Smart People Need to Leave it Alone

There's an ancient story that came out of Ur of the Chaldees, told by an old herdsman and minor prince who settled along the trade lanes between Ur and Egypt. The story goes that in the beginning, the first woman wandered off and took up conversation with a snake - probably something reptillian or saurian with some nice coloring and reasonably sentient looking, for the snake turned out to have rather a lot to say.

He started out talking about the scenery. 

"See yon tree?" 

"Isn't that lovely?"

That sort of thing.  From there they went on to talking about food.

"Nice apples, huh?"

Then he moved on to politics.

"Wouldn't it be nice to take a bite?"

"But the law says we'll die if we do..."

"You won't die. Your soul is immortal. The authorities just want to deny you the good stuff."

"My soul is immortal? I didn't know that."

"Sure. Trust me. I know this stuff."

Then the conversation got around to stroking the old vanity.

"Look, you're a pretty smart chick there. Can't you see, the Man is just wantin' to keep you down? He knows that if you eat from that tree, you'll become a god just like Him."

Well, as those of you who've read this old story before, know, things went badly from there. 

I once read Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. In it I could hear the voice of the serpent in the garden speaking smooth words to people who believe they are a bit above the rest of the ignorant proletariat. And they are such suckers for that. My suspicion is that most so-called smart people were picked on when they were kids. Any appeal to such a person that says, "Come on, now. You're so much smarter than the rest of these rubes," is going to be very very powerful.

That's what Alinsky's "Rules" does.  It convinces people who think they are smart that they aren't held down to the same rules as the rest of us. That's the lure of socialism - it tells everyone they are too smart to be held down, melds them into a vast collective and then turns them into one big universally downtrodden proletariat.  Even brilliant people like Einstein fell for it.

Dr. Einstein's said this in his essay, "The World as I See It":

• "My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized."

Yet, despite his reverence for the individual, in later essays the good doctor speculated that there ought to be a way for the truly intelligent people of the world to fix all of the world's problems. Even, Einstein who hated military "herd life", faced the temptation of smart people to believe they might step into God's shoes and fix things.

As it turns out, smart people don't do so well at fixing the troubles of others. We can't make anyone happy it seems - not if they don't want to be happy. The world today stands at the crossroads between two great ideas.  To the right, we take the path in which the individual is supreme.  To the left, it is the collective which rules.  

The individual or the hive - that's the choice.  One way offers potential for chaos - that is the danger of free will.  The other path offers peace in exchange for our individuality. As the first great American smart guy, Ben Franklin, once brilliantly said, "He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security.”

My people, Christians, are an odd lot in this debate and many of those outside our ranks do not understand us at all. We believe absolutely in free will (at least those of us who are not Calvinists) and yet we act collectively to do good to others. We believe that God values each of us, not as an element within the ranks of church members, but as sons and daughters - individuals, for whom He would have sacrificed his Son had we been the only one. We love sinners, but hate sin. We believe we choose our own fate, but we believe God knows what that fate will be from the very beginning. We don't even fully understand the nature of the God we worship, yet we show up every week to do so.

I suspect that if the majority eventually win the debate and we take the left turn as a nation, that such troublesome Christians will need to be either converted or eventually eliminated. If you read much history, that's usually how it goes for individualists in a collective.

I'm just sayin'
 
Tom King
© 2015

Dystopia or Utopia: How's That Working Out for You?

© 2014 - The Giver

Have you noticed who the villains in the latest dystopian books and films for young people have been - Hunger Games, Divergent, The Giver, Maze Runner, Elysium, et al?
Each of these films casts a large intrusive, control-everything, would-be utopian government as the bad guys. As the Meryl Streep character said in "The Giver", When we give people a choice, they always choose wrong!" Free will always gives those who would rule problems. So the solution virtually every government comes to eventually is to remove all choice from people whether by laws, repression, drugs or brainwashing. Humans can't seem to come up with any better cure than brute force for the problem of free will - at least not those humans who tend to make up governments.

I've only found one solution that cures the problem of free will and it does so by giving us a choice. Joshua articulated that choice to the children of Israel, "Choose you this day, whom you will serve......"

Making that choice leaves you changed. Making the right choice leaves you changed to a better person; one fit to live forever, free and able to truly choose without prejudice, habit, ignorance or confusion to get in the way.

It's an incredible thing, but I think our passage through the crucible of Earth where self service (also known as sin) is allowed to work itself out to its inevitable conclusion, is the only way such a change may be wrought in creatures with true free will. Lucifer thought the Earth needed a prince. Turns out, all it really needed was love. Nothing more complicated than that.

Merry Christmas to you all.

Tom

Keeping Score: Does It Damage the Precious Snowflakes?

We live in a society that increasingly exalts the individual as supreme in the political, social and religious realms. We exalt, what Bill Whittle calls the "precious snowflakes" to preeminence with the new iron doctrine that everyone is special and everyone must have certain things or be able to do certain things he or she wants to do regardless of their ability. This new system of belief that is being foisted upon us by politicians, educators and (sadly) religious leaders has sprung up in an age where, as C.S. Lewis put it, "There is a crowd of busybodies, self-appointed masters of ceremonies, whose lives are devoted to destroying solitude wherever solitude still exists.  They call it 'taking the young people out of themselves' or 'waking them up' or 'overcoming their apathy'."   

(c) by William Wetmore

We see this most clearly in the physical education classroom. Gym teachers, once the tough, no nonsense, hard-drivers of the education system have increasingly bought into the precious snowflake philosophy of teaching. Many have not only stopped keeping score, but have also stopped even teaching kids how to keep score on the grounds that scoring sends a negative message to children that some of them are better than their fellows and, as we all know, each of us is the same - individuals to be sure, just not too individual.  In this system there are limits to one's individuality.  We are all equal members of the team only in the sense that we are all the same, except, of course for our leaders.  On that issue Lewis further complained that, "If an Augustine, a Vaughan, a Traherne or a Wordsworth should be born in the modern world, the leaders of a youth organization would soon cure him."  The precious snowflake version of individualism is useful if you're planning to dump a lot of six-sidedly uniform individuals into a snowdrift or a socialist collective somewhere. Doing away with scoring of athletic competitions in the name of protecting the feelings of "individuals" is an essential precursor to creating a collectivist state.

There is a time to score and a time not to score according to Solomon.  What he actually said was, "To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven," but it means the same thing.  I worked with abused and emotionally disturbed kids for almost a decade as a therapeutic recreation director at a residential treatment center. I taught the kids to play games like baseball where there was plenty of scoring.  We even fielded a team in the local youth league. We kept score. The kids lost a lot. Some of my colleagues thought this was a bad thing for kids with already low self-esteem.

The kids thrived on it. While on the ball field the kids held themselves to a higher standard of language and behavior than any other team out there. They measured their performance by the scores, yes, but as they improved, they also knew they were making real progress because nobody was playing down for them.

The telling moment one day was when the scheduled team confused their schedule and only half of them showed up for the game. We had the field for a couple of hours, so those that showed up decided to play anyway.  We mixed up the teams and played a joyful game of softball for two hours. The good players were helping teach the poorer players (mostly those on my team) and we had such a blast that we totally forgot to keep score.

I started an equestrian program for emotionally disturbed children that everyone said was insane. They were certain the kids would run away on the horses or get themselves hurt or abuse the animals.  What people don't understand about horses is that they teach their riders as much as their riders teach them.  Horses score you on how well you ride and the consequences are immediate and more than a little disconcerting. 

So, if our best game was unscored and our most therapeutic activity didn't post numbers to a scoreboard, am I saying there is no value to games that have no score?  Not at all. The unscored pickup game I played with my treatment center ball team was probably the most therapeutic of the year, but it would not have been so without its having been set within the framework of the scored games. I'm saying there is no value to games that have no point.  The score of a game may well be whether or not you accomplish a task.  The score for the unscored game was mutual understanding and helping each other learn the game.  The score for horseback riding was a successful ride in which the horse went where you wanted it to.

I took a group of kids out once to the woods to build a trail.  We cut the trail, cleared the brush, lined the trail with logs and then wheeled in sawdust to fill in the trail between the logs.  It took weeks to cut a two mile trail. The "score" was riding down the trail on horseback and knowing we'd built that trail with our own hands. No one got paid. Everybody did what they could. The stronger guys pushed the wheelbarrows. The smaller kids spread the sawdust and pitched branches aside. Those of us who could use machete's and axes cut the branches and brush back.

My kids trying out the new trail.

That's actually a pretty good metaphor for how a team or organization of true individuals actually ought to work. Paul (the apostle, not the Beatle) compared it to the organs of the body.  The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you."  The eye also cannot claim to be the hand for it is not at all the same thing.  Each has his part to play. Each is an individual, distinct and whole, but without whom the rest of the organism would be unable to work.

In the opposite way, the athletics departments of our schools have gone too far by making the individual all important and reducing the lesser players to a supporting role. We elevate our stars to a lofty and privileged stature and in the process the stars forget that they are, or at least should be, part of a team. This also is an essential precursor to the formation of a collectivist state in that this teaches that some should be elevated in status over the mere rabble (Marx called them the proletariat) because of their special and genetically superior genes.  These elevated special people then become the privileged caste who are charged with managing the snowdrift.

"There lies the maddening ambiguity of our faith as it must appear to outsiders," says Lewis.  "It sets its face relentlessly against our natural individualism; on the other hand, it gives back to those who abandon individualism, an eternal possession of their own personal being, even of their bodies."   When at last we renounce both the collectivist's "precious snowflake" notion of "individualism" and the equally destructive notion that some of us are superior by birthright, we may then move on to achieve a state of true selfhood.  When we submit our will to God, we get it back from Him, scrubbed clean of all the old grime and with all the psychological entanglements we've accumulated over a lifetime pruned away. Everything that has all along prevented us from achieving our true individuality is removed and we may, by our own unencumbered free will choose to fit ourselves snugly into the very place in the universe for which we were all along intended.





(c) 2013 by Tom King