Daily Archives: August 25, 2015

Loving the weird

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As regular readers (hello, you lovely people!) know, I have a rough theory of the common traits of intellectuals. Well recently it has occurred to me that intellectuals share a trait that I didn’t list in my original theory : love of the weird.

It is a subset of our love for mental stimulation. For people who need a great deal of mental stimulation, strange and unusual things are a breath of fresh air. The normal, by definition, is what is usually around, and the human mind automatically tunes out familiar stimuli. The normal, therefore, provides no stimulation at all. This can lead to the greatest fear of intellectuals, which is boredom.

So we automatically seek out the new, the fresh, and the different. The form and degree vary from intellectual to intellectual, but every intellectual is, by default, looking for something that stands out from the background noise of the humdrum. The search for mental stimulation takes care of that.

This is different from people of normal IQ. For them, the strange and unusual is far more troublesome. They might well find some strange things amusing, in a clownish way, but other strange things will frighten and confuse them. For them, that selfsame humdrum world is more soothing and comforting than boring and intolerable. They stick to the main corridors of life, knowing that by doing so, they will remain safe.

This need for the new and strange, then, is one of the factors that put intellectuals and regular folk on different paths. It is one of the things that causes the average Joe or Jolene to think we are very weird. They look at us and see how we casually disregard the border between the normal and safe and everything else, and they just plain don’t understand. They can’t imagine anything that would drive a person out into the outer darkness when everything they could possibly need was available right here in the normal world.

Or so they think.

This brings me to another mark of the intellectual I missed before : choosing individuality over conformity. High intelligence leads naturally to a higher confidence level in the products of our minds and our ability to figure out the answer for ourselves, and this combined with our need for the new and strange leads us to reject conformity as boring and an affront to our individuality, and hence, we go our own way.

This is perfectly in tune with the freethinking ideals laid down by the intellectuals who founded modern democratic cultures, but that does not mean it is without cost. By disregarding conformity to various degrees, we make ourselves seem unsafe and hence unacceptable to the rest of the herd, and we end up ostracized as a result.

Normal people actively avoid anything that might make them seem weird, because to them, being singled out of the herd as strange and hence unsafe would be to have the comfort of the familiar yanked away from them, and that is unthinkable.

We intellectuals lack the kind of social sense required to stay in the middle of the herd, and if we had it, we would likely disregard it as unimportant and/or unnecessarily restrictive. Our mental self-confidence leads us to feel much safer than the average person with mental exploration into what lies outside the normal, and our curiosity (in other words, the active form of the need for mental stimulation) drives us out there to find out what it is that the others fear.

Thus, the intellectual, merely by following their natural inclinations, ends up isolated from the mainstream of society.

One of the ways this manifests is in our sense of humour. Intellectuals, as a group, have a high appetite for abstract absurdity and even downright nonsense. Hence their love of Monty Python and skit comedy in general. Humour that the average person either doesn’t get because it relies on knowledge and a form of thinking unavailable to non-intellectuals, or they understand it fine but don’t see what could possibly be funny about it.

The comedy we consume has to be at least somewhat bizarre and surreal in order to even keep our attention. Comedy requires surprise, and it is harder to surprise someone with a higher than average IQ. We will “see it coming” at a much higher rate than the average person, and that means the demands we place on comedy are quite a bit higher than the usual stuff.

And so it goes with the rest of our tastes as well. We develop an aversion towards anything that has too much of the smell of the herd on it because it is therefore a lot more boring and furthermore will have a lot more competition for it. All intellectuals, being edge of the herd dwellers, have an innate fear of getting trampled by the herd’s sudden changes of direction, and we would rather eat scraps than fight through the throng for our share of the bigger pie.

It doesn’t matter to you who wins the rat race if your main concern is not being a rat in the first place.

And the thing is, nobody creates intellectuals. You can encourage them or suppress them, but they will occur naturally in any human population. Those of higher IQ are an emergent phenomenon of the human race, and we have to consider that perhaps we are meant to be the thinking part of natural human society.

Note that I did not say we are the leaders. Intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient condition of human leadership, and indeed, the barriers to social understand engendered by the intellectual’s strong preference for products of the mind over products of instincts makes many intellectuals terrible leaders. In order to lead, you have to understand the herd, not ignore them with all your might.

So our duty, as it were, is to think and explore. Luckily, like a flock of starlings, this complex phenomenon requires nothing more of us than, ironically, following our natural instincts.

Keep up the good work, everybody!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

About the Amazon thing

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I saw this whole thing coming.

For those of you who haven’t heard about it, it has recently surfaced in the mainstream media that working conditions at these giant Amazon fulfillment centers (basically warehouses where they put your order together and ship it) are terrible. Specifically, it’s a very high-pressure, coldblooded, morale-killing wasteland where employees (all of whom are of low social status, whether it’s working class people or college kids) are held to an inhuman standard of efficiency and a lot of people get ground up and spit out of the system shattered and disillusioned.

I was worried this would happen.

When I first heard that Amazon was building these giant cube shaped fulfillment centers, I got nervous. Large scale facilities have a tendency to become as cold and dehumanizing as something out of Metropolis, and I was worried that even a golden-halo company like Amazon would fall prey to the inherent problems with this particular form of systemization.

Turns out, I was right to be worried.

Then, about a year ago, I started reading personal accounts of what life was like in an Amazon cube, and it confirmed my worst suspicions. Entirely the wrong kind of people were in control, and something akin to a human disaster was the result.

These people are clearly those who think efficiency is measured in numbers and whatever makes those numbers go up is good. Their narrow definition of efficiency ignores non-quantifiable human costs and drives them to demand increasingly inhumane things of their employees and feel nothing but glee at the fact that they made their numbers better.

Then something like a crisis in morale and subsequent breakdown of the entire work environment starts making those numbers go in the wrong direction and they are mystified, absolutely mystified, as to what might have caused it.

Sooner or later, they will blame the workers for not being enough like unfeeling machines and for having pesky needs like humanity, warmth, comfort, consideration, and some kind of sense that the system gives a shit whether they live or die.

Money in, work out! That’s how these people think it’s supposed to be.

So the situation at these fulfillment centers is dire. All the employees are expected to fulfill a very high number of orders per second, despite the fact that their inventory system puts incoming items in whatever space is available and therefore to fulfill one order, you might have to go all over the giant warehouse to get everything. New employees are given a woefully inadequate amount of time to get up to speed, and if they don’t, they are fired and replaced by someone else who is desperate for a job.

See, this, to me, is the real problem with high unemployment. It’s not just that it makes people poor. It’s that it makes them exploitable. The higher the unemployment rate, the shittier the workers can be treated.

And I am sure that’s exactly how the powers that be like it. Quick tip : if you can’t afford to quit your job, then you are not free. The whole premise of labour capitalism is that because you are free to quit a job where you are treated poorly, and this puts pressure on the system to treat their workers better, the workers are free, not slaves.

But how free can anyone be if losing their job will mean their children starve?

Anyhow, back to Amazon. Up to this point in my revelation, a point could be made that the conditions at these centers are harsh and it’s a demanding job, but overall it’s not that bad. I mean, some people must be able to meet these goals or the whole system would break down, right? So it’s a tough job, but it pays $15/hour, so it’s clearly worth it to people.

But the thing that clinched it for me, that proved that entirely the wrong kind of people are in charge, was that they have a snitching program, where employees are encouraged, and rewarded, for reporting their fellow workers slacking off and/or breaking the rules somehow.

And there are a LOT of rules.

Now that is out and out lunacy. The literature proving snitch programs are a terrible idea could fill the Grand Canyon. There is absolutely nothing that is a more effective morale killer. Sowing mistrust and paranoia amongst your employees is a terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE idea and the very idea that the people in charge of these places would enact a policy that is the most deadly morale assassin known to humanity despite the fact that business literature is nearly unanimous in its opposition to it proves, without a doubt, that there are some cruel hearted bastards who hde their sadism behind their piss poor definition of “efficiency” in charge at these fulfillment gulags.

These bastards are primarily to blame for the problem, of course. But the mother corp bears some responsibility too, for farming the jobs out to these facilities then treating those fulfillment centers as “black boxes” that you never open as long as they continue to give you what you want.

I am sure a lot of the people who have been at Amazon for a long time, well educated middle class Silicon Valley types, are shocked, shocked to find out that the working class people doing the grunt work are being treated poorly. After all, they never told anyone to do that!

But as the Stanford Prison Experiment, Abu Graib, and countless other examples, nobody needs to force evil into existence. All they have to do is set up the conditions for it, and then stop paying attention.

The nerds at Amazon can say, quite truthfully, that they had no idea that any of this was going on. And that’s the problem. They should have known what evils were being done in their name.

But they chose to close their eyes to what was going on inside their fulfillment centers, and as a certain song of which I am fond says, evil grows in the dark.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.