The Smartest People in the Room

How much better off does it really make you to be smart enough to know how to create justifications for negative consequences? There are people whose whole job it is to do nothing else, and it's typically called "public relations," but that is only half of the rotten fruit being sold to you as ripe. What good does it do to graduate at the top of your class if that status propels you into a position that only brings out the worst in you? On the whole, it makes little sense to squander one's abilities for any reason. It seems, though, as often as people take the low road and do just that for no reason at all, or even for good reasons, just as many decide to take the even lower road and squander their abilities in the promotion of malicious or devious ends, if only to put their learning to "some" use. It is not because they are "bad people," it's just that they are raised in a learning environment where they are prompted to "give in" more than they are empowered to resist.

I know this firsthand from my own experience with higher education, where I was tempted to undermine my own credibility at times to ensure I made the grade and gave the average response to every question. Staying "in" was more important to me than rising "above," due to the potential of falling back down. In conversation with fellow students, I observe more "giving in" and "giving up" in institutions of higher learning than anywhere else (and certainly more than in the workforce), and it seems that it's because nowhere else is one's conformity so desirable towards their so-called longevity (outside the military, that is). Just as much as a wasted talent seems a shame to me now, even more so does a talent that has been put to misguided use via people-pleasing conformity. You could say, it is better that you should be a failure who does good work than a success who wallows in their justifications for iniquity.

For instance, what is the value of a higher education when so-called "outside the box" thinking means finding new ways to scam, lie to, or deny people a critical service? The phrase "smartest people in the room" originated to describe the men who ran Enron during the corruption scandals that brought the company down, and is pejoratively used now to describe any group of people who use their brilliance for malevolent ends. Many of those who engineered the economic collapse for their own gain could also be considered among the "smartest people in the room"--those who were smart enough to discover how to push buttons all day and make obscene amounts of money in the process, introducing little to no innovation or development into society. Where does it lead you as a conscionable individual coming out of the college system when the so-called "smartest people in the room" have the least integrity? There are many examples of how unbridled passion without reason can cause the collapse of a person and a society, but it seems equally perilous when self-concerned reason is exercised without regard to an empathic concern for one's fellow human beings. Those who are smart enough to switch off their conscience in the light of some flimsy justification suffer from a lack of integrity.

What good does it do one to be the the most educated and adept person in the room at exploiting loopholes to get away with corruption?  What good does it do you to be pushed into pursuing some college-bound path from the time you're born as if it's the only option in existence, where your future is mapped out long before you can even see any concrete routes to take within it-- much less have enough of an identity to know which route to take? And what good would it do you then, being in that situation, to set an uncharted course through that labyrinth with only a fabled "exit" in mind and no concrete idea of how to go about finding it, lining other people's pockets and ensuring your own indentured servitude to debt in the process? Higher education is capable of doing great things for the world, but so are people with vision, passion, and freedom from debt. You can be the smartest person in the room without having to forfeit your personal integrity to acquiesce to some "company line" of whatever institution or organization "accepts you" once you "get out." Education was never meant to be a conveyor belt upon which you just sit and accept whatever people instruct you to think. It ought to be a platform from which you can, as an independent voice, graciously challenge the scams, lies, and conspiracies that are propping up those very same people who do nothing but acquiesce to injustice-- it should give you the tools to refute them rather than become them. 

Higher education ought to be about making complicated systems more humane and more responsive to human beings-- not merely training on how to give a false smile, a firm handshake, and an automatic response that has been programmed into your head to the point you and only you believe it. It doesn't take a smart person to be a public relations slave for a major corporation, for example-- at least, no more than it would for a trained dog drooling on command-- so why one would waste all that time and money just to end up the equivalent of a drooling dog in the workplace seems beyond reason. That is, unless one's reason is to simply do anything (no matter the consequences) on the pretense of the Nuremberg defense, or the "need to make a living," or more appropriately, the "need to repay a debt." Only because the drooling corporate slaves out there are not alone responsible for the negatives of the world do they find some absolution from consequences. But why betray your conscience if you don't have to?

In a world where it is still possible to make a living doing positive and pro-social things for the world, choosing to contribute to something that produces more negatives than positives on the justification that it "repays the debt" sounds more like defending one's conscience through excuses. No one, unfortunately, is more skilled at turning off their conscience to become a slave to flimsy justifications than the so-called "smartest people in the room." And ironically, no one appears more well-equipped to combat those "professional justifiers" than those among the smartest minds who happen to still have the virtues of empathy, honesty, and a thirst for social justice intact. It all begins in the home. Empowerment breeds integrity. Conformity creates corruption.

The Public Good

When the public good is pitted against the interests of the private enterprise, the private enterprise has almost never lost. Every one of those battles was waged on the pretense that protecting the private enterprise would serve the interests of the public good, but so few have actually turned out that way. For every bill introduced on behalf of a public need, there are lobbyists standing in the corridors of government with suitcases of money and campaign donations to essentially "influence" it out of existence. Those lobs of funding are a lot more influential than a bunch of disparate constituents back a thousand miles away.

Corporations know about the fickle nature of the voting population, for it has lost all hope in its elected officials. And since private entities are not in the same public spotlight, politicians have more to lose by placing the needs of their constituents before those private interests than they do by signing on and towing the corporate line (and thereby avoid having to air their dirty laundry before the public via the corporate media). After all, in the next election cycle, he or she who made the most corporate friends in their tenure will most likely be reelected-- all constituents do is just put in the physical votes to ensure that the process takes place. Campaigns with the most money have the most resources, staff, and publicity, which is why those campaigns get elected.

This is why there has never been a politician in the last hundred years who has favored constituents over businesses. It turns out that businesses can afford to hire lobbyists. Those lobbyists can court their preferred politicians during all the various formal receptions and private meetings, and thereby gain a rapport with them in a way that constituents will never have the opportunity to do. Those lobbyists then use that special rapport to make the case that whatever is in their best interest is actually also in the public interest, and that it will undoubtedly benefit that politician's constituents should he or she get behind whatever they propose, no matter how far fetched the rationale has to be. The politician is then left to ponder the benefits of "killing two birds with one stone" before they break out the cigars.

That, kids, is the story of how politicians that win usually end up in the pocket of multinational corporations that actually don't give a damn about constituents. That is how the worst outcomes usually follow from the best intentions. That is how democracy gets auctioned off.

Occupy Wall Street

Say what you will about the much maligned childlovers, but I bet you they could ever be guilty of stealing 4.6 billion from federal teacher training and afterschool programs in order to re-route that tax money so that high-income taxpayers this year can spend 5.2 billion of it to "remove limits on their itemized deductions." So say what you will about childlovers, but they could never be guilty of stealing 7.6 billion dollars in your tax money--which would have gone to fund "supplemental nutrition for children in poverty," and instead spend 6.7 billion of it on "estate planning" so that the wealthiest among them can avoid "paying taxes on their estates."

The truth of the matter, of course, is that Wall Street and high finance doesn't give a damn about the country's young, unless they happen to be the sons and daughters of bankers. That is no surprise, but what is unsettling is that those who orchestrate this extraction of public resources to avoid their civic responsibilities (which would otherwise be benefiting children and schools, in this case), are still allowed to sleep soundly at night.

Better my money goes to help fund an early childhood education program for inner-city kids right here at home than become a subsidy for some CEO's second vacation home in the Dutch Antilles, but those are my priorities. They are not those shared by the "Greed is Good" gangsters running financial institutions, who believe instead that it's better a wealthy man inherits wealth than a poor child inherits food. Here be strange priorities: rich before poor; money before food; slavery before decency. Unbridled capitalism works that way.

High finance and the wealthy in general have siphoned all but the blood from the underling classes for more than thirty years, and have bought the people's government to legislate their selfishness. They mean to extract from the current generation and extort from the future ones, so that they can make out good before things fall apart. The collapse in their wake will fall on the shoulders of every child living today unless we put our society's future ahead of their next tax-exemption loophole. Dare I say, high finance is a bigger threat to more impoverished young people than drugs, gangs, and child molesters ever were.

The American people have seen the power of demonstration in Tahrir Square to overthrow one corrupt regime, and now simply want to bring the same to the one residing on Wall Street.

Stan, on Class Warfare

I didn't create this image, I just gave him a name and a voice.

I felt this was appropriate considering the same US politicians he's talking to are currently playing Russian Roulette with the global economy to advance ideological agendas favored by millionaires to the detriment of everyone else. The stability of the world is "too big to fail." If we don't bail it out, we destine our children to live on a sinking boat. 

So Stan says, bicker later, raise the debt limit now.