Monsters, Misfits, and Misbehaving
Today I'd like to talk about how society looks at diversity and how our perception effects how we treat people.
Monsters are of course made in laboratories by robotics engineers who make terrible mistakes and we most often see these monsters when our fears are heightened and our imagination is doing us more harm than good.
Too often the term misfit is used among people who could be more specific but aren't.
Certainly there are those who are having more difficulty acquiring accommodations for their differences, and no one who has overcome these obstacles can claim anything but good fortune as long as the majority of the WORLD'S population doesn't have the same opportunities. Elite conformists delight in local (rather than global) comparisons because that encourages internal battles.
For instance, Winston Churchhill and F.D.R. both claimed that charity would weaken us rather than impassion us to do even more for each other, as it actually does. Abraham Maslow also did alot to influence (what we now call) modern psychology to be even more dehumanizing. Maslow did this by assigning a standardized path of hierarchial needs, and a narrow description of the human condition and guidelines for how we should then behave.
Since these men DID INDEED know enough of how their decisions and the ways that they used them to influence people would effect the world, they acted in ways that were at least, irresponsible, narrow minded, and shortsighted. Their leadership led to unreasonable demands. Certainly a different path would have led to something better for everyone.
These are not popular views anywhere. The reason is not because they are not educated views and not because they cannot be backed up. It is instead because they don't follow conventional form. Basically they don't fit.
Bricks in a wall fit. Nature will form minerals in all sorts of different ways. A brick is instead formed by taking minerals that have been made pliable by saturation, conformed into strict standards, exposed to harshly heated environments, and once they meet conventional standardized tests of measurements of size and density, they are seen as being stacked with other bricks to create protection, insulation, etc.
Of course, those that fail at any point during the conforming process are broken, ground down, resaturated, harshly heated, and retested until they are seen as worthy of conventional USE and the treatment that accompanies that evaluation.
The majority of people never speak in terms of "in my opinion" and only a small minority that are geographically hindering the elite get a diagnosis based on how the APPOINTED evaluaters describe their thinking and behavior. ( AUTISM SPECTRUM INDEED!!!! **** **** **** ****) Why should anyone else receive a level of exclusion based on some sort of spectrum? They are geographically excluded and therefore more convenient to ignore.
Western idealist are pacified by funding organizations that go to other parts of the world where they claim to educate people and by doing so these people can become more "sophisticated".
People rarely think of how few westerners even get any formal education. If it were truly important to the elite to educate us:
1) The education budget would reflect that.
2)If we westerners had aspirations of helping the rest of the world to become more "sophisticated" we would spend less money on bombs to kill them with.
The majority of the worlds population reaches "self actualization" without acquiring anything like what westerners consider to be adequate food and shelter.
The claims that anyone has ever rushed toward being seen as poor and down trodden in order to do anything but survive in a world that doesn't accept them, are made by those who don't need to do that.
Our world has nothing more to acquire than the humanity it has traded and sold. Our monsters and our misfits will continue to misbehave until the rest of us get our act together.
4 Comments:
reminds me Ed, of my one daughter's God-mother-she's a missionary nun from zimbabwe.
they have really little in the way of food/shelter, and life is brutal, but they have a better sense of self -actually than any westerner - they send missionaries HERE, they are in shock about the state of our youth HERE, they are coming here to help us get our act together.
As far as exclusion based on spectrum, i was thinking about this last night ( i cant sleep -i think philosophic-but i'm too lazy to get out of bed and write)it is the "in" thing to make any difference in how you think apart from the majority some sort of pathological problem.
and God forbid you state an opinion which isnt popular (people with differing opinions are supposed to just sit down and shut up I guess.
ok thats a long ramble...hope you dont mind Ed.
No, I never mind if you ramble here and philosophic thought keeps me awake too.I never have slept much.:)
I think what you commented on is the main points I'm trying to descibe in this post.Thanks.
Certainly something like the pros and cons of FDRs time in office is very debatable and I could argue either side. I could say positive things about Churchill and Maslow too but I used ideas about them to make a point.
Westerners don't think on a global scale often enough and sometimes how people speak and act need not be contraversial at all and certainly not be seen as wrong.
I don't think that we are conscious enough about how we all support needless conformity and how we may be combative about things that make us uncomfortable but really don't matter.
Often I think that the conformists and/or those who are combative are behaving the way they are based more on thier own issues than what or who they claim to be fighting against.
One more thing Amanda. Thats a good point about the Zimbabwe missionaries. What must they think....
Have you read the book Look Me in The Eye by John Robinson? The word "misfit" is used repeatedly, because the author felt that word described him best. Don't get me wrong, it's a good story and I'm happy for this man, especially since he got a job he liked after dropping out of high school , trying jobs before that he disliked, and having crazy parents. I recommend this book to those who were diagnosed as adults.
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