Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Limited resources

Consider this.

The world has a limited supply of "common sense". One giant dollop, spread across the globe like slightly melted butter spread across a piece of toast. This supply is a constant amount, never being consumed, and never being created. It simply is.

Unfortunately, this level of common sense must be shared across the entire population of planet Earth. In the good old days (let's say Ice Age/Neanderthal times, leading in to the rise of Homo Sapiens), this common sense was distributed within a tiny population. The end result - humans survived, flourished, evolved, found fire, developed the wheel, began farming and agricultural practices, domesticated animals, discovered ores and metals etc.

That evolutionary process was quite impressive, and led us to our current state, many, many billion people on a tiny rock, spinning through the universe. That fixed level of common sense now has to be shared across billions and billions of people, young and old, tall and short, rich and poor. Just like butter on toast, the process of spreading the common sense isn't necessarily even when considering such large population. Clumps of common sense may be left on the edges of society, providing us with the brilliance and inspiration of artists, musicians, scientists... But for too many other millions and millions of people, there just wasn't enough common sense to go around, leaving us with...well, quite frankly, idiots.

I like to remind myself of this theory each day when I'm watching tv, reading the paper or just walking around, shaking my head at the multitude of acts of sheer stupidity, rudeness, incompetence and ignorance I've witnessed.

This theory does have the occasional flaw, like what about rude geniuses? Millionaire fools? But that's a thought for another day...




PS. In case the point of this entire post didn't make sense, here's the answer - I've finally decided to start writing down my genius theories before they slip away, back into the ether, never to be remembered again. More for amusement than any particular reason. I've already started forgetting the details of my karmic marketplace for hangover symptom sharing...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your theory only makes sense if common sense is disadvantageous in an evolutionary sense. If it was an advantage to be a non-idiot, then all the non-idiot genes would be replicated and propagated, and you would wind up with thoroughly buttered toast.

A-Man said...

Ah, but it can make sense if the amount of common sense is fixed, rather than increasing with the size of the population.
In that instance, although non-idiot genes may have propagated down the generations because it was advantageous, I'm guessing that this would have been a slower process than the population explosion caused by improved living conditions due to the application of common sense. Thus, I'm hypothesizing that the idiots established too much of a population base before breeding could weed them out. Ever since then, it's been a see-saw battle, where unfortunately, I think the population of idiots is winning out, in general.