After a day of memorizing the interior details of the typical Airbus 330, pursuant to completing online cabin crew training, not planning a low-budget, scriptless re-enactment of Air Force One (I get to be Harrison!), I thought I would wed two obnoxious personalities on a single debate topic; that of whether being smart and/or in charge, means you are entitled to view the world with a slick contempt.
The first is the CEO of the now defunct Tiger Oil of Houston Texas, and Richard Dawkings, Oxford Zoologist and author of "The God Delusion", and other works, and a prominant member of the American Atheist Society. His lips makes me want to throw tacks at animal balloons.
Now the former CEO of Tiger oil is clearly working on the Dr. House premise of personality: namely, that as long as you think you are a genuis, you can treat people anyway you like. Richard Dawkins very much seems to be in the same category, except that he only attacks opinions; though I would imagine that Edward Mike Davis also would defend his treatment of his employees as not attacks on them per-say, but as attack on poor work habits. Excuse me, I have to open a window. What is that SMELL?!
Ignoring the fact that no one is too smart or important to be killed by lesser men (sorry, Galileo), except of course, Issei Sagawa, who eats out with the finest Japanese TV talent, the taste of that Dutch woman still on his breath, generally, the smarter you appear or the more exhaulted and specialized your job, the more you can afford to be a piece of shit of a human being.
It doesn't make sense to make an enemy out of someone who you does something you may need and would be hard to replace. Therefore, these individuals can wield influence because, if they realize their worth, they can feel somewhat secure in the knowledge that the people in their lives and society at large will tolerate their transgressions to a higher degree and they may not be ostracized due to their behaivour as readily as someone without said skills/brains/money. Actually, I sometimes suspect this to be the basis for the American Dream: the whole "I want to rich so I don't have to answer to anyone" diatribe. Wanting to have the reach to be able to flout social convention is understandable 'cause some some social conventions are just plain stoo-pid; like prom-night and cannabalism. However, many forms of social convention, like marriage and food-safe, exist to protect people, both from others and themselves, and the desire to flout those kind of conventions comes, I suspect, from a desire to have a kind of unrestrained control over others. There is an irony to this though, in that good versus bad behaivour is determined more by leadership and participation than by the nature of the behaivour itself, and if participation equals convention, why the hell did we all participate in the creation of conventions we desire to flout?. Clue TED Talk.
My fear is that intelligence and or special skills can, only "can", not "does", unfortunately de-incentivize behaivour that is decent and considerate; namely behaivours that make other people feel guilty for harming "useless" people who are just so kind and forgiving that you want them over to house to make pie every Thursday.
Though it is kind of hard to talk about these two people together (psst, we're back on topic) because one of them is a scholar and the other just some hard-up oil prick, what really rubs my buns about Dawkins and Davis is that they both present themselves as people who are always taking home the debate-club trophy by virtue of their own self-importance visa-vie brains or money, not based on their (hard as it is to judge) worth as people.
While Dawkins at least has a platform from which reasonable arguments can be made, he still doesn't seem to care that a) the existence of God is not a matter for scientific debate to begin with, and b) that atheism is a cold hard pillow that puts crinks in your neck if you try to lay your wiry head on it for some comfort. I concede that religion is the opium of the masses, but the masses are in pain goddamnit, and they need their opium. All the real problems that religion tends to get blamed for, those at the "root" of religious zealotry, are things like unemployment, social and intellectual poverty, disenfranchisement, abuse, powerlessness, loss of love and support...you know, "bad things". Religion may not be my drug of choice, but it is for most, and abberhent religiousness is a symptom of more widespread disease, not the problem itself, which Dawkins treats it as. He's like some pimp-cop slapping a po' bitch around for being a 'ho: it ain't her fault yo; the street made her that way.
And Mike Davis is just an asshole with money. Not anymore I suspect.
So as we cut into that steaming slice of humble pie baked by our nice neighbour whazzisface, it bears reminding that even after so many PhDs, wealth beyond measure, scads of friends, and the odour of influence wafting about like a stale fart, you ain't never to high to stabbed to death by a hooker at a bus stop, or to be brought low by insider trading at the TSE.
So be nice. Cause the world is no-ones oyster; it's more like one of those prehistoric giant clams that eats divers whole. And the lower you go, the closer you get to their habitat.
