Without unfits and misfits, what you end up with is a group or society that fits together only all too well and that produces nothing but 100% group think and 100% group agreement : led by alpha male bosses and seconded sotto voce by timid yes-men.
Which in turn leads to such well known dangers such as the lemming or bandwagon effect, herd behavior, mob or crowd rule , right down into mindless conformity , cults and dictatorships.
WWII's dying were unlikely to ever get penicillin in the quantities needed but for the efforts of The Seven (misfits), led by Dr Martin Henry Dawson.
Even more unlikely would we have ever got the world's best, safest lifesaver at prices too cheap to meter but for The Seven's sturdy principle of Penicillin-for-All , even in , particularly in ,a Total War supposedly fought to the death against the ultimate evil which had divided the world into a few people worthy and most people unworthy of life ....
Showing posts with label nazi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nazi. Show all posts
Friday, July 4, 2014
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Plentiphobia : fear of being overwhelmed by plenitude
"Too much information".
Humans are easily overwhelmed - temporarily - by too much.
Too much choice, too many people on a crowded street, too much choice of new clothes in a story - on and on.
They recover by retreating into places with much less choices and decisions - usually their own home.
But , starting in the 1870s , almost all of us in the educated urbanized middle class western world - all the time and everywhere - felt overwhelmed by too many new scientific discoveries , too many new immigrants, too many new imports, too much too much.
The un-coordinated activities of modernization/ globalization had produced the mother of all plenitudes and humanity reacted with a strong case of plentiphobia.
This phobia - given that humanity also supposedly welcomed modernization and wanted it to go faster and bigger - manifested itself in a complex way.
Western civilization now semi-consciously used the processes of modernization to reduce this plenitude - tidy and clean it up - perfect it and then freeze the result in place forever.
A few perfect chemical synthetics and plastics were to replace the vast variety of natural and imperfect materials we had traditionally used.
Against germs - a greatly hightened gospel of cleanliness.
Against plant and animal and insect pests - ditto.
Against immigrants - immigration controls and wholesale efforts to socialize those few that were admitted.
Against humans as imperfect as wood and wool and rock could be - culling out and purebreed breeding.
Plentiphobia in people who failed to graduate from university is called Fascism and Nazism.
While formal eugenics is just plentiphobia with a PhD ....
Humans are easily overwhelmed - temporarily - by too much.
Too much choice, too many people on a crowded street, too much choice of new clothes in a story - on and on.
They recover by retreating into places with much less choices and decisions - usually their own home.
But , starting in the 1870s , almost all of us in the educated urbanized middle class western world - all the time and everywhere - felt overwhelmed by too many new scientific discoveries , too many new immigrants, too many new imports, too much too much.
The un-coordinated activities of modernization/ globalization had produced the mother of all plenitudes and humanity reacted with a strong case of plentiphobia.
This phobia - given that humanity also supposedly welcomed modernization and wanted it to go faster and bigger - manifested itself in a complex way.
Western civilization now semi-consciously used the processes of modernization to reduce this plenitude - tidy and clean it up - perfect it and then freeze the result in place forever.
A few perfect chemical synthetics and plastics were to replace the vast variety of natural and imperfect materials we had traditionally used.
Against germs - a greatly hightened gospel of cleanliness.
Against plant and animal and insect pests - ditto.
Against immigrants - immigration controls and wholesale efforts to socialize those few that were admitted.
Against humans as imperfect as wood and wool and rock could be - culling out and purebreed breeding.
Plentiphobia in people who failed to graduate from university is called Fascism and Nazism.
While formal eugenics is just plentiphobia with a PhD ....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)