On June 5, 2013, Robert De Filippis writes in OpEdNews:
From Livescience.com, “In November 2012, Stanford University School of Medicine researcherGerald Crabtree published two papers in the journal Trends in Genetics suggesting that humanity’s intelligence peaked between 2,000 and 6,000 years ago.
Crabtree based this assertion on genetics. About 2,000 to 5,000 genes control human intelligence, he estimated. At the rate at which genetic mutations accumulate, Crabtree calculated that within the last 3,000 years, all of humanity has sustained at least two mutations harmful to these intellect-determining genes (and will sustain a couple more in another 3,000 years). Not every mutation will cause harm — genes come in pairs, and some weaknesses caused by mutation can be covered for by the healthy half of the pair, Crabtree wrote; but the calculation suggests that intelligence is more fragile than it seems.”
Add to this that Swiss psychotherapist and psychiatrist, Carl Jung, believed people who are successfully adjusted to “normal” social standards can still be suffering if those “normal” social standards are neurotic. He once said, “I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life.” Our world is, so to speak, dissociated like a neurotic”
Could a drop in IQ and neurotic social standards, be what French essayist, Henry de Montherlant, was talking about when he said, “Stupidity does not consist in being without ideas human stupidity consists in having lots of ideas, but stupid ones.”
In other words, even if we’re not very smart and are well-adjusted to a neurotic world, we still have ideas? Let’s see:
Bring your guns (symbols of violence) to church (place of peace). Add more instruments of violence (guns) to curb gun violence. Vote for the candidates who run the most malicious attack ads and don’t explain what they will do in office. Declare war on every social ill in our society as though it has nothing to do with a failing society. Reduce funding for the education of the children who are the future of the country, but keep building more tanks and airplanes even though we already have more military equipment than the next 12 countries combined. Remove barriers to special interest influences in our elections while the electorate is clamoring for more controls. Gerrymander voting districts to distort the results of elections and call it democracy.
I happen to think that these are just plain “stupid ideas”. But we all know there are those who are well adjusted to them and will argue in their favor.
Another plain “stupid idea” is that by aiding the already wealthy to get richer the benefits will trickle down and lift up poor people. This flies in the face of the reality that the reason the “1 percent” rich people are rich is because they OWN viable shareholdings of wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital assets, and the poor or “99 percent” do not.
While “humans aren’t getting smatter,” the non-human contributions––physical capital––to the production of society’s products and services are getting more productive and increasingly replacing the need for labor, destroying jobs and devaluing the worth of labor.
Technological change makes tools, machines, structures, and processes ever more productive while leaving human productiveness largely unchanged (our human abilities are limited by physical strength and brain power––and relatively constant). The result is that primary distribution through the free market economy, whose distributive principle is “to each according to his production,” delivers progressively more market-sourced income to capital owners and progressively less to workers who make their contribution through labor.
If we are to put ourselves on a path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice then we MUST finance the FUTURE economic growth of the nation using capital credit mechanisms that simultaneously create new capitalist owners of the wealth-creating and income-generating productive capital assets that will produce general affluence for EVERY American.
The question that requires an answer is now timely before us. It was first posed by binary economist Louis Kelso in the 1950s but has never been thoroughly discussed on the national stage. Nor has there been the proper education of our citizenry that addresses what economic justice is and what ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percenters equal opportunity to become capital owners. The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital owners) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and service,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?”
The solutions can be found in the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, Monetary Justice reform at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice and the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-dulling-of-humanity–by-Robert-De-Filippis-130605-970.html
