Amerika

Once upon a time, populations weren’t diverse, at least not anywhere near to the forced extent they are today.

Some of these non-diverse populations started to think of ways to avoid conflict among themselves, which included thinking about ending fratricide.

One consequence of the development of humanist philosophy during the Renaissance was the increased emphasis on the importance of education.

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Later, these same populations began to take in different newcomers from all over the planet. At first, they treated these people as tools beneath the level of beasts or as funny exotic oddities.

Then, guilt wormed its way in through various channels and the opposite ludicrous extreme occured as a call went out to insist everybody was a supremely dignified The Same.

In a ranking of 50 states and D.C. by how much each spent per pupil in public schools in 2005, New York ranked first; D.C. third. The state spent $14,100, and New York City just a tad less.

And the bountiful fruits of this massive transfer of taxpayers’ wealth?

Still later, cognitive dissonance began to seep in between the widening cracks. We wanted to keep insisting everyone is the same because like defecating is the ugly outcome of attractive feasting, conflict is the ugly half of our interactions.

The socially polite assertions, a desperate clenching of the gluteus maximus to keep unattractive reality concealed, kept blaring out of the televisions, movie theaters, preacher’s pulpits, teacher’s podiums, politician’s soapboxes and newsman’s microphone, all the while conflicting with the empirical results back in the real world.

Bodily toxifying within, because nature will not be resisted only delayed in vain, society pukes forth the ugly nonetheless:

Yet last week came a report from New York that makes D.C look like M.I.T. Some 200 students, in their first math class at City University of New York, were tested on their basic math skills.

Ninety percent could not do basic algebra. One-third could not convert a decimal into a fraction.

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The answer is less likely found in equally educating with blindness to differences which is on the inside a rotten excuse to not bother with people on an individual basis due to sheer population numbers today. The excuse’s more marketable, friendlier face is called Equal Treatment.

The more likely solution is identifying some best fit vocational path choices on an individual basis. To manage this, since mass social programs alone are generating a lot of mediocre life stories at best, parents themselves would need better tools, possibly including Myers-Briggs typology to identify the individual features of their own children for improved guidance.

Society itself needs to stop insisting that In America, Anyone Can Be President, CEO, groundbreaking scholar, or musical genius because the reality was always that only the rare few get to rise above the rest. Because equality was always no more than comforting illusion, the rest of us in all our great numbers are lost to history forever. I believe we can choose to be adult enough to accept this understanding of our own limitations, ditch the collective ego drama culture, and move on to things better in life than fantasy delusions of humanistic grandeur.

Tags: cognitive dissonance, humanism, liberalism, myers-briggs