Particularly slow start to my day today. Slept until 2:30 pm and I am still pretty freaking sleepy. When I am done with Part 1 of the day’s blogging, I will likely go right back to sleep. Guess this is one of my sleepy days.
I know I shouldn’t resent them like I do. It’s counterproductive. I would no doubt be better off if I could treat them as cozy little vacations from my usual life. A time to relax and enjoy the warm comfy feelings that come with sleepiness, knoing that this too shall pass in its own good time.
But I can’t help it. I’m a stubborn and ornery kind of person and I fight back. I can’t stand the feeling of my life slipping away from me as I sleep and sleep and sleep.
Not that I was going to do anything amazing with my time anyhow. Oh no, I am falling behind on all my video game playing.
The world needs my mediocre gaming skills!
And we’re back to my feeling that there is something I should be doing. Not sure I have any choice about that one either. I have tried many times to give myself permission to live the life I currently live without any anxiety about all the millions of things I could be doing and therefore should be doing.
I think I stumbled upon something huge when I talked about option paralysis being the result of trying to process far too many variables at the same time.
Well I said something along those lines, anyhow.
I think perhaps that creative types tend to have parallel processing type minds. Creativity requires that kind of complex reasoning.
Creativity, after all, is all about finding connections, and you can’t find the connection between things if you can’t hold those things in your mind at the same time.
And that is fine when the number of variables you can perceive does not exceed the number you can process.
But when it does, the whole damn system crashes. And if, like me, your mind is hyper specialized towards this parallel thinking, you have nowhere to go from there.
So what is needed is to develop my serial thinking skills. Creative types like myself tend to look down on serial thinking types as being dull people who lack imagination, but they don’t get stuck in this kind of quagmire (giggity) because their linear approach to things inherently limits the number of variables they have to deal with at the same time.
I have never been good at doing things slowly and methodically. I attack things with the overwhelming power of this big ol brain of mind and conquer them that way. Slowing down to do things step by step along a well established path makes me want to scream.
But if it allows me to avoid option paralysis, it might be worth a scream or two. Anything that frees me from the infinite hall of infinite doors would be a blessed relief.
Dunno what such a method of determination might look like. But it will probably involved deadly dull things like making lists and setting formal priorities and such.
If I must, I must.
More after the break.
The problem is they’re stupid
Or perhaps I should say “differently intelligent”.
Patient readers know the setup for this intractable issue. Basically, it boils down to this impolite and inappropriate question :
What if some fully enfranchised adult human beings are simply not smart enough to really understand what is going on?
What if, from the point of view of those of us with above average IQ (heretofore referred to as “intellectuals”) the average person simply does not possess the mental hardware to see and understand the world as we do?
What if that means that the average person will always be “stupid” in that sense?
If that is true, then I have no idea how one solves this problem. We certainly can’t pat them on the head and tell them to just trust us because we’re smarter than they are.
That’s a non-starter. It’s completely at odds with everything we are taught as free citizens of a modern democracy. Baked deep into the very structural elements of democracy is the notion that every citizens has both the duty and the right to figure things out for themselves and come to their own conclusions about the issues of the day, and vote accordingly.
And I am sure that made a lot of sense in the early days of modern democracy, when the only people who could vote were educated landowners.
And then the march of egalitarianism demanded that everyone get that same right. And there was no way said march would have even stopped to consider whether this was something the average citizen could actually do.
After all, the people leading the march were liberal intellectuals and as a class we have a marked tendency to imagine that everyone is just like us, and that they too can see the world as we do if we only take the time to educate and inform them.
This often fails. But we keep trying anyhow.
After all, it’s not like we have a choice. It’s not like we would support the formation of some kind of intellectual aristocracy where only the smart vote.
Well, some of us WOULD support that, but most of get that such a class would rapidly become corrupt and tyrannical and far, far worse than democracy ever was.
So the only solution is to shoulder the burden of leading the flock. It is up to us to explain ourselves in language the average person can understand and use our superior minds to lead them to a better tomorrow.
And if we cannot or will not do so, we have only ourselves to blame when things fall apart because we decoded it was better to let stupidity prevail than to “lower” ourselves to the task of explaining complicated things in simple words.
We are, after all, the shepherds of society.
And if the herd goes over a cliff, do you blame the sheep?
No, you blame the shepherd.
The responsibility lies with us.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.