

I know there is always a calm before the storm, because otherwise how would you know it was a storm? I mean, I grew up in a place where it rained 60% of the time. There were no storms per se, just "Breaks" when the sun came out. Its all about perspective.



An equally random rant:

I fully expect standardized testing to accomplish nothing. By definition, standardizing would imply everybody takes the same test... and the distribution of measured success will always be a normal one (normal distribution), because by skewing it low, you create the appearance of general failure, and if you skew it high, you create the appearance of general success (this is what schools do in order to "pass" national standards, or show "improvement") while essentially devaluing those that excel by swallowing up their scores in the critical mass of academic genericism.

And finally, why have so many people given up on our children? Its unnatural to love oneself above their own offspring unless their natural, evolved sense of instinct is compromised, say by drugs or alcohol, for example. What I can't figure out is exactly what in many modern cultures has compromised our instinct. I used to say religion, but now I am beginning so think that may be a symptom. So what is the cause? What instigates our need to be controlled? I know E.O. Wilson and R. Dawkins have good ideas on this topic--among others--and I can just say that if you follow through some of the arguments one may suggest that it all comes down to s sort of stunted intellectual maturation by enabling the sustainability of immature behavior and habits in modern cultures. In other words, instincts such as following instructions from parental figures blindly as a child (to avoid walking off of cliffs, sticking hands in fire, or 0predator territory) are eventually replaced by the ability to make educated decisions as an adult, or at least be able to educate oneself enough to then in turn make a decision.

There is currently very little cultural pressure to enable oneself to develop the skill of self teaching. Free enterprise makes teaching a business, and creates demand for dependence by propagating the institutional monopoly on education, a sort of positive feedback loop. From a more socialist perspective, teaching is directed by the masses which, like democracy, only works well if those masses are educated well enough as a whole to be an educator. One example would be the mistake of ignoring the difference between teaching people stuff, and teaching people how to teach themselves stuff. Some entities end up reinforcing the "teach stuff" as a result of self propagation, that is, entities comprised mostly of those who only know how to teach stuff, and not how to learn.

A third tether on intellectual maturation is economics. Economies drive supply and demand markets on skillsets that sustain the dominant economy. "Skillsets" is the key word here since the definition of that term is half assed, and done within the constraints of greater economic, socialistic, and religious machines that define only a few set paths that are acceptable to those that make up a bulk of the dominant cultural inertia. In other words, economic machines cater to the greater good and benefit from raw labor, people who know stuff.

The first sign of intellectual maturation is the ability to question. Not just to ask questions, but to question the answers. Entities such as governments and religion subvert any pressure for intellectual maturity by making people comfortable not asking questions (in the best case) or afraid of questioning (worst case). Eventually, some predict that modern culture will either fail catastrophically, or wind up re-inventing social systems that have long been used by some insects. These systems are very efficient, and benefit the population as a whole, but at the expense of diversity continuums among individuals.

So, I ask of you: Do you want your kid to be a person, or an ant? If it helps, I've taught my daughter to squish ants.

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