Inspiration: “Brick by Boring Brick” by Paramore
I grew up listening to stories about King Arthur, Davie Crockett, and Paul Bunyan. From there I began reading about Crusades, Roman Legions, Samurai, and World War II platoons. I played Final Fantasy videogames and lived in a world that was all my own. I had an active imagination as most kids do. I became enchanted with the ability to mix history into the stories of our fictional media. It made them seem as if there was a chance they could be real. After all, Medieval stories are full of dragons and demons despite being based on factual events. Is it so hard to believe that such a story as Final Fantasy VI could have truly happened with some slight modifications? I know it did not, but the historical traces laced throughout give it the credence to allow our minds to be encaptured.
Many of the greatest kings remembered in the history books or among the stories of the people are known as warrior scholars. They fought their battles, and when they had an opportunity to rest, they studied. Most focused on topics along the lines of politics, economics, and military strategy. However, there were also those with interests in religion, astrology, astronomy, and agriculture. A man with a talent for battle was a scary sight. A man with a talent for battle and a brain for making the battle easy was something to truly fear.
Lately, I have been associating with this image. I recently graduated college and took a short hiatus to get away from everything. It was a nice break including family, friends, Christmas, snowboarding, and videogames. Yesterday, I returned to the working world. I say return because after three internships and a couple student jobs, I do not feel like it is a wholly new experience. To me, going to work is stepping onto the battlefield. My coworkers are fellow soldiers, and the problems encountered in breaking greater service to the clients is the force opposing us. It is where I employ everything I have learned over the years. It is where all the training comes to the forefront.
Then I go home in the evening. Where medieval kings may have played chest by candle light, I dabble in web development and other programming projects. They are miniature versions of problems I may encounter at work. I begin to expose the forces at play and develop tactics to meet them. I spend time reading books and blogs. I watch enlightening shows on the television. You may think all I do is watch sports, but I argue that football relates to far more of life than the local three-day forecast.
Tonight’s agenda is no different. Tonight, I resume reading The Art of War.
In the past few months, three broad classes of people have been made really obvious to me. I have seen it online playing videogames, at work, and in my classes. I have decided to throw them out here and see what sort of a reaction I get. The three classes are the leaders, advisors, and sheeple. Because I find they have very interesting parallels to common class distinctions in ancient cultures, I have listed their historical parallels in parentheses after the class name.
Sheeple (Commoners)
The sheeple class is by far the largest of the three. The people in this group do the grunt work. They show up at their eight-to-five jobs day in and day out. They will gain a few raises and promotions as their experience grows, but their destiny is limited. They exist because work needs to be done. Most of their purpose will be replaced by mindless drones in the coming decades, maybe centuries, but I doubt it. In all honesty, if one dies tomorrow, the world will never know. Those in direct contact will be upset momentarily before work resumes once again. Their lives are grinding. Fortitude and endurance for monotony are perhaps their most redeeming qualities. They have either come to accept their place in life or live on with misguided delusions of grandeur. It is a sad, cold, hard life they live.
Advisors (Priests)
Advisors are the experts in their respective fields. This includes not only professors, but also those out actively working. While they may very well be doing some of the same work as sheeple, they are working constantly to push the limits. They are inventing new techniques and technologies. They have come up through the status quo, and now challenge it. They have seen how things are, but yet understand how they could be. Their passion is for their work. This most often prevents them from organizing large change. They do not have time to bother with engaging others and convincing them of the greatness of their ideas. More often than not, they publish their ideas in some way that a leader can get a hold of them. They are rewarded for their insight and talents. They will not be glorious figures, but footnotes in history books. History remembers them not as changing the direction of civilization, but as the creators of new things. Those things are then responsible for impacting society. More often than not, there are several advisors behind every great leader.
Leaders (Warriors)
Leaders have a natural skill for knowing when and how to connect the new creations of advisors with the common sheeple. They craft mass opinion in a way to drive their respective communities forward. Their talent is not in new creations, but in rallying the masses around the developments of others. Leaders have best-seller autobiographies. The greatest of them are remembered forever in history books. They are self-starters. They seize upon an idea, and strive to make it reach its full potential. It is not about developing further upon the idea, but rather, embracing the idea into current practice. Their knowledge is more diverse than an advisor, but not as deep. They are dependent on advisors for guiding them in the right direction as well as providing a new direction to guide the sheeple. They also require the sheeple to affect the mass change which makes their efforts meaningful. While perhaps the most prestigious of the classes, it is a symbiotic relationship.
When I tell people I am a double major in Computer Science and History, most are dumbfounded. What do those two have in common? I usually smirk and respond with a simple, “Not much.” The truth is they require a similar mind. A person needs an analytical mind to solve the problems encountered in computer science as well as to get to the bottom of an historical event. The most common thing I see is the constant search for patterns. Even in analyzing the two majors, I am looking for patterns. When writing for either discipline, I am required to be concise and to the point while backing up what I say. It is not about writing a fictional story for a literature class. The required documentation can seem overwhelming at times, but without it, the whole work means nothing. Writing a blog is a joke compared to a research paper. Did I mention both majors require their students to write research papers? I actually feel mildly ashamed of the lack of links at the bottom of my blogs to provide further reading. My computer science head, Eugene Wallingford, is much better about doing this on his blog. As you can see, I am not only learning from him in the classroom.
Now that I have spent all that effort describing the similarities between the two fields, I will tell you I am not a double major because the two complement each other. I am in history because a person, regardless of where they are going in life, can learn a lot from studying history. Some might think it attracts people who like a good story. These are the people we weed out with research papers. As colorful as the lives of past individuals and their deeds may be, spending a night in the library or locked away in your dorm room has nothing of the same exhiliration. It is the sort of excitement found by getting to the bottom of things. The detective has this excitement when he solves a case. A computer scientist experiences a similar euphoria upon solving a difficult problem. Still, the real value in studying history comes when taking a step back to look at the world around me. What are the recent trends? Where have things come from? Where are things going? What does this mean for me? What does this mean for you? What does this mean for us? Was the recent legislation a good idea? Does the education model universities are built on still have a solid foundation? Will that remain to be true fifty years in the future? What about the economy? What is the story with world politics? If you ask me, I will tell you a historian is the best discipline from which a United States President should come. If you want someone making important decisions, having the foundation for thinking critically about what led up to the decision and what might happen based on the choice, I choose a historian who has spent his life studying such climactic decisions.