CDXXXIV – Were The Genuis’s At

I saw a conversation, also on substack, that asked the question, “How do we cultivate Genius?”

This question has two parts. Part one is cultivation, what does that look like. Part two is Genius. What crop are we even trying to cultivate?

The conversation was by the same people who had the Utopia discussion so they can’t see their faulty assumptions. My guess if the conversation goes on for a long time that they would settle on a definition of Genius that means “very smart big brain people like us” and a mechanism of cultivation that looks very much like antiseptic bureaucratic tyranny.

All that I’ve told you so far is what I think about what I think they would say, and not what they have actually said, nor what I actually think about what they actually said. That’s because I’m a judgmental person as increasingly apparent by my writing. It wasn’t the content that intrigued me, but the question. How do we cultivate Genius? That’s what the rest of this article will focus on.

Genius I do not accept means big-brain-smarty-pants. A musical genius is a person who is talented at arranging music in a way that is beautiful and moving. A literary genius is someone who can write beautiful and evocative prose. Genius then means extraordinary talent. My personal belief is that everyone has the capacity for extraordinary talent in some field or other, but we use the word Genius to mark the best of the best. A society filled with geniuses would cease to consider themselves geniuses and only the best of the best of them would be extraordinary and so considered geniuses.

So if we accept that Genius is another way of saying extraordinary talent, then the only question remaining to us is cultivation. Thinking about genius naturally lends itself to thinking about the education system, and that is partly the right answer. It should be thinking about the vocation system, which for some means education. Industrial education has ruined society, forcing oddly shaped human pegs into uniformly round holes. Some people just don’t fit. True geniuses–people with an innate, natural talent in some aspect of things–become either depressed or suppressed, and the only kinds of geniuses we get are the kinds that are extraordinarily talented at navigating the academic system. Genius can fall into any category in any endeavor, which is why a vocation system is very important.

I wrote about this–without calling it vocation system–in my previous article on Scootland, which you can find here. In the article, I give responsibility for baseline education to the Church, and then make a proposal for advanced studies:

Advanced studies would take three different tracks: Professional/Vocational schools, Seminaries, and Philosophical universities. Professional/Vocational schools would train students for work in a trade, in a profession, in a service, whichever. I went to school for Accounting, I would have gone to a professional school for accounting. Seminaries obviously would train both Priests and teachers. Philosophical universities would be for the truly advanced and learned men and women who are studying and advancing the search for truth.

The idea here is that if you are a young Scoot and you find you have a talent for numbers and spreadsheets, you don’t need to waste your time learning Spanish or reading Dostoevsky; you should receive training to make you a good accountant. (Exposure to Spanish or Dostoevsky should happen in that basic education, as well as exposure to numbers and spreadsheets.) Creativity comes from connecting unrelated fields, but free learning should be a private endeavor. If young Scoot finds himself interested in languages, then he should go to the library in his spare time and study languages. Lots of resources should be available to encourage private study. Mentorships, internships, apprenticeships, should all be available to help young Scoot learn more from people than books, so that his knowledge is not confined merely to Accounting.

The idea is that talents should be identified early so that later work can allow one to focus on that talent and bringing out it’s full potential. This is NOT exclusive of other areas of learning, just aimed at drawing out natural talents.

So “cultivation” here means identifying talents and giving young people the resources and training to grow those talents. The identification of talents is up to parents and teachers and other wise older people around; the desire to pursue the training has to come from the student.

This idea is not without flaws–I welcome constructive critique! Let me know what you think.

AMDG

CDXXXI – Dispatches From Customer D411

I have been wading deeply through bureaucracy recently. Today […] I went to the DMV to get drivers license […]

Bureaucracy is such an interesting phenomenon in human life. I wonder if it is required or if it is an emergent property of modernity.

Bureaucracy industrializes human effort. Customer fills out forms–might as well be punching cards for a Hollerith tabulator–and submits them to the exacting gaze of people who spend all day every day looking at these same forms and looking for inconsistencies. It is a non trivial task to move to a new state, and I certainly had no idea all the things that were required when […] I made the decision. [I] don’t regret the decision by any means, but the bureaucracy makes it very difficult–prohibitively difficult on the margins, I am sure–to cross bureaucratic boundaries.

What is the alternative? We need to tell our administrators we owe a debt to a different Caesar. What kind of structure would allow this to be done without bureaucracy? Can bureaucracy be prevented at all?

The question is who is responsible for doing the work. It is definitely conceivable that we could tell one person one time and the worker bees behind the scenes file everything that needs to be filed. But that requires much more government administrative staff. Bureaucracy exists to put the responsibility for all the work on the citizen and all the responsibility for checking their work on the administrator. It minimizes staff–there is clearly an efficiency here otherwise bureaucracy wouldn’t exist.

What is the least number of forms that could be filed, requiring the least amount of staff to process?

It’s an interesting thought experiment, if nothing else.

AMDG

CCLXXVIII – All Ownership Is Derived From The Sovereign

Or, The Sovereign & Property, Part 3 of 3

In Part 1, we discussed duties owed to the sovereign by the subject. In Part 2, we discussed some of the duties owed to the subjects by the sovereign. Here, we bring it all together with the idea of ownership.

Ownership is a lesser order of authority than sovereignty. To be sovereign obliges all the people and their property to be subject to the authority of the sovereign. To be an owner obliges only the thing owned to be subject to your authority.

Private property is an element of natural law, this means that it is proper to Man to have property of his own. What this also means is that it is proper to the sovereign to permit private ownership. Communism attempts to abrogate the private property aspect by returning all property to the sovereign; yet communism demands that the sovereign retain the duty of custodianship to the people and administer all that property for the good of the people. This is disordered not only because it abrogates private property but because it doesn’t change the relationship of the people to the sovereign. The sovereign does have a duty of custodianship to provide for the needs of the people, private property means, in other words, that people have a responsibility to determine the best way to satisfy their own needs. Currency permits this dynamic: The sovereign cannot be everywhere therefore the sovereign delegates authority via tokens which the people can use to acquire property which the sovereign ought to be providing for them.

However, the sovereign ought to provide because the sovereign has authority over all property. All property is subject to the Sovereign. Every inch of land, every ounce of raw material yet to be mined, every unit of processed goods which completed manufacture–all of this property is subject to the sovereign.

So this is the punchline: All ownership is derived from the Sovereign. Just as the Sovereign can delegate authority of West Scootland to the Duke of Scootland, the Sovereign can delegate authority of this computer I am writing on to me via ownership. The Duke rules West Scootland as a representative of the Sovereign, not as owner of West Scootland. I rule over this computer not as representative of the sovereign but as owner of it. In the former case, the Duke and West Scootland remain subjects to the Sovereign, but the Duke administers the province on the sovereigns behalf. In the latter case, the Computer and I remain subjects of the sovereign, but I can dispose of the property in whatever way best suits my needs.

The principle that describes this phenomenon is subsidiarity, the principle that problems should be solved at the closest possible level to the problem. The problem I have is that I need food, clothing, and shelter. Subsidiarity suggests that it would be inefficient for the sovereign to solve this problem for me, I must solve this problem for myself.

What is interesting to me is that implicit in all this is the virtue of an Aristocracy. Aristocracy, like the Sovereign, have a custodial duty to the people. Contrast this with Bureaucracy, who have a duty of efficiency to the Bureaucracy itself. Aristocracy have an obligation to treat people as people and to be the caring face of the sovereign. Bureaucracy have an obligation to administrate with profit motive, which we’ve already established does not imply public good.

I don’t know if these arguments make me a monarchist–it would be interesting to take this perspective and analyze our democracy with it; also to see what controls are necessary to prevent a monarchy/aristocracy from becoming a tyranny.

AMDG