It really does bother me how widespread ignorance has become, it bothers me more how profound those levels of ignorance are. I don’t have to give examples here, you can all think of them, from lack of basic education in maths / science / history to genuine dumbass stuff.
But.
It is a mistake to equate lack of intellect and education with lack of cunning, and it is a truism that those with some intellect and education vastly under-estimate the efficacy of raw cunning, usually by claiming it is not applicable here.
I spent much of this weekend talking to, and listening to, some of the gutter yoof of today, mid to late teens stuff, and of course I was their age once, and I have a functioning memory, so I can see where a lot of their shit is coming from, but I can also see some remarkable shifts in degree, in many areas.
I spark up a cigarette, I know smokes aren’t a health food, but cancer is a possibility / probability some time down the line, it is not an immediate concern, immediate concerns are I want a smoke, a coffee and a blowjob…. these are things I want today, I’m not going to forgo those pleasures today, because there is no guarantee I get anything tomorrow, so I grab it when I can.
Discussions about Syria or the petrodollar or fiat currencies are discussions you can’t have, they don’t know and they don’t care, they care about what is in reach, right here, right now.
Discussions and plans for tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, those are for rich cunts, even paying the landlord at the end of the month, that’s a long way away, here and now ain’t.
Making a series of instant gratification choices as they are presented by opportunity doesn’t require any intellect, nor does knowing any of 200 or so “trigger phrases” that can be spurted out on demand to produce a pavlovian response in whoever they are said to, for immediate advantage to the sayer, whether it is how to get a “loan” out of the social security to how to bullshit the po-lice or the magistrate.
I haven’t done drugs for years, many years, but when I was young I did, and me being me, if it was worth doing, it was worth doing to excess.
To put it bluntly, I spent months at a time, with the odd very rough day interspersed when I was straight, and I was hanging out with, according to common knowledge, the most dangerous and despicable elements of society, and I am not stupid enough, even under a blogging pen name decades later, to put any of it down in writing in any detail, but I laughed real hard when I first read some of Hunter Thompson‘s stuff, hey bro.
During this period I was particularly fond of acid, and so I spent a lot of time totally whacked on the stuff, and came to understand dogs extremely well indeed, and by extension, people.
If you ever really wanted to know what it would be like to be a creature with a smaller brain, but still an intelligent creature, such as a dog, just do loads of acid and spend time with your dog, preferably out in the woods.
Life gets sliced up into lots of small things, and those things absorb your entire attention, until the next thing intrudes and pushes that moment away to make way for the next.
If I say “vinegar” you can taste and smell it, and if I think of one of those times out in the woods with the dog, I can smell not just that dog, but that breed of dog, and to this day I can recognise that breed of dog by how they smell, it’s a good smell, I had good times with my dog.
If you had been around in that area at that time (late seventies) you might on one occasion have seen a guy in leathers sat on a proper outlaw hardtail chop, one built to run and run fast and corner well, in a car park of one of the new supermarkets, high on acid and toking on a spliff with a sawed off shotgun casually leant against the sissy bar, while my bro was off in the supermarket in question, it was his gun, he left it with me to go in and take a bottle of scotch, I can’t remember your faces, or the exact town or supermarket, or the exact month or year, or what specific reason the guy was carrying for that day, I remember there was one, but can’t remember what it was, I can’t remember much about worrying about the po-lice, or anything else.
I can remember in very great detail the sunlight showing off the engraving on the stock, and noticing and marvelling at the similarities to the engraving on the sissy bar, and realising (duh) with a whoosh that REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED who did the engraving on the sissy bar for me was a gun smith too, and next thing I know my bro is back with the bottle of whiskey, “time to boogey” he says, and off we go.
I can remember later than day a veritable convoy of po-lice vehicles surrounding us, they were looking for a couple of bikers with guns, we didn’t have any, my bro had gone off and done whatever it was and returned, apparently without the gun, I didn’t know and never thought to ask until after the po-lice left us, we weren’t the ones they were looking for, we had no weapons, and all bad-ass bikers look alike to the straights, and it was all no big deal, over as soon as it was over.
Just one of many many many moments in a life lived moment to moment, thanks to the intervention of drugs in my case rather than any innate don’t give a fuck attitude, and yet I slid through it all relatively unharmed and unscathed, simple animal cunning was what did it.
I really do have to stress that point, whatever intellect and “what about tomorrow, and next week, and next month” smarts I had were suppressed, chemically in my case, but the method doesn’t matter, the results do.
Even functioning only on animal instinct, it is extraordinarily hard to truly fuck up, because said animal instinct is a *lot* smarter than we want to accept, intellectually, and yet, it is only there as a by product of millions of years of evolution, it SHOULD be good at this shit.
I had occasion to go back to that area some time ago, and bumped into some people who knew me, or knew of me, back then.
Much to my surprise, and disquiet, I apparently had an awesome reputation as a very mean, very dangerous, very badass individual.
“How the fuck can you possibly say that, I never hurt anyone or did anything to anyone!” was my reply.
“No,” the guy says, “you were way too cold and smart for that.”
“What the fuck are you on about?” I ask him, while noting that he is growing uncomfortable, he is thinking I am angry with him, thinking about my past, that he thinks he knows about.
He tells me, “I was sat right here, and you were sat right over there, and REDACTED who wasn’t exactly a big softie say something about ya missed me cos of beer coming out of a bottle, and you just jerked the bottle and it spurted out and hit him in the face and said no I didn’t”
Now that he mentioned it, I did sort of recall the incident in question, he continues..
“so REDACTED grabs the bottle from your hand, smashes it against the table and raises it to shove it in your face, and he freezes, and the whole fucking pub goes quiet watching, and there you are, as usual, no expression on your face, looking at him right in they eye, with that small smile of yours.. no reaction, no flinching, nothing, stone cold bastard, waiting to see what he would do, and after a few second he puts the bottle down and walks away”
I tell him, “dude, I was on acid 24/7, you don’t think, you don’t plan, you don’t analyse, you feel, you react, you experience.”
I could tell, he wasn’t buying it, and trotted out a couple more stories, to which I gave him the exact same answer, he still wasn’t buying it, but then, he had never done acid.
My dog was smarter than him, my dog would not have needed the explanation, yowf…
Heinlein kinda said it in his 1941 short story Logic of Empire
But it is intellectual mind defending itself by ascribing intellect and intent to actions by others that outwit it, because to accept otherwise is to accept that intellect does not trump everything else.
You got outwitted by a dumbass, dumbass.
Ouch
Any “education” that does not, as a priority, teach the student about the inherent dangers and weaknesses of that education, is itself suspect.
Back when I was being taught engineering, much of what I was taught was what engineering could not do, and the myriad ways in which things could go wrong, and leave you worse off than when you started.
A simple example is using plastic metal to “fix” a leaking compression fitting, the correct fix is strip the union, clean it up, new olives and maybe some PTFE tape, once you use plastic metal you have to cut the offending section of pipe out and make a new one.
Engineering is no longer taught this way.
Nor, it seems, is anything else, from economics through politics to sociology.
And it is these “last week I couldn’t even spell engineer, now I are one” types that rule the roost, they have an education, they know this because they have been told it is so, not by any empirical analysis.
And while I would not wish to praise the total lack of education of the yoof of today, and to a slightly lesser extent those in their twenties, and a slightly lesser extent those in their thirties, the less edumakayshum you are burdened with, the more chance there is for base animal cunning to come to the fore, hopelessly short sighted and amoral as it is.
They are not necessarly burdened by this lack of an edumakayshum, whereas they would all benefit from an education, but that has been systematically destroyed alongside the rise in feminazism and the rise of the state.
