Pardon my acronym ignorance, but what is an "SKW?"
There is a paradox about all of this. Reading more books and absorbing more information -- even such works as "Capital" by Marx, will sharpen the mind. But people without sharp minds will never give much weight to it -- especially if they're angry about something, and confuse their causal analysis of the human condition with the wrong factors.
A news item some 20 years ago observed that the percentage of Mensa members -- with their little yellow stick-pins -- seemed abnormally represented among lower income groups. That is, even if their proportion was the same as the general population, it would seem too high because one would've suspected there would be fewer among the poorer groups.
I could elaborate on this topic at length, but I don't have the stamina for it because I feel old, it's been a long day. Well, perhaps I will digress and wander, now that I've started in my pontification.
But the observation and conclusion I've made on my own is that we expect the world to work according to a certain logic. We expect, for instance, that the hardest and most productive worker gets the gravy, gets the promotion, gets to move up to be the "pointy-haired manager" in Dilbert. But that is precisely the point of the cartoon series.
We live in a world of chaos masquerading as order.
Here's another thought. Fundamentalists and those opposed to the notion of evolution find the notion of "randomness" to be toxic. God determines everything, therefore -- nothing can be random. To them, random means a scatter without sense to it. Instead, the simple mathematics of statistics and probability are a universal manifestation of order. if it were not so, we wouldn't make sense out of well-behaved statistical distributions which still show random variation. Take again the notion of evolution -- the assumption that only the strong survive, and they always survive. This, too, is subject to random variation, and I'll use an example of the American author, Jack London (who happened to lean toward socialist thinking, but that has nothing to do with anything here.)
London, in one of his books -- "Call of the Wild," "White Fang" -- I can't remember -- describes a pack of wolves on an ice floe. They are all competing for a piece of meat. The strongest dog in the pack slips on the ice and loses his balance; the other dogs tear him apart. Or -- you could imagine the La Brea Tar Pits, and how all those animals fell into that hole -- again a matter of chance and likely owing nothing to DNA, genes or natural superiority. In the short term, one sees this random variation and can't make sense of it. in the very long term, fewer of the strong dogs die before they procreate; the weaker ones may fall by the wayside, but only in a random statistical distribution over time.
So the lazy-minded -- to call them simpletons would be an exaggeration -- look for easy rules of thumb. If you have more money, you contributed more, you were smarter, you're a better leader -- a paragon of the race. They choose this financial factor as a rule-of-thumb, precisely because they are lazy-minded. So we now have a man in office, who can barely write a 140-word tweet and not even close to a high standard of the King's English. He can't remember what he said last week or last month; he tells lies based on the assumptions about the stupidity of others, making him look stupid. He damages an alliance which had fought cooperatively in Afghanistan, giving heart to the terrorists who thought they'd help him a bit by setting off a massive bomb near all the embassies of NATO countries and especially Germany.
Yet people continue to follow this rule of thumb. "Give him a chance!" they say. They never wanted to give Obama a chance.
No two opinions can be equal. Somebody has to be wrong, someone has to be right. But since I'm "equal" with an equal vote, I can apply any cockamamie standard, rule of thumb or emotional non-logic that I wish, and stand by my decision -- because -- "it's democratic," democratic votes always return the best outcome (but they don't), and -- therefore, if I won, I'm right." Wrong.
For some people, you'd have to severely damage their physical well-being before they'd admit to being wrong.
If you observe that you were "poor" during the first 33 years of your life, there are a lot of very bright and productive people who probably share that experience, or part of it.
People assume somehow that the "bidnissman" is rich because he was smart, and he can fix things because he was a "bidnessman." He was rich because daddy dropped a $100 million-dollar business in his lap when Donnie was 24. My father had a bright future in a well-known insurance company, having started out from a North Texas shithole with uncanny mechanical skills going into the post-war civilian world as a Chevy mechanic. A childhood head injury eventually caused a frontal-lobe brain tumor at the age of 36. He was smart enough to leave a great insurance policy for his family, and knowing he was going to become a vegetable after a 1950s-era frontal lobotomy, he took a gun and punched out early. He was actually a hero to his family. But he didn't leave them a $100 million-dollar business.
All of this Ayn-Randian myth about the wealthy "creators" is drivel derived from nonsense.
Our educational system has fallen short. One should only need a reverence for the Truth, an unquenchable thirst to absorb the knowledge of the ages, a keenness for collecting empirical facts, and a respect for logical inference -- a mathematical pursuit -- to deduce Truth wherever it is not simply evident in a simple set of facts. But people act on emotion, bad assumptions, racialist attitudes that are almost unconscious and easily denied. As a group with a group psychology, they can make mistakes.
There is only one sure thing about democratic decisions. They legitimate authority on a temporary basis, and the electorate can recognize a mistake and correct it in the next election. But it often seems they're grasping in the dark, acting like the rabble in the Roman Coliseum with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down based solely on whim and a sense of "needing change of some sort" but not sure what to expect of it. And maybe they're all gamblers who can't count cards in Blackjack.
So -- there you are. Those with the least exposure to the wisdom of the ages assume that the only thing worth pursuing is the Dollar and material gratification -- statistically speaking with many contrary examples like Eric Hoffer -- or for that matter, Jack London. What is the Truth? What value is there in the Truth that doesn't always pay a dime to the person who discovers it?
It is one thing to be poor. It is another thing to be ignorant. And since Einstein would've admitted his ignorance routinely, it is yet another thing to be crass or stupid. And if you land on an unlucky square at birth with a promising cerebellum, everything depends on choosing a better square in the checkers moves of life. But you could be a total asshole, starting with a silver spoon and material advantage, and being an asshole might not count toward anything except a major loss south of a billion bucks making you a genius for carryover losses that any social security recipient with a rental property knows about.
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