Staring Over the Edge – Has the Collapse Started?

How do we solve the problems we face when people cannot think for themselves or even communicate effectively? What happened?

I recently was trying to solve a problem with a service provider through their chat service. I am used to having to talk to people on those for whom English is a second language as the work is farmed out to India or somewhere South of the border. So, when I found myself talking to someone using broken English, poor grammar, no punctuation, and using close but the wrong English words to say something I thought maybe I had a chat-partner from India. I, after all, do similar things when my feeble language skills try to talk to someone in Spanish or German – I can usually be understood but no one will confuse me with a native speaker. I have always wanted to go to India and see the ancient temples and ruins there so I asked what his first language was and asked if he was from India. “No,” came the reply, “My first language is English, I am an American.”

Holy Frakkin’ hopelessness true believers! I recently mentioned that I was watching an old Spiderman cartoon from my youth in the 1970s. I was surprised that even back then he was making fun of the failings of our public school system. That was 50 years ago? How much farther have we fallen today!

This is where we are after a lifetime of degeneration under the Government’s leadership and dominance of educational policy in our public schools and universities. [For an explanation see: Who Stole Your Education? Were You Indoctrinated in Ignorance? – SabersEdge – Cutting Through the Lies to Get to the Truth ]

Now, we have no had at least 3 generations that have been mal-educated by our public schools and universities. [see also: The World Built In the Last 150 Years Is Broken – SabersEdge – Cutting Through the Lies to Get to the Truth] and people cannot even communicate effectively in their own language! I am over 60 years old, (all together now: “OK Boomer!” But in many ways my experiences were that of Gen X as my mom went back to school and I grew up as a latch key kid. Don’t judge me by my generation and I won’t judge you by yours. We all have stuff we need to overcome.)

It was in my day (the insanity of the 60s and 70s,) that the ideas we now call Leftist or Woke began to take hold with a vengeance. It included the belief that all of the assumptions of Western Society were wrong. Yes, the foundational ideas that allowed us to build the greatest, richest, and most powerful civilization the world has ever seen had it all wrong. Instead, we needed to look to the Leftist/Neo-Marxist/Progressive or simply “new” ideas that would allow us to “boldly go where no one has gone before.” (Yeah, I grew up with the original Star Trek too. I would hurry home from Junior High School to watch the afternoon reruns on TV and record them for my sister and I on her reel-to-reel tape recorder.)

While I am all for moving boldly into the future the assumption that everything that has made us successful is wrong should have been found wanting on its face. But it wasn’t.

Even today more and more are looking away from the traditions and ideas that built the comforts and riches that are all around us and that we take for granted and we are told to look to Diversity Inclusion and Equity (DIE) and other reworkings of the Marxist philosophy that killed more people in the 20th Century and shoved more people into poverty or subsistence living than even two World Wars did! Communism was tried in a variety of cultures, nations, and situations and it has always failed. [If you want to look at that go here: Are We the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave? Or Did We Lose the Cold War? – SabersEdge – Cutting Through the Lies to Get to the Truth ]

Instead, the sophists and “experts” took over throwing away the success of thousands of years of learning offering nothing in return but untried theories, trial in error, and a refusal to admit their mistakes. This was not only in education but in politics, law, government, and other areas as well [see for how this “modernist” and “progressive” conceit slaughtered tens of thousands of elephants here: GREENING THE DESERTS, SAVING THE EARTH, STOP GLOBAL WARMING NATURALLY – SabersEdge – Cutting Through the Lies to Get to the Truth]

They questioned everything and without any evidence but filled with pretty sounding ideas they simply announced things that they didn’t understand or whose purpose was buried deep in tradition as “unnecessary” or “old fashioned.”

There is a saying of a young leader who was soon to take power and he said, “Why is this gate here on this road in the middle of nowhere. I see no reason for it. Get rid of it.” “No,” said his father. “I don’t know who built this or why either. Let us go and study this. Once we know who built this and why only then can we see if it is still necessary or not. Just because you do not “see” the reasons for something. Doesn’t mean that there aren’t any or that they are obsolete.”

In the last 50 years we have ignored this advice. People in every field of endeavor (like the situation with the elephants and the gate in the road mentioned above,) have pulled at strings or foundational ideas that we didn’t fully understand or see a reason for and cast it aside without bothering to even try to understand the whys and wherefores of things. “If it is old, get rid of it. This is a new progressive world.”

So, I was in the first generation when English teachers began to think, “We don’t need to teach all of these rules of grammar and spelling. They are old rules and difficult and probably are not that necessary. We don’t want to be grammar Nazis.” So, they stopped teaching grammar.

It was when I became and agent and writing had to be clearly understood, specific, and precise that things had to change. But since it was a problem for everyone, even back then, we were all issued a copy of Strunk and White’s book “Elements of Style.” It is a handy little book that I used to home school my son. He even chuckled at places. I remember when he looked up and said, “I didn’t expect to find anything funny in a book on grammar.” But the authors had a humorous style in their teaching.

When I started a game publishing business I asked the person who was to be my editor. “Do you have a copy of Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style”?” Yes, she answered. She had been issued it at university in a writing class. “Good, I said.” Unfortunately, I didn’t ask if she actually knew it. Later when we were discussing the Oxford Comma she had not used it, because she didn’t see a reason for it. I knew that the Oxford Comma was discussed in Strunk and White and the problems in communication that can develop when it is ignored. I had made the error of asking if she was familiar with it. What I should have asked is “have you read it?” She had not. I had the mistaken assumption that other intelligent people actually read the books they were assigned in college.

Here is an example of a sentence actually used without any punctuation. The lack of punctuation totally changes the meaning:

Worse, she apparently finds inspiration in killing and cooking her family and dog!

Assuming you are younger than I am you probably had the same idiocy forced upon you. Since your school didn’t teach you grammar, punctuation, spelling, or vocabulary you must train yourself. Most people don’t have the discipline and many don’t even see the need. The problem is that you often don’t see the need or the reason until things have begun to fall apart. Too many then, look for someone else to blame instead of what they can do to fix it.

It happens in every civilization toward its end. Too many people drop things that seem to them “old fashioned” without bothering to ask why they were developed in the first place. The rules of punctuation are not ancient. They were not even fully developed in the early to mid 1800s. Webster hadn’t even put out his dictionary yet. The rules of grammar and punctuation were developed over time to reduce miscommunication.

Now we are degenerating from the height our civilization rose to and it can largely be set at the feet of educators who played with our future and discarded things they did not fully understand.

The Dunning Kruger effect is alive and well and may destroy us all.

The Dunning Kruger effect is a pernicious human affectation that demonstrates, among other things, that the less knowledge a person has on a subject the more sure he or she is of her opinions on that topic. In a sense, they don’t know what they don’t know. This is worse when people are less intelligent, but no one is immune to it. I suppose it is worse for the unintelligent because what they don’t know is a lot more prevalent than what they do know. However, it can also be summed up in the word “hubris.”

A pride and arrogance that destroys.

Not only is communication diminished but when people don’t bother learning the hard won knowledge that got our civilization to the place its at – and assume they can dispense with it – then the ability to repair things that are failing, to communicate, and even to lead or manage effectively begins to faulter.

Because of my injury I was bedridden for several years, then my liver failed when I got Covid, and I needed a transplant. This resulted in my being out of the workforce for seven years. When I returned, I was shocked at (what to me appeared to be) the “sudden” drop in competence and sense of personal duty and responsibility of both workers and supervisors and corporate indifference of the businesses.

Supervisors and managers didn’t know how to supervise or manage effectively, despite thousands upon thousands of books being written on the topic (not all of them good.) Then I saw people would accept jobs and not even show up for the first day of training, or they would show up and find out the job had something they didn’t like to do, and they would just walk off and never come back. People would wander in late, not show up for shift, or simply fall asleep at work. What shocked me more was that managers and supervisors didn’t seem to know how to train their employees or effectively modify their behavior. They either ignored the problem until it got so bad they had to fire them or just fired them outright. However, finding new employees who were actually willing to work was also hard.

My father taught me that anything you do will have things that you like and things you dislike. You need to find a job where the things you like outweigh the things you dislike. I passed that onto my kids. However today it seems that many, as soon as they find anything they don’t like, they run away and hide.

I have heard people say, “these younger generations are irresponsible and don’t know anything.”

I think a lot of it is their parents utterly failed to teach them to be successful in the world (or in some cases failed to prepare them for life altogether.) I was talking with someone who said that someone we knew was a great parent. I countered that a parent’s job is to prepare their children to survive without them. Because parents die and will leave them on their own eventually. I said I don’t think they have prepared their kids to live and survive on their own and that is the most important thing a parent can do.

Children must be taught to be a real man or a real woman and not to have to run to mommy or daddy for everything. You do not simply “arrive” at manhood or womanhood at a specific age. It is a goal to be achieved. Today we have too many aged children, and while I have seen them all my life there seems to be more now.

Too many parents seem to have left it to the schools to prepare their children for life and the schools failed. I remember the shows I grew up with that taught values and gave examples to follow but today I don’t see the same. Oh sure, the special effects are better, but character is lacking. I remember The Rifleman, Big Valley, Star Trek, The Waltons, and more that showed families and friends that grew and worked together.

We have plenty of examples of “real” men and women in history. Unfortunately, because too many today don’t look at anything before they were born you get stupid statements from stars and public figures that “finally a woman is in a lead role.” Such a stupid statement only shows their ignorance of everything that came before them. Not only have women made their mark on society from Cleopatra to Joan of Arc, to Margaret Thatcher but women have kicked butt in movies from Ingrid Burgman, to Sigourney Weaver, to Mila Jovovich, and more.

“Progressives” have too often spent so much time looking forward they miss the good that we’ve already got and in so doing they lose that too. “Experts” and “scholars” have tried to destroy heroes, heroines, and great men and women of history by insisting that they be without fault. By pointing out that they had faults they think they have “knocked them down” (we won’t look at the disturbed personality that feels they need to destroy everyone of note here but it should be noticed.) No one is without fault. A hero or example is one precisely because they have overcome their faults to do something significant in life – and there is nothing more significant in the long run than being a father and mother and raising a stable family.

I used to take pride when managers came up to me and commented on what well behaved children I had in restaurants or stores. I still take pride when I hear my son’s supervisors or managers tell me how well my son is doing, how dependable he is, how hard working he is, how kind he is to others, and how he clearly thinks things through.

So, clearly, not all twenty year olds are losers and if they are we must ask whose fault is it?

Unfortunately, if you were screwed by our educational system, your family situation, economics, or whatever you are left with two choices:

1. you can wallow in victimhood, be a failure, and suffer for a lifetime; or
2. you can take charge of your own life and work to bring yourself up to speed and ensure your children are properly raised even if you are not.

It is not all the educators’ fault.

I live a few blocks from the Federal Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. I asked one of the guards there what the chief problem was that he saw (expecting to hear murder, rape, theft, drugs, or something of that sort.) He answered, “single mothers.” The jail is full of criminals who were raised by single mothers. I looked at data and found that to be true. Children raised by a single mother had a much higher chance of getting in trouble, being irresponsible, or just plain failing, than children raised in a two-parent home.

I was always taught that men and women fit together. The biological differences complement one another – evolutionary biologists bear this out, it isn’t just a quaint Biblical idea. Apparently, the old joke of “you just wait until your father gets home.” Is no joke if there is no father in the home. Our society blames the dad, but in too many divorces I know the woman becomes a complete and total shrew. Not in every case but in far too many. I know cases where ex-wives yell into messages (venting literally at no one,) as if anyone with any self respect is going to bother listening to that. Finally, courts are recognizing divorced women who practice “parental alienation” turning the kids against the absent parent and blaming them for everything. With or without cause.

However, you have to ask yourself, what is the common denominator. If you have someone who has never had a lasting or good relationship with a person of the opposite sex in any relationship, they have had what is the one constant? Her or him. Is it more likely that every one of the opposite sex is useless or that they were never taught by their parents (or parent,) how to recognize a good mate or how to maintain a happy marriage?

My parents told me: If you want to know what your marriage or life with someone will be look at their home life and their parents. They will tend to recreate what they have seen all their life. My first marriage I married a deeply troubled teen from a broken marriage. That marriage last seven years until she started hanging around divorced friends and her mom and drinking large amounts of Yukon Jack. Then she wanted out and filed for divorce. We were not well matched and if I had followed my parent’s advice I would have seen that. Now that I am older (and married 33 years to a wonderful woman,) but over and over again I see that my parents were right about more than they were wrong about. I see my mistake repeated over and over by others who marry into generational dysfunction.

The Bible says, the sins of the fathers (and mothers,) will be visited on to the 3^rd and 4^th Generations. I used to think that was an unfair curse. But it was simply a statement that it can take 3 or 4 generations for someone to work free of dysfunction that they have been taught. Many simply avoid the work of breaking the chain and perpetuate it for another generation.

We stare into the abyss.

Too many in our society have been mal-educated and failed by our public schools, their parents, and/or their family situation. Too many bonds of relationship – both family and friends – have been broken. How can any society survive when the basic building block of every human society we have ever seen on this Earth for the last 400,000 years – the family – is failing? How can we even fix it when schools have not taught people to communicate or think effectively, and parents have not taught their kids to accept responsibility and enter the fray with courage?

The future is grim. But you don’t have to go down with the ship. Quitters lose precisely because they quit. As long as you keep fighting you have not yet lost. Even if you die fighting no one can say you were defeated. Remember the Viking Proverb: An Eagle should show his claws; even when dying.

Your life is your own and you can take charge of it and do the work to correct any misconceptions or lack that you have in your relationships, education, or training. Life is a struggle and we don’t always get to choose what struggles we will face but we will all face struggles. The most important thing is not where you are or what you face but that you face it head on and keep fighting.

No one is more motivated to build a good future for you than you yourself. Wherever you find yourself, face and overcome your challenges. Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome! So, Freedom Troopers, draw your saber, stand firm, and fight for your own future.