"As to examples of the common masses showing ingenuity and common sense, I suggest talking to farmers. Not Agri-business hacks, working massive enterprises barely distinguishable from Soviet-era plantations and quite happy to spoil the topsoil and squeeze thousands of pigs into tiny feedlots just to squeeze out another dollar today and to heck with tomorrow, but real dirt farmers who have immensely complicated problems to solve in a dozen different fields, starting with plant and animal biology ... and who plan to pass on a working farm to the next generation's next generation. I think you'll find the bulk of them not necessarily good at calculus but very good at making rational decisions that are good for the community."From a discussion at Contrary Brin about the "wisdom" of the masses. Reading this, it occurred to me to wonder if the dumbing down of America is a result not of television or consumer culture so much as our increasing urbanization and industrialization. When you work a job doing basically the same thing week in and week out, you have far less need to do any long-term planning. Once upon a time most of the people in the nation were farmers, and your life and your family's lives depended on how well you planned out the year. Now few have that problem.
I mean, how smart can you hope that a nation will be when half of them are pretty much working as meat robots.
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Of course, even back in the farming days we had serfdom and it's ugly cousin slavery. You're probably right in saying we had more long-term decision-makers back then, but we always had the "meat robots."
I think what happened in a nutshell is this: the technology that was supposed to make our jobs less strenuous made too many of us lazy. We have people who are rich simply because they "consult" or "speculate" or even because they did/said something outrageous enough to garner a modicum of national attention. This goes against the very (outdated) model of "making it" which involves working hard. But that's a different post for another day.
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