Miss C has to give up a few expectations

I have been re-reading the Bell Curve. A few weeks ago I read a fabulous book called, The Feast of Reason. Both of these books have had a very profound effect on me. I read The Bell Curve when it first came out and it pretty much reinforced what I had been thinking already. That is, your IQ pretty much determines your place in the world. In my nearly 45 years of living on this planet, as a strong, healthy, intelligent and attractive (for my culture) human being, I have had many advantages over others whose natural born traits were not the equal of mine. However, my own IQ precludes me from entering certain professions. I could not become a lawyer for instance, but I am moderately successful. Life seems infinitely more difficult for people who are not very smart. They are not able to make intelligent decisions or weigh the consequences of their actions.

The other day I was talking to one of the security guards at work and he began to tell me about his problems with credit and how he does not have a bank account. This is a guy in his late 30's who lives with his mother. I was full of advice for him, but as I talked with him I realized that nothing I said would make a damn bit of difference as he did not have the capacity to learn from his experience and find a different way of being. It just is not in him. To him the simple path is, get a credit card and charge it up to the max while buying things you want at the moment, regardless of the consequences later. I have friends who get joint accounts with relatives, in order to help them repair their credit, only to have the relatives turn around and ruin their own credit. One friend had a joint card at a jewelry store with a boyfriend. After the boyfriend left her for another woman he bought his new girlfriend a diamond ring with the card and did not pay the bill. My friend was stuck paying $7,000, for a rival's engagement ring.

Often there is a lot of onus on mortgage companies that charge poor people high interest rates. But I can not name one low income person I work with that has good credit. They often will stick with a bad mortgage broker who will keep refinancing them over and over with a balloon mortgage. Their thinking being that they will never pay off the mortgage anyway. This type of thinking is rampant. On the other hand my smart friend and her husband are trying to pay off their mortgage as fast as they can. They have a 15 year mortgage. They pay their credit card bills when they become due and have never carried a balance. They also have a large savings set aside. Now, my smart friend has repeatedly tried to set up our other friends with her mortgage broker. I refinanced with the broker myself and she gave me the best advice I ever will get. She told me to refinance at a lower interest, but to still pay the same amount as I was before, with the over payment as extra principal. That way I would pay the house off a lot sooner and save hundreds of thousands of dollars. I am able to understand this thinking, but many other people are not. So I will be more successful and better off financially than those who can't. It is not because I was raised to be fiscally responsible. I was not. my mom wrote bad checks all over the neighborhood for many years. But I learned from her mistakes.

The Feast of Reason author talks about rationality. There are very few rationals in the world. They are a minority elite. There are even fewer altruistic rationals (of which I am not one, as I am not much given to public service) so we must expect that most of our institutions are run by altruistic irrationals. Because of this, we must expect some chaos in the way our institutions are run. Education is a primary example. I find public school teachers to be some of the most over-emotional, irrational human beings on this earth. Perhaps this profession attracts them. So we must never expect that the educational system in the US will be well run. The same with any social service agency. We just have to accept humans for the flawed beings they are.

Most children will never do well in school anyway, because most of them are not intelligent. It's not that the school system is so bad, so much as the kids can only use the brains they've got. The problem is that the rational cognitive elite in the US are undereducated and unchallenged academically because we have dumbed down the system to fit the unintelligent. What I think I am hearing on my bus rides are undereducated teens, mixed in with slightly stupid and very stupid teens.

There is not a whole lot to be done about this. The more people in the US the more stupid people there will be, I just have to relax and not let it get to me. I have been thinking too much like a liberal and expecting humans to be perfectible. They are not.