Manufactured Ineptitude

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Let’s for a moment suppose that I’m a dirty, rotten scoundrel. I want a majority of my fellow Americans to be miserable and broke and incapable of managing their lives. How would I go about creating this epidemic of ineptitude?

I would do the following three things.

Financial Ignorance by Design

The fundamentals of personal finance aren’t hard. Work, avoid destructive vices, temper your appetite for stuff, save, and invest—do these five things consistently over the course of a couple of decades and you will be a wealthy man or woman.

But the fundamentals of personal finance aren’t wired into our DNA. We have to be taught them, and we have to be taught how to account for a lizard brain that naturally rebels against those very same fundamentals.

So if I wanted to raise one generation of financial morons after another, I would forbid K-12 education from ever broaching the following subjects:

• The fundamentals of personal finance
• The fundamentals of investing
• The glories of work and how to increase your value in the labor market
• The dangers of consumerism
• Behavioral Economics
• Discipline/Willpower

Underclass Chauvinism by Design

When I look at successful people in America, I see a pattern.

Work before vice.
Credentials before marriage.
Marriage before kids.
Savings before wants.
Wealth before extravagance.

“To everything…turn, turn, turn.” The “success pattern” bequeathed to us by the cosmos will not be trifled with. Heed it—make smart actions your default actions and keep burdensome obligations at bay until your wallet and circumstances can handle them—and you’ll greatly increase your odds of having a wonderful life. Mock it, and you’ll be courting abject ineptitude. Your life will very likely be characterized by low wages, poor health, and regular visits from Mr. Murphy.

If I wanted to make sure as few Americans as possible embraced the success pattern, I would turn allegiance to or rejection of the success pattern into a race thing.

It’s no secret that of all groups in America, black Americans are the least likely to embrace the success pattern. They take the top prize when it comes to such anti-success-pattern benchmarks as academic failure, violent crime, and out-of-wedlock births. So I would get all of our major opinion-shaping institutions to promote the following arguments:

• “Real” blacks don’t take school seriously, don’t frown on street gangs and the thug lifestyle, and don’t wait until they’re married to procreate.
• “Real” blacks legitimately flout society’s norms because those norms were crafted by white Americans, the most racist people to ever inhabit the earth.
• Any black American who questions the received definition of what it means to be a “real” black person is nothing but a low-down, Uncle Tom sellout.
• Any non-black American who questions the received definition of what it means to be a “real” black person is nothing but a low-down, dirty racist.
• The best way for non-black Americans to show solidarity with the black struggle is for non-black Americans to reject the racist success pattern as well.

Ever-Handy Excuses by Design

It’s human nature to deflect when failure visits. No one wants to admit that one is a giant freakin’ screw-up. I should know. Up until my late 30s, I was adamant that those bastard politicians in Washington and Albany were the cause of my financial, professional, and interpersonal failures.

Excuses were an excellent balm for my ego, but they did nothing to make me less inept. In fact, they made my ineptitude more implacable. Whatever you subsidize you get more of! As soon as I renounced my ever-handy excuses and took complete responsibility for my life, however, my financial, professional, and interpersonal failures began to disappear with remarkable dispatch.

If I wanted to nudge Americans toward ineptitude and then keep them mired in that sorry condition, I would call on our finest university minds to pump out one “study” after another that categorically “proves” the following:

• Not only is racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia everywhere but the poor, benighted American also has to contend with a whole host of newly discovered obstacles. Those obstacles include but are not limited to the following:
  • hate speech
  • mansplaining
  • rape culture
  • body shaming
  • microaggressions
  • cultural appropriation
  • opportunity hoarding
  • white privilege
  • male privilege
  • implicit bias
  • wealth inequality
  • misgendering
• The variables of self-sabotage and everyday goodwill (i.e., systemic kindness and love legalities) have little to no bearing on why people fail or succeed. This is especially true for people from historically disadvantaged groups, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either a fool or a fascist.

I would then sit back and let nature take its course. With “science-backed” excuses everywhere—and with credulous institutions falling over themselves to honor those excuses everywhere (no reputable institution wants to behave foolishly or Nazi-like, after all)—your everyday American will naturally gravitate towards excuse-making rather than personal responsibility.

Final Thoughts

Does my three-step plan for manufacturing widespread ineptitude sound familiar? It should. It’s the exact plan our ruling class has been fighting to implement for some fifty years. And I must say, its efforts have proved to be remarkably successful. Very few Americans today can feed, clothe, house, educate, and doctor themselves without the coerced charity (i.e., welfare and subsidies) of the state.

Quick aside: I define our ruling class as the most powerful and influential players in education, journalism, entertainment, art, philanthropy, business, and politics.

Does this then mean that our ruling class is evil? No, our ruling class isn’t evil. It’s just effed in its collective head. And if we’re ever going to escape widespread ineptitude, it’s imperative that we learn to ignore our ruling class with extreme prejudice.

Quick aside again: I’ll be exploring in future posts how the average person can effectively ignore our lame ruling class with extreme prejudice. Stay tuned, the plot thickens.

Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. What say you? Is our ruling elite doing a better job of manufacturing ineptitude or manufacturing competency? I say it’s the former—and it’s not even close. Let me know what you think when you get a chance. Peace.