Here's a statement that seems to come equally from snotty jerks on every point on the political spectrum and never fails to infuriate me: "The average American is a moron." You know, the average American can't find Iraq on a map labeled "IRAQ" and "EVERYWHERE ELSE." The average American thinks the winner of American Idol is more important than the president. The average American believes everything they're told and misunderstands half of it. The average American eats nothing but McDonalds and watches Jerry Springer fourteen hours a day. And of course, the sheer thickheadedness and gullibility of the average American is the only reason the opposing political party exists.
I've now heard variations on this viewpoint from so many people, from liberals going "we're in danger from the ignorant oil-guzzling of the average American" to conservatives going "the average American just wants the government to support them on welfare forever" that I'm fairly sure the average American thinks that the average American is a moron. (Wait... that might make them right.)
Have you ever met an average American?
I have a job where I talk to strangers every day. Of course some of them are fulminating imbeciles and they tend to stand out in my mind, but really they're just a memorable minority. The majority of people are in the majority of cases pretty reasonable folks. Everyone's got a few things that they're irrational about and a lot of things they just never learned, but I really believe most people do a decent job of understanding and implementing the knowledge that they're exposed to. Look around you, at the technology and businesses and structures in just your immediate vicinity, and you'll find that you're for the most part surrounded by competence.
I really believe that the average American is a capable grown-up who's putting in a decent effort to make the best of what they've got, and who holds political beliefs they've thought about and can justify.
I would like to agree with you but I have seen just too much stupid out there. Hell some of the stupid has been from people who mostly agree with me politically. I think it was the pizza delivery that job that finally convinced me that most people are dumb as rocks. When you don't even know where you live well enough to give decent directions...wow...just...wow.
ReplyDeleteLook around you, at the technology and businesses and structures in just your immediate vicinity, and you'll find that you're for the most part surrounded by competence.
ReplyDeleteBWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
If you mean *immediate* immediate, then you're right. LabRat is competent. But at work? Nothing could be further from the truth. Since I'm a techie, I'll address from that angle first. My coworkers aren't just uneducated about computers and how they operate and relate to what they do day-to-day, but they're actively unwilling to learn. Take for instance this situation, which happens to me on at least a monthly basis: "Hi, Stingray. Can we do [digital task] somehow?" "Why yes. The stuff is already in place for that/Why yes, let me get that in place, and here is how you use this system." "Oh, I guess I'll do without or use the old klunky way. That's too hard." (the latest "that's too hard" was a fucking FTP program. FileZilla and an in-fucking-person step-by-step was too tricky.) That is not competence.
More? Ok. My company's president just hired a salesman to sell a product for which we have a) no inventory, b) no production facilities, c) no functional prototype, and d) a design that was basically outright stolen from a company in Japan.
Still? The senior management team, one with a psychology degree, one with a business management degree, and one with a mechanical engineering degree have started making IT infrastructure decisions without input from anybody with experience in that field.
Keep going? That new salesman I mentioned cannot operate a webmail interface even though he was hand-held through a demonstration. I've answered one question from him about four times. The same question.
Hell, my dog Kodos isn't even a competent guard dog. Apparently a little girl with a pink backpack walking up the street is the deadliest threat known to man, judging by his response and unwillingness to stop barking.
Yeah, there's a good reason 95% of my social interaction happens on the internet. For me, the memorable minority are the ones who don't make me roll my eyes and want to distract them with a jingling bell or something after talking to them for more than five minutes or bland pleasantries. If you exclude family, I can count the number of local (and by that, I'm extending "local" to Santa Fe 45 minutes away) people who fit that description on one hand.
'course the fact that I'm a picky curmudgeon might have something to do with the fact that I don't exactly go out hunting for such folks, but still.
I wish I could agree that most people are more competent than we give them credit for, but well, I work in a salon.
ReplyDeleteMy manager the other dy asked me "Dorkie, what is a biochemistry? My last client said that was his major, what does he study?"
Or my Coworker that didn't know waht uncanny meant, it was written in her birthday card from her sister "Wow sis! the resemblance is uncanny!" (the girl who got that card is a nursing major, brain hurts!)
That's just the people I work with. The clients? Don't get me started, it's just scary some of the things they say!
I agree with you. I can be a bitchy intellectual snob just as well as anyone else and I could probably count the people I actively get along with on one hand, but that's more my problem than theirs. I'm antisocial, and if a person doesn't share a fairly large percentage of my interests and attitudes, I'm just not interested in talking to them.
ReplyDeleteBut that's not because they're stupid, it's because I'm a picky jerk. If 'the average American' was as stupid as some people paint him, society as we know it would grind to a halt. And for all the hand-wringing on either end of the political spectrum, that hasn't actually happened yet.
I strongly suspect that what a lot of these people actually mean by 'stupid' is 'unwilling to do things my way'.
Well...
ReplyDeleteI am deeply suspicious of anyone pontificating about statistics, and throwing around the words "Average" or "Every (x) seconds, a (y) occurs". If yer going to claim that the Average American can/can't (insert stupidity here), I want to see some SOURCES and double-blind scientific studies. Dammit.
On the other hand, I work in the construction industry (not to imply that construction workers are necessarily stupid. Not at all; and stupidity is endemic all the way up the food chain; but the fact is that a lot of the guys I work with are saddled with really crappy jobs because they are uneducated and uncurious and kind of scumbags. But I digress) So yeah, I get to see deep human stupidity --both work related and not, blue and white collar-- on a daily basis.
Here is my favoritest example:
(you may say it is not technically stupidity, but rather ignorance. But still...)
One morning me and my gang are sitting around drinking coffee before starting work, and my smartest ironworker asks me a question(I'll call him Joey. Not his real first name. Very hard worker, a good mechanic, a good family man)
Joey says to me "Hey Larry, how much do you know about English history?"
"Not that much," I say, "Why?"
"Well, how to you get to become a princess? And what do princesses do?"
"Hmm. Well you usually have to be born into the job, though you can get in through marriage. And the post is largely ceremonial these days. Why do you ask?"
Joey had seen an awards show the night before, and the princess of Monaco was the ?MC? ?handing out awards?
I was deeply tempted to bring Joey a tiara the next day, but I refrained. I didn't think he'd get the humor.
True story.
Man, I didn't say that stupidity doesn't exist.
ReplyDeleteWell yeah. And I wasn't trying to make like you said otherwise, but instead point out that in my interactions, the stupid levels are well higher than 50%.
ReplyDelete(Which is great for the irony machine since Los Alamos has the most PhDs per square mile on earth.)
I don't deal too much with outright stupidity fortunately, but I do have problems with willful ignorance. Things like "I don't want to know how it works - you do it." (They don't usually say things precisely like that, but it's usually what they mean.) Or "I don't want to learn how to avoid screwing up, so you have to keep wasting time to fix everything for me." Or worst of all (though this is admittedly just my mother) "I don't even want to know *if* I screwed something up, so you have to waste tons of time and money fixing everything for me without my even noticing it."
ReplyDeleteAnd of course it pisses people off to no end when they are reminded that my entire life does not revolve around doing half their work for them because they don't want to take the time to understand how computers or complex tools or physics or whatever actually work - they just want to get the task done *now*, and get away from having to think about it after it's done. Even if it's something they'll be doing a lot of in the future.
They don't usually seem to be stupid or lazy in a general sense, it's just... more like some sort of rampant personality flaw based on the bizarro logic that learning how to do their work is itself work that takes time away from actually being able to work. As if they would be spending all their time learning how to do something and never actually get the chance to do it. Or something.
Or (to make a semi-wild speculation) maybe it's just that the local schools are so bad that they actually caused some sort of virtual brain damage that made it hard for some people to learn anything useful. After all, I *did* frequently cut classes to go to the library at a nearby college - to give myself a better education because my high-school classes seemed pointless and mind-numbingly dull. So maybe I escaped that. (Nobody questioned it because I never tried to check anything out and looked about 5 years older...)
(Which is great for the irony machine since Los Alamos has the most PhDs per square mile on earth.)
ReplyDeleteStingray: High INT, low WIS.
See also: The senior management team, one with a psychology degree, one with a business management degree, and one with a mechanical engineering degree have started making IT infrastructure decisions without input from anybody with experience in that field.
Remember, 50% of the people around you are dumber of average.
ReplyDelete