Awful People
Perhaps it takes one to know one. I can hardly qualify for the world’s worst person, but perhaps I qualify as a normal run-of-the-mill one. And one, who knowing it well, is disgusted by it.
I like the Merriam-Webster definition for run-of-the-mill: manufactured goods not graded or sorted for quality. I have definitely been manufactured – as we all have been. And this manufacturing process had not been beneficial. It has produced, in my opinion, the worst kind of people. But people with a very high opinion of themselves.
Ortega y Gasset – a philosopher much admired, but totally ignored – saw much the same thing in the mass. Mass production, the technology of the Industrial Revolution, also produced mass man. And the world has never recovered from this.
If we had been smart, which we certainly were not, we would have carefully considered the effects of each of our new technologies (beginning with the Printing Press) before making them part of us. Only now, with people like McLuhan, have we done this – but these thinkers have been ignored too.
We are standing in the remains of a battlefield, surrounded by total destruction, saying “Maybe we shouldn’t have done this.” But everyone else is saying “We had to do it, we didn’t have much choice.”
And they are right: they had been changed so that they had no choice.
They had become awful (or self-destructive) people.
reading your post, I am reminded of this theory I read in school…someone said that since intelligent people reproduce less and stupid people reproduce more, the world is turning into a numerically more unintelligent place (he assumed that wisdom is inherited). Our manufacturing is turning out to be a process of diminishing quality!