A Flood of Fools.

I gotta get in on this trump dump. I am not going to comment on his behavior with regard to women, as others are doing a far better job than I could. Rather, I want to focus on something that has been concerning me for quite some times.

This came from a facebook post. I will admit that I have a few things wrong here, but I am happy to hear dissenting views.

Our generation (30ish people) have borne witness to a major shift in attitudes towards critical thinking and thoughtful prose and rhetoric. There is a major anti-intellectual component of modern American mainstream culture, and in this post I hope to document my experiences of it and point toward what I see as a major factor in its growth.

We grew up to see Captian Picard, Janeway and Sisko be replaced by a Kirk who punches aliens for half of a movie. We watched the Superconducting Supercollider fail and turn into a counter-terrorism training pit. We watched the anti-vax movement. We saw the rise of the extreme right, and the extreme left, both subjugating fact to feelings. We watched people force our school children to learn bullshit.

The American space program languished, until being saved by a few wealthy individuals. Our news has devolved into short segments of no investigative value. The articles we share are infected with invisible sponsored content.

The message of modern America seems to be “It’s okay to be stupid. We will let you be stupid, and give you just as much attention as people who have dedicated their lives to learning”. Trump is the Golem created by our gradual acceptance of idiocy into the public sphere.

Now, where do you think this came from? I have a hunch. 
Dodge Vs. Ford Motor Company. Wiki link attached. This was in 1919. This set the stage.

In short, this is the case that made it law that a corporation shall only act in the interest of its shareholders. This made it an actionable offence for any C-level executive to behave in a manner inconsistent with maximizing profits. Then, something else happened, gradually, since the the 60s. The holding period for stock has gone from an average of 8 years to 3 months in 2016. 3 months happens to be about one financial quarter.

What does this all mean?
1. It is illegal to operate a public company without putting shareholder value as a primary focus. 
2. Investors now only value short term gains.

What does this have to do with anti-intellectualism? 
I feel that the media, which is a combination of print, film, news networks, internet, and such has a huge impact in shaping the cultural landscape. People reference movies and television shows to contextualizes their lives. Political news gives people the feeling that they are part of something bigger than themselves. Movies are the collective dreams of a culture.

Because of the nature of business, competition generally leads to a winnowing of the field, and fewer and fewer companies control a larger and larger part of the landscape. Most media is produced by a handful of companies. These companies are under pressure, due to Dodge v Ford, to optimize for shareholder value. The shareholders and demanding short term returns. The best way to increase revenue is to increase your total addressable market.

In media, this means lowering your standards enough such that your material can be accessible to as many people as possible. Not everyone knows that evolution is a fact, and that vaccines have saved billions of lives, and that Donald Trump is neither as rich as he says he is or as successful. Reality television was born because it fills programming hours at a lower cost. Television news became less wordy and more emotive, because, hey, bored peopled don’t watch, and commercials pay for everything.

As a result, our collective overmind has dumbed itself down to allow for a larger swath of the population to feel included. This has legitimized idiocy. Rather than using the media to set the national tone of thoughtful, reasoned thinking, we have let it become the plaything of morons, because hey, that will increase revenue per share.

There are a ton of other ways in which Dodge vs. Ford have messed us up culturally.

Outsourcing? Check 
Sale/Leasebacks? (Destroys a companies equity in itself) Check
Hostile takeovers? Check
$500 EpiPens? Check

What is my point? Where am I going with all this? Forgive me, this is less well reasoned than I would like: 
Humans invented money to allow us to further our goals in an easier manner. The point of money was never money, but the processes enabled by money. However, Money for the sake of money started to take precedence. Look no further than the exponential curves on employee pay-scales at major corporations.

Let’s say you start a company that makes drill bits. Your drill bits are the best, they don’t dull and they can be sold for a lower price than your competition. Now you get bought by a public company, or go public yourself. Now, your company is no longer about drill bits. It is about money. It is illegal for it to be about anything but money. So you get ousted by the new board because you liked making the drill bits more than reaping profits.

So what does the new CEO do? He sells all the drill grinders to a holding company, and leases them back. The massive injection of cash goes on the balance sheet for that quarter, increasing earnings per share. Then, he takes all the drill grinders, ships them to Vietnam, fires your Huston staff, and switches to a cheaper metal. The drill bits suck now (Mostly because of the cheaper metal), but also because the new manufacturing staff wasn’t passionate or interested in making drill bits. Then, the new CEO winds down your industrial sales division and switches to a direct-to-consumer model with Home Depot and Loews. This increases quarterly earnings yet again.

Having done all he could to increase short term value, the guy quits, does it to a few more companies and then runs for president under the GOP, saying that he is going to bring jobs back to America.

Meanwhile, you go into home depot and see your name on some shit-ass drill bits that suck. But the company makes more money now.

So those are my thoughts. America, by subjugating itself to financial pressures, has perverted our own human needs. Donald Trump is a symptom of this illness. His idiocy is celebrated and allowed because it is profitable to tolerate it. And it is illegal to be unprofitable.