"When the compassionate revolution came, he wrote, it would 'mark the termination of the past 50,000-year epic of evolution.'"
This is one of the scariest sentences I think I've read in recent memory. We are living it today.
The problematic sentence is here: "I propose to make an ape out of a rat,"
What intellectuals (in my experience, almost all intellectuals) fail to realize is that they are a tiny sliver of the human population. And they are relatively insular. And they deign to design social frameworks that service only their small, insular sliver of humanity.
Most people have more in common with the ape and the rat than the intellectual. Even the intellectual, though he doesn't know it, is mostly driven by the same motivations as the ape and the rat.
Design a framework that works for single moms, burn out high school football players still reliving the glory days, and people working dead-end jobs squirreling away for their short, dismal retirements.
Every time you try and treat the whole of society like intellectuals, you will create a system the falls short.
Literally this. The reason I like night skies and tall heights is that they serve as a grounding rod of sorts, a reminder that I am not the whole, and the whole is not me. That beyond a single degree of separation, I cannot hope to reliably guide the lives of others. No system exists independent of others, nobody lives in a vacuum or on an island, and everything we do is of monumental import to someone else’s existence even if neither party realizes it.
To assume the intellect of others is folly when designing solutions or systems. Instead, a more reliable and scalable indicator of outcomes are actions, not words, and that is something we can shape or control with sufficient stimuli.
Or to be more blunt: we should cease assuming that if we enlighten others that the world will be better, and instead build a better world absent the requirement for enlightenment.
This is one of the scariest sentences I think I've read in recent memory. We are living it today.
The problematic sentence is here: "I propose to make an ape out of a rat,"
What intellectuals (in my experience, almost all intellectuals) fail to realize is that they are a tiny sliver of the human population. And they are relatively insular. And they deign to design social frameworks that service only their small, insular sliver of humanity.
Most people have more in common with the ape and the rat than the intellectual. Even the intellectual, though he doesn't know it, is mostly driven by the same motivations as the ape and the rat.
Design a framework that works for single moms, burn out high school football players still reliving the glory days, and people working dead-end jobs squirreling away for their short, dismal retirements.
Every time you try and treat the whole of society like intellectuals, you will create a system the falls short.