Creating havoc since 2006. Fair use is claimed for images on this site, but they will be removed (if owned) on request out of politeness. movingnorth@gmail.com
One of the themes and concerns I see on a continual basis in my wandering around the web is that we are living in the endgame of a society. Dutton and Woodley quoted Charles Murray discussing the eerie way that we get the sense “. . . that the story has run out.” There is a sense of national exhaustion. It’s hard to do things. It’s like we have become a nation of teenage boys on summer vacation with no summer job.
From a societal standpoint we seem to be at or near the point of no return, headed in the wrong direction on multiple fronts. It’s not just the inability to tackle or construct big things. Heck, the Empire State Building was designed in weeks and built in a little over a year. Freedom Tower in New York City? Over seven years of construction, and that doesn’t include the years of design that had to take place before anyone was even bribed.
It’s not just railroads and buildings that seem to be headed the wrong direction:
We all know that the bad math is eventually replaced by firing squads, but like winning the lottery, we get to dream first.
Pink? Purple? Are you an anime character?
Bad tattoos. You’re gonna have to live with that tattoo sleeve when you’re in the rest home and have to explain to the kids changing your bedpan how cool Justin Bieber® was.
Constant remakes of television shows and movies that weren’t that good in the first place. Why won’t they remake some quality television, like Hogan’s Heroes®?
It’s easy to give up. In fact, every bit of the media challenges us to give up our values. We’re told we should celebrate children being pumped full of hormones after they make the brave and courageous decision at the age of seven that biology was a mistake and they’re really DeeAnn instead of Dean. I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust a seven year old to find the remote control around my house. Trust them with decisions about pumping chemicals into their body that will utterly change the future? Sure. Makes sense.
The politics of the media have reversed: it used to be that free speech was celebrated. Now? Free speech is celebrated, but only if the free speech in question follows the values of the elite. For a brief moment in time, platforms like Twitter® really were able to amplify voices that cared about values. Now? Those voices will be silenced from those platforms. From financial systems. From jobs and eventually housing, if the Left can manage it.
I’ve seen this world-inversion where every value that was known to be good and true is vilified and every value that was known to be evil is celebrated. It’s at this time I really need to pause and remind our viewing audience that the central tenant of Christianity isn’t “Do what thou wilt.” That’s an utterly different religion with a boss who smells like sulfur with shiny horns and a pitchfork. Except in Clown World™, “do what thou wilt” is the single highest value.
Alright John Wilder, you’ve convinced me and depressed me. Why should we bother to continue?
It’s simple. We should continue because it’s what we’re born to do. Going gently onto that goodnight? If you’re reading this blog, that’s not your style. And despite what media is trying to convince you – what is good and right is not finished. That’s why they’re so desperately attempting to use the media at this point – to create despair. Despair is the main tool of evil – it causes us to curl up like we’ve been eating too much soy and give up without a fight.
Don’t give in.
How should we continue?
We continue by living our daily lives and living them unashamedly. Living them devoted to what is good and true. By having wonderful children. By teaching those children the values that we know are true. By teaching them to discriminate between good and evil, and how to choose good. By being good role models. By being fit. By being prepared for the tougher times ahead.
We continue because that’s what we do. I do think that times in the next decade will be tougher than the times a decade or two decades before.
That just means we’re lucky. Calm seas don’t make good sailors. Easy lives don’t make moral men.
But I will get that transcript done before next week, paratroopers or not.
“As a matter of fact, you can hardly call me a fortune hunter. Because when I first proposed to Mrs. Claypool, I thought she only had seven million. But the extra millions never interfered with my feelings for her.” – A Night at the Opera
Update: I just saw David Lee Roth in a rowboat . . . .
Pop Wilder was generally a cautious man. Adopting me was an example – one of the few – of when he stared Caution straight in the eye and said, “I would like to ruin any chance of sleeping well until he’s 18.” He likewise glanced at Fortuna and said, “I really don’t need those thousands of dollars that I’ll have to spend fixing the house. And the television. And the car. And the other car. And the other car.”
Pop really was restrained in his spending. While we never wanted for anything in particular, I certainly wasn’t spoiled, especially by today’s standards. The first vehicle I got to drive around was a pickup that had a rubber mat covering steel a steel floor, vinyl bench seats, AM radio, no air conditioning, and was a decade old. It also had an “engine” that was perhaps slightly weaker than an Ebola patient after a marathon.
Pop kept his cars for a decade or more. He always bought cars with cash – and never paid interest on anything that I know of, ever, even our house. The house was built it in stages over the course of years (by a local contractor crew of farmers who built houses while the crops were growing) until it was exactly the way that he and Ma Wilder wanted it. He owned it outright.
He retired while I was still in school, not long after I got a scholarship. Those things might have been related – after I got the scholarship I think he was pleased to hang up his hat and sit on the porch, and I was the last risk he needed to manage before he could do that. Pop had been working at the same place since he was five, with the exception of a certain all-expenses-paid trip that the government provided him in Europe. He got to see places like London, Normandy, and even the Rhine.
Pop says he saw him. But I’ve never seen any pictures of Pop with Winston Churchill . . . .
Pop’s life was built on the idea of financial stability. That would make sense – he’d seen lots of people do finances poorly. He’d been a small-town farm banker, back when there were such things. Banks back then didn’t have branches, they had roots: the lessons learned from the Depression had led regulators to build resilience in the system by only allowing banks to serve a limited area. A big bank with branches all across the state or even across a county was seen as an unacceptable financial risk and a concentration of power so large that it would invite corruption. I’m glad that we have figured out how to avoid systemic financial risk and that our politicians are now beyond corruption.
Oh, wait, this isn’t the cover for the remake of Dumb and Dumber?
Thus, if you wanted to deal with a banker, you’d drive into town from your farm and go talk to Pop. Pop wouldn’t loan you money if you couldn’t repay it. When he retired, he felt that he had his risks covered. The same year I met The Mrs., Pop Wilder headed off to Europe to revisit the location where he saw a certain Mr. Churchill taking a stroll on a French beach.
I can’t speak to the financial condition of The Mrs.’ family in as much detail. But at the time I met her, her dad had to sell several head of cattle (there weren’t all that many to begin with) to cover a debt from his wife’s business. He was retired, but it was obvious that they were counting on Social Security to cover the bulk of their retirement costs, especially after my mother-in-law shut down her small business and entered semi-retirement herself.
Who does it look like would have the most trouble-free retirement?
Sure, we’d all say Pop Wilder. But in the end, my in-laws have had the better run. What happened to my in-laws was a temporary setback. Within two years, several oil and gas companies began knocking on their door of their farmhouse. Soon enough, they’d sold a lease.
The oil company drilled. Within a few years, my in-laws had their old house (it was held together, The Mrs. said, by the termites and mice holding hands very tightly so it didn’t collapse) demolished. They replaced the house with a new one, and filled in the pit where the basement of their old farm house had been.
My in-laws had been frugal all of their lives, but at this point, retired and on Medicare, they were doing beyond okay – they were thriving. Were they “buying a brand-new Ferrari®” okay? No. But there’s nothing like the peace of mind that having a producing oil well on the property creates. And, yes, production has gone down, so it’s not as much money. But it’s still been a big help.
And whatever happened to the ever-planning Pop Wilder?
No, really, voters, I have eyes only for you.
Pop Wilder spent it all. Slowly, and not at all frivolously, outside of the trip to Europe. Pop had gotten to the point where he was just a little bit under water each month. Not by much – my brother (also named John Wilder) and I could easily help him out by kicking in $200 each month. And that was a small price to pay for all of the cars I’d wrecked.
When Pop passed on, I think he was down to $100 in his account.
William Blake died in 1827, and was far from a conventional thinker. I’d spend more time studying his writing, but from experience I’ve found that when you pick up the book of an esoteric author that died 200 years ago, you miss a lot of what they’re talking about without a great deal of study. I bought a book about the Knights Templar back in 1999, and after reading about eight other books I was able to pick that first book up and follow it.
There’s a lot that they don’t teach you at school.
Anyway, back to Blake. There is one quote from Blake that’s not unconventional and you won’t have to study for three years to figure out: “Life can only be lived forward, but understood in reverse.”
I’ve always loved that quote, and the longer I live, the more that quote makes sense: most of the time as you go through life you can’t really understand the reasons for what’s happening to you. And I wonder what lessons Pop Wilder learned – was it the ability to let go and let fate guide him while he had friendly hands to help? Maybe.
That was a tough final – we had to construct our own universes – from scratch!
And for my in-laws – was the lesson that a life frugally lived can be paid off with comfort in the end? Again, maybe.
I can’t be certain. Those lessons were theirs, not mine.
The Romans had a goddess, Fortuna, who represented luck – both good and bad. This particular goddess had a long life in Rome, she showed up around 600 B.C. and was hanging around in the Medieval days when St. Augustine wrote (not approvingly) about her work as a goddess in his 5th Century book, City of God. Perhaps the version of Fortuna that inspired Blake was from St. Boethius who reflected in his 6th Century book the Consolation of Philosophy that (from Wikipedia) “the apparently random and often ruinous turns of Fortune’s Wheel are in fact both inevitable and providential, that even the most coincidental events are parts of God’s hidden plan which one should not resist or try to change.”
That sounds more like Blake.
Is it me, or has Fortuna been lifting?
As for me, by observing this the one thing I know is that the future is uncertain, and as I get closer (not there, yet) to retirement, I begin to understand that, while I can put together spreadsheet after spreadsheet, I certainly cannot control Fortuna. There are too many possibilities in the future that are simply beyond the ability of anyone to control.
Will:
there be inflation?
they strike oil under my house causing Granny, Jethro, The Mrs. and I to move to Beverly Hills? We thought about it, but live next door to a banker? I hear they bring down property values.
civilizational decay make it so I can’t get a decent chili dog?
I live to be 190? I hope not.
government have to change the deal as Medicare eats all of the Federal budget? Nearly certain.
And what will I do in the face of such uncertainty? In the immortal words of David Lee Roth . . . “I’ll just roll myself up in a big ball . . . and fly.”
Unless, of course, my lessons revolve around being Pugsley’s house-television-car repair service.
“As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.” – Idiocracy
This is the second part of the review of the book At Our Wits’ End. The first part can be found here at At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First: Increasing Intelligence and Civilization. Again, I recommend the book, and the link is below. As of this writing I don’t get any compensation if you buy it here. Buy it anyway. It’s an important book.
When last we left Western Civilization, we’d reached the smartest point ever in history. Isaac Newton was an example of the genius produced at this time in history. Dutton and Woodley have data to suggest that 1750 was the peak of intelligence for Western Civilization.
Is there any evidence for this?
Certainly.
Life in 1770 was fairly comparable to life in 1470. Given three hundred years, things hadn’t changed much at all. But by 1804, life was dramatically different. The Industrial Revolution® was a product of the accumulated intellectual capital of the preceding five hundred years and it changed everything.
Medicine also kept more of the children of poor people and poor single mothers alive. As established previously,
Poor impulse control is correlated with lower I.Q.,
Single motherhood is correlated with lower I.Q.,
Less overall wealth is correlated with lower I.Q., and
Having more children is correlated with lower I.Q.
Again, none of these predict the behavior in individuals. The friend I have with the greatest number of children has a very high I.Q. There are several very smart people I know that don’t have a lot of money. And anyone under the influence of testosterone and being 18 has really crappy impulse control. I will also remind everyone being rich doesn’t mean you’re virtuous. Neither does being smart. But in group behavior, the correlations above are well documented.
Dutton and Woodley note that they’re not the first ones to see the inherent problems with the removal of natural selection in a wealthy society. Benedict Morel, named after a mushroom, observed this problem in 1857 between surrenders in France. Francis Galton wrote in 1865 that “Civilization preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.” Ouch.
But it’s true. As of this week, every member of our family wears glasses as Pugsley was the last to leave the “good eyes” club. And The Mrs. developed type I diabetes when she was 12. Prior to the 1920’s this was a near immediate death sentence. However, since insulin was isolated and entered the market in the 1930’s, she’s alive and had kids, namely Pugsley and The Boy. Her genes would never have reproduced without the Industrial Revolution™.
Spoiler alert: they’re never going to be ready.
Charles Darwin wrote an entire book on the problem: The Descent of Man. It really wasn’t a light “summer at the beach” read as it described humanity getting progressively . . . worse. Smarter people use contraception more (remember, the prohibition against birth control went away as religious beliefs changed). And lower I.Q. people not only have more children, they actively desire more children.
Further factors that have developed as society absorbed the wealth of the great capitalist expansion include the development of a welfare state. That’s a problem if you want smart people around. Welfare states support and encourage single mothers (lower I.Q.) to have more children and ensures that those children survive. Dutton and Woodley also note that data suggests that welfare may encourage those who are also low in “personality factors” (agreeableness and conscientiousness) to have more children. What does that lead to? A population that is more impulsive, paranoid, apathetic and aggressive. By coincidence these traits are also associated with lower I.Q.
So, numbers increase on the lower end of the I.Q. scale. What about on the upper end? Are smart people are having lots of babies? No. Opening high value careers up to intelligent women causes them to have fewer babies. Higher I.Q. people also use birth control more frequently, and actually desire to have smaller families. So not only are lower I.Q. people having more lower I.Q. babies, smarter people are having fewer high I.Q. children.
But at least they have what plants crave!
Having a wealthy society also increases the desire for people from less wealthy countries to immigrate to the rich countries. As we shown in the previous post (I.Q. – uh- What is it good for? Absolutely Everything. Say it again.), less wealth generally correlates to lower societal I.Q. Does this translate to real-world outcomes? Yes. Dutton and Woodley cite Danish studies that show the average Dane I.Q. to be around 100. However, the I.Q. of non-Western immigrants is roughly 86 in Denmark. Immigrants certainly aren’t making Denmark smarter.
To think, you could live in a paradise like this . . . .
Since intelligence is 0.80 correlated with genetics, they and their children actually can’t make Denmark smarter. This result would indicate that wealth, quality of life, and ability to self-govern would decrease in countries facing high immigration, while crime would increase. As a completely unrelated note, the United States has more immigrants than any country on Earth, with 40% of the population (How the Constitution Dies) now being either first generation or born of a foreign mother.
But What About The Flynn Effect?
The Flynn Effect refers to a general rise in IQ scores between 1930 and 1980, noted by a guy named (drum roll) Flynn, James Flynn – he’ll take his data shaken, not stirred. For whatever reason I.Q. scores seemed to be increasing. However, Dutton and Woodley explain that the Flynn effect is most likely environmental in nature (i.e., better nutrition) and not genetic.
Apparently the I.Q. test sub-scores that show improvement tend to favor very specific areas of intelligence, namely those areas that are environmentally influenced. There is a parallel with height, they point out: in 1900, average height in Great Britain was 5’6”. In 1970 it was 5’10”. But growth has been in leg length (which is more correlated with environmental factors) versus torso length (which is more genetic). People are taller due to nutrition.
Additionally, schools train more for abstract thought than they would have in a mostly agrarian society, which would have been the norm throughout the West in 1930. Country schoolhouses didn’t need to teach logic puzzles, since they were focused on traditional subjects. Now children are drilled in the kinds of questions that are used on I.Q. tests – and if you practice, you do get better even if you’re not smarter. On some I.Q. tests administered to youth, they’re not considered to be valid if the child had the test in the past year, so practicing the kinds of questions on the test will likely improve scores.
The bad news is that evidence suggests that the Flynn effect has stopped around somewhere around the year 2000 and is now headed downward. Reaction times (a proxy for intelligence) have dropped. Reaction times aren’t as closely correlated with I.Q. as many of the other things we’ve talked about, but they are directly measurable. It may be a bad ruler, but it’s a ruler that we can use to compare across time.
Also confirming the I.Q. drop is work done by Augustine Kong, a Chinese researcher at the University of Iceland studied genetic components known to increase I.Q. They’re declining. The average Icelander born in 1990 wasn’t as smart as one born in 1910, and the genetics aren’t there to support an increasing I.Q. The opposite appears to be happening.
Dutton and Woodley conclude that based on the metrics they reviewed, the “average” Englishman of 1850 would be in the top 15% of intelligence today in England. Oops. And apparently all tests surveyed indicate declining I.Q. That’s a problem: if average intelligence is declining, and intelligence is a bell curve, there will be fewer geniuses and a smaller “smart fraction” that is able to put run and hold together a technologically advanced society. Or build a SR-71 Blackbird. Or a Saturn V rocket.
Just like a bad horror movie, it keeps getting worse. The very temperament of genius is changing – from stereotypical genius – a very driven, self and work-preoccupied Einstein to Todd from corporate: intelligent, socially skilled, agreeable, and conscientious. Thankfully the genius “Todd” will provide us really detailed policy manuals and snappy PowerPoints® instead of that useless groundbreaking physics.
On the bright side, the murder rate is down. Why would that be so? Murder, violence and impulsive behavior is correlated with lower I.Q. Dutton and Woodley theorize that the environment that creates violence is down – given a robust welfare system it’s less likely that financial pressures or social pressures are as high. You kid won’t be starving to death as they stuff their face full of Cheetos® while they sit on the couch playing X-Box™, and since obesity is up, killing people is such hard work, anyway.
Why do Civilizations Rise and Fall?
Like your mother-in-law, early civilizations have a low I.Q. – they’re dangerous places to be. But over time group selection pressures intensify, the people become highly religious and ethnocentric – the hill people want to kill and eat the valley people, and vice-versa, and everybody wants to kill the group whose god makes them wear purple. The nice thing about strong religion and ethnocentric behavior is it allows your group to compete well.
If your religion is good enough, and if you get enough selection for I.Q., you just might end up with a baby civilization on your hands. Once I.Q. increases, conditions get better. An elite is formed, and, since they have nothing better to do, they begin to question all of the social traditions that made civilization smart and wealthy.
The elite begins to compete on who can be more altruistic and ethnocentrism (favoring your own people) becomes badthink. All of the values and norms that created the civilization are despised and thrown out. Society begins to decline. “. . . extreme views . . . eventually become the norm.”
Resources are then taken from those that are more capable and given to those that are less capable, which is called fairness since all people are equal, right? I.Q. drops. Innovation drops.
Then? The elite is purged, and the civilization collapses. The authors anticipate the following response, that: “. . . it doesn’t work precisely with some obscure civilization or other; or demand that we respond to an infinite regress of every unlikely possible alternative explanation . . . .” Yeah, even academics get denial.
Okay, maybe it won’t take that long.
Does This Explain Past History with Other Civilizations?
Sure.
Ancient Greece.
Islamic Civilization. 64% of important Islamic scientists lived before 1250. 100% of them lived before 1750.
China. It came very close to its own industrial revolution.
The Roman Empire. Why didn’t Rome (as awesome as it was) have an industrial revolution? Contraception and abortion were approved of. Higher IQ women generally had fewer children, and this collapsed Rome prior to that great leap that would have led to Maximus™ brand Ocelot Bitez® and Roman tanks. Man, I wish we would have had Roman tanks.
What About Western Civilization?
Western Civilization has followed the same cycle, but with this important difference: Christianity had a taboo against contraception and abortion which kept higher I.Q. women having children. The Spring of Western Civilization was from 1000 to 1500. During this time, it was highly religious and highly ethnocentric, just like the model.
Autumn – Industrial Revolution™ to last Tuesday. We find ourselves with the elite questioning society. The ideas and thoughts that the civilization is capable of are reaching their highest level as we harvest the fruit of hundreds of years of human advancement.
We may be in Winter or close to it. The hallmark of winter is a declining I.Q. as the less intelligent spew out children like a society-destroying genetic AR-15. Culturally, Winter is characterized by the reproduction of good ideas from the past rather than coming up with new ones. Multiculturalism and Marxism are “anti-rational” and “their adoption should show how far g (I.Q.) has fallen.” Dutton and Woodley quote Charles Murray with the phrase that describes the era – “The feeling that the story has run out.”
The authors are not certain we are there, but feel that it’s worth noting that things don’t look very good.
Thanks, guys.
Are There Solutions?
I’ll leave you to read the book for those alternatives. I’ll summarize it by noting that the solutions provided are not easy choices, and unlikely to be implemented in any democracy. I.Q. drop is caused by our society and values, and won’t be undone by a society with our values. The authors further suggest that maybe we should spend some time saving our knowledge so it’s easier for the next group through.
Dark.
I still recommend the book. I also recommend Dr. Dutton’s YouTube® work. I’ve linked to a good one down below. Next week I should have the transcription done of my interview of him, and it’ll shine a bit more light on these conclusions.
“Give the likes of Baldrick the vote and we’ll be back to cavorting druids, death by stoning and dung for dinner.” – Blackadder
I love accurate historical dramas.
What happens when you find a set of ideas that might explain the world as we see it, that ties together dozens of topics you’ve written extensively about over the course of years?
You smile, even if it means civilization might be ending. Heck, if civilization ends, no more mortgage!
I was not disappointed when At Our Wits’ End arrived and, in my first spoiler alert for the review, I heartily recommend the book without reservation. Dr. Dutton wrote the book along with his colleague, Dr. Michael Woodley, and together they have put together an interesting and compelling scientific narrative. I research many of my posts, and some research takes hours and has dozens of notecards of notes. In this case, I typed my notes about the book – the notes alone are sitting right now at 1725 words. We’ll see how many posts that ends up being: I’m betting it will be two, and I’m certain that not all of my notes will be used. I may end up posting the combined review when it’s complete as a separate page on the blog, along with the interview of Dr. Dutton that he was gracious enough to agree to. I’ll be posting that interview after the review is complete – I think it will form an excellent post script.
Last week’s Monday post (I.Q. – uh- What is it good for? Absolutely Everything. Say it again.) was a warm up – it dealt with how I.Q. shapes the present. In it, the relationship between I.Q. and national wealth is fairly obvious. This week’s post deals with (to me) the more crucial and compelling question – what will the future of Western Civilization and humanity be? This is the core of At Our Wits’ End.
But first, from page 108 of At Our Wits’ End:
One problem with science which many people find difficult to get their heads around, is that the aim of science is to understand the nature of the world and to present the simplest explanation, based on the evidence, for what is going on. Science is not there to be reassuring, to make people feel good, or to help bond society together . . . . Those who call for suppression are, in effect, arguing that scientific pursuit is fine until it forces them to question the worldview that they hold for emotional reasons. Once it does this it is ‘bad science’ or ‘a higher standard of proof should be demanded’ or ‘it is immoral’.
This is perhaps the quote that impacted me the most strongly from the book. We live in a world filled with truths – and the most uncomfortable questions are perhaps the most important to ask. We may not like the answers, but when dealing with reality we cannot make rational decisions without that knowledge. In my personal life, the questions that I hate to ask myself are nearly always the most important ones. Strangely, I also seem to know immediately the answers to those questions, at least when I have the courage to ask them.
The first question posed by the book is a simple one:
What is intelligence?
As discussed previously in this blog, intelligence is the ability to solve complicated problems, generally with some speed. For this review, I’ll use I.Q. and intelligence as well as ‘g’ – the general intelligence factor – interchangeably. Although these are all very different terms for a scientist studying the subject, for the purposes of this review I’ll mangle the language and call them all the same thing and use them more or less similarly. It’s like calling a zebra a horse, but hopefully it excludes centaurs and giraffes and makes for clear reading for the lay reader. Also, keep in mind that these are group numbers – we all know and can cite examples of individuals who don’t follow the group correlations we’ll discuss – the genius level smart dude who has bad body odor and lives in his parent’s basement. The sort-of dim kid who developed a business and makes $350,000 a year. They exist. But they’re the exceptions, not the rule.
Intelligence has a most interesting property: it’s inheritable – with a correlation of about 0.8, which is pretty high. 1.0 is perfect correlation, -1.0 is perfect negative correlation. Educational attainment and economic status correlate with intelligence, as does salary – at about 0.3. Other things that are correlated with intelligence include impulse control. People with higher IQ are also more trusting. On an individual level to predict a person’s performance you also have to have information about their personality, but on a group level I.Q. has significant predictive power.
It’s generally the dream of every first grade teacher that all of her students are equal. But she knows that’s a lie. Every student isn’t equal – some are much better at some tasks than others. Some are much better at every task, and people who do well on one task generally do well on other tasks – intelligent brains just seem to have more bandwidth in general – it’s like they have an overclocked nervous system. Again, this doesn’t mean that they’re more virtuous, simply that they have greater capabilities.
The average IQ also determines interests to some extent – the average IQ of someone who studies anthropology is lower than someone who studies physics.
What are the properties of IQ?
IQ test scores fall out on a bell curve.
~70% of the population has an IQ between 85 and 115.
95% between of the population is between 70 and 130.
Intelligence is “polygenic” – lots of genes are involved in making a smart kid.
But certainly, John Wilder, intelligence means different things to different cultures? In the very succinct commentary of Dutton and Woodley, “No it doesn’t.” I realize that’s not an argument, it’s a refutation – I’ll let you read the book for details. Scientifically it appears that IQ is a valid concept across cultures. It’s valid if the culture is literate. It’s valid if the culture is non-Western. IQ (or intelligence, or “g”) is potentially one of the most predictive and studied properties in social sciences, which tend to be a bit squishier and less science-y than, say, physics or chemistry, so give the social science folks a break that they found this gem.
So can a civilization get smarter?
Yes. If a trait can be passed on via sexual selection (like my butt), then it will be selected for. But in, say, the year 1400 a great butt wasn’t as important as regular food. If you look at the data as generated in the study Survival of the Richest (Gregory Clark) – as quoted by Dutton and Woodley, between 1400 A.D. and the mid-19th century, the top 50% had more surviving children than the poor 50% – nearly twice as many. Since economic status is strongly correlated with I.Q., society became smarter each generation.
Brutal? Yes.
Concerned with sexy butts? Not at all.
Why would smarter people have more surviving children? Less intelligent means less money. That means less food, less heat. That means the poor children are all weaker when the ice weasels (extinct since 1745) came. There’s plenty of evidence for this, as Dutton and Woodley note: the average height on the ship Mary Rose was 5’7” around the time Henry VIII lived. Henry VIII was 6’3”. Henry got better food. He got better genes.
No, it was the genes, silly.
Henry wasn’t especially good at having children, but most of the nobles around that time were good at it – with or without their wives. There is evidence that as many illegitimate children of nobles survived as legitimate children. Most people have to work their whole lives to become a bastard, but like me, those lucky kids were born that way. And some of them did okay – William the Conqueror was illegitimate and managed to invent the paperclip (I made that up) and invade England at the head of the Norman Conquest (I didn’t make that up).
I don’t know the percentage, but I’ll bet a sizable chunk of England is, like me, related to William.
Genes for being wealthy, which is correlated with intelligence, spread throughout society. This still doesn’t explain my sexy, sexy butt. But there were further selection pressures in place: 2% of males were either executed or died in prison. Presumably these were the worst 2%, so society was pruning itself. But mobility worked both ways – people could move up the social strata as well based on their (generally I.Q. related) merits.
Also pruned were the children of unmarried women who didn’t have the position of mistress to someone higher up the social strata. Unmarried mothers have an average I.Q. of 92 in the United States. Childless or married women have an average I.Q. of 105. Today children live via welfare, but back in 1741 (when one study in particular was done) moms would have abandoned them. 71% of these abandoned children in 1741 were dead by the age of 15 versus 40% in the population as a whole. Presumably there would be even less child mortality in the upper incomes.
These selection pressures led to the gradual increase in intellect, culminating in what Dr. Dutton mentioned in one of his YouTube® videos as his estimated date for the smartest generation in recorded history – those born in and around 1750.
So, all is well, and humanity keeps going on an ever-smarter upward march of intelligence?
“The Federation has taught you that conflict should not exist. But without struggle, you would not know who you truly are. Struggle made us strong.” – Star Trek Beyond
Some people think the Universe will last forever. Silly people. We’ll only have stars for the next 100,000,000,000,000 years or so.
The Universe is built on multiple simple principles that interact in ways that make Elvis™, PEZ®, and mayonnaise covered garden gnomes all possible. A light coating of mayo will do – we’re not crazy here at Stately Wilder Manor®. One of those simple principles is that as time passes, disorder in the Universe increases. This tendency towards disorder is called entropy, and it’s not just a good idea – it’s the law: the second law of thermodynamics. The nice thing about this law is you can’t break it, so there’s no need for Thermodynamics Police and Judge Judy can’t preside in Physics Court®.
A way to think about this inexorable drive toward disorder is to imagine that the Universe is a campfire – one that you can’t add wood to. At the beginning it’s a great blaze, because you were an idiot and used gasoline to start the fire and burned off your eyebrows. As the blaze burns, it consumes the wood. After a time there is nothing left but coals, which glow dimly for hours. The current most accepted theory (but not the only one) is that the Universe started with a sudden quantum instability, more commonly known as the Big Bang®.
This tendency toward lower overall energy and thus overall lower order is called entropy.
It’s important to note that entropy always increases in a closed system – like when you store a decapitated human head in a Yeti® cooler – who hasn’t had that problem? The Earth, thankfully, isn’t a closed system. It has a wonderful thermonuclear reactor pumping energy down from millions of miles away, every day. To put it in perspective, the Earth only receives one billionth of the energy that the Sun puts out daily, like you only received one billionth of your mother’s love, since the rest of it was reserved for chardonnay and “Daytime Daddy.”
Why isn’t the Earth a closed system?
The Sun allows us to have surplus energy, and thus order on Earth. With the exception of nuclear reactors, all energy on Earth is solar. Wind is caused by differential heating of the atmosphere. Rain is caused by solar evaporation of water. Even oil is millions of years of trapped sunlight, helpfully stored by God in gas stations. Nuclear fuel used in our current reactors (and the core of the Earth) was forged in the heart of a star. Not Nicholas Cage®. Maybe Johnny Depp™.
This energy is responsible for other things, too. Salt deposits. Sand dunes. And life.
But we know these things for certain. Without energy:
Your house will someday be a wreck.
Your carpet should have been replaced Reagan left office. Brown shag is . . . 1980.
Your body will die.
Until you die, you have to have standards. You have to hold the line.
You have to fight for the glorious tomorrow over the whispering of losing your will and relaxing today.
Life is hard. Life is a struggle. If you are lucky, you can struggle for mighty things, good things, virtuous things. Hopefully with a healthy body and maybe a hardwood floor.
But I’ll let you in on a little secret:
We all lose in the end. Entropy will win. Entropy always wins.
The struggle is the goal.
Regardless of where you are, this is your golden age, your moment – it’s the only one you have. When you were six you knew this. What you read, what you watched – what was thrilling, who were your heroes? People who went to work at a bank? No.
In ancient Sparta, apparently they did Cross-Fit® but didn’t talk about it. They were advanced!
Your heroes were people who struggled, who fought. Winning was preferable, but the struggle was enough. A defiant loss like the Spartans at Thermopylae or the Texans at the Alamo is, perhaps, an even stronger example of virtue.
There are plenty of things in life that are worth fighting for, worth struggling for. What are you going to do with your life?
Grandpa McWilder didn’t wear a kilt. He was an overalls kinda guy.
You have two choices.
You can waste your life. Or you can struggle. Do you have the discipline to embrace the struggle?
All the cool kids are doing it.
At least struggle with a rifle cartridge if you’re gonna fight aliens.
“Could you tell me something about the Corporate Wars?†– Rollerball (1975)
My CEO says this is the wave of the future for corporations, or at least he does when we go visit him at San Quentin.
“Dad, where should I go to work to make a fortune before I win a Nobel Prize®?â€Â The Boy actually said this to me when he was in fifth grade one day while just he and I were out driving. I think that his expectations might be more in line with reality right now. In his defense, by that time he had already made the equivalent of $2,500 by trading in Bitcoin and other crypto currency in his bedroom on the computer he had built when he was in fourth grade. I had no idea that he’d set up a trading shop in his bedroom until Wired® showed up to do a profile on him. Needless to say, his computer moved to the front room the next day.
Today, The Boy’s expectations are a bit more in keeping with what most adults consider reality. He’s thinking about college and career.  The Boy is now contemplating a life of drudgery where he spends his time at a dull, faceless gray job working long hours so he can fulfill his obligations by existing only to pay bills until he dies. Oh, wait. I guess I misspelled, “looking to go out and conquer the world!â€
Seriously, who touches people at work besides strippers and Joe Biden?
The sad fact is, however, that most Americans nowadays work for mid or large-sized organizations of more than 100 employees. What’s the definition of most?
70%+.
I guess that makes sense. We live in an age that celebrates the collective, the large, the behemoth, and that’s just our sodas and underpants. And working for a corporation/large organization has to be nice, right? Of course it is. Otherwise, just like vaping, all the cool kids wouldn’t be doing it.
Benefits: In theory, a large organization can negotiate discounts that save the organization money while providing valuable health care to employees, but in practice it’s a choice between selling the kidney the didn’t operate on to pay the bill or Fred’s Medical School Discount Surgery®.
Relative Disconnect Between Pay and Performance: So, why is this listed as an upside? You have bad days. Bad weeks. Bad months. So blame it on the business cycle. Or on some competitor. Or on someone. Certainly it wasn’t you. Mostly, a boss will buy this as long as you didn’t take a pellet gun and shot customers/other employees in the butt as they walked by while spraying mosquito repellent in their eyes. Heck, even if you did do that, blame it on Phil from Marketing. Everybody knows Phil is crazy.
Autocratic Governance: Your boss may be horrific, but can you imagine how bad they would be if you had to elect them? Can you imagine the campaigns? Then Phil from Marketing would start a Political Action Committee . . . .
Specialization: This is a true upside. It’s nice that large organizations offer positions where you can study and become a true expert on a narrow slice of the business to improve results through superior knowledge. Thankfully, after you’ve done this you can train your replacements from India who work for wages paid in cardboard, broken furniture, and used dental floss.
“I wonder if McDonald’s® is hiring,†wondered wonderful Karen wonderingly.
Increasing Rewards: The farther up the organizational ladder, a strange thing happens. It’s mentioned above that pay gets decoupled from performance, but the higher you go, the more likely you get raises and huge bonuses if the business performs poorly. You’d think that this would require more work, but it really doesn’t. Please tell me the last time you took off in the middle of the day to smoke weed while you were on a podcast? Yeah, looking at you, Elon.
Occasionally, Working With Great Teams For A Great Boss: By accident, you are occasionally thrown together with a likeable group of competent people with good hygiene who share common interests. These people are dedicated to producing good results and in helping each other for both individual success and group success. Please notify HR if this happens so the team can be broken up and reallocated through the business.
Apple’s® 2024 business strategy.
But it’s not all wine and PEZ® coffee and bagels. There are downsides to large organizations, too:
Perception is Reality: I had one job where my boss may have been a biker who indicated that he paid a witness in a felony trial to “be out of state†on the court date. I have no idea if he was telling the truth, but he was weird enough that we all thought that he actually lived in his office. His particular brand of Business Fu (ancient New York martial art) was to convince everyone that he was blameless. In one particular instance he decided to blame me. Thankfully, I had a friend who heard about this and tipped me off. I walked into his office and used Wilder Fu: “You know, I’m glad you’re my boss, since if I look bad, you look bad and perception is reality. I know you’ll take care of me.â€Â He switched from blaming me to blaming Phil from Marketing.
That’s what we do at work, just draw random words and circle them. It’s motivating.
Random Compensation: One year I saved the company $800,000 dollars – and not made up dollars, actual dollars. Result? A 2.13% raise. One year I didn’t contribute a whole lot at all but looked great doing it. 20% bonus.
Increasing Rewards: If you’re getting the increasing rewards, they’re awesome. If you’re working and read in the paper how the CEO is off to Monaco after buying a New York penthouse, maybe not so much.
Most Decisions Don’t Matter (Pareto): As I’ve discussed before (Pareto and the 80/20 Rule Explain Wealth) a small number of decisions you make are the most important ones. It’s the same for a company. Most decisions simply don’t matter if you get them right. I’ve noticed that if I want to keep management busy, I’ll ask them what color they want something to be. They’ll spend (nearly up to the CEO Level) hours and hours with meeting after meeting just to pick carpet color. One time the president of a multi-billion dollar corporation had to pick who got what office at a facility located somewhere in BFE. As an aside – The Boy heard me say “BFE†the other day and was greatly amused when he found out the definition. You can Google it® (not safe for work). I’ll wait.
No One Knows Which Decisions Matter: Which decisions are important? You can’t really be 100% sure – the chain of events started by a typographical error on a McDonald’s® menu that led to Joseph Stalin’s clone destroying Europe in 1978 and the rest of humanity having to escape to another dimension where they never invented the virus that wiped the memory of everyone that with an IQ of less than 160 . . . oh, I’ve said too much. Never mind.
It was even sadder when they started fighting about who got to keep the trophy for “Nearly On Time To Work This Week, Tied For Sixth Place.â€
Rules: Big organizations have rules. Silly ones like having to show up on time. Showering at least weekly. Not flirting with the waitress. Oh, wait, that’s not work, that’s home. But big organizations do have rules, too, and they have to.  Why? Because somebody always has to push the limits. Every single rule in every company’s HR policy manual has a story behind it. And every story has Phil from Marketing behind it. Stupid Phil.
Weird Bosses That Got Promoted Beyond The Level of Sanity: See above. This has happened often enough that I think that being a psychopath is a predictor of business success. Oh, wait, it is? (LINK) That explains everything.
My bad.
Depersonalizing: You can be replaced. That’s really part of the strength of a corporation – everyone from the CEO to the accountants to Phil from Marketing can be replaced. In most cases, unless the CEO is visionary (and most aren’t) you’ll never notice the difference. Who else is part of this faceless collective?  And the system will put you into a gray box with gray computer and gray walls and a gray chair. Why gray? Because it goes with everything.
Nobody Really Cares: I’ve worked with hundreds of people during my career. Outside of a few coworkers from decades past, I’ve lost touch with most of them. It’s not just that I’m a jerk (I am) but also that people are busy with their jobs, their lives and the only intersection they have with you revolves around that 8AM to 5PM time slot. They’re like people your mom paid to have come to your birthday party when you were five. Or that porkchop she put around your neck so the dog would play with you.
This wasn’t on my physics final.
Large Organization Jobs Only Prepare You To Work For Large Organizations: Let’s say you hit mid-career and decide you want to open up your own Sushi-Pizza chain called Samurai Luigi’s – it’s okay, I won’t tell anyone that your secret is serving the pizza raw, too. Chances are you haven’t learned anything about business that’s useful beyond a small narrow window of “capital tax law related to manufacturing investment for Spork® production in Toledo, Ohio.â€Â See, corporations want you to be good at that. But it won’t help with your garlic-salmon-tiramisu or knowing who to bribe to get the local building permit.
So, chances are you’ll be working for a large corporation, but that’s okay. And to all of you soon-to-be graduates out there, look forward to a life of drudgery where you spends your time at a dull, faceless gray job working long hours so you can fulfill your obligations by existing only to pay bills until you die go out and conquer the world!â€
“Well, that’s the end of the film. Now, here’s the meaning of life.” – Monty Python, Meaning of Life
I heard that someone told the Dalai Lama this joke and he didn’t get it. Which is makes it even funnier.
I was busy trying to adjust my phone to listen to a podcast while driving and pouring coffee the other day, and it hit me like a ticket for inattentive driving: There are only four questions that are worth asking. I found that to be amazing, since I have hundreds of note cards with ideas for posts on them in boxes waiting for the right day for me to write them up. So how do I condense most of those ideas as answers to four questions?
I was worried that this was too simple. I bounced back and forth between three questions and four questions, but finally settled on four questions. They were simple questions, and the first one that occurred to me is the first one on this list.
What brought us here?
Who are we?
What is this place?
Where are we going?
Originally I had a fifth question, but then I found my keys. Under my hat. Again. Also, when I use the word “us” in this post, it’s certainly meant to include everyone. Everyone except Johnny Depp. He knows why.
But these are big questions. As I thought a bit about it, these are the questions that drive me to write this blog, with the exception of the odd post here and there.
What brought us here?
This was the first question, and it hit me as I was working out the ideas for a future post in my head. It hit me like an angry wet salmon wearing a bear suit. At its core, this questions the all of the conditions that led to our present state. All of them. It questions the way that we are – as individuals, as groups, as a species.
I would have sworn that Washington had a blue lightsaber.
This is only a four word question, but it’s a really big four word question. Thankfully, it’s simple to answer. All you need to understand it is the answers to any questions you can think of in these subjects:
All of human history.
All of physics.
How PEZ® was invented.
All of the history of the universe.
So, the question is very short, and the answer is very long.
We still don’t know many answers to questions that are fundamental about each of these subjects. One time I was talking to The Mrs. back around 2000. My exact quote to her was, “The Mrs., I’m willing to bet that one day they find that we have Neanderthal ancestors. I think that the reason why I came to that conclusion was based on me. I’m pale. I can sunburn under the glare from an LED computer monitor.
That sort of pale didn’t happen overnight. Along with other physical observations I’d made, it just seemed the most logical conclusion that Neanderthal wasn’t extinct. Neanderthal was us.
So when the DNA evidence came back and, eventually, showed that most European-descended people had Neanderthal DNA I wasn’t surprised. And I’m not surprised now when I hear that our most basic assumptions about the way that things like physics work are subject to change – massive change.
If Vinnie drops a car on Frank’s car, neglecting air resistance and assuming g=9.81m/s . . .
That’s a lot of words for a very basic thing – let me break it down a bit. The Universe that we see is comprised almost entirely of normal matter, not anti-matter. But the Big Bang® should have produced equal quantities of both, so where did the anti-matter go? This is a pretty significant question, since anti-matter explodes with the force of a billion bipolar ex-wives (GigaX) when it comes into contact with normal matter. It’s really good for us that we don’t have this anti-matter going around and wanting alimony payments, but there’s no real reason that the Big Bang™ didn’t produce equal quantities of both.
This discovery from CERN might explain why my ex-wife anti-matter is thankfully rare in our environment. It appears that anti-matter doesn’t follow the same physical laws that matter does. This is the first time we’ve figured that out, but we don’t know how it’s different. But think just for a second – what if you could have a substance that wanted to fall up instead of down? That was anti-magnetic? That could coat, soothe, and protect a sore throat?
Yes. This discovery could provide technologies that we haven’t even dreamed about, but most people have never heard about it. Thankfully we’re all up to date on Kardashians, though.
Thankfully there’s tons of things left to discover, both about ourselves and about the Universe that we can safely ignore while we are Keepin’ up with the Kardashians.
Who are we?
I got this question down to three words. See what a ruthless self-editor I am? This question opens up a lot of today’s biggest mysteries:
How the human body works.
How the brain works.
What consciousness is.
If people have souls.
Why 80% of the world is silly and watches soccer.
What health is.
Immortality – anything besides a great three-letter-score in Scrabble®?
What motivates us.
Why we do the things we do.
I’ll admit, some of these questions do have overlap – the question of “What brought us here?” overlaps some with “Who are we?” Ancestors are crucial to both, for instance. Protip: since you inherit somewhere between 60% and 80% of our intelligence, the first thing you should strive to do is to convince your mom to pick a smart dad for you.
But even given thousands of researchers spending billions of dollars annually, the primary positive impacts to health in the last 150 years have been clean water, better nutrition, antiseptic surgical conditions, and antibiotics. Newspaper stories keep showing up about the immortality around the corner, but I haven’t even seen one fifty year old mouse, and we can cure any kind of mice-cancer at this point.
No, thanks, eyes are fine. And I’ll skip the colonoscopy, thank you.
Thankfully, medical science can all of the questions about why humans are like they are.
Except for the interesting ones.
What is this place?
Our surroundings are curious. There is the world and cosmos we live in, but there are also the civilizations we’ve made. How does all of it work?
What virtue is.
Where virtue comes from.
What societies work well for humanity.
This is the question I could (sort of) cram back into the other three, but I felt it was important enough because of the great deal of discord in society today, and the uncertainty about the future of what we’ve made. Understanding the ability for humans to govern themselves and live together is crucial, and we still haven’t gotten the knack yet.
Where are we going?
This is the final question, the future. The mysteries of the future are different. The past and present are set, the future is undecided, wrapped in probability. What are the big questions, the big unknowns of the future? This question is easy to answer if we just know:
The fate of ourselves.
The fate of our civilizations.
The fate of humanity.
The fate of life itself.
Physics (all of it), again.
I’ve mentioned religion twice. Though it’s not a constant part of posting, it’s a very important component in understanding these questions, especially the ones where I’ve listed it. And religion is important as a philosophical construct – it has been the largest single influence on humanity in all of recorded history, and probably before that. Beyond religion as pure philosophy, there is that possibility that deity as contemplated by religion exists, and maybe even close to what is on the label. Science certainly hasn’t ruled that possibility out.
Does a bear answer trivia questions in the woods?
But in 2000, they had ruled out the possibility that we were part Neanderthal, or at least that was the general consensus.
So you never know what we’ll learn in the future. And it looks like I’ve got plenty to write about, and with the amount of Neanderthal blood I have, probably some mammoth to catch and some caves to paint.
“Feller told me one time they got a weed down here and they call it loco weed. When the horses and cows eat it they get wilder than all get out.” – Bonanza
Like this meow meme meow?
I used to be in favor of marijuana legalization. The basis for my thoughts went something like this: it’s your own body, so go ahead and put anything you want in it – it doesn’t ruin my day. Add to that, if the criminals are running the marijuana business, we’re just funding the criminals with the profits. If alcohol prohibition funded the Mafia so it’s still giving us problems nearly 90 years after their source of profits ended, we’ve probably funded the Cartels so that they’ll still exist when NASA restarts manned spaceflight for the United States sometime in the year 3224.
Criminals liked marijuana being illegal.
Politicians liked marijuana being illegal.
Anytime criminals and politicians agreed on anything, I figured it would be better to be on the other side of that equation. And it’s just weed, right? Stoners are happy folks, and probably actually do drive a lot better than anyone after a six pack and have plumper, pinker livers.
As a non-participant in marijuana culture (except for the occasional Cheech and Chong movie) my exposure had consisted of the two or so times I’d given it a try in the VERY distant past. Like having hair after 30, marijuana was something that just never had impacted my life. Weed was just weed, right?
Wrong.
What are Chong’s three favorite things? Chicken pot pie.
I was listening to the radio around the year 2000, however, and a radio doctor (he specialized in AM and radios transitioning to FM) came on and said, “Guys, you have to realize – the marijuana today isn’t the same thing as marijuana from the 1960’s and 1970’s. The new strains have been bred so that they are much, much more potent and have much higher levels of THC (the stuff that gets you high) than weed from back in the day.” As a non-toker, it didn’t really matter to me, but I found the fact fascinating. I filed it away, mainly to use in dad-related conversations when I talk to The Boy and Pugsley about not doing weed.
In my weird family (as noted before, my brother’s name is John Wilder, as well) one member (it would be too complicated and ultimately pointless to explain the relationship, needless to say we have a lot of the same DNA) of our family was . . . baked. We’ll call her Jean Wilder, so we can have John, John, and Jean.
I was exceedingly young when Jean, who was thirtysomething at the time, came to live with us. I might have been four or so. It was obvious even to me at the tender age of four that Jean’s elevator was stuck somewhere near floor 13 – often she would sit in a chair, smoking cigarettes, staring blankly off into the corner of the room above and to the left of the 15” black and white television before laughing at something that no one else could see or hear. Sure, this is common behavior today, but since this was before cellphones, this behavior was considered unusual.
More proof that weed is safe.
I asked Great-Grandma McWilder why Jean was so goofy, and Great-Grandma McWilder looked to the left and looked to the right as if to check if invisible elves were monitoring her in the kitchen (this was before Alexa®) and then whispered to me “dope.”
Sure, you guys might think she was talking about me. And I’ll agree – most four-year-olds are pretty dopey. But in this case, dope was what Great-Grandma McWilder called any illicit recreational substance. Having been born in approximately 1732, Great-Grandma McWilder’s knowledge of illicit substances consisted of the illegal gin and untaxed cigars that I think Great-Grandpa McWilder sold at his “pool hall” during prohibition. Or maybe he just read his bible all day?
Anyway, Great-Grandma McWilder whispered “dope” because at that time families felt a thing called “shame” for the misbehavior of their members. I think “shame” has since been replaced with ribbons that say “participation” on it.
“What’s dope?” I asked innocently, because at that time in my life I actually was innocent.
She sighed. It’s difficult when you have to explain to a four-year-old what illegal drugs were. I don’t remember her exact words, but I got the idea that it was like aspirin, but very bad for you in that they hurt your mind. She didn’t have to explain much more. I had seen Jean.
As I grew older, I found out more about Jean. She had been very smart as a child, but willful. Her spacey and other-worldly behavior didn’t change as the calendar pages flipped, however. As my school gave my class more and more details about the drugs we shouldn’t be taking including lots of instructions about how we shouldn’t take them, pre-teen me guessed that Jean had probably taken LSD (not to be confused with LDS) and the experience had changed her. Forever.
By the time I got to my teens, I asked Jean about her past drug use. She said that the only drug she’d ever tried had been marijuana. Back then, I figured she was lying. Certainly grass didn’t cause the delusions and hallucinations I had observed, right? Harmless weed wouldn’t have convinced Jean that Madonna® had stolen the songs from her notebook (this was what Jean believed). Ganja wouldn’t have made Jean phone in a missing person report to the sheriff on ME because a shadowy cabal of evil doctors (I’m not making this up) had kidnapped me, even though I was off in the college dorms safe and sound at the time? Reefer wouldn’t do that, right?
Well, not so fast, Pat Sajak.
A recent study came out this week and showed that instances of psychosis were three times higher in areas where you could get strong weed. And psychosis explained every symptom that Jean had. Jean was very nice, very sweet, and a danger only to herself. She self-medicated with nicotine – she was never without a smoke – but anti-psychotics seemed to work much better.
But trends are troubling – weed THC content has doubled in the last 10 years. But Jean toked up long before then. What happened to her? Some mutant weed? A lot of weed? I have no idea. I’m not a doctor. Jean did live a long, happy, though not particularly useful life, and I’m certain wouldn’t be offended by this post.
Okay, I guess this is my final conclusion.
There appears to be some evidence that marijuana and some marijuana derivatives are useful for things like seizures, overcoming chemotherapy side effects, and playing Red Dead Redemption™ and Fallout® in Mom’s basement. Again, I’m not a doctor, but I will be warning my kids that marijuana is certainly more dangerous than is commonly accepted and should be avoided at all costs for recreation. It’s just not worth the risk of, well, being psychotic for the rest of your life. Plus I’m going to make them get tattoos that say “legal doesn’t mean moral” on their foreheads if I ever catch them lighting up a doobie.
If only there was a way to stop drug use while not funneling money to the cartels.
“In 1539, the Knight Templars of Malta paid tribute to Charles V of Spain by sending him a Golden Falcon encrusted from beak to claw with rarest jewels. But pirates seized the galley carrying this priceless token and the fate of the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery . . .” – The Maltese Falcon
In Malta they don’t check your bags for guns, they check them with guns.
Sometimes advice that is good for a country is really bad for an individual. I tried building my own navy once, and it was an abysmal failure, since I’ve never lived near water all the ships just sat on the gravel. Thankfully it was still enough of a navy that France surrendered anyway. So, memo to self: don’t build a navy 1000 miles away from water unless you want to take Paris.
But why beat on France? I’ve discovered that on this blog, it’s really okay to trash-talk the French because in the last year I’ve gotten more traffic from Malta than I have from France on an absolute basis. On a per capita basis, Malta is ahead on visitor count of any place in the world. The United States is second, but it’s gaining ground. Malta, spread the word!
I digress because it’s late and I’m a bit punchy – so I’ll get back to the point. One place where the advice for a country and the advice for an individual both make sense is when it comes to know-how. Where does know-how come from? Sweat.
I had a boss fairly early in my career (technically a grand-boss, i.e., my boss’s boss) who was fairly fond of saying, especially when assigning a task that would entail huge hours of overtime and personal sacrifice, “Think of it as short-term pain for long-term gain.” He’d smile when he said it, but that didn’t make it better.
Being young and stupid, we grumbled about what he was saying: “What does he know? It’s always short-term pain. We’ll never get to the long-term gain.” This was exactly the type of short-sightedness you’d expect out of a kid. And we were kids, really. We also worked our butts off while we were in our twenties, and most people who started in that group did okay. The short-term pain translated (finally) into long-term gain.
Please donate to Malta so they can end this horrible poverty.
It’s that way for individuals. Is it that way for countries, too?
Yes, absolutely.
When you do something productive, anything productive, you learn. You learn as an individual. You learn as a company. You learn as a country. If you do it right, it’s painful. It’s hard. It’s work. It’s frustrating. And when you finally win? It’s exhilarating.
If you do a really, really, really good job? You get rewarded, by trying to do it again.
And those results are consistent between an individual, a company, and a country.
Imagine a kid who was born wealthy. Given tutors. Given “help” getting into a good college. Coasted in college. Coasted in Daddy’s company. Unless Daddy was very, very wealthy, the kid will ruin the company as he runs the company. Why? The kid never had to work, never had to learn.
The entire life of the child was built around pain-avoidance.
Okay, I’ll admit, that water looks the complete opposite of painful. I guess I wouldn’t learn anything there.
I’m not going to blame wealth – wealth is neither moral nor immoral. I’ve known wealthy kids who were better people than I’ll ever be. I’ve known wealthy kids who weren’t worth gum on the bottom of my sneaker. But poverty is no virtue, either. I’ve met horrible people who had no money. And, again, I’ve met people who were dead broke that could qualify for sainthood.
Morality aside (for the moment) the one thing I know about effective people is that they know how to work hard. They are driven. Most of them, wealthy or not, were not spoiled.
Pain and sweat is good for companies, too. It makes them shed employees, it makes them focus on the things they do that actually provide value to the customer. Or they die. And the death of inefficient companies is good – those resources can go to companies that can be efficient, can meet the needs of their customers, like PEZ®.
All of that’s pretty good, but they also develop the teams on ground – the engineering know-how to solve the production problems that invariably start. You might have a complete set of drawings of a baby, but you certainly don’t know how to build one from start to finish. Nobody does.
Oh, wait. You probably do. Okay, pretend the baby is a 1966 Mustang™. That you don’t know how to build from start to finish. You have to go all the way from smelting iron to figuring out how to put numbers on the AM radio dial.
That’s (one of) the problems that we have getting into space nowadays. We forgot how to build the Apollo stuff. Certainly we know, for instance, what chemicals went into the heat shield on the Apollo command module, but we had to figure out how to build one in 2018 – the engineers who did it in the first place are all retired. My bet is that they didn’t figure out how to build it the way they did in the 1960’s – they probably figured out a new solution.
More fun facts: If you stacked all of the current residents of Rome in the Pantheon, someone would arrest you, unless they were at the bottom of the stack.
This isn’t the first time we’ve lost technology. The Romans used concrete to build many structures, including the largest un-reinforced concrete dome ever – at 142 feet in diameter. How do we know this? The dome still exists today – it’s in Rome, and it’s called the Pantheon, and like your mother, it’s almost 2,000 years old. Yes it’s made of concrete, as in concrete just like your garage floor is made of. But after the Goths came over for an extended visit, the Romans . . . forgot how to make it. Consequently, concrete wasn’t “invented” again until 1824, and we weren’t that great with it until 1900 or so. The Romans had a quality of concrete that was so good, it wasn’t until the last few decades that we were able to match it, and some of the properties we still can’t figure out.
We don’t have records on all the failures and sweat that the Romans had as they perfected their concrete, but they were good at it.
This floor could break a LOT of plates.
But as the Romans learned, if you don’t make stuff anymore, you forget how to do it. You specialize it, you ship it abroad. The Romans didn’t have time for nasty old industries like making dinner plates, so they shipped it off to a lower labor cost area in what’s now France. Archaeologists know this because when they sifted through the trash, they found these really nice plates. But after Rome fell, trade fell off with France, and the factories closed because they didn’t have customers. Archaeologists love plates because people break them on a periodic basis, and even more often if there are teenage boys in the house. Thus, they go into the trash at a regular rate, and you can date the trash by the style of plate.
In the trash 100 years after the fall of the Empire (in the west), the plates were rough. Even the most wealthy people ate off of plates that were inferior in every way to the plates common people had easy access to in the past. The future didn’t get better, because the Romans forgot.
I worry sometimes that we’re the wealthy spoiled kid, shipping off our work to other people so that they learn how to do it while we ship them money that we’ve printed out of nothing, short-term gain for long-term pain. But that’s okay.
Based on the recent protests in France, I think the French are planning something. Maybe they’ll surrender to Malta?
Nah. The Maltese are too good for the French.
Pantheon photo: By Mohammad Reza Domiri Ganji – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, via wikimedia
Malta floor photo: By Sudika [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)] via wikimedia
When I was in grade school the teachers spoke of the Constitution with reverence. As second graders, we listened as the teacher told the story of how it was written and the freedoms it guaranteed us and the responsibilities that it demanded of us. My grade school teachers were all married women, and they loved America. It was a small town, and the teachers had grown up in the area. Some of them had taught their own children and their own grandchildren in the same school where the chalkboard dust, lead paint dust, water from lead-soldered pipes, and asbestos floor tiles soaked into my skin daily. Even the early reader books were taped together with yellowing cellophane tape at the bindings, and most of the books had been printed decades before. I got to See Spot Run like legions of boys before me, running my fingers over the same dog-eared pages that had been read for years, young mouths quietly sounding out the words.
And these boys before me, who had sat in the same desks, drew beginning math on the same blackboards, pulling chalk from the same worn, wooden tray that I did, got paddled in the same principal’s office that I did. They had traveled the world to strange places that their teachers never named when they opened the geography books during the time they spent in second grade. These were places with foreign names like Guadalcanal. Bastogne. Chosin Reservoir. Da Nang.
One of these boys in particular, a blonde haired young Ranger, was barely eighteen when he was shot climbing the cliffs at Pointe Du Hoc on the sixth of June, 1944. His sister was a friend of my father. As a young boy that Ranger sat in that same room, learning the same math decades before I was born. He sat in that same classroom just a few short years before he was buried in Normandy in late spring at the age of 18. No member of his family could afford to visit his grave until over fifty years had passed and his sister walked to his grave and touched its cold marble stone and ran her fingers over his name. Despite that, the young Ranger isn’t lonely – he is surrounded by 9,387 of his comrades who died during the invasion of France.
Rangers climbing Pointe du Hoc.
The teachers, those mothers, in the distant past had taught the children the value of patriotism. The value of the Constitution. The belief that freedom was a great gift from both God and our forefathers and was an idea and an ideal worth fighting for was taught to them in school and in church. Those boys who travelled far wearing Army green, Navy blue, the camouflage of the Marines, and eventually Air Force blue were mainly the sons of farmers, used to hard work that started early in the morning and sometimes went too far into the night when the cows were calving. The things that they were told that were true were God, freedom, family, and country and that you always had to work hard for these things, and sometimes you had to fight for them. And sometimes die for them.
Even the cartoons as I was growing up were infused with patriotism:
Corny? Yes.
The school was torn down some time ago – I don’t know when. A bond issue was finally passed, and a new school was built. There aren’t many more students than when I went there, but there are new classrooms. These new schools are gleaming with whiteboards and new furniture and new books, and from the pictures you can see that the kids look a lot like the kids from when I went there; but the connection with 100 years of history went when the building was torn down.
Change is inevitable, but the one thing that my teachers taught us was that the Constitution was a rock, something special, something that every American had shared for hundreds of years. It was important, and it protected us, and protected our freedom.
I believed that, the way the boys that live forever on Pointe du Hoc did.
Ladders used to scale Pointe du Hoc.
Today, however, the population of the United States is at least 14% foreign born, but I’d bet that number undercounts illegal aliens. Second generation Americans, people born here of immigrants, account for at least 10% of the population. A quarter of the population of this country simply has no connection to anything American. 10% were born here, but were raised in a household that had little to no connection to anything American.
I was working in Houston on one particular job, often late into the night. The cleaning crew came in after 8 PM, and I was often still there. I’d taken Spanish in school, and would share a sentence or two with the very nice cleaning woman who came by. She spoke no English. One day I asked her, in Spanish, “Why don’t you learn English?” I realized that this nice person would have no chance to move up, no way to take part in the economic miracle that is the United States without English.
“Es muy dificil.” It’s too difficult.
The cleaning woman is very nice, but has no connection in any meaningful way to the United States. I’m sure she’s had children by now as 21% of children in the United States have foreign-born mothers. Her children likewise have had no part in building this country and have no reverence for the principles of its founding, or the sacrifices made along the way to create freedom. This is similar to me if I moved to say, England, or Denmark. I love England. I love Denmark. I’m ethnically related to those areas and admire both cultures.
If I moved to England I’d always be the Yankee. Or Amerikansk in Denmark. My kids, even if I had kids there, wouldn’t be English. They wouldn’t be Danish. They’d be the “kids of that American that lives here.” Maybe if my kids were born there, and then worked hard to assimilate away from the American attitudes and culture of their parents, then they one day the kids they had would be considered English or Danish. I’m an American, a product of American culture and no citizenship documents will ever change that.
25% of the people in the United States, however, simply aren’t American by any sort of rational criteria. One out of four – an amazing number and a number that is going to grow based on current trends and census data, perhaps to one in three by 2060. The United States has never had such high numbers of foreign born in history.
As these numbers grow, the electorate changes to an electorate that has no history of a representative democracy – most people coming to the United States are from places where elections are not free and fair, and in many cases the politicians from those countries are so corrupt to make Illinois look like a Boy Scout® camp. These are also places where constitutions are meant not for the people, but for the state, and are changed out with stunning regularity, often accompanied by firing squads and atrocity. They expect better here, but they also are ready-made for the politicians that promise them the world.
The political class, however, is excellent at creating and playing on resentment in new immigrants with no history of good government. Division is the strength of these politicians. “Why do these people have a say as to who is an American?” “Abolish ICE.” “You deserve free education, free healthcare, free housing, free food.” “Living wage for all.” “Common sense gun laws.” Thankfully, native language broadcasting is available to all of these new residents and new citizens so that they can avoid assimilation into the culture.
These residents also don’t have teachers that teach that the United States is good, that the Constitution is a meaningful document – times have changed and that just isn’t the “woke” take. They don’t get any of this from their family, either. Their family simply doesn’t know anything about freedom and the Constitution in most cases, and probably wouldn’t care if they did. It’s a document that foreigners put together – it is not part of their history at all.
Pointe du Hoc, after it had been taken.
As I said, I had faith in the Constitution. It was a great wall that both defined and constricted government, but in recent decades “rights” have been made up from layer after layer of interpretation that have nothing to do with the original text. On the other hand, rights that are written about clearly in plain language are somehow interpreted to be so limited that they hardly exist at all. But there are still some protections that exist, as long as there’s a majority of five to four. Change that number? Watch those liberties evaporate as Justices that admire the constitution of South Africa, the one that’s being interpreted to allow the theft of land, become a majority.
If we have politicians that actively create divisions between Americans with a heritage of limited government and an increasing number of people for whom the history of the United States means nothing, the Constitution won’t mean anything. It will be a speed bump for those who have no connection to it and who have no love of it. The Constitution in the hands of those who hate the limitations it puts on them will, in the long run, provide no safety at all as it is interpreted away, as the press revolts against it, and as the newly imported electorate ignores it.
And what meaning will the blonde Ranger of Pointe du Hoc have then?
