People are retarded. I have come to realize that no matter how much I would like to believe this isn’t true, society caters to the dumbest people amongst us. We are born and bred to be incompetent in most all aspects of our lives. Don’t believe me? Take a second to think about a few things. Think about how many useless warning labels you see in a week’s time. Harmful if swallowed on jugs of laundry detergent. Warning, you might get cancer labels on cartons of cigarettes/bags of tobacco. What’s next, a “you might get drunk if you drink this” warning on bottles of beer? What happened to common sense? Generalized logic? Critical thinking? Do we just accept the fact that all of these things pertain to a bygone era? If so, society is doomed sooner than Scott Adams predicted.
As information becomes more and more accessible to all beings in society today, there is really less and less reason to “know” anything. Let me explain. I am a horrible speller. I hate grammar more than I hate voicemail. Which by the way, will definitely be a blog in the near future. I use spell checks, proof readers, and even a bit of grade school English rules to make my blogs the best that I can. Sometimes given the level of alcohol or time of night it is better/worse than others but all in all I try to make them as coherent as possible. This is a good example of how I really don’t know anything about a subject but could claim to be a great speller. You’re probably thinking that this is rather old information and people have been doing this for a while and you see no harm in it. You are correct. This is “good abuse” of technology to make our lives easier. Not all abuse is “good abuse”. Let’s take Johnny Watson for example. He doesn’t exist, I just made him up. No use “googling” him… hard to tell what/who you find. Johnny doesn’t know jack shit (not a person, just an expression) about much of anything in life but knows everything. He can theoretically be an “expert” on anything from building hydrogen fuel cells to raising cattle. What he lacks is any first hand information or personal experience because all the data he has on a subject is third party information. All Johnny manages to do is toss in his uneducated .02 on anything and everything all the while contributing nothing to the situation at hand. People like this are a waste of space, time, and air. If you could somehow take all the information compiled by Google and stuff it inside your brain, you would know more than the average Joe, but a lot less than Jack Shit.
Be someone that knows something. Don’t be “that guy” that doesn’t have a clue. Be the guy that said “I don’t know but I’d like to find out”. When did learning about something become replaced with a Google search? Just because I can explain to you how a hydrogen fuel cell works within 10 minutes of “googling” doesn’t mean I have ever built one or have any idea why it burns cleaner than fossil fuels alone.
Think about this. We have the most freely accessible information at our fingertips and what have we done with it? We had the ability to reach thousands of people and ask them for first hand help with anything we had a question with. There is an enthusiast group or a forum for most every topic imaginable and what did we do it all? Create Facebook? One of the biggest players in the social networking boom and all we use it for is to tell people “Can’t wait till Friday!” “Go Lakers!” or “Wish I was still in bed!” We turned the most accessible form of free communication into the world’s biggest bitch and complaint generator. Big round of applause because we are awesome! It won’t change because it’s profitable. Society as a whole loves to complain and listen to complaints. We like to be unhappy. It’s been described before as being comparable to driving past a car wreck. You always look. You know someone could be dead or mangled, could be a child or adult, doesn’t matter, everyone looks.
Ever been in a job where you knew the right guy for it but couldn’t get him hired. I’m not talking about “hey, my buddy Jack Shit needs a job because he’s out of weed money”. I’m referring to “that one guy/girl” that would be perfect for the job and streamline whatever problems the position had before. Make the company run better, smoother, and cheaper than before. What if Facebook would have been used for that purpose instead of a gossip generator? What if it was used as a way of reaching people who were once unreachable? A way of getting the information we need from the people we need it from. Having the ability to ask real experts in real time was over ruled by the obsession to see who amongst your “friends” was living a more fulfilling life than you are. Way to go society, way to waste yet another perfectly good form of instant communication.
Conclusion is simple. I say we pass out a standard IQ test and separate the results into two tiers. Top 50% and bottom 50%. We then ship the bottom 50% off to Canada and the top 50% stay here in what would become an ongoing effort to reverse the “stupidity curve” that is currently higher than Tom Petty on April 20th. Who’s with me?
