04-08-2022, 02:09 PM
(04-08-2022, 03:43 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: 1) If you think about it, it's a little arrogant to start out wanting to be a therapist, teacher or HR rep right out of college. At that age....you don't know much about the real world. All you can really do is recite theory to people who probably have much more experience than you do. No, 23 year old, recent-intern Hannah from HR is not better qualified to decide who is/isn't best qualified to do my job. Someone with actual field experience is.
2) It's healthy to have a little bit of bravado. You need a little hutzpah to have the courage to tackle new challenges and get shit done.
1) As an example, a K-12 teacher, among other things, is preparing most students to do anything other than teaching, including some jobs (domestic service, construction labor, sales-clerking, food service, delivery, cleaning, and factory work) which generally offend the sensibilities of someone with an IQ over about 90. In most communities, school teachers are among the more intelligent people in town, but if they have never done those menial or hard-labor jobs they have no idea of what the real world is like. The HR rep needs to know something about the work that most people do for that company, and if most people in that company work on an assembly line, then maybe a year of work on the assembly line is a good idea. One might not be comfortable and one might not relate to the prole culture, but maybe you will know enough to not subject people from that prole culture with Haydn string quartets, allusions to Dostoevsky novels, or chromos of Degas. I'm not saying that therapists need an excursion into drugs or alcohol to fully understand many of the clients.
2) Few people lack self-confidence, but those who do because they are autistic need to build themselves up incrementally. If anything, many people have too much self-confidence, and if that excess in self-confidence suggests that one can succeed at shady behavior, then one must disabuse oneself of such a delusion. The penal system might do so, but this ain't Denmark.
Addendum: there is no shame in doing productive work that supplies basic needs such as food or fiber, shapes raw materials into something useful, connects people to things that make their lives better, maintains expensive objects. Our system of economic rewards lionizes people who have climbed the ladder of success somehow and then destroyed the ladder or sent it hurtling down upon those 'beneath' them. There is no shame in toil or service. There should be shame in exploitation, whether as a bureaucratic toady whose contributions are nebulous at best but whose pay is astronomical, an alcoholic or addict who cripples himself vocationally, a shady operator, or an outright crook.
A few times I have suggested that the sanest people in our economic order despite their limited education are the Old Order Amish. Their economic system supplies very basic goods, like food and furniture or some skilled trades. They are strictly capitalist, but they have no bureaucracy supplying huge numbers of jobs suited to over-educated people who don't like getting their hands dirty. Well, that is how America used to be. An eighth grade education used to be adequate for holding a job (although more is necessary now due to the complexity of life). I have suggested that giant corporations have bloated bureaucracies to sop up educated people who can be rewarded well enough (a single-family house, which is now a clear luxury, a late-model vehicle, nice clothes, and access to similar people as marital partners) so that they prefer watching Hitchcock movies to reading the works of Marx, Lenin, and Mao.
That may not be your chosen life; you may prefer listening to Haydn string quartets, reading Dostoevsky, or visiting art galleries. Most people have no desire for anything like that.
Finally -- we need more capitalism in the sense of small, competitive businesses with narrow niches, and not less. To be sure, vehicle manufacture, operation of railroads, manufacture of weapons systems, software design, the extraction of petroleum, government (K-12 education excepted), insurance companies, or the creation of watchable movies require large organizations with bloated bureaucracies. With limited markets by geography or by being big fish in a small pont, small-business owners have a stake in the quality of life of their communities that absentee owners and bureaucratic elites who have no local loyalty (the latter two sorts are loyal to an income stream more than to a community) almost never have.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.