The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

I really hate to bring up the infamous forgery that asserted that a small group of people has a conspiracy with which to dominate the world. Truth be told, if you want to achieve something, including economic gain, then don't rely upon a conspiracy to make it work. People who really get things done with excellence, people who run circles around us all without exploiting and degrading us are more likely to be described in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. To do extraordinary achievements in fields as disparate as painting, acting, sports, writing, music (composition or performance) or engineering one needs about ten thousand hours of early preparation before one reaches the necessary level of sublimity. The vast majority of people either get directed to something more banal out of economic necessity or don't get the chance. Can you imagine many parents allowing their kids to put four hours a day on a violin playing repetitive exercises? Few could tolerate that.

10,000 hours is about the time it takes to become an attorney or physician or get a PhD. There is no cheap way around it these days. The high-achieving dilettante is no more in a time in which practically everything not at a modest level of skill is banality. Maybe a machine paces the production or the clock paces driving a truck. It is noteworthy also for what one does not do. Musicians in first-tier orchestras are infamously immature at dating. That's 10,000 hours for you.

Conspiracies are comparatively easy to form. Even if they are devious they are usually scatter-brained efforts to do what others can't do, like deal drugs, pull off a terrorist act, or arrange a murder for hire. Or perhaps a bungled coup in some unfortunate countries. But their scatter-brained character makes them easy to pursue after they do something horrible.

We have a President scatter-brained enough to think that he could get away with a conspiracy to murder American democracy.