Ping and Pong

This thought ping-ponged between the edges of my skull the other night, so I thought I’d better record it just in case I need it later on.

The Enlightenment saw, for the first time, the rule of reason over all means of making decisions and choosing subject matters to ponder.

As it turns out this has certain benefits over other forms of doing these things.

The proof is that Enlightened Europe managed to colonise much of the world, have massive increases in productivity, have a continuous industrial revolutions, and the like.

Since the Enlightenment only really happened in Europe and those colonies dominated by Europeans (as in Canada, NZ Australia and the USA), the migration of the benefits of the Enlightenment to the rest of the world has been quite interesting.

Mostly, it has been an exercise in cargo-cultism where countries like China have assumed that if they adopt the habits of the Enlightenment then they will be as productive. Not so.

Japan and Korea are interesting in that they sort of half got it. But their ultimate limitation was revealed by their lack of respect for a lack of respect.

The truly interesting thing is that in the West, the rise of Enlightenment followed two paths.

One gave us technology and the continuous industrial revolutions.

The other gave us the rule of law for the general social good of all citizens.

Over the years this latter path just got more and more complex, as all identifiable risks became engineered out of our lives. The Nanny State.

I would say that we have got to the stage now where the rule of law is in the process of killing the rule of reason.

These two have become incompatible since, in order to live in the bizarre and complex nature of the rule of law, your average citizen has had to depress their rational capabilities.

Our systems have responded by educating and rewarding people that fit in well, but produce very little.

That is, to some increasing degree the Western children of the revolution have become cargo-cultists themselves.

The evidence? Well, although productivity continues to increase I can assure you that the rate of increase per person in the West is dropping at a rate of knots.

We are basically relying on an ever-decreasing percentage of monkeys that have the intelligence to refuse to contemplate being chained to a typewriter.

Which is why I give China a fighting chance to compete for the world’s resources while they are still there.

(proof positive below…morons)