I sat on a plane talking to a twenty-something-year-old girl, not much older than my daughter, after a brief introduction, talking about the meaning of life. This girl was bright, curious, and could hold her own. She had a well-paying job right after college and was living the life preordained for her.
Yesterday’s Discovery
None of her schooling prepared this girl for the conversation we were about to have. Our discussion aimed to comprehend who our leaders defer to and depend on to craft a world that will soon be theirs. The dirty little secret on the Hill is that most U.S. legislation is actually drafted by twenty-year-olds and fed to senators instead of the other way around. Therefore, testing the acumen and preparedness of young people is crucial.
In my conversation with this girl, I covered Einstein’s theory of relativity, the decline of available energy described by Feynman as entropy, the confounding of cause and consequence referred to by Nietzsche as the depravity of reason, the whims of human wants in democracy not living up to human needs, Artificial Intelligence cunningly regurgitating hindsight, our broken systems void of an embedded human theory, and other topics congruent to the excellence of humanity.
Cognitive Dissonance
It is clear the answers to fundamentally improving humanity are not coming from young people who have already sold their souls to the religions of foregone conclusions widely promulgated as undeniable truth today. I talk to many young people worldwide, in the words of Thomas Sowell, about today’s problems from yesterday’s solutions.
The sweet girl I spoke with had never questioned the value of democracy, did not know what general relativity meant, had never heard of entropy, and just knew the world we created for ourselves was a mess from which she wanted to escape. Cognitive dissonance is in high demand, with her using the escapsim of travel as the next best solution to subdue reality.
Foregone Conclusions
I find it despicable and irresponsible to witness daily how our government, as the arbiters of human excellence, cannot substantiate the burden of its proof. They have failed to recognize that human excellence is defined by nature, not man. Our current vector of human expansion is incompatible with nature. If we keep tinkering with it, those “leaders” leave innocent young people with a feeble hope for a better future. That kind of hope is more than feeble.
We impose democracy as the best thing since sliced bread worldwide, while none of the resulting systems work as advertised. We confound cause and consequence at every turn when we sell the practice and the state of economics as a matter of cause instead of as the measure of consequence it is, leading to widespread depravity of reason.
We sell sustainability as growth for the sake of growth with the ideology of a cancer cell when entropy dictates sustainability is an evolutionary oxymoron. We severely limit humanity’s expansion by ignoring Einstein’s relativity, which would add a whole new dimension to human ingenuity.
Government Arbitrage
Our leaders, elected by populism, so short on substantive influence, full of solipsism, uninformed about nature’s first-principles, married to age-old foregone conclusions, are stuck in hopeless suboptimizations of a human theory left undefined. Young people should not take their cues from the conventional wisdom of the current generation.
We cannot fundamentally improve humanity by leaving behind a foundation of foregone conclusions to which unsuspecting young people yearning to fit in are forced to sell their souls. We should be embarrassed by the boulevard of broken ideologies we leave behind.
A future that breaks the norm will not come from young people preordained to adhere to an extrapolation of the current norm. We must change the norm for human excellence to trace nature’s excellence.
