pinkfloydpsw's Blog

I’d love to be thick, joyous it would be, and I’d fail to sit in wonder of the idiocy that surrounded me because I would be in it and of it. I sound cruel and aloof I know, call me so if you like, I don’t mind, it’s the easiest reaction. Who does this asshole think he is? Is he attempting to show himself intelligent when he is surely not so because, according to his own qualifying criteria, stating intellect as one’s own summation of one’s self is in fact an admission of the lack of it yet also proof of a desperate will to have it in the eyes of others. Nobody who is truly smart actually tells you that they are because it is usually apparent anyway and nothing obvious ever really needs pointing out. People are as they do and rarely as they wish to present themselves as being, but I digress from the start, what we are here to learn is how the smart observe the pseudo-smart and how obvious their will to intellect is, when you are unfortunate enough an individual to be cursed with seeing it. I have lost my aloof approach you might notice, as I stated before, I’d love to be thick.

Sherlock Holmes, Sheldon Cooper or Greg House might take great delight in pointing out how quaint a thing it is to watch the normal folks thinking, working some shit out yet failing miserably to see all that is there, that which is glaringly obvious to the natural intellect. I make no claim of pleasure in this, I merely find myself very usually understanding the things people say in a deeper way than the crowd I am often surrounded by, the ‘audience’ if you like. It’s a burden, a curse; I am not proud of it and do not write these words in an effort to convince you the reader that I am deserving of accolade, this essay has a point which I will ramble my way towards presently. Believe me when I say that I truly wish I were more stupid and happy rather than correct. Ho hum, I suppose one cannot get everything one desires. I’m sure at this point you are utterly convinced that I am indeed and asshole of the most colossal order, put that thought to the side for a moment, it isn’t all about me you know…

Where are we? We find ourselves at the O******* School speech day for the 4th time and listening to the latest guest speaker, all the while willing the self to just stop thinking and stop deconstructing the thematic and, as always, to stop with the scepticism already! Who we are listening to this year is an advisor to business persons, an adviser who advises successful people on how to be successful, that sounds like hard work right? Well not really, it kinda sounds like somebody who gives advice to monkeys on how to be monkeys and then tells the world of how well the monkeys are getting along at being, in fact, monkeys.

Rich folks are her clients, they must be because to qualify for this sage advice one must have already proved oneself capable of not needing it in the first place, I mean how could such a business person sustain themselves in this endeavour if their client list was replete with a bunch of nobodies who were merely wishing to better their standing but had not the gumption to do anything about it in the first instance, and where would the revenue stream come from if chances such as this had to be taken? No, it is in this speaker’s client book where we will find the safe ground of only dealing with the cream and then claiming that those dealings are what define such clients as cream. I recognise this from my philosophy books, it is the fallacy of the Texas sharpshooter, I will now explain….
A sharpshooter (his own claim) comes to town; in front of a gathered audience he proceeds to fire his pistol at the wooden door of the livery. After twenty or so shots from a suitably impressive distance he approaches the door, he spots where the majority of the bullets have penetrated the wood (the grouping or cluster) and paints a target with a bull’s-eye closest to that spot. The claim is then made (by the sharpshooter) that he is an expert in the field of shooting and to support this claim he points to the target. Who is to claim he has not achieved something? Most of the bullets are in the bull’s-eye, after the fact the claim looks rather convincing, if a person had have happened upon the aftermath of the event and not seen it unfold from the start they might surmise that a sharpshooter had visited town.

What is the problem with this fallacy and why have I likened it to this lady speaker? Well, the problem is that she is also painting the target on after the event. It is unimportant that she is an adviser and that the advice may in fact be correct, what is important is that she now stands before me and is promoting herself to those persons that have not yet achieved anything barring attending this school and that what she wishes is for the audience to take her postulate seriously, the postulate that she is the main mechanism of these interested persons successes yet can work her magic after their success has manifested, well that’s ridiculous! At least it should have been, but yet again I find myself mostly alone in my absence of applause and praise.

I have worked it out though, why this happens, it bugged me for a while that I couldn’t figure out how the majority of folks bought into the ridiculous myths of the myth makers, what about a person drove them to believe this nonsense? It’s simple, we desire the world to be a different way than it is, we desire the world to be fair and in doing so we make it seem fair through our cruel perspective, each of us internalising our guilt over non-achievement while setting aside our awareness that the society we live in that enables our actual achievements (regardless of what those achievements happen to be). What I mean to say is that for myself writing this essay I do not in any way acknowledge or applaud my mother, who first taught me how to read and write, I make of it a purely self-regarding endeavour, I also make no mention of all that I have read in my forty plus years that has allowed me to express myself in these terms before you nor do I acknowledge the education that you yourself have received which enables you to understand it. I point these facts out because there is little in a structured society that stands alone when examined thoroughly; even guilt does not exist in a bubble, it is a mechanism by which one judges oneself by the criteria of what is acceptable as defined by others based on norms which are themselves codified into laws and have their fundament rooted firmly in the motivations of those folks who historically have had the political capital to proliferate their own self-interested rules amongst all other persons. Say I decide to urinate in the drain outside my home (as Diogenes perhaps?), what harm would that do to anyone? The urine ends up there anyway; I would be saving the flush at least. What negativity is created by such an act but in the eyes of others who have come to believe that there are acts that are wrong even though they are morally indifferent? Something to think about anyway…

Back to our guest speaker, the sharpshooter, her postulate has been put forward and she has had more than her share of applause but she is not finished yet, now that she has them (the audience) in her grasp she wishes to self-congratulate by pointing out some of the tricks of her trade so we can know them, the first will be very familiar to those person who use Yahoo as their homepage – the traits that all successful persons share, this is pure advertising gold. The premise here is that to be successful one must simply copy the behaviour of those who have already been successful, while I do not disagree that to study and emulate is to learn of how a thing can be done this postulate has some knock-down objections which can be levelled at it, the first of which is this – the actions of all those persons who have tried and failed rarely differ from those few persons who have tried and achieved, nearly everyone who failed to win the lottery had also bought a ticket just as the winner did and wanted to win just as much, and maybe some of them had an egg that morning, and some of them wore jeans and had red hair etc etc etc…. The second objection is that circumstance is a big factor in how things play out, luck if you will, is it not always the case where if the circumstances were different then someone else would have risen to prominence rather than the person who did? And not frequently the case that in the ensuing anecdotes presented by CEOs this very fact reveals itself? Think of any businessman and try to figure out just how well they envisioned the future and how it could benefit them, to be able to say after the fact that superior prescience allowed them to know more about tomorrow than could be known is simply wrong, they acted as others acted and differing outcomes came about because of unreasoned events, therefore the simple act of luck (our term for not knowing every eventuality) plays a role that cannot be underestimated in all things, including and especially successes and failures. I am reminded of Camus and his principle of absurdity wherein life teaches the individual through a series of happenings that to believe in a plan and to be sure of it playing out cannot be entirely, or in many cases in a miniscule way, made definite by covering all of the possibilities and planning accordingly for them, the reason for this is that we have nothing that indicates that everything we have known will continue to be as it has always been, the problem of induction, nor do we have any way of knowing what may seem in the best interests of others and what way they will act and in knowing these facts we come to realise that our plans hang on the same contingencies as tumbling dice or coin tosses. When something happens that is extreme and something happens also that is unbelievable we realise that even the best plan is a guess, let’s say that you read in the newspaper that a prominent figure has survived an assassination attempt where they were shot nine times in the chest by a crazed assailant and on the very same page there is an article about a man who died when a jumbo jet released its toilet waste over the north sea and it sank his rowing boat, there’s nothing fair or rational or scientific about the stuff that just happens, it strains the senses, it makes us react in disbelief, that is what Camus was getting at, it is just absurd.

The second trick is a dodge; it avoids failure by encouraging the listener to only pursue that which one finds oneself to be sufficiently talented in, to work on and by one’s strengths alone. This is a trick because it is saying that the avoidance of things which you cannot do is a strategy, it is not, and it is merely the promotion of non-endeavourus behaviour, the opposite of risk taking. What people do to attain prominence, when they do not already have it, and to out-achieve others is to take risks rather than avoiding them, that is why there are rewards worth attaining in the first place, which is the essence of entrepreneurialism, to see a gap and to go for it rather than occupy safe ground? I had at this point figured out what this lady was actually up to, hers was not a speech designed to motivate the listener into action but to appeal to conformity and caste in so much as to promote acceptance of the status quo that serves the wealthy (her social group as well as her client base) so well. This, given the setting, is a good strategy because it is important to realise where we are here, at a private school full of the offspring of rich folks who need that belief in conformity so as to stay rich in a society that contains unjustified and unjustifiable levels of inequality. Her strategy is to bolster within these folks the idea that the flag they wave is the flag that all should wave with them, the audience are because of their wealth the assumed to be the leaders of the next generation, it is important that they have the right message to get across to their followers and she is here to get them on message and free of doubt. This trick as I have called it prevents the mobility of good ideas, differing ideas, radical ideas and I personally don’t like that; if we look at the world historically we find that all forces of change for the better have arisen in time where a collective of persons became disillusioned with the social status quo and recognised that change was imperative, this recognition for the need of change is made possible by the admission of failure and the focus upon it. It is not the accepting person who changes the world, it is the dissatisfied person or group, I would go as far as to say that the greatest motivation for change is failure rather than success for why would anything or anyone need to change if it succeeds? The second criticism I have of this trick is that it is simply no fun, no fun at all to play only the games and work only the jobs that one possesses the natural tendencies for. What if I didn’t want to be what I am good at? What if I wanted to do something else, something that I am happier doing? Should I be prevented from my dreams because I may not realise them? I would rather be happy than successful any day, but that’s just me.

A further criticism can be levelled at this trick in that it argues against the premise of the private school it is being promoted to, the headmaster has applauded this speaker as though she has brought great wisdom to the day but he has entirely failed to spot the contradiction she has posted in that her position is one which states that there are things that one will find oneself to be less than good at, if we remember again where we are (a private school) we will also remember what that means, what it’s ethos is, namely that all persons can achieve all things and that success is simply a product of will (just like Matthew Syed says), there are no such things as natural abilities. If this lady is correct then last year’s speaker is incorrect, the principal appeared to agree with both of them, a bit of a conundrum there….

This school, for the second year in succession has presented me with limited thought and fallacy, and for that fact and the fact that it fuelled this essay I am thankful. I am more thankful though that my son has left the school and will be pursuing his education at another establishment where he will be in a more real environment (not without its bullshit either) with real people who don’t actually believe the lies they tell.

Paul Simon Wilson