Panacea – Part II

One of my most common complaints while arguing or debating with someone is how the other person is refusing to give credit to my intelligence. Not agreeing with my opinion is something that I love to come to terms with, but not being given credit for possessing intelligence is something my vain mind seems to have a recalcitrant tendency to not do. This I believe is the case, albeit with varying degrees of vanity, with most people.

This vanity happened to meet its match when my darling girl asked me as to why she happens to be stuck with the most bull-headed of bosses all the time. What struck me was the universality of the question. Why in the world, of 6 billion people, do most people feel they are dealing with a boss whose level of intelligence and of common sense is about two rungs below a heap of compost? Or put in another way, why does Dilbert exist at all? Or even better, why is Dilbert so widely acclaimed?

All these questions have one single answer. This answer has one single word.

Education.

What education has got to do with the collective turdiness of bosses the world over, and what education has got to do with the existence of Dilbert and education being the reason for the collective misery of large sections of populace can also be summed up in one word.

Everything.

Education, especially the kind there is to be got from elite schools and colleges, instead of doing what is promises to do does exactly the opposite. What is effectively does is narrow down the view of everyone being subjected to it.

By constantly allowing their students to flatter themselves for being the best and allowing them to have a smug feeling of security that they are, no matter what, destined to the plummest jobs available,  these schools also foster among their pupils a sense of exclusive self-worth, which is, in most cases, stunningly misplaced.

I say exclusive (when mentioning self-worth), not because it is exclusive in the sense of only a few people possessing it, but in the sense that it excludes you from the rest of the world. It makes the person with the exclusive sense of self-worth incapable of being able to talk with those who did not receive similar education.

When they say that people from elite schools have a strong sense of leadership, it gives me the creepy feeling that what they mean is actually that the pupils who have graduated from these schools have a strong feeling that they ought to be leaders, no matter what. This, if you ask me, is like saying that anyone who owns a Ferrari is a great driver. Considering that it is such people who end up  owing such sets of wheels, it is of little surprise that most of the people driving these fancy sets of wheels actually behave as if they are great at whatever they do, including driving, – which they are not.

Here in lies the problem.

What this sort of an education does is equate academic supremacy with universal supremacy. While it might be true that the geek shall inherit the earth, the schools give a twist to the thought saying, only the geek ought to inherit the earth. It like saying my grandmother will be a great CEO because she is kick ass at killing snakes. Or more even appropriately, it is akin to allowing someone like say, George Bush, rule a great nation like America just because he went to Stale Yale.

Oops? Not really.

What these schools do is make students adept at jumping up the rungs of ladders. What they train them for is to grab leadership when it is passing by. What they do is create masses of pupils who, no matter how pointless the subject is, do not question is presence, but merely aim at getting a perfect 10. What they do is create masses of bosses who are more interested in how huge their resume is than how they can be of real value. What they do is make you adept at bargaining. So when the time comes to sell your soul, you get a better price. What they do is to create hordes of leaders who in their smugness think that creating complex solutions to simple problems is a shortcut to greatness.

What they do is give us people who can probably calculate the market risk factor to the fiftieth decimal point but do not know how to shell a boiled egg, because they are people beneath them who shell the egg for them.

This is the answer to all questions hierarchical. This is the answer to why bosses rarely have the balls to go beyond the rules mentioned. This is the answer to why we have problems with seemingly simple solutions explode into unmanageable issues. It is the reason why when a monkey that got down the tree in China invented money, everyone followed suit and now no one knows how the hell to control inflation.

The schools instead of cultivating intelligent minds that can come up with original solutions, create minds that are tuned to do nothing other than scale the ladder of hierarchy with all the eagerness then of a cat whose behind tasted a spiked boot. Since these minds cannot do anything but that, they subconsciously strive to protect the hierarchy they are built to climb. Because, without anything to climb, they are a waste. To ensure this, they have mentees who are also from the same schools of thought, of whom they expect nothing more than continued existence of the tradition of hierarchical ladder climbing.

The explanation for the general state of affairs for being rather sad is really, really simple. It all starts with them facing problems. Problems, by the consequence of not having the right education, do not follow rules or hierarchy. Problems do not discriminate between a person from Yale or Harvard and a plumber. Problems cannot be solved by the ability to find loopholes or by the ability to jump to leadership positions. Problems need solutions and finding these require intelligent minds.

It is why, for so many years, animals have been in existence without border control, without passports, without the UN, and without NATO, while the human race owing, to their great leaders from great schools cannot deal with the simple problems of global warming (stop deforestation by not granting any more permits to construct housing on virgin forests), inflation (who was the bastard who thought paper money was a good idea?), food deficiency (remember the virgin forests that you allowed to be cut down?)

This is also the reason why most of the really successful entrepreneurs are rarely from great schools. This is also the reason why most of the disgraces that the world has seen, from the Enron fiasco to the Price Waterhouse Cooper issue have at their root, someone from an elite school.

It is also why most people complain about the rising prices of food, and fuel but cannot come up with the simple solution of cultivating their own in a pot or in a kitchen garden, or taking a bus to the office. Because the first is beyond their ken and the second, beneath their dignity.

God has indeed blessed the world!