Rilalities X

May 29, 2017March 28, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

Are you offended? Have you ever met someone who was easily offended? Have you ever told them that that gives the other side ammunition? Their response centers on the idea that it’s not them. They’re not easily offended. The just find the other party offensive. A talk show host, named Dennis Prager, took questions from the audience after a speech. A woman asked Mr. Prager a question. In the course of that question, she informed him that his views on the subject of her question offended her. When she finished her question, Dennis Prager answered it. He then went back to the idea that he offended her. “You said you were offended,” he said. “Why were you offended?” The two went back and forth for a bit before it became clear that her basis for declaring Dennis Prager offensive was that Dennis Prager had a different view on the subject. An older, wiser Dennis Prager looked back on that Q&A and suggested that the sole reason the woman was offended was that she disagreed with his opinion on the matter. “This,” Dennis Prager said, “Is what is going on in our culture today. Too many people confuse having a different opinion with being offended.”

We all believe that we have special insight on a given subject that leads us to know more than others. The others could be wrong, and they could be ill informed, but those that are offended believe that it’s more likely that they have a nefarious motivation for believing the way they do. Some of us do have a motive, and some of those motives are nefarious. We cannot discount that. We can say, however, that not everyone that disagrees with another has a nefarious reason for doing so. This is what we call painting with a broad brush. When a loved one disagrees with us, we know that we can’t paint them with this broad brush, so we find, or fabricate, a motive for them disagreeing with our impassioned pursuit of the truth. It seems impossible that educated people that have put some thought into their opinions can disagree with ours, so the only answer can be that they’ve arrived at their notion by nefarious means, and that offends us. Claiming offense seems like a shortcut to persuading another of their views. It’s a way of saying that I hold passionate beliefs based upon my special insight into the human condition, and you are not only wrong and lacking by virtue of your limited insight, but you are irredeemable.

Here’s how to do it, for the uninformed. If the member of an audience hears a comment from someone that audience member shares a worldview, or they like on a personal level, it doesn’t matter what that comment is, the audience members finds a way to support, excuse, or forgive that provocateur’s comment. The general thesis of their reply is, “I know what’s in his heart.” If a provocative point comes from an individual that has an opposing worldview, it doesn’t matter what’s in that person’s heart. In an attempt to portray themselves as well informed, the offended will react to the provocateur’s point. In the face of what they deem to be an offensive statement, they react. They don’t argue against the merits of the case the provocateur presents, and they don’t offer a substantive counter argument. They react, and that reaction is to claim offense. Being offended permits them, and some would say obligates them, to be offensive in return.

Bowie: The difference between rock stars and musicians/artists is a wide chasm. The groups AC/DC, Eagles, and ZZ Top developed a formula that consumers enjoyed, and they enjoyed the formula. The bond between the two was such that the rock stars didn’t venture outside the formula. If their fans would argue that point, they would have to concede the groups put less effort into making their albums as different as the albums in David Bowie’s catalog. The consumer never knew what to expect from David Bowie. Most of us now know the history of David Bowie, and we now assume that long-term success was a forgone conclusion, but a broader look at his career suggests that Bowie could’ve rested on his laurels after delivering Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. How many artists would’ve sold their souls for half of the longevity of these two albums? How many artists would’ve done whatever it took to carve out the niche Bowie did in the rock world with these two albums? How many artists would’ve then released various incarnations of the formula found with those two albums, at such a young age? How many of those same artists would’ve been so grateful for the financial support that the record industry offered them to achieve such success that they would’ve been susceptible to their advice? Bowie could’ve had a successful career based almost entirely on the Ziggy Stardust character. What David Bowie decided to do was retire the Ziggy character soon after he achieved a peak with it. Three years later, he delivered an entirely different sound in Young Americans, and five years after Ziggy Stardust, he delivered three albums (in the space of two years) that demolished everything he built to that point and rebuilt a new sound for himself that some call his Berlin trilogy.

The thing with invention, and reinvention, is that an artist is bound to disappoint those that expect a more regular, consistent product. The thing with experimentation, on par with some of David Bowie’s discography, is that not all of it will work. No one that listened to Ziggy Stardust for the first time would expect that artist to produce the Low and Scary Monsters albums. Those albums are a stark departure from that which preceded them, as are Hours, Heathen, and Blackstar. I’ve listed but a few albums here, but most of the albums in Bowie’s catalogue had an individual beauty that any music lover should explore. Not everything Bowie touched turned to gold, of course, but I would say that he, more than just about any artist in his rarified air, believed that the essential ingredient of the artist was to take a risk and pursue avenues their audience might not, and often times did not, find entertaining. It is for this reason that I list David Bowie at, or near, the top of the list of rock stars that also happen to be musicians and artists.

These Dreams: Every person has dreams, hopes, and aspirations. Our individual dreams describe us as well as anything else does. I knew a person that believed that he discovered a ticket to ride. He spent a number of years compiling a VHS tape of nude scenes from movies and television shows. Before anyone begins assigning modern techniques to this pursuit, they should know that my friend make this tape in the basement of a home, in the Midwest, in the 80’s. My friend had no technical equipment. He had a pen, a notepad, and a VCR. My friend had no idea how many hours he logged compiling this tape, but he had to watch a movie, document the minute mark at which the actress removed her top, wait for the scene to arrive in the second viewing, and hit record at the perfect moment. For those that don’t remember, the cable channels of that era assisted my friend by replaying the same movie repeatedly. My friend spent years collecting these scenes, and he swears he had a three-hour tape almost full of, on average, four to five second scenes, when his sister found the tape and recorded over it. She recorded the movie Vamp for those interested in history.

Much later on in our friendship, I found a book that documented these scenes for him, so he no longer had to do it. I gave it to him for his birthday. He considered that book a bittersweet present. I was confused. I didn’t see how he could be anything less than overjoyed at the prospect that he was onto something with that tape. I told him the book had become a best seller.

“I should’ve written that book,” he said. “That book led me to the realization that I wasted years of my life making a tape that wouldn’t have seen the light of day. I was a dumb kid,” he furthered. “I didn’t know anything about licensing and attaining a person’s rights to using their image. That book had those scenes documented down to the minute, and the description of those scenes, just as I had. You joked about those little notepads, but I filled with the descriptions of the scenes in which Hollywood’s brightest stars showed their hoo hoos. It also had the exact minutes and seconds into the movie in which those top stars removed their tops. I didn’t think of rating those scenes, like that author did, but if I had spent some time writing a book on it, I probably would have come up with that. I could’ve made some real money off a book like that.”

Objectivity versus obliviousness: A friend of mine, we’ll call her Fawn, opened a story from her life with the qualifier, “This is not a story that you will view from objectively.” She said, “I don’t want you playing devil’s advocate with me. I just want you to listen.” When she finished, I went silent, as a form of rebellion to her direct order. “Well, what do you think?” she asked. I told her that she did not permit me to answer. She said I was. She just said that it had to be within the parameters that she drew up.

Everyone wants their listener to side with them in a story from their life, some just want the listener to listen with a comment the sides with them. Most are not this blatant. I thought it was a hilarious comment on the idea that I rarely take her side.

Another friend, a woman named Maddie, informed me that her friend Patricia invited Maddie to lunch at a restaurant. Maddie informed me that she reluctantly agreed to meet Patricia in this restaurant. After agreeing to go, Maddie decided that she wouldn’t be going. Maddie informed me that she had no other plans. She just didn’t want to go. Maddie also admitted that she never attempted to call Patricia beforehand to inform Patricia that she had changed her mind. Maddie then informed me that by not going, she would be leaving Patricia alone at that table in the restaurant. As the morning hours crept toward to noon, Maddie decided that she was not going to go. Rather than go through the painstaking process of developing an excuse “I just blew her off,” Maddie told me.

After the questions and answers established the particulars of this situation, I said, “How would you like that if she did that to you?” I considered this a time-honored question that my dad asked me so many times that it’s an ingrained response. I dare say that most people have a version of this question ingrained in their brain. I didn’t consider this question a brilliant display of my skills, and I didn’t consider it confrontational. I consider it a question that my dad would’ve asked of me, if I relayed such a story to him. It’s a question we ask of one another, when we think the other side doesn’t see the error of their ways.

Maddie had apparently never had a parent put them through the character-building exercise of viewing matters such as these, objectively. She informed me that Patricia wouldn’t do that to her. “You’re missing the point,” I said. In the course of this email, I set off a firestorm by saying, “I have to tell you that I think what you did was wrong. It would be one thing, if you had conflicting plans, or if you called Patricia to cancel your lunch, but leaving her at the restaurant alone was wrong.” This was the gist of my reply. It might have been a little longer, but I can report with confidence that I did not disparage Maddie’s character in any way. I did write that email, I must confess, but I deleted it. I wrote a second email that omitted my personal feelings on the matter. I wanted Maddie to continue to be my friend, but I thought someone needed to tell her what she did to Patricia was wrong.

This set Maddie off, I would later learn. She couldn’t understand why I would do this. She spoke to her brother, my best friend, to try to understand why I would say such a thing to her. They both knew that I had no allegiances to Patricia, so they couldn’t understand how I could condemn Maddie’s character in such a way.

“What’s wrong with your friend?” Maddie asked her brother. “He’s freaking out. Accusing me of stuff. He’s hysterical.” My friend, her brother, asked her for the details of the story. Maddie told him. He believed that it was all about him. He had a history of telling me that he would show up to a restaurant, and he wouldn’t show. He did this to me more than ten times. He believed I was harboring ill will towards him. I could see how he would think that, I could even see that he might have viewed me as empathetic to Patricia in that regard, based on our history, but I can tell you that I didn’t consciously call upon those moments in my defense of Patricia. I am the type that will judge people for their actions, as often as I expect them to hold me accountable for my actions, but that had no bearing on my exchange with Maddie. In the email exchange I had with her, she provided me a scenario, and I reacted. If there were never any prior occasions to match that one, and I would’ve provided that qualification in my answer.

As for the hysterical charge, our conversation occurred via email, so there was no way she could’ve determined if I was hysterical. I wasn’t hysterical. I just thought it was wrong, and I think 99% of the population would agree with me. Maddie is a princess though. Maddie lived a life where she could do no wrong, and she never had people call her out like that. Therefore, even though she couldn’t say I was wrong, she found an interesting way to make me the bad guy.

I think the two parties concerned should applaud me for my objectivity in this matter. It’s true I have no allegiances to Patricia, but Maddie was my friend until this argument. I could have viewed this episode from her perspective, but I didn’t. I made an effort to be objective. I tried to give Maddie every out possible. I asked her if Patricia had ever done this to her in the past, I asked if Patricia had ever done anything that warranted such as action on Maddie’s part, as a form of revenge, and Maddie assured me that Patricia hadn’t. I don’t think she knew what I was getting at.

No matter how many times I experience a situation similar to this, it amazes me how oblivious some people can be. My dad raised me to ask that “How would you like that if they did that to you” question. He raised me to abide by the “Treat others the way you want to be treated” credo that we all know, and we all shake our heads in agreement to it. The years I’ve spent interacting with people have taught me that most people don’t abide by tenants they shake their head to, but the obliviousness to confronting it in a given situation often shocks me.

I can see how an outsider, that doesn’t know Maddie, might think some form of guilt guided her into projecting me into the role of the bad guy, but I know Maddie. I know that guilt is not on her wheel of emotions. I believe her attempts to understand my simple reaction to her real-life scenario was genuine. When she couldn’t find my motivation for condemning her, because it made no sense to her that I should consider her actions wrong, she deemed me hysterical. When that didn’t make sense to her, she approached her brother. He came up with an answer, a plausible answer that I didn’t consider, and the two of them were satisfied with that answer. The idea that telling someone you will have lunch with them, only to blow them off and leave them at that restaurant alone, is the wrong thing to do didn’t even enter their conversation. It may sound like there’s more to story on the part of Maddie and her brother, but I can assure you there isn’t. They simply didn’t see it as wrong.

Prescription Drugs: “I think that we should take away the control doctors have over prescriptions.” How many problems in our country are drug-related? How many people have progressed from using illicit drugs to prescription drugs? How many more problems would result from the population having unfettered access to prescription drugs? At this point in a theoretical situation such as this one, the libertarian would suggest that we don’t give people enough credit. One could suppose that suspecting widespread chaos is unilaterally cynical. Yet, my counter proposal is that it’s not cynical to state that good and honest people, experiencing chronic pain, can accidentally develop a habit for taking painkillers as a means of soothing chronic pain. It’s also possible that these good and honest people can either ignore the harm these drugs can do in their quest to seek relief, or they might not have a thorough understanding of the harm some of these drugs can do. A possible overdose could occur, if informed third parties do not govern usage. Some of these informed third parties rely on test studies, and outside research to understand the benefits and harm of these drugs. They might better inform the chronic pain sufferer of the damage they may do, they might advise curtailing, and they might suggest a less addictive, alternative.

I attempt to be as libertarian as anyone else and I try to maintain an openness for suggestions regarding how America can become more libertarian, but I would suspect that one of the most libertarian politicians in Washington, ophthalmology physician Rand Paul, would agree that keeping restrictions on access to prescription drugs limited is a good thing. The answer my friend had was to take away all controls, so that we might thin the herd. You’ll have to trust me on the characterization of my friend, when I say that he was not joking.

Death: We will exit our celestial plane on a waterslide. A centrifugal force greater than gravity will pull us to the portal. The force will be such that it takes our breath away. It will dawn on us, before we hit the portal that we are dead. We will consider all we’ve left undone before we hit the slide that will take us to our next existence. Those thoughts will consume us to the point that not only will we not enjoy the ride. We won’t remember it. At the end of our ride, we will enter our local bar. The bar will be so close to our home that we will see our house on the hill. The lights will be out. Our family members will still be sleeping. We will wonder about the effect our departure will have on their lives. We will sit with many people in this bar, some of the associates we knew in life, some of the friends, and some of our loved ones that have passed on. They will tell us that this bar is our way station, our purgatory if you will, to ease us into the transition of our afterlife. They will tell us that the mystery of life is beyond most mortals, and that the only thing we do understand is that it moves on. This will soothe us and depress us. We were never as vital to their existence as we once thought. We will eventually run into an individual whose existence mirrors ours. They will tell us, “Life goes on. My son even laughed at my funeral. He wasn’t disrespectful. He wasn’t laughing at me. Somebody told a well-placed joke, that had nothing to do with anything, and he laughed. He laughed hard. I find it a depressing exclamation point on the idea that life goes on.”

Rilalities XI

May 29, 2017February 19, 2018 RilalyLeave a comment

Electoral College: We can provide an answer to the debate over whether the Electoral College is an outmoded way of electing presidents in two simple sentences. America is a Representative Republic. It is not, as some have suggested in a variety of ways, a democracy. The distinction, as it pertains to the Electoral College and presidential elections, is that the American voter is not voting for a presidential candidate when they cast a ballot, but for a representative that votes on their behalf in the Electoral College meeting that occurs a month after the election to determine the official winner of the election.

Those of us that are not scholars cannot claim to know all of the ideas that went into the formation of America’s federal government, but one of their goals was to create a system that made change difficult. They made it difficult to pass legislation, they made the Amendment process even more difficult, and they instituted numerous checks and balances on the powers of the branches. The Founders also instituted federalism to give the states more power, and thus provide an even greater check on federal power. By doing so, we can make the educated guess that for all the consternation that the system the Founders created has caused legislators, and their constituency, their goal was directed more towards stability than it was the equal representation that a democracy can provide.

In that vein, the Founders created the Electoral College. The Electoral College was, in effect, a check on the majority to provide some balance to the minority. The Founders knew that the majority would rule regardless of their efforts, but they did not want the majority (i.e. the passions of the mob) to hold a tyrannical rule over the interests of those in the minority. The Representative Republic form of government was their answer to allow minority interests, such as those in modern day Nebraska and Kansas, to have some say in the manner in which the federal government conducted affairs. The Founders believed that Rome’s version of a Republic was a superior form of government, because it allowed its representatives to make tradeoffs, or compromises, to form legislation for the common good. The Founders also believed that the people would hold these representatives accountable for their tasked role of providing representation. If America were a pure democracy, the interests of the larger states in our union would hold a tyrannical rule on the minds of national politicians.

Some state that due to the fact that such a large percentage of the nation’s population now live in urban areas of California and New York, the votes of individuals living in Wyoming, Kansas, and Nebraska are given more prominence, in the Electoral College system. They state that this violates the principle of voter equality, and they declare that this is a violation of our democracy, and might be if the United States of America were a true democracy.

Those that pose the democracy argument rarely encounter an effective counter argument, for it is tough to argue against the idea that our system of representation should be population based to provide greater voter equality, and that a vote from a citizen in Kansas is disproportionately more important than a vote from a citizen from California. One of the many counter arguments is that the Founders based three-fourths of our government branches on this idea of equal representation, as opposed to providing population-based representation. The only branch of our government that provides population-based representation is The House of Representatives.

A proponent of the equal representation principle, provided by the Electoral College, might be willing to cede to the idea that the system we have in place regarding presidential elections is inherently flawed. They might also be amenable to changing it, if the opponents of the Electoral College were willing to cede that the other two branches of our government also provide population-based representation. If the proponent began his argument with the notion that we change the Senate to a population-based representation, most opponents of the Electoral College might be willing to compromise on that, as that would give the larger states even more power in the Senate. Would these same opponents be amenable to changing the Supreme Court into a more representative body? The proponent could argue that the unelected nine jurists on the Supreme Court do not represent the population as well as the judicial branch could if fifty-one jurists sat on the highest court in the land. (This proposition suggests that Washington D.C. be included, and we would deem it necessary to have an odd number of jurists, I suspect). Not only would that provide more representation for a wider variety of interests on the Supreme Court, it would provide some dilution of the vast power the nine jurists currently wield. In this scenario, we could have Governors, or even State Legislatures, nominate jurists to make sure that the jurists represented their state well. The proponent could also argue that one president doesn’t represent the population well and that we might want to consider having fifty-one presidents, 435, or however many it takes to provide better representation.

Those that seek to “guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all fifty states and the District of Columbia” have made strides to basically end the original intent of the Electoral College. The first and last question these reform-minded citizens should ask themselves, is if we are going to make changes to the federal government, the Electoral College, and the manner in which the government represents the people how far do we take it?

The idea that these reformers only want to change that which furthers their agenda is obvious, but there are other agendas. That question asks the question, ‘Can a reform movement make all of the people happy all of the time?’ Of course not, and they are not driven by that goal. Their goal is to satisfy a personal, partisan agenda. Most reforms begin as personal, partisan agendas, however, and if this action makes America a better place then we should all be for it. That’s the question. Would this National Popular Vote bill make the country a better place? It would provide greater voter equality of course, but the goal of the Founders was to provide the nation what they believed would result in long-term stability. Those efforts have resulted in the fact that America is still on her first Republic since 1776, and France is now on her fifth since 1792, so one could say that if that was their goal they succeeded. If that stability is a direct result of all of the checks and balances on government power, including the check that the Electoral College places on what they believed would result in a tyranny of the majority, what would be the unforeseen and unintended consequences of the alternative.

Diet: “Pay attention to what you eat?” nutritionists say. We ignore some of the nuggets of information nutritionists provide, because some of them can go a little overboard. They suggest that we follow a plan that we don’t want to follow, from food we don’t want to eat, to smaller portions, to massive intakes of various vitamins and supplements. Most of us do not want to spend our free time reading ingredients, creating detailed charts of protein intake versus carbohydrate, and fiber. That could be overwhelming, and it could leave us eating nothing but grain and tofu. We may do this short term, but we don’t want to deprive ourselves of the goodies that make life enjoyable. Yet, from every philosophy comes a nugget of useable information.

“If you are what you eat, why would I want to mimic the diet of a person from the Paleolithic Era (AKA the Paleo Diet), if that person had a life expectancy of thirty-five point four years if they were a man, and thirty if they were a woman? Why would I want to mimic anything from an era whose highlights consisted of some use of tools, art that was limited to cave paintings, and whose controlled use of fire came so late in their existence?”

The answer to these questions, say some, is anatomical. The answer lies in various places along what Rob Dunn of the Scientific American calls “the most important and least lovely waterway on Earth”, and what he calls “a masterwork, evolutionarily speaking”. What Mr. Dunn is describing is the human body’s alimentary canal, or our digestive tract. Rob Dunn also states that while “most canals take the shortest course between two points, the one inside you takes the longest.” The theory behind the Paleo Diet, put simple, is that we only eat food that which the human alimentary canal recognizes before enhancements and we added preservatives to the foods in various agricultural cultivations.

What’s better for the human body margarine or butter? The competitor to butter lists the tale of the tape. The makers of margarine state that it is a vegetable oil based product, as opposed to butter’s saturated fats. They state that butter contains milk, and milk is a dairy product, and anyone that knows anything about losing weight knows to eliminate dairy from their diet. Butter contains contain 100 calories per tablespoon, a typical serving size. One serving has 11 grams of fat, and 7 grams of it is artery-clogging saturated fat –about one-third of your recommended daily value! It also contains 30 milligrams of dietary cholesterol (10% of your daily value). Butter also contains vitamins A, E, K2, and it “contains a type of fat called butyric acid, which helps maintain colon health. It’s also rich in conjugated linoleic acid, a type of fat that may actually help protect against weight gain.”

Margarine is a plant-based alternative, but some margarine contains some trans-fats. Some margarine products suggest that they contain no calories, but most of the products have fewer calories than butter, so margarine is the winner right?

The question that Rob Dunn, and most enthusiasts of the paleo diet ask, and that which might be a usable nugget of information in the debate between butter and margarine is, what does your digestive tract consume in a quicker and more efficient manner?

The human digestive tract does not process the imitation egg, for example, as well as it does a natural egg that is prepared in the most natural manner possible. The theory holds that weight can be lost, as a result of the digestive tract recognizing how to metabolize that egg in the most efficient, quickest, and most natural manner possible. The theory also holds that the more familiar our digestive tract is with the egg, butter, meats, fish, vegetables, fruits, and nuts that could be found in the Paleolithic Era, the more it knows what to do with the food that has been introduced to it, the greater the health benefits.

I may be wrong in my assertions here, regarding the import of the Paleo diet philosophy, but I do not believe it calls for an exact mimicry of the diet of the Paleolithic man. Rather, it suggests that based on the current evolutionary design of the human body, we should study the diet of the Paleolithic man. We should take some nuggets of information that we believe made the Paleolithic man healthier, in lieu of the more processed foods that have additives and preservatives that can inhibit processing food in the digestive system, and make choices on our dietary habits based on that information. The paleo diet does not call for a complete overhaul of our diet, in other words, it just provides details that allow humans to make choices. Mimicry is a stretch, in other words, but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Historical Inevitability

March 16, 2017January 10, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

The idea that history is cyclical has been put forth by numerous historians, philosophers, and fiction writers, but one Italian philosopher, named Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1744), wrote that a fall is also an historical inevitability. In his book La Scienza Nuova, Vico suggested that evidence of this can be found by reading history from the vantage point of the cyclical process of the rise-fall-rise, or fall-rise-fall recurrences, as opposed to studying it in a straight line, dictated by the years in which events occurred. By studying history in this manner, Vico suggested, the perspective of one’s sense of modernity is removed and these cycles of historical inevitability are revealed.

To those of us who have been privy to the lofty altitude of the information age, this notion seems impossible to the point of being implausible. If we are willing to cede to the probability of a fall, as it portends to a certain historical inevitability, we should only do so in a manner that suggests that if there were a fall, it would be defined relative to the baseline of our modern advancements. To these people, an asterisk may be necessary in any discussion of cultures rising and falling in historical cycles. This asterisk would require a footnote that suggests that all eras have creators lining the top of their era’s hierarchy, and those that feed upon their creations at the bottom. The headline grabbing accomplishments of these creators might then define an era, in an historical sense, to suggest that the people of that era were advancing, but were the bottom feeders advancing on parallel lines? Or, is it possible that the creators’ accomplishments might, in some way, inhibit their advancement?

“(Chuck Klosterman) suggests that the internet is fundamentally altering the way we intellectually interact with the past because it merges the past and present into one collective intelligence, and that it’s amplifying our confidence in our beliefs by (a) making it seem like we’ve always believed what we believe and (b) giving us an endless supply of evidence in support of whatever we believe. Chuck Klosterman suggests that since we can always find information to prove our points, we lack the humility necessary to prudently assess the world around us. And with technological advances increasing the rate of change, the future will arrive much faster, making the questions he poses more relevant.” –Will Sullivan on Chuck Klosterman

My initial interpretation of this quote was that it sounded like a bunch of gobbeldy gook, until I reread it and plugged the changes of the day into it. The person who works for a small, upstart company pays acute attention to their inbox, for the procedures and methods of operation change by the day. Those of us who have worked for a larger company, on the other hand, know that change is a long, slow, and often grueling process. It’s the difference between changing the direction of a kayak and a battleship.

The transformational changes we have experienced in technology, in the last ten years, could be said to fill a battleship, occurring with the rapidity of a kayak’s change of direction. If that is true, how do we adapt to them at such a breakneck pace? Those 40 and older can adapt to change, and we incorporate those changes into our daily lives at a slower pace. Teens and early twenty somethings are quicker and more eager to adapt and incorporate the latest and greatest advancements, regardless the unforeseen, and unintended consequences.

Some have suggested that if the technological changes we have encountered over the last 10 years occurred over the course of 100 years, we might characterize that century as one of rapid change. Is it possible for us to change as quickly, fundamentally, or is there some methodical lag time that we all factor in?

If we change our minds on an issue as quickly as Klosterman suggests, with the aid of our new information resources, are we prudently assessing these changes in a manner that allows us to examine and process unforeseen and unintended consequences before making a change? How does rapid adaption to technological change affect human nature? Does it change as quickly, and does human nature change as a matter of course, or does human nature require a more methodical hand?

These rapid changes, and our adaptation to them, reminds me of the catch phrase mentality. When one hears a particularly catchy, or funny, catchphrase, they begin repeating it. When another asks that person where they first heard that catchphrase, the person that now uses the catchphrase so often now that it has become routine, say they don’t remember where they heard it. Even if they began using it less than a month ago, they believe they’ve always been saying it. They subconsciously adapted to it and altered their memory in such a way that suits them.

Another way of interpreting this quote is that with all of this information at our fingertips, the immediate information we receive on a topic, in our internet searches, loses value. One could say as much with any research, but in past such research required greater effort on the part of the curious. For today’s consumer of knowledge, just about every piece of information we can imagine is at our fingertips.

Who is widely considered the primary writer of the Constitution, for example? A simple Google search will produce a name: James Madison. Who was James Madison, and what were his influences in regard to the document called The Constitution? What was the primary purpose of this finely crafted document that assisted in providing Americans near unprecedented freedom from government tyranny, and rights that were nearly unprecedented when coupled with amendments in the Bill of Rights. How much blood and treasure was spent to pave the way for the creation of this document, and how many voices were instrumental in the Convention that crafted and created this influential document?

Being able to punch these questions into a smart phone, and receive the names of those involved can give them a static quality. The names James Madison, Gouvernor Morris, Alexander Hamilton, and all of the other delegates of the Constitutional Convention that shaped, crafted, and created this document could become nothing more than answer to a Google search. Over time, and through repeated searches, a Google searcher could accidentally begin to assign a certain historical inevitability to the accomplishments of these otherwise disembodied answers. The notion being that if these answers aren’t the correct answers, another one could be.

Removing my personal opinion that Madison, Morris, Hamilton, and those at the Constitutional Convention the composed the document, for just a moment, the question has to be asked, could the creation of Americans’ rights and liberties have occurred at any time, with any men or women in the history of our Republic? The only answer, as I see it, involves another question: How many politicians in the history of the world would vote to limit the power they wield, and any future power they might attain through future endeavors? How many current politicians, for example, are likely to vote for their own term-limits? Only politicians who have spent half their life under what they considered tyrannical rule would fashion a document that could result in their own limitations.

How many great historical achievements, and people, have been lost to this idea of historical inevitability? Was it an historical inevitability that America would gain her freedom from Britain? Was the idea that most first world people would have the right to speak out against their government, vote, and thus have some degree of self-governance inevitable? How many of the freedoms, opportunities, and other aspects of American exceptionalism crafted in the founding documents are now viewed as so inevitable that someone, somewhere would’ve come along and figured out how to make that possible? Furthermore, if one views such actions as inevitable, how much value do they attach to the ideas, and ideals, created by them? If the answers to these questions attain a certain static inevitability, how susceptible are they to condemnation? If an internet searcher has a loose grasp of the comprehensive nature of what these men did, and the import of these ideas on the current era, will it become an historical inevitability that they’re taken away in a manner that might initiate philosopher Vico’s theory on the cyclical inevitability of a fall?

I’ve heard it theorized that for every 600,000 people born, one will be a transcendent genius. I heard this quote secondhand, and the person who said it attributed it to Voltaire, but I’ve never been able to properly source it. The quote does provide a provocative idea, however, that I interpret to mean that the difference between one that achieves the stature of genius on a standardized test, or Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test, and the transcendent genius lies in this area of application. We’ve all met extremely intelligent people in the course of our lives, in other words, and some of us have met others who qualify as geniuses, but how many of them figured out a way to apply that abundant intelligence in a productive manner? This, I believe, is the difference between the 1 in 57 ratio that some have asserted is the genius ratio and the 1 in 600,000 born. The implicit suggestion of this idea is that every dilemma, or tragedy, is waiting for a transcendent genius to come along and fix it. These are all theories of course, but it does beg the question of what happens to the other 599,999 that feed off the ingenious creations and thoughts of transcendent geniuses for too long? It also begs the question that if the Italian philosopher Vico’s theories on the cyclical nature of history hold true, and modern man is susceptible to a great fall, will there be a transcendent genius who is able to fix the dilemmas and tragedies that await the victims of the next great fall?