A Shade Of Solecism

In the process of understanding this wide world, a strange inner transformation comes to fruition. Just like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the expenditure of energy in observing something changes the observation. The world we learn about is only the world that includes us, and the world there is is made up of people who change it continuously. What we can learn is what it is, but the mistake would be in trying to teach ourselves what it could have been instead of understanding it for what it was.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Rites of passage"][/caption]

I learnt of the world outside my window by writing. When I write things and hit "Save", an exuberance sweeps over me that signifies that something has been said and set in stone, that something cannot be changed and for every moment that comes after it, it is embellished deeper and deeper in the murk of history. For that reason, I can't let anything be wrong. I want my footprints on history's pages to be picture-perfect. It's not something I'm pretending to be - it's only something I know I can be and am trying my best to be so. In order to make correctness a habit, I read, I discover, I interpret. Reading and discovering can happen over and over again, without interpretation they will remain useless as time passes. Our mark does not lie in understanding that darkness is darkness and the light is the light; it lies in being able to light a candle without regard to whatever winds may be blowing then.

However, as the writer writes more and more, there is more and more about the world that is new, that is there in the now but wasn't in the then. If this moment has been prepared for, then disillusionment can be spared in favour of understanding, as has been noted that to attempt to learn is futile if understanding is absent. The prevalence of a loss of context forces a delineation on the matter of "understanding": to say that one understands is to not have integrated the ability to recognize, disintegrate and recreate, but to have only remembered the meaning encapsulated therein.

As much as contributions are expedited, so much is the world changed, and the world of the minute before understands its retirement just so. I, who have learnt much in this process of writing and self-discovery, am now a different man than of the minute before and have cast over my understanding of the world then a shade of solecism. The greatest lesson, therefore, does not concern the contents of our learning but the methodology itself: not what we learn, but how we learn. By integrating the idea that the spinning top spins so because tops spin so, we do not graduate from being fools. We must learn why it spins so. A top spinning the moment past will grind to a clumsy halt, but in setting another in motion is our learning vindicated.

A Smart Man's Utopia

I wish most people just shut the hell up and walked away.
Instead of sticking around like geniuses wanting to give me advice.
I hate it when that happens.
When caution is mistaken for weakness.
When patience is mistaken for hesitation to grab an opportunity.
I hate it when people consign me to idiocy.

A friend of mine once proposed what can only be called a pogrom.
Jovially, of course, please don't go hunting after him. He's a nice chap.
He's not a hard worker but a smart one, which I think is the new hard.
He said let's wipe out the stupid people from the face of the earth.
Smart people spend half their time cleaning up after the idiots, he said.
Which is mostly true.
Jeremy: "How do you decide who's stupid and who's not?"
The IQ score was proposed and accepted.

To wit: Jeremy has always refused to take an IQ test.
For all his adult life I'd say - a period of 22 years.
Jeremy is also one of the smartest people I know.

Anyway.

We assumed that the pogrom was executed.
That a hegemony had transcended into utopia.
There were smart people everywhere now.
A smart man no longer had to clean up after his less-endowed predecessors.
Now that we were after the first hurdle - our own imagination - we were up against the more urgent ones.

1. Without stupid people, isn't a more dangerous hegemony in the offing?
   When everyone has an IQ of more than 100, the new stupid are smarter than the old stupid.
   When everyone has an IQ of more than 100, who's going to want to do the old stupid's work? 
   
   When the new stupid are smarter, the issue of re-executing the pogrom is raised.
   The new stupid are going to do things that won't find appreciation from the new smart.
   The new smart are still going to have to clean up after the new stupid.
   Is the pogrom re-executed?
   Or does the executor promise that the pogrom will be halted after the first generation?
   Or can one trust the executor with anything at all?


2. How is the man who condones a pogrom a smart man in the first place?
   By extension, the new smart become the new stupid and there is a massive population inversion.
   I could go into it but am holding back because it would be a heavily mathematical affair.
   Let's keep things light.
   Like killing stupid people off? Sure. 
   
   Can't a smart man have a smart man's utopia?
   Isn't it unfair that the smart man immediately becomes a fool when he desires a smart man's utopia?
   Isn't it even more unfair that the fool can desire anything and yet remain a fool and not worse?
   It's like a spiral that descends downward.

Being smart is like being in a set with an upper limit.
You come all the way from negative infinity.
All the way from being an abject moron to being smart.
The moment you realize you're smart, you start all over again.
It sucks to be smart.
There, I've said it.
I've to start all over again.
I do that everyday, anyway.
Being an idiot is much better than being smart.
An idiot's utopia does last longer.

You might notice how it could be the world you're in right now.
It is.
You might wonder if the idiocy manifests as mediocrity.
It doesn't.
The idiocy manifests as the tolerance of mediocrity.
And other such things.

Sigh!

This chancy, chancy, chancy world.