Someone once said that thinking is by far the hardest work you will ever see done. I suppose that's why you see it done so poorly, so often and in the best of circles. The best of circles.
I'm a big believer in biography. The internet makes it possible to research a person's origins, education and resume in just a few moments. Just as often as I listen to someone and think, 'That's bullshit', I also think, 'Why don't they know it's bullshit?' I believe this axiom: Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. I would add the word ignorance.
So, the question becomes: How does a reasonably intelligent person get thru a first class education and be totally unaffected by it? The answer is: You dismiss it as being in the way of your goals and thereby cripple any chance to achieve your goals. It's surprising how often impatience makes you miss the boat entirely.
There is a lot of impatience among undergrads. Some people are impressed with that "force of a million new ideas" but others just think to themselves, 'Let's get on with it.' I was always close with a dollar. I paid attention mainly because I was paying them. It must have seemed, sometimes, like I was asking questions just to make them earn their money. Sometimes I was. I get bored like anyone else but usually, I was just curious.
Impatience. Everybody declares a major. People are there because they are interested in following a certain field. The first three semesters of a university education are all the same. They teach you to read, they teach you to write and they try to teach you to think, all in a systematic fashion. These courses seem to have nothing to do with your major. Impatient people resent them. These survey courses are treated like mass-production assembly lines. Yeah, that's a mistake. They should be taught like senior seminars but they aren't. The post grad assistants who teach them treat them as throwaways. A lot of students are led to treat them as throwaways . They rely on detailed notes, sometimes purchased notes and cramming for exams so they may regurgitate in detail what they perceive as useless and immediately forget the gist. People who can't think properly end up with advanced degrees and end up spouting absolute tripe without knowing it. You do see it in the best of circles.
Some of these people who have fallen victim to their own impatience fall victim to another mistake. They begin to think just about everyone else is stupid and exist only to be taken advantage of. These people are uniformly self-serving and dangerous. They speak in fallacies because they think in fallacies that serve their own self-interest. They think in fallacies because they never learned better. It's a vicious circle.
There are very few epiphanies in public life. I can only think of one on a national level. Lyndon Johnson came on television. Announced he would not run for President. He announced he had ordered a stop to the bombing of North Vietnam and had called for peace talks. I almost swallowed my tongue! He realized his thinking had been based on elaborate fallacies. No matter what you have heard he was an exceptional man and our country is infinitely better for him having been President. You can read his biography for a few keystrokes. I think he paid attention in his survey courses in that dusty Texas classroom. Those voices came back to him when it really mattered. You could make the case it was a little late for a couple thousand Vietnamese but better late than never and it's the "never" that's truly dangerous. Nixon and Kissinger proved that by killing 5 million Cambodians. Yeah, they never got it.
They didn't get it in the dust of Wittier or Harvard.
I wonder what you could make of Johnson being the only modern President to have been an elementary school teacher? I wonder a lot of things. I wonder if that's because I paid attention in those survey courses?
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