Sunday, August 5, 2012

"Good-Natured Unambitious Men"

If Pareto's 80/20 law is correct (and history has shown that it is) then while 80% of men are good-natured and not overly-ambitious, there will be that 20% that are more ambitious than the average. And if you take that 20%, and use it as 100%, then 20% of them are the really ambitious ones.

These super-ambitious types aren't necessarily a good thing. In fact, I'd say they're far more bad than good. Think politicians, most of whom are very ambitious and almost always immensely destructive. Think lawyers. Think MBAs. Think of the ambitious in our finance industry.

If none of these people had never existed, would it be a better or worse world? I'd say it's pretty obvious it's be a better world. A much better world.

Even if a man is good-natured and mostly unambitious, he should still be highly paid. I knew a man who spent his career as a janitor at my high school, and he led a middle-class existence with a two-story house, a wife who didn't work, and two kids.

These day, janitors are paid mostly minimum wage. In reality they should make $50,000 a year, which is what my high-school janitor made.

Don't laugh. Wages stopped going up in 1973, courtesy of government interference in the economy. Had they kept going up as they should have, one economist (whose name I have forgotten) estimated the average wage would be about $90,000 a year. So the idea of a janitor making $50,000 is not outrageous at all.

I also knew a cab driver who started driving in the 1950s. When I met him, he told me that when he started driving a taxi, he wondered, "Where has this job been all my life?"

He made what today would be about $50,000 a year. One month out of the year, he went on vacation. He put his wife in the sidecar of his motorcycle and off they would go.

Today, with the influx of 85-IQ Third Worlders, the yearly wages for driving a taxi are below $20,000 a year. It used to be a very good middle-class job; now it pays nearly poverty wages and is a lower-class job for anti-American immigrants, who are obsessed with their "rights" and have no understanding of their obligations and duties.

I also knew a man who told me "I could have been rich but it wasn't worth it." He was a general contractor who built four houses a year. He said he could have built entire subdivisions, worked 60 hours a week including nights and weekends, and become rich in about ten years.

I understand his sentiment. He decided there was more to life than working your ass off just to be rich.

Some economists support these destructive things. My experience with economists is that the people who least understand economics are the Ph.D.s; those who don't understand economics at all are the Ph.D.s from Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

Eric Hoffer, in his The Ordeal of Change, wrote, "It has been often stated that a social order is likely to be stable so long as it gives scope to talent. Actually, it is the ability to give scope to the untalented that is most vital in maintaining social stability. For not only are the untalented more numerous but, since they cannot transmute their grievances into a creative effort, their disaffection will be more pronounced and explosive."

In other words, if there is no place in society for the untalented, i.e. those good-natured unambitious men, then they are the ones will rise up and turn into blood-thirsty sheeple.

Not only is the middle-class is in trouble, thanks to the incompetents in government, so are the relationships between men and women, again thanks to the government.

It used to be not so long ago, a man could work 40 hours a week and live a middle-class existence. His wife didn't have to work unless she wanted to and they could raise as many kids as they wanted.

Those days are gone, again thanks to the government.

It now takes two incomes to live a middle-class existence, and as for the children they have to be farmed out to preschools, which means you're putting them in the hands of strangers.

Poorly-paid strangers, I'll add. If they were paid $50,000 a year to take care of your kids there wouldn't be any caretakers. No one would pay for them.

I've known people who've opted out of these horrors. I know one couple who live in a rural trailer and homeschool their children, which consists of the mother taking them for walks, showing them nature and discussing things with them, and getting them books from the library.

It may not sound like real schooling, but look at it this way: kids are in school from five to 17. What exactly do they learn in 12 years? Can you name anything that takes 12 years to learn?

With the destruction of middle-class jobs comes the destruction of families and children's lives. Forty-nine percent of people in the U.S. are unmarried. Might this have anything to do with the destruction the middle class?

I think it's pretty obvious that it is. As high-paying middle-class jobs for good-natured unambitious men are outsourced and destroyed, families will not form.

Many women will opt to have children on their own, with them of course being paid for by the State. And there is huge problem with this.

One is that the word "bastard" has two meanings: a boy with no father and a cruel, heartless man. It's been noticed for a long time that boys without fathers quite often become cruel, vicious men.

Without fathers, society and civilization will always go backwards.

Without the middle-class, and high-paying jobs for all those good-natured unambitious men, society will separate into two classes: the superrich and the superpoor. And the superrich will live in gated communities and use the police and military to keep everyone else under control.

It won't last all that long, though. The economy will collapse, again courtesy of the federal government. Unfortunately, things will get a lot worse before they collapse. And this includes the relationships between men and women, marriage, and worst of all, the damage done to our children.

4 comments:

SirStanley said...

I agree with several things in this post, but I disagree with the primary idea. Why should people with no talent or ambition make good money?

As more and more mindless labor jobs are done by machine, I always thought this was a great opportunity for men to stop working assembly lines and pushing buttons and n really do something. Learn a trade, get real skills, DO SOMETHING. You disagree?

lulu82 said...

@SirStanley: You missed the point. Unambtious or "no talent" was not meant to be too literal. All jobs require a certain level of skill and training, and not everyone is going to be the Bill Gates or Beyonce of their craft. For example, teachers, chefs, mechanics, etc... These are professions which require skill, but are not considered "professional". These professions should demand decent wages but they don't, for reasons stated in the article.
There are many people with talent and ambition who are not considered talented or ambitious because they do not want to own a business or be famous. Yet they still are hard-working and deserve decent wages. Would you want someone underpaid to teach your kids or fix your brakes?

Dr. Illusion said...

The unskilled, un-talented, and unambitious should either die out or be crushed under the heel of real men. The real men will rebuild this country when it all comes crashing down.

Unknown said...

"The unskilled, un-talented, and unambitious should either die out or be crushed under the heel of real men."

Pareto's 80/20 says that 80% of men should die, then, using your logic. You forget that perhaps you are the 80% who will die.