The Child We Are, and the Child We Nurture

Something I like about Facebook is that it is a reasonable version of our world. 2.38 BILLION users. There were only 2.67 billion when I was born, so as a rough statement, FB is the size of Earth when I was born. The conversations and interactions give us a fairly decent idea of what human beings are, whether people are connecting, fighting, or talking past each other. Think the politicians in Washington are some special breed of feeb? Read your own feeds, when you allow people of divergent opinions to participate. How much fighting do you see? How much miscommunication? How much “gotcha” going on?

Is your reaction that people are stupid? Better understand that someone like you who wasn’t you would think the same thing about YOU.

Me, I assume that saying “people are stupid” is stupid, as “stupid” has to practically mean “lower than average” and the average person can’t be lower than average. If you think all the great accomplishments of humanity are things of the past, we see different worlds. If you think all the great accomplishments are the result of “great men” while the rest of us were twiddling thumbs, you might not have noticed that every basic human accomplishment seems to have been worked on by multiple people in different locations at the same time. We grow by accretion, by sharing and communicating, by countless millions of mini-experiments some of which produce better results, and are then shared with others. If a brilliant person pops up, great. But if not, the normal variation in human thought and…