Jaywalking

Jay Leno, Ronald Reagan, Alyssa Ahlgren, hipster coffee shops, Robert Malthus and Alanis Morrissette all tied up in one man's lament about a lack of a common body of knowledge.

Without revealing their identity, a lifelong friend of mine, someone who lived just across the holler from my old home place in the Magnolia State, mentioned this earlier this morning:

“I just mentioned to someone that a friend of mine was in the Galapagos, and their response was “what’s that?” There seems to be no such thing as a common body of knowledge in our culture anymore—things you can expect everyone with walking around sense to know. Sometimes I feel like my whole life is an episode of Jaywalking with Leno, which I always assumed was staged. Apparently not.”

At the risk of falling into the crevasse of that common body of knowledge, “Jaywalking” was Jay Leno (an ancient late-night talk show host that was funny) doing “man on the street” interviews of random people about current events and personalities in the news. As my friend noted, sometimes the answers were, how shall we say, uninformed.

In my opinion, the lack of a common body of knowledge is not only an aggravation, but also a chasm that prevents common understanding of this world – and if we don’t have a common understanding of the world, there is little we can do because opposition becomes a matter of ignorance rather than principle.

There was a knock-down, drag-out funny video on Twitter this morning, apparently a serious one, in which a lefty social media star called PoliticsGirl who claims she just doesn’t understand why people still vote for Republicans – and as par for the course – continues talking long enough to show you why.

She is completely ignorant. 100% weapons grade dumbass.

She is not ignorant because she doesn’t know stuff, but recalling what President Reagan said about liberals, she is supremely confident about things she “knows” but is entirely (and provably) wrong about. Her entire knowledge base rests on lies, bigotries and bogeymen the media and Democrats have designed and labeled for her to hate. She's a nice little useful idiot, with the emphasis on idiot.

Since I have friends who egg me on to torment you with my thoughts, another friend emailed something to me – a 2019 article titled “Thoughts on Prosperity from a Hipster Coffee Shop”, written by a former college student by the name of Alyssa Ahlgren, who was in grad school pursuing her MBA at the time. Of her generation, she says:

“We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty. One. Times. Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful.

Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow. Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, "An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity."

Never saw American prosperity! Let that sink in. When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I've ever heard in my 26 years on this earth… [M]y generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn't live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, the Korean War, The Vietnam War or see the rise and fall of socialism and communism. We don't know what it's like to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don't have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it's spreading like a plague."

So, another case of know-nothings, but this time about life.

It is a frame of reference thing. When a certain frame of reference exists for long enough without challenge, people seem to forget what it took to create that framing.

I think that this, beyond wars and natural disasters, is the real root cause (somebody call the Vice President) for the fall of civilizations. We forget so much that we don’t realize we don’t know what we don’t know anymore.

And that is why our young like AOC but neither understand nor oppose the stupidity of Marxism.

I know I have said it before, but the greatest fallacy people believe is that because something as always been a certain way for them, it will always be that way. Humans fight to climb Maslow’s hierarchy one rung at a time, but there are no guarantees they won’t slip and fall all the way to the bottom, and all at once.

So, Michael, what do we do? That is most certainly the inevitable question.

I’m not sure we can do anything until a catastrophe of such Malthusian proportions befalls our civilization (or at least our corner of it) that society in general either remembers history or realizes they must set about relearning it.

This is not something an individual can change; this is a social learning experience, a situation where many, many people say “Oh, sh*t!” at the same time. It must be broad and deep enough to completely reset our references by reframing them, maybe not to zero, but to something that approximates it.

Only then will the important things in life be appreciated enough to study and learn about, thereby rebuilding that common body of knowledge.

As Alanis Morrissette (who was a hipster coffee shop favorite) once sang:

You grieve, you learn
You choke, you learn
You laugh, you learn
You choose, you learn
You pray, you learn
You ask, you learn
You live, you learn.

Oh, yeah. If you don’t know who Alanis Morrissette is, go ask your mom.