One of the frequent questions that life

Reflective Awareness and Intelligence:

Endangered American Qualities

One of the pressing questions that life’s little daily encounters recurrently brings to my mind is ‘Why do so few Americans actively exercise reflective intelligence in the course of their lives?’

Mulling this little gem of a poser over and rolling it around from compartment to compartment within the drafty halls of my (hopefully ‘open’) mind, some curious awarenesses thrust themselves up from the murky surface of my personal intellectual reflecting pool.

Quite clearly, there are far too many possible contributing factors that act to constrain calm, rational reflection on the quality of the lives we (I address specifically my own fellow citizens of the American nation) all lead to quickly formulate a simple answer to this complex query; however, there are a few component fragments of the enigma that are discretely palpable enough to warrant further attempts at construction of some meaningful thought on the subject

Even the most superficial comparison of the daily ebb and flow of human events of a century ago in contrast to the present pace of daily life in the United States will quickly underscore the fact that the basic rate of human activities has accelerated dramatically in the most recent past 10 decades. Much of this ‘speed-up’ is directly attributable to the formidable catalytic effects of our exponentially expanding knowledge, a process enhanced by near logarithmic advancements in science and technology, which have unfortunately now been applied by commercial business organisations towards the ultimate corporate goal of transforming all human beings into little more than rigidly controlled and regulated consumptive organisms. This process naturally

(Above: Albert Einstein's mugs for the camera on April Fool's Day, proving that humor is relative...)

discourages reflective intelligence and the exercise of any discretionary capability for autonomous awareness, since intelligent analysis of any glib commercial visual or auditory ‘reality’ will quickly unveil and starkly reveal radical inconsistencies in logic, truth, and fact, as presented therein. Thus, it is to the advantage of the powerful corporations that control the lives of most Americans to discourage any vestige of iconoclastic inquisitiveness into the deeper nature of apparent (commercial) realities. Naturally, this lamentable status quo is not the product of natural processes as much as it is the product of human behavioral researches that have been harnessed and directly applied towards the goal of both fostering, regulating, and motivating human consumptive tendencies.

It is a well established fact that given a lack of sufficient time to consider each 'commercial' challenge to reason on a per-item basis, the human being so coerced by the stress of such a severely reductive process will ultimately and quite predictably resort to simple reactive responses: thus, the lavishing of billions of dollars of money that are each year spent by corporations to prompt a purely reactive basis of the life experience in America. This is in fact the fundamental founding premise of the entire American advertising industry. While some of us are bright enough to realise we are being unceasingly subjected to this merciless process and highly resent it, most of the population is not—a sad fact that is far too often overlooked or underestimated by those of us who have been gifted with a few less cells dedicated to rational thought processes than most. The basic fact is that the spread of IQs found under the Gaussian distribution curve of intelligence favors the average, or only marginally ‘bright’ individual; the very group most susceptible to coercive manipulation and distortion of information intended to produce a narrowly defined consumer response forms the bulk of that population. QED. Think of that large inverted parabola as a vast ocean full of fat tuna and all those little indices on the curve as clusters of very hungry Great White Sharks waiting for the dinner bell…..

As the pace of American life has accelerated in more or less direct proportion to the growth of science and technology’s profound impacts on our culture, yet some vital and insuppressible questions about how a life is well-lived will still not succumb to the sheer force of mind control and behavioral manipulative powers arrayed against us by a specific group our own more avaricious and morally bereft fellow Tunas. One of these questions, given the immensity of this daily commercial onslaught against our wisdom and reflective powers, is the problem of how to most productively use that small amount of ‘free’ time, left to the average human being after completion of each dreary work day, to most beneficially renew one's sanity and self actualise.

With this question in mind, it is worth further digression to consider the fact that Americans are generally divided into two large and distinct categories (those with children and those without). Since propagation of the species is a natural, biological force, the nature of which more often than not obviates any rational deliberation over the wisdom of instinct-driven mating, arguing over whether or not perpetuating the species is an ultimately wise activity or not assumes a completely academic status. Hence we are left with the '0-point' fact that one either ‘creates’ little extensions of one’s self as a natural course of events, or one does not (either through a conscious rational decision not to propagate, or due to physical inability). For the sake of the argument, further divide these two larger groups into four sub-groups of people to consider: 1) “parents”; 2) childless older couples (whether married or merely ‘paired-up’); 3) single, unpaired or unmarried individuals; and 4) individuals whose mates have left, separated, been lost, or have passed away.

If we take a minute to reflect on the basic and profound disparities that separate each group from the others, it doesn’t take long to come to an awareness that those who are without children have a considerably more substantial ‘reflective range’ within which to roam, than those that are so totally encumbered by their immature little specimens of the species (off-spring entirely dependent upon their unceasing adult care, nurturing, and custody) that they essentially have no such luxurious ruminative option open to them. This status is convenient only in that it provides a ready-made social milieu of similarly preoccupied acquaintances to relate to.

Since most ‘single people’ (that is, currently un-mated, un-coupled, or un-married) are still (usually) on the ‘not quite yet fully matured’ end of the growth process, this suggests that they are somewhat less well equipped to consider the larger aspects of ANYTHING, let alone reflect wisely or intelligently on many of the far broader questions that it behooves all of us to consider. It is further reasonably safe to speculate that (lacking the supposed 'maturity' that age theoretically bestows) single people (specifically younger adults) are less adequately enabled to seek broader, deeper meaning in issues, and as a result (generally) do not. It is not therefore a great mystery why adolescents and immature adults constitute the greatest single target of today’s advertising steam roller, naturally enough.

Excluding for a minute those who are older, yet single, due to the vagaries of fate, fortune, and emotional conflict, this leaves the group known as “parents” and those who are older, married adults who have deliberately chosen NOT to have children to ponder upon. Since there are FAR more of the former than the later, most cultural groups constitute ripe potential victims indeed for commercial consumer-rapists

Considerably complicating the situation, given the fact that today’s American citizen has been increasingly socialized to adapt to a highly mobile, communally disconnected lifestyle in which one routinely travels appreciable distances to work and lives in a ‘bedroom community’ that has little distinctive inherent character as a discrete, cohesive community, there is also a far more oppressive yet vaguely palpable sense of social isolation that obtains in the lives of ordinary Americans today, than ever before.

The chances are great in this homogenous chaos of ethnic, racial, social, and cultural ‘diversity’ that constitutes every-day life for the average American, that he feels (or senses, whether consciously or unconsciously) a degree of alienation and disruptive dissociation with his immediate surroundings that have never been more profound or intrusively impactful. This status quo anomie has led to a social condition wherein the home assumes even more of a ‘fortress refuge’ (again, perhaps not as much consciously regarded as it is vaguely ‘sensed’) from a disturbing world full of sights, sounds, events, activities, and associations that one would not willingly chose to participate in, given any real choice in the matter. This is one of the results of being thrust willingly or not into the widely touted American style ‘diversity’ that is promoted by proponents of today’s operative norm of politically correct socio-civic structuring, since the positive nature of social or cultural diversity may only be recognised and embraced when regarded with an receptivity that draws almost exclusively upon broad-minded openness. The sort of forced ‘diversity’ we are hit over the head with each and every day is more than likely NOT favorably experienced by that great broad mass of marginally bright people that lie within the predominating parabolic hump of our Gaussian curve, and in fact may well promote further antipathy and ignorant reactivity by this most massive segment of our population.

(Right: An amusing and non-lethal variation of "Friendly Fire" in the Middle East)

Thus, while the popular theory of enlightened ‘admixing’ of races, cultures, castes, classes, and social sub-groups looks great on the demographic drawing board, the practical result (an effect that ‘white’ America is experiencing more and more as the white Anglo-Saxon former majority that dominated our culture becomes lost in the rising tide of ‘otherness’) in today’s commercially controlled and ruthlessly consumer subordinated culture is a potentially dangerous building of social resistance and cultural conflict that is exacerbated and further heightened by radical economic shear effects that divide the wealthiest upper classes from the great bulk of the (rapidly shrinking and) increasingly dispossessed middle classes.

This palpable polarization trending that one can see clearly in all sectors of today’s American society is deleteriously augmented by the fact that today’s immigrants to America are not acculturating themselves to the mainstream as willingly as they did a full century ago, when coming to America presupposed a ready commitment to ‘becoming an American’ in every possible way, as quickly as possible. Today, in fact, recent immigrants to America tend to prefer segregating themselves more solidly into socially and economically discontinuous sub-communities and sub-cultures, and their members seem not as willing to readily adopt the formerly dominant (Anglo-Saxon) linguistic and cultural norms that previously obtained, in profound contrast to the previous waves of predominantly ‘western’ (read ‘European’) immigrant peoples arriving on American shores in the late 19^th century.

This digressive consideration and its impact upon present urban American homogeneity notwithstanding, let us return again to the question of how two distinct groups of Americans--those who deliberately chose to have children and those who just as consciously (perhaps more so) chose not to—find themselves relating to today’s social and cultural reality.

A good case for illustrating this may be found in the present political chaos that exists in the state of California, a confused and hotly contested storm center of conflicting priorities directly attributable to economic issues relating directly to the catastrophic impact of multitudinous diverse demands made by a rapidly growing heterogeneous population.

Factoring out and setting aside the fact that California’s woes were as much the result of the deliberate and malicious energy gouging that the nation’s corporate energy cartels engaged in at the state’s expense, as from overall latent effects of an inevitable deflating of the nation’s consumer-supported economy, one fact that emerges in all of the present contention (expressed for the most part as a recall campaign to remove elected Democratic Governor Gray Davis--that has been conveniently funded and disproportionately supported by conservative right-wing Republicans) is that the gross preponderance of state expenditures (figures of 75% or more of the total have been posited) have been for meeting radically increased California education and healthcare needs.

Education in California, a state widely referred to as possessed of the world’s 5^th largest regional economy, has traditionally been provided free of all cost from ‘Kindergarten’ through the first two years of college (post-gymnasium education to Europeans) to all residents of the state. This amazing and generous benefit of ‘free education’ that very few of the states within the US are able to offer their residents (many of whom must pay for part or all of their entire educational costs) has been taken for granted for so long in California, that most people not actually born in the state regard it as part of their basic constitutional rights.

While the cost of providing free education for every single child in the state of California may have been (barely but) adequately manageable in the past (when the state’s overall population was on the order of a mere few million), in today’s demographically impacted state, as the population soars to nearly 55 millions, such generosity is simply no longer economically sustainable public policy. With education being extended equally to the children of non-legal residents, as well as to the children of those who have flocked to California in the last 40 years to take advantage of the state’s peerless social benefits to families, the great cost of providing these benefits has continued to expand exponentially in a near inverse relationship with the state’s economic resources. And yet no one wants to recognise that fact, nor does anyone (especially politicians) want to address the matter fully and objectively, for to do so is uniformly perceived as political suicide by aspiring governmental apparatchiks.

Parents with children uniformly demand that their children’s educational costs be fully paid for by the state as it always has been in the past, despite the fact that the major share of the state’s massive deficit budget of some $38 billion dollars has been created by attempting to continue to meet that unimaginably expensive cost (an outlook that defies reason and/or any sort of rational economic analysis of the issue). The persistence of this public demand for free education is partly due to ignorance of the economics implicit and partly due to whole generations of residents having been spoiled by the accustomed luxury of our (formerly) wealthy welfare state.

(Above: GeeDubya "fighter pilot action figure", or "The Texas Air National Guard out-of-action figure".....take your pick)

The genuine and unavoidable reality of today’s life mandates that ‘free education’ is no longer supportable—even for the world’s ‘richest’ regional government. The fact is also true that parents of school-age children MUST start to accept responsibility for their having casually brought new human lives into the world, despite the daunting and increasingly grim finite socio-economic realities that face the coming generations of Americans. These ‘grim realities’ mandate individual acceptance of personal responsibility for paying for one’s children’s education just as surely as having to pay the disproportionately low petroleum prices that support America’s addiction to wastefully consumptive motor vehicles, or the ever-increasing income taxes that help keep our once powerful national economy from collapsing under the weight of our Iraq War incurred multi-trillion dollar national deficit!

Of course the less obvious benefits that come with having to actually pay their children’s own way through school include gaining a greater influence on the quality of that educational process (a substantial consideration that takes on substantial new importance when one considers that at present people hand over virtually ALL responsibility for their progeny’s upbringing to an overburdened public school system that succeeds in little else than bringing all children down to the same miserable level of the least capable student --the ‘lowest common denominator’ hypothesis), is completely lost on most parents. But once more, this failure to astutely analyse the situation falls back on the subject of this discourse: the incompetence of the masses to reflect intelligently on the quality of their lives.

To digress on the digression, if one may permit one’s self the option of further confusing an already loose thesis, one of the central problems with American educational system in general is that we in American have allowed ourselves to be deluded by our obsessions with ‘political correctness’ and that grossly discriminatory institution known as ‘affirmative action’ to believe that ALL children need a higher (college level) education. Given the immense breadth of the same Gaussian IQ curve originally discussed, on the face of the argument this assumption is beyond credible belief to begin with, but when applied to the wildly varying performance levels of all American children such a cause is soon seen as a product of infinite simple-mindedness (coincidentally on the same order of magnitude shown by our beloved national leader, George Dubya). Granted that many children of so-called ‘ethnic minorities’ have suffered generally from substandard levels of instruction and educational resources, it is still an impossible goal to achieve without bringing the bar down so low as to cheapen higher education to the point where a ‘college degree’ from a typical American ‘community college’ has about as much value as a diploma handed out by a community high school (secondary school) of the 60s.

The arrived at solution of dumbing down the quality of an American higher educational experience certainly makes all of our incapable students feel good about themselves, but in terms of providing them with the critical thinking powers and learning tools with which to achieve substantial goals in life, this sort of 'quick and dirty self-esteem' solution is simply self-defeating in the extreme. Thus it is no wonder that compared to students around the world, in other cultures, our typical American college graduates of today are hopelessly outclassed.

Interestingly, in Europe for virtually centuries another and far more realistic school of thought has served as the basis for the establishment of two separate types of education: pure academia and the trades. Under the European system, after careful aptitude assessment early in a school career, if a child is determined to not have those qualities of rigorous self-application and mental discipline requisite to progress normally in higher learning institutions, he is diverted from the academic path after reaching the equivalent of a high school graduation and placed in a trade school. In the first (or academic) path, a child may rise to academic heights and successfully complete graduate programs leading to Masters and Doctorate level degrees, while on the second (trades) path, a child may develop into an equally respected and valued member of society as a master craftsman. One result of this is that only in our own United States is a so-called ‘blue-collar’ worker (or tradesman) looked down upon as being somehow less worthy than an esteemed doctor or attorney. In Europe the master tradesman is virtually equal to the German ‘Herr Doktor’ in all respects. In fact, only in the United States does a ‘doctorate’ result in more prestige, more remuneration, and more respect for the bearer of such pedigrees; this is not the case at all in the European system, wherein the limitations of the individual are carefully appraised and then directed towards making the most of their potential, without worrisome anxieties about status implications..

A further irony of the American system is that, in part due to rising educational costs and a corresponding and long-established resistance by most Americans to personally meet those costs, all but a few of our most prestigious and highly respected universities are today charged with the job of instilling hard occupational skills in college students, rather than imparting the wherewithal of creative, stimulating self-actualised fulfillment required if one is to be a thoughtful, broadminded, and ‘aware’ individual. Thus, our ‘colleges’ have become little more than trade-schools (a bitter irony, if you ask me), while graduates from our most prestigious universities are essentially doing little more than fulfilling membership entry requirements to the top level ‘old boy’ power cliques that lurk behind powerful national commercial corporate facades.

Considerably complicating the disadvantageous setting within which our educational system struggles to truly educate, we have such wonderful added liabilities as the ironic racial reverse-discrimination that Affirmative Action perpetuates. As if the last impediment weren't daunting enough in its own right (wrong?), the black youth subculture that so flagrantly celebrates the outlaw 'gangsta' hip-hop stereotype actually prides itself on cultivating a violently anti-intellectual posture (this translates to a near black adolescent consensus that in order to be cool you have to dumb-down your affect into the apotheosis of absolute ignorance) that virtually assures the fact that no black adolescent who truly wants the respect of his peers would dare appear to be bright, interested, alert, and/or eager to learn. Now, with commercial advertising co-opting that bad-boy image of youth-gang 'coolness' to sell everything from shoes to sexually violent video games, there is little hope of EVER breaking that particular crippling hammerlock effect on impressionable black adolescent attitudes.

With American education perversely constrained in this most reprehensible and hypocritical manner by liberal white America’s obsession with political correctness, there really is nothing about the present system of ‘free public education’ that is worth saving, let alone squandering billions of dollars of state money on furthering the ruinous educational charade it has become. And so it must be seen by any reasonable person possessed of a vestige of clear thinking, in my opinion, but of course these arguments are FAR above the awareness of that same average American this discourse seems to vilify so thoroughly (and perhaps somewhat uncharitably, although a shoe must still conform to the foot it covers).

Thanks for sticking it out to the end of this tangent. My point remains that America most needs citizens who are able to arrest the enslavement of their reflective intellects by corporate America and dare to take as long as is needed to truly consider the deepest nuances of all things that affect them, so that human life may be elevated from the present depths of filthy commercial ordure and knee-jerk political reactivity that mires most of us down in the muck of consumer America. The only way this process has even the remotest chance of turning around what is clearly a VERY sick culture that has lost its soul (along with its ability to think clearly) is if enough people recognize the intellectual enslavement they have been made captives of and strive to think for themselves again!

(Above right: Cartoonist Dan Pirarro's take on the "Elite Force Bush Action Figure"

The enabling empowerment that will bring this about is not going to be found in anything produced by a powerful American corporation, nor is it likely to come from a fully paid for public school environment that handicaps talented instructors while promoting kids who take pride in being as ignorant as they possibly may be. It may come about through spreading awareness of such groups as the "BRIGHTS", who offer a new take on understanding the human experience that is free from conventional and crippling parochial mind-sets: http://www.the-brights.net/ .

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With a bit of luck, some effort, and not a little patience, perhaps we’ll all be lucky enough to see the present period of America’s cheap and sleazy domination of the world subside to the point wherein the entire rest of the world may finally be allowed full participation in the fate of the planet (that we Americans are so madly determined to destroy in our blind lust for personal power and wealth) as fully entitled equals.

Cheers, C2....August 2003

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