Because modern politics is a nose-counting expedition, and because people generally vote in their own self-interest, the transfer of power distills to demographics.
Whatever group can be formed of the most people wins. This realization kicked off centuries of activity to convince people to construe themselves as members of various groups, social classes and identities, so that they could be induced to vote against the interests of each country as a whole.
At this point, the election process itself begins to redefine the population; the tool becomes the master, and the master the tool.
The need for demographics of large numbers means that any attempt to ascend to a more refined state, which naturally has fewer members, is to lose power.
What wins is a broad appeal, not so much a lowest common denominator as lowest semi-plausible qualifier. You admit everyone who has not blatantly disqualified themselves through criminal convictions or bad opinions.
That in turn creates a mania to identify bad opinions and root them out, as if they spread, it ruins the consensus formed of the broad appeal group. The group itself becomes a tool that replaces the master, and brings people in on the basis of acceptance.
A large group has one salient value to offer: if it accepts you, you are given a place and will survive the natural selection process, where in the wild you face uncertainty about your survival. Approval “equals” your survival, unless you disqualify yourself.
In turn this begins sweeping together a group of people we might call the clever. They are witty enough to game the system, and to use its bulk against itself in forcing approval of themselves, but not wise enough to see the consequences of this will be disaster.
Opposing them are the smart. They are not clever; they appear slow-witted, un-hip, unexciting. However, they think in terms of the end results of things, which means they are interested in both consequences of actions and the knowledge of the world and its ways to understand them. They tend to think outside of time, meaning that they design cities to last for millennia and create policy to benefit the next 10,000 generations.
The smart will never win elections because they are an exclusive, rather than inclusive, group. They have moved up the ladder of rarity and not down to the broader common denominator as the clever do. But as a result, the smart demonstrate an expertise-based decision-making process.
However, the smart infuriate the clever just by existing. The smart see things the clever cannot; the smart always seem to interrupt the plans of the clever by pointing out how five moves ahead these plans will lead to disaster.
The clever resent the smart. They would like to be included in the ranks of the smart, but for whatever reason are not, so they want to destroy what they cannot have. They will turn to desperate measures to make their inclusive group larger in order to defeat the exclusive.
All of the issues we discuss in politics conceal this underlying warfare. The clever naturally are most popular, but the smart are most in demand where function is critical. In this war, stability and happiness empower the clever and penalize the smart.
The great pretense of the clever is that this war is not existing, and that the default state of humanity is cleverness. They will attempt to construe the smart position as an anomaly, so that we return to “normal” which is (funny that) the clever position.
Thus the war rages on, consuming the society around it, since no one has thought to ask the question of whether we want to be smart or clever as a society.
43 queries. 0.880 seconds
These are my choices?
I can be six cows or one dog?
Nein! I am a crow!
There is nothing like me in all the universe.
Although, to the clever, and to the smart, there seem to be many crows.
There is, in fact, just One.
How unfortunate it is, that humans do not understand this concept.
“Opposing them are the smart. They are not clever; they appear slow-witted, un-hip, unexciting. However, they think in terms of the end results of things, which means they are interested in both consequences of actions and the knowledge of the world and its ways to understand them. They tend to think outside of time, meaning that they design cities to last for millennia and create policy to benefit the next 10,000 generations.”
I get the city model as a way of illustrating the point. But I have only vague understanding of historic big cities. I guess Cairo has been around the longest, based on ancient Egyptian civilization, a long, long lasting empire but then each empire after that has grown shorter. The Aztec temples are all abandoned. That one city in Cambodia is abandoned. New York City will probably always be there. It had a few lasting ideas such as Central Park and a huge underground infrastructure and the Hudson River… If you could call a church a city, the Mormon Church is a huge city.
Great blog entry. I like to think about it.
You think NYC will probably always be there?
What makes you think that?
I imagine, of almost any possible example, NYC will be one of the shortest-lasting of any ‘great’ city.
Constantinople, perhaps, is a good example of long-lasting. It seems to have adapted to whatever came its way, and continues to.
If a forest is a city, populated as forests are with so many creatures, then they are examples to emulate: no matter what happens, even to the point of total destruction, forests nearly always eventually regenerate.
Not saying I love NYC… I’d love to see what would happen afterward but I just think it’s such a mix of everything. Surely the strongest would survive. Rome is still there but changed leadership a few times.
I was waiting for mention of Rome…however, to take the discussion further (supposing anyone was interested), we would need to define what it means for a city to have “lasted”: i.e. is it leadership and/or inhabitance by the original ethno-cultural/religious group, original base architecture/infrastructure still extant (this one seems dubious to me), history of successful defense of the city against external attack. Any others I’m missing (should be a few)?
Not that this is the main point of the article; just thought I’d put it out there if people were interested
Great post and glad you are saying it. Someone needs to, as once it is said, it cannot be denied that it has.
I read the previous post before this one, and I made a comment that pretty much says the same thing you say here (in a way, related to my own experience): “The clever resent the smart.”
Funny how that works. So cannot say I disagree with you on that one.
Is clever like understanding, and smart like wisdom?
There is nobody, any more, and no source, for defining the words people use. Oddly, this may turn out to be a good thing, ultimately. It can cause people – or at least some of them – to not assume they know what is meant, but to apply some consideration to it, and reach their own conclusions. Which is something that has being going downhill for some considerable time.
There I go being positive again.
I really need to address that obvious flaw :)
People are halfwits, with few exceptions. I change nothing by giving the benefit of the doubt. It took me a very long time to figure that one out.
‘Clever’, to me, in this context, means stringing together thoughts and words to explain what needs no explaining, so that ‘sense’ can be made of it.
‘Smart’, by contrast, means knowing when, and when not, to try to impose ‘sense’ on things.
Then again, I am from outer space.
Crimpled thinking, even with good grammar, to try and explain stuff objectively that is subjectively invalid. Right.
I would indeed agree that “clever” in this context is akin to understanding – the ‘clever’ understand how the system works, and use that understanding to gain profit (not necessarily financial) for themselves, regardless of longer-term consequences. “Smart” is akin to wisdom because the ‘smart’ not only understand how the system works, but they have the wisdom to recognize that it is flawed (broken if you’re melodramatic), and seek to effect change to alter how the system works so that it does not collapse, resulting in chaos, disorder, and other things people don’t realize how much they depend on until it “disappears” (i.e. disintegrates due to lack of maintenance).
Unless you were asking for the definition of it outside of this article’s context – in which case crow’s answer above makes sense (I think – he is an extra-terrestrial crow after all;-)