Dearest Blog Reader.
I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. Spring/Summer
has arrived and I spent last week getting the garden in Amish Child condition.
If you are new, Amish Child gardens, along with assassin deer are recurring
themes of You Said What Roger. The phrase came to my head while traveling with
the family through Pennsylvania Amish country one summer marveling at how clean
the gardens looked. While filled with zucchini envy, I figured out that the
reason for the weed free situation of these gardens was the fact that the Amish
have relatively large families and no video games to occupy their large
brimmed, hat covered minds. Houses filled with undistracted youths during
summer vacation are rapidly evacuated by mothers who love the peace and quiet
of the school year. Chores are assigned and viola gardens are kept in pristine
weed free Amish Child condition.
Last year, after several years of well intentioned failure,
I rededicated my summer free time to maintaining a great looking garden. I was
amazed. You can grow so many more vegetables on a smaller piece of land when
they don’t have to compete with pig weed, velvet leaf or jimson weed.
Enough gardening; two weeks ago, I read a headline that
stopped me in my tracks. It boldly proclaimed that 4% of Americans believe that
they are less intelligent than average. There you go. It explains so much. Once
again the failure of our school systems staggers me. By definition 49% of the
population are less intelligent than average. So 45% are delusional. (I know. I
know Mr. or Miss Smarty pants you could have some really funky distribution of
the smart and the less smart that left only 4% below average but that is not
the case here. 49% of us are less intelligent than the average. I just know it.)
I suppose that there are other explanations. The 45%
probably have gone to the Internet for their research. The Internet would have
provided good information about the Darwin Awards. The 45% would correctly
assume that they were smarter than that dumb a*&%. However, they made a
strategic error in their analysis. Once a Darwin Award winner has gathered
their certificate of participation at the pearly gates, they have gotten out of
the stupid pool. They are no longer available for comparison. The 45% are still
just as fuzzy on the facts.
None of the 45% have climbed out of intellectual sub-mediocrity.
In fact, for every past Darwin Award winner, one of the smart loses their
tenuous grip on mediocrity and slipped past the tipping point with the rest of
the less thans.
Other explanations? How about too many participation awards?
This over inflated drive to build self-esteem has warped our perspective. The
over awarding of participation could be a cause for this lack of
self-awareness. At the spelling bee if little Johnny receives a participation
award for misspelling “dawg” and little Suzie receives the same participation
award for misspelling “there” when it should have been “their” because in her
enthusiasm she did not ask for it to be used in a sentence, little Johnny
doesn’t learn to study harder next time. He got his award just like the
over-enthusiastic Suzie. In this world, they are both about average.
Look at little Johnny eating dirt; we should give him an
award for being the best dirt eater in the 1st grade. NO we
shouldn’t. We should ignore little Johnny’s earthworm proclivities. He’ll get
over it. Dirt doesn’t taste that good. And for goodness sake we shouldn’t feed
the rest of the kids dirt pudding with the little gummy worms in a flowerpot.
It just lets Johnny think that eating dirt is something to be emulated thereby
casting himself into the world of the self-deluded.
This over inflated sense of self has a name. According to
Wikipedia (a big contributor to the ‘I’m just as smart as you” crowd), 45% of
Americans suffer from illusory superiority. Or as my dad liked to say “Don’t
worry about them son. They think that their poop doesn’t stink.” Actually that
is a paraphrase of what dad used to say. Illusory superiority is a huge field.
In fact in 2000, two guys won a Nobel Prize for a paper called “Unskilled and
Unaware of it: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to
Inflated Self-Assessment.” It was subtitled “Don’t worry about them son. They
think that their poop doesn’t stink.” Dad was thinking about bringing
plagiarism charges but he had to admit that he got that one from granddad.
So there you have it. We live in a world where the smart
write 500 page papers for ideas that our parents and grand parents synthesized
in fewer words than the Noble winning paper’s title; a world where the heights of achievement are so level that even the mud puddles look average. We
live in a world where we have lost the humility to accept and embrace those who
have excelled through raw talent and application to heights beyond our own. We
have lost the ability to know whose paper to copy off of.
Take care,
Roger
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