Summary: Four social scientists nurse their pet success theories, then get into a bar fight. A tale of human success stories and the formulas we've invented to explain them.
Here is a tale of four social scientists.
Let's say the son of a landowner and the son of a welfare patron both go out into the workforce after schooling, where one of them had gone to Harvard and studied Descartes, while the other flunked public school and studied Harry Potter, Jerry Garcia and WWF Monday Nitro. The Descartian retires thirty years later with a house in the Hamptons and a yacht docked at his private pier, while the Slacker does 12 months for possession with intent, and spends the rest of his life moving from county to county. The first scientist spends enough time to judge their respective comfort and concludes that Descartes is the superior philosophy. He then spends a fortune in grant money to figure out what the magic ingredient is in Descartes, so he can slip it into the scriptwriting for the World Wrestling Foundation.
Meanwhile the second scientist is a grumpy old man who shakes his fist at the televised press conference and says, "bah! All it takes is hard work and attention to detail!" This revelation is so banal, however, that he couldn't get a government grant to study "The reason why hard work and grits make people successful" and so neither he nor his insight became famous. He wants the government to phase out welfare and reform public schools to put new and greater emphasis on responsibility, pride in workmanship, and hard work, so everbody can learn the same skills.
The third scientist was closely affiliated with The Human Genome project, lobbied for stem cell research, and considers The Boys from Brazil to be one of the greatest movies ever made. He sees a sad but incontrovertible lack of talent in the Slacker that's entirely the fault of his genes, but an equally genetic push to succeed in the Descartian. If only he could identify those genes he could make sure they're spliced into everybody before they're born.
The fourth scientist was a statistician and unimpressed by the sample size. After observing traffic patterns in New York City for a month, he theorized that the slacker was like the guy who pulled out of his lane to fill up a two-car space, only to get stuck behind slower traffic and lose his fleeting advantage. When the slacker thought he was maximizing his pleasure by smoking weed in the parking lot he was actually doing damage to his future success. Only he can't be blamed for that, because it's statistically unlikely that any subjective opportunity will go unclaimed, and the Slacker just happened to be the schmuck who claimed the wrong one.
To the statistician, the two men were therefore the product of competition for opportunities of unpredictable value. The reason why everybody is different is because those opportunities are scarce and unevenly distributed. When the slacker smoked weed he deprived the Descartian of the same opportunity, even if it was an infinitesimal difference. And when the Descartian went to a drug-awareness class, there was one less seat that the Slacker could've sat in. Multiply by tens of millions of kids, stretch it over decades, and patterns emerge which lesser scientists foolishly study in isolation.
Plus, unlike the other three scientists, the statistician didn't want to "fix" anything. There was no problem. There were only pebbles which filled the cracks and made the road smooth for other pebbles to roll over.
One day all four of them discover each other in a bar after a couple pints too many, and after sending each other to the hospital in a nasty brawl, they all decide to reconcile their differences and come up with a unified formula for success. All you gotta do is...
be born to the right parents in the right place at the right time so you can check out Discours de la methode from the library before anybody else does, then pack an hour's reading between the end of first shift and the beginning of third.
And for God's sake, if you're ever driving in New York City, stay in your fucking lane!
(These are discovered in real-time and sorted by newest first. See how to get listed.)
Have a response to something said on this page? Want others to see it after reading this article? This page can detect where a visitor is coming from and provide a permanent link back to it that all other visitors can see. Link to this article from the page where you've posted your response, and a reciprocal link to your page will be made automatically and for free.
More information is available for this service and even how to make individual paragraphs link back to you
All material published at this site, unless otherwise indicated, is Copyright © 2000 - 2004 Synesmedia, Inc. All rights reserved. No reproductions in any media are permitted without written and electronically signed permission from Synesmedia, Inc. Disenchanted occasionally features references to real people, companies and products for the purpose of satire.
Disenchanted is published by Synesmedia, Inc. Synesmedia also publishes Interchange Techniques