Skillion Musings

Thanks to Pete, yesterday I rode my first electric bicycle.

[Metaphor alert] It’s like not walking up an escalator; you have to consciously pedal the thing or else you find yourself cruising on the finger.

Pedalling the Skillion with its motorcycle fat tyres and 20 odd kg weight reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Harrison Bergeron’ (yes, really) in which the Handicapper General’s agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear ‘handicaps’; masks for those who are too beautiful, radios inside the ears of intelligent people, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic.

Without electricity the Skillion would even bring Cadel back to peloton, the one composed of Lycra-clad pot-bellied corporate warriors puffing around Centennial Park on weekends.

Back to Harrison Bergeron. In this book Kurt extrapolated to the year 2081 by which time the American constitution was amended to dictate that all Americans be fully equal. Therefore no individual was allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else.

Laugh? A friend was telling me a story the other day of a friend’s young son’s soccer team. In this team they rotate the ‘man of the match award’ and there is a rule that each kid has a mandated touch of the ball every 5 minutes during a game.

I am pretty sure that the parental push for childhood equality must have started in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney. Bondi possibly, given the accelerated state of hysterical parental delusions down there.

This movement is an obvious extension of the Nanny State. First we engineer as much risk as we can out of our lives. And once that is cracked we start engineering inequality out of our lives. After that I suppose we will be so unhappy we will work on removing consciousness.

I have written previously (http://bit.ly/1T4MmV7) that, as productivity and real wealth has increased over the last three hundred years (since the industrial revolution), western governments have increasingly upped the percentage of tax they take out of the economy to ‘redistribute’.

Taxing us and spending it on behalf of all is a process related to, amongst other things, ensuring ‘equality’.

Right now all government taxation in Australia represents around 35% of GDP. By 2081 you can expect that to be more like 70% of GDP.

Most of the real work will be done by computers and robots and us humans will mostly be employed in fabricated employment related to (1) ensuring we are all at low risk of harm, and (2) that the equality laws are adhered to, and (3) a third category of jobs with no discernible function (there are plenty of these already).

Given the accelerating development of biotech I wonder if someone might have the bright idea of ensuring equality prior to conception or prior to birth. For example IQ could be attenuated artificially to ensure that no one is smarter than anyone else. Or appearances could be modified to ensure that no one is prettier than another.

Kurt Vonnegut was a genius hidden within the world of science fiction. He correctly spotted this equality trend before anyone else did.

He was trying to point out the difference between the ‘equality of opportunity’ and the ‘equality of outcomes’.

The former has merit and the latter is just plain stupid because it will enshrine a decline to the lowest common denominator, otherwise known as fair average quality.