INDOCTRINATING IDIOCY – PART ONE
The ABC recently posted something that caused quite a stir. Well,
something else. They do that a lot. In this case, it was the annual Are You Smarter Than A School Leaver
nonsense. A series of random multi-guess questions based on what those students
have most recently been studying but, more importantly, you have not or maybe
never did. It proved to be an incredibly divisive post that revealed more about
individuals than their answers to those questions ever would.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-07/hsc-are-you-smarter-than-a-school-leaver-take-our-quiz/9116236
Needless to say, it
triggered a lot of folk suffering from a variety of psychological problems, not
least of which were the kind who suffer from narcissism, paranoia, an
inferiority complex leading to an uncontrollable desire to tear down others to
make themselves feel bigger, and the apparent inability to actually bother to
read, or listen, and think about things before responding with an offensive (knee-)
jerk response based on what they choose to infer despite the complete absence
of evidence to support their idiotic allegations.
Normally I’d try to avoid
referring to people in terms of generational groups because a social construct
founded on general observations unfairly brands every element of a that group
with stereo-typical characteristics. The reality is usually very different.
Individuals could demonstrate many qualities normally associated with another
generation rather than their own. It only distracts people from the topic being
discussed with divisive nonsense. That’s why I try to avoid using these terms
wherever possible. I’ve only used those terms here to refer to the appropriate
age-groups.
It is said that in any
job involving office duties, if you want something done quickly, ask a Y-gen to
do it. If you want it done right, ask an X-gen. This is, of course, a
generalised statement that could easily be applied to individuals regardless of
their ‘generation’. It could even be used in jobs outside an office setting.
It’s interesting to note there were no references to Baby Boomers in that
‘observation’. Guess they’re management.
Twenty to thirty years
ago you could change the statement to replace X-gen with Baby Boomers and Y-gen
with X-gen. The target here is youth. They are often considered idle and
unfocussed, apathetic, selfish, narcissistic, and unwilling to wait for things
and wanting material possessions right now. Twenty-to-thirty years from now the
younger generations will be where the X-gens are now and making the same
generalised comments about the younger generations.
A couple of days earlier,
Geordie Brown, from Oxley High School in Tamworth, took Education Minister
Simon Birmingham to task by asking him whether it was fair to continue to
direct Commonwealth funds to private schools, while their public counterparts
couldn’t afford to print their resources on paper. Geordie said, quite rightly,
that the education system was “failing” students and teachers. And he was not
satisfied with the usual LNP blame ALP game either. He identified a problem and
wanted an answer for the purpose of finding a solution.
Geordie’s the tail end (depending
on the source) of the group identified as generation-Y or among the first of
the generation that came after them. He has as much in common with the earliest
ones from generation-Y as he does with the youngest members of generation-X. He’s
amongst the last of those the rest of us hope will live up to the expectations
we placed on the X-gens. Our hope for a better future. The generation that will
learn from the mistakes of the past and fix them so the world will be a better
place. Geordie’s attitude brought many of us that ray of hope. We can only pray
he and others can maintain it and follow through.
“You weren’t elected to
play the blame game,” Geordie told Education Minister Simon Birmingham in that
episode of Q&A. No. But Simon was indoctrinated into the culture that does
that. And so were far too many others, including a great many trigger-happy people
from the demographic known as Y-gen. A lot of them may be in their late
twenties or even thirties now, but far too many of those carry a huge chip on
their shoulders and continue to behave like over-privileged children. Common
complaints about them include idleness, narcissism, self-centredness, ignorance,
and monumental arrogance. The behaviour of the most vocal of them doesn’t help.
Too many of them don’t
bother to read or listen all the way through before lashing out at perceived
slights they infer despite a complete absence of supporting evidence. They make
rash decisions and go with the first thing they find on Google rather than
checking the legitimacy of that article, or the first thought they have on
skimming the first few sentences of an article. And they don’t learn from their
mistakes. They double-down to heap further slander and insults upon their
victims. But they are not alone. That kind of idiocy knows no generational boundaries.
My comment on the School
Leaver post was long by design, to demonstrate a point. It identified
fundamental differences in how people have been educated and their
personalities shaped by the environment in which they lived at the time. Their
personal experiences and opportunities play a huge role. As do the methods used
to teach them, nature of the ‘facts’ at the time, and advances in technology
and knowledge which can provide us with both advantages and disadvantages.
The content was only part
of the method used to prove my point. Its length was bound to attract a lack of
interest from younger people on social media, as was its form. In general, the
younger generation tend to dislike reading, preferring a short blurt of
information and usually in the form of a Tweet or Youtube video file. The
responses were far more revealing of the nature of younger people than anything
for which I could have hoped.
Cultural shifts influence
the way people think. What may once have been considered acceptable and
normalised has changed a great deal over the last thirty years, mostly for the
better. But the same problem attitudes and behaviours still exist and, worse,
appear to be undergoing some kind of resurgence. A last push to reclaim that
vile heritage as a new generation unwilling to learn from the past is doomed to
repeat it. The comment was unapologetic observations founded in fact.
My comment included a
reference to people who now consider their ignorance a badge of honour.
Regardless of age, the arrogantly ignorant accuse others of being ill-informed
and stupid in poorly spelled, grammatically flawed, blurts of noise that are so
far from fact that only make sense when they are corrected. The simple entry of
“idiot” becomes more of a “heads up” or “FYI” to identify the nature of the person
who posted it, while “blah blah” demonstrates the poster’s inability to
communicate anything of value, and “fake news” only becomes accurate when it is
followed by a colon before the rest of the drivel it also includes.
It doesn’t matter if you
don’t like the facts. Getting angry when you see too much of yourself in an
observation, and deciding to infer something that isn’t there, will not change
the reality despite all your efforts to create one of your own to justify your
temper tantrum. And the evidence to support the point made in my comment
followed very quickly. Paul Loader responded with a reply that did exactly what
his generation are predicted to do according to stereotypical generalisations.
Ordinarily I’d agree with
some of the things he said, but that would require enabling the idiotic
elements with which he started. At no point did my comment ever imply my
generation was better than the ‘current one’. It can only be assumed he was
referring to his own (Y-gen). He even made the claim my comment was “a classic
case of letting nostalgia run free”. Maybe he should have taken the time to
actually read it and think instead of skimming and loading it down with
personal baggage of his own in an embarrassing attempt to present himself as an
intellectual.
There was no nostalgia
there. His interpretation of “classic case” also reveals a total lack of any
understanding of what that means. He did note that I’d already provided the
arguments against what was wrong with that time, as if I was completely unaware
that was what I was doing, like it wasn’t intentional. The guilt of his
obsession with mobile phones (his profile page is littered with narcissistic
selfies) also tainted his interpretation of my final comments.
Nowhere did my comment
indicate that people of other generations were not also obsessed with their
mobile phones. The fact that it is predominantly the younger generations who
are fixated on those things, his own experiences, and narcissistic personality
led him to assume he was being targeted in the comment. That it was all about
him. He also assumed I’m a Baby Boomer and was calling him lazy, despite the
fact that I’m not, and I didn’t.
In fact, if anybody was
being critical of a generation, and selfish, it was Paul himself. His claim
that “the future is ours, and we’re sick of our predecessors’ constant attempts
to ruin it for us in service of themselves” demonstrates a level of
self-absorbed hypocrisy that would embarrass any well-adjusted person. The
future belongs to everyone, but mostly to those who will follow. Once they
arrive, they become the caretakers for the next generation, and so on. Instead,
Paul insists it’s his right to dominate and do whatever he wants in service of
himself.
Where have we heard that kind
of put-down about a generation before? Oh, yes, when X-gens finished school and
entered adulthood. They were called lazy and entitled, and told the world was
the sole domain of the Baby Boomers, not ours. The Baby Boomers were just as
disillusioned as the X-gen and Y-gen that followed. Consider the lyrics of Don
Mclean’s American Pie. It appears their efforts were focussed on reshaping the
world of the previous generation in their own image. They entered politics and
did just that, then made sure nobody who came after them could do the same, and
quickly became as corrupt as the regimes they fought against.
And now we see the same
personality flaws in Y-generation. Yes, it’s a generalisation. We see a common
occurrence in elements of a generation and brand the whole, but guess what? It
doesn’t really matter. In the end the problem that element causes remains the
same. Yet members of that generation insist they have an excuse. They are what
we made them. Education and our influence shaped them. Even though they often
did their own thing and refused to listen. Even though they rail against us
now, blaming us for their problems instead of taking responsibility.
That kind of logic would
see me a chain smoking alcoholic with a gambling problem, at least one divorce
and multiple kids behind me, beaten, broken, and repeating the same domestic
violence, racism, misogyny and theft that was inflicted on me by my parents and
the world around me. Just like my parents did to me and my siblings. Just like
my siblings do to others. How come I don’t do that? Because I took
responsibility for the things I did and worked my arse off to be better, to try
and make the world a better place.
And now I have to put up
with the idiot projections of dickheads like Paul, who finished by further
demonstrating his hypocrisy and inability to think. He was wrong. Einstein was
only partially correct. You can go back in time. You just can’t change what
happened. Memory and history. We can read, watch, and consider what happened.
That’s how we learn. Not Paul or all the other sad little Y-gens that ‘liked’
his comment. Those fools are opposed to thinking because they were blessed with
an abundance of self-centred stupidity. Offended by the things he inferred in
my comment despite them not being there, Paul told me to “get over it”.
Get over what? Did Paul
mean Coke? When people like me were kids, we were blasted with ads implanting
the permanent message that “Coke is it”. But I’ve never liked Coke. Does that
mean I’m “over it”? Mission accomplished! Hoo-rah! Maybe he meant not being
able to go back in time? But we can, so how can I grieve for the loss of
something that isn’t lost and I never actually liked? Could he have meant get
over him? Well that’s easy. Job done! Still, I’m confused. Clearly not as
confused as Paul and the other idiots that happily ‘liked’ his baffling rant
though.
Sadly, social media does
not come with a flashing ‘sarcasm’ sign you can add to your comments to help
people avoid inferring and making hypocritical judgemental assumptions. If Paul
had made any real effort to read between the lines instead of adding his own
subtext, he would have realised there’s not a lot in the past that I actually
liked, and that (to me) the here and now is a much better place. He would have
also realised that it was him accusing himself of being lazy. I never wrote
that at all. But you cannot reason with unreasonable people, and he’s obviously
an idiot.
He did speak truthfully
when he wrote that he didn’t really get my point. That didn’t stop him from inferring
one that wasn’t there, though, or with langue he probably thought made him
sound like an intellectual. It did the opposite. But in so doing he actually
proved my point about education. It isn’t just about the intended lesson, but
what we learn by the actions of others in the process. Our own experiences will
influence how we choose to interpret information. A failure to correct idiotic
behaviour and our own neurosis will influence our responses.
Paul and the people that
‘liked’ his reply (two of them, in a remarkable coincidence, just so happening
to appear on his profile page as ‘friends’) demonstrated that point rather
aptly. His response to the sarcasm about Darwin was actually quite amusing. Who
was this Wallace he had mentioned? An ambiguous question like that needs to be
a little more specific. It could be any one of a number of things. Given how
predictable Paul is, it’s likely to be a Y-gen person of no real consequence to
the betterment of society and who will quickly be forgotten by history.
He may have meant William
Wallace the Scottish hero. William Wallace the scumbag currently wanted by the
Victorian police. Wallace and Gromit. There's a chick called Wallace that
sings. There's a city Missouri, in the United States, called Wallace. And a
freight company called Wallace International. There's even a legal firm called
Wallace & Wallace. I think there's even a Wallace Community College, though
I don't know where it's at. I’d have to Google it. Fun game though. I’d ask if
he knew who Martin Luther was and what he did, but what’s the point?
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