Ogden / Kent Stupid Humans

The Devolution of the American Experiment
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-0983-1537-5
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 186 Seiten

This book is written by two Military men, with a combined 50+ years working in the Military Industrial Complex. The views here provide thought provoking insights into where we are as a Nation, and how we got so far removed from the vision of the framers. It goes into basic economics to illustrate how business works in a free market economy and uses analogies to show just how 'We The People' have been duped over the years and how the liberties guaranteed in the Constitution have been consistently degraded.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ogden, Clay

Kent, Gary

Leseproben

CHAPTER I: WHO AM I?

Intro

There comes a point in many a person’s life when he or she thinks their experience or knowledge is worth recording on paper. This is that time for me. I will get into who I am later, which is only important so you can assign context to my observations, regardless of whether or not you agree with them.

Through the course of my life, I have observed some recurring themes that are applicable across many facets of life. I can’t help but wonder how or why others don’t see things in the same way, but when I debate certain subjects from a principle standpoint, I have yet to hear legitimate arguments against the reasoning found within these pages. Really, it baffles me that some folks can be so wed to an opinion as to refuse to see logic and reason within an issue. I think, and have read somewhere, that it goes to some deep psychological need to be accepted rather than right.

I’m not immune; I was born and grew up with a good deal of “need to be accepted” as far as high school and adolescent peer pressure, but somewhere along the line logic and reason took over, and I began to see things “objectively,” or so I think anyway. At least that is how I feel. If you read on perhaps you will agree with me. Or perhaps, you may think I’m nuts. You may find a little both to be somewhat true.

Sometimes when I’m done discussing an issue (often it’s a principle within an issue that I presume to know more about than others), and my “opponents” have failed to impress their views on me, I feel really smart. But then I look around and quickly realize that’s not the case, because I know many of my friends and colleagues are far smarter than I, as well as (statistically speaking) half the people at the bus stop. Actually, when I think about it, it rarely has anything to do with being smart; it’s always about being informed. Just being open to consider each side of an issue, and considering opinions older than last night’s evening news, generally produces significantly different views on a subject than most in mainstream America ever consider.

My experiences tell me that the average American’s knowledge on most issues does not go farther than a newspaper or magazine article, and they rarely, if ever, question the information that is presented there. In this regard, I’m very different from normal. I’ve always been the guy to ask why. When I was a kid, telling me to remember history or a math formula never appealed to me if I saw no use for the information, but if I knew the reason I needed to know something, learning the specifics was usually very easy.

This is true to some extent for everyone who has survived life, and it is interesting to point out that it is survival, and survival alone, that drives the process. For example, I didn’t know the physics behind electricity when I was 10, but I sure understood the shock I got when I touched the spark plug wire on the lawnmower and so I stopped doing it. In my view, this is as much nature as the lion killing the antelope. I also quickly learned that the plug had to be clean and the gas tank full in order to get the motor to run so I could cut my neighbor’s lawn and earn $10. Also nature—the law of self-preservation I think.

Maybe it’s a gift of clarity that has come with my unique experiences and cursory research that has enabled me to form what are, to me, relatively obvious conclusions from ordinary observations. Or maybe the most likely condition is that I’m just the first one to write them down in this context. Maybe it will be earth-shattering, maybe amusing, but hopefully at least worth your time. Anyway, it’s a short read, and so it shouldn’t take too long before you know what you think.

I have to state early on here that I take no credit for any of the observations or even the conclusions, as everything in my mind is ultimately something that I learned or heard from another source. This is an important part of my outlook on life and my view of who we are; that our psyche is largely made up from experience.

Think about it. If we are all amalgamations of our experiences, do we ever really have any original thoughts, or are we just a summation of everything we’ve seen and heard so far on the journey of life? This is really a deep philosophical question that I won’t answer in this book but it’s interesting to ponder. Personally, I think it’s a mixture of us all having different DNA, coupled with the stimuli we receive over the course of life. I think I read somewhere that that is what makes life worth living; we are all different, and constantly changing.

So this is a book about logic and intelligence, as I understand it, applied to everyday life, as I see it. The title is meant to be catchy (in order to sell books, of course) as well as a reflection of the basic conclusion I have come to over the course of 50+ years on the planet. The basic premise is that humans, collectively, are stupid, even though individually they can be quite brilliant.

This is quite a paradox, yes, but nonetheless my estimation. How else can it be explained that the human race can produce a Mozart or Einstein and also elect and follow a Hitler or be convinced to aimlessly slaughter each other by the thousands over seemingly meaningless things?

I hope that my observations will amuse you and perhaps sway your assessment of the world and how things work, or at least foster some independent thought that I dare say will be considered “out of the box” by the masses. However, I rather think that many, namely the ones who have learned how to exploit you, would rather you just keep your mouth shut, keep going to work and paying your taxes, and raise your 2.5 children to be future taxpayers as well.

My summation is that using knowledge acquired through a basic contemporary education (which can easily be obtained at a local library or even online in the modern world) can produce an understanding of how things work to a degree of relative certainty, and that many of life’s mysteries are not so mysterious at all, if you just objectively investigate them a little bit. I’ve concluded that logic, and some basic principles that I’ve ascertained to be accurate, can be applied to most any problem or instance to reach fairly clear conclusions.

By applying a mediocre human intelligence and investigating information readily available (especially nowadays with the Internet) one can leverage the nearly unlimited amount of data to aid in decision making or opinion forming. Of course, if everything I think is accurate, that would make me some sort of genius, which I am not. But if any of my insights are unique or can help some see things differently, perhaps this book will be worth reading.

I should point out that I’m in my fifties now and think I have a lot of life pretty well worked out. Of course, in my thirties I thought I was pretty smart and worldly, in my twenties I thought I was some sort of genius and of course as a teenager, I knew EVERYTHING.

I guess if you follow that string of logic, I’m either getting dumber or realizing that there’s a little more to life than figuring out how to get through college or find a decent job. I heard once that when you figure out life, that’s when you die. If that’s true, then I might live forever because things seem to be getting more complicated all the time.

So through a variety of life experiences, education and selective reading, I’ve come to look at the world and history in the macro sense, through a wide-angle lens with ample logic applied. Perhaps this is because it is easy to do, at least in my mind. I think picking an ideology, philosophy or cause to support is easy if you don’t have to apply it to real-life, everyday situations. For example, it’s easy to just say free healthcare is a good thing, as long as you don’t ponder the question of who’s to supply the “free” healthcare. Of course, in this instance (as with many others) one would quickly (or eventually?) come to the realization that nothing is free, and then likely see the paradox of modern government in America: how to promise more to the people who elect you while at the same time purporting to administer fairness and freedom as is allegedly guaranteed in our Constitution (liberty).

The basic premise being that, since the government does not produce anything, the only way it can give something to one portion of the population is to take it from another, which of course is neither fair nor free. But along the way, at the same time you would realize that most of the humans are stupid, or at least undereducated about most issues. This fact is exploited by politicians, and citizens are repeatedly cajoled to vote for and support politicians who purport to deliver free things to them. They either do not understand or, more likely, choose to ignore the reality of governmental theft. The stupid part is that many think this can somehow go on perpetually.

OK, so stupid humans. A catchy title intended to sell books? Sure. But what is the reality? Are...