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.
I turned twenty-two today. My Ancient Near East professor jokingly asked our class what we had done with our lives when talking about Alexander the Great. The man was twenty years old when his father, King Philip II, was assassinated, most likely in a plot formed by Alexander himself. By the age of twenty-two, he was invading the Persian Empire and Asia. People always talk about turning over the reins of control to the next generation. I am seven months out from my collegiate graduation. I watch the fate of today on the news. I think about the fate of tomorrow when I go to bed. I have spent the last 17 years of my life studying in school for the day when I will look down and see the fate of the world in the palms of my hands. You can call me arrogant for thinking I will have such importance when that day comes. I will call you ignorant for not realizing the weight which rests on your shoulders. It is not about you or me. It is about us. The choices we make as individuals affect us on a whole. Whether we like it or not, we are in this together. Remember those classes in school when you were assigned a group to complete a project? It is time to pull those skills down off the shelf and dust them off. You are on this planet with the rest of us and we have to find a way to make it work. You can stand in the corner uncertain of what to do. If you do, I will climb up on the table and start to direct you. We might do everything wrong. Maybe we will do everything right. I am guessing we will make some mistakes along the way, but we will also get a lot of things right. However, in the end, rise or fall, I am determined to make it one hell of a story. Regardless, get involved. I do not care where or with what, but do your share to make a difference.
This is long overdue, but here’s my continuation on presidential campaigns. I spoke briefly in the last post about the amount of money being pumped into presidential campaigns. Most of this money is used to slander the opposing candidate. Where does it come from? A fair portion is provided by third party sources hoping to gain an influence on the future decisions of said candidate should the individual become president. First off, just because someone provides funding for a person’s campaign doesn’t mean they need to honor the donation with later legislation. The donater provided the candidate with the money because they thought they were the best person to promote their interests. That means they respect whatever decision the candidate makes when in office. It is like hiring a head football coach for a college program. When that is done, the school is putting its faith in the individual to lead the program as best as he sees fit. If that means when the game is on the line that he chooses to go for the 2-pt conversion to win the game instead of kicking the extra point and going to overtime, the school needs to accept that. They don’t expect the coach to ask them what they think he should do in said situation. They’re paying him to make the right decision. If in the long run, they determine he is not the best choice, they may remove him for another coach. If a campaign funder determines their candidate is no longer the best choice for future elections, they can support another individual. Still, the candidate has no reason to alter their decisions based on who provided them with cash. I know this isn’t likely to happen seeing how corrupt individuals are and how much they like to play the game for themselves, but I can hope there are still some decent people out there.
Secondly, we spend millions, if not billions, of dollars on advertising, et cetera, for these campaigns. Then we decide the government is in debt and people are starving. Why not make the presidential campaigns more useful than seeing who can throw the most money to push their public image? There are a couple different directions this can go in. The first is to limit the amount permitted to be spent on the campaign. This option allows those with lesser finances to actually stand a chance in the campaign. They don’t have to own an oil company to pay for their election. Then feel the need to influence the market in favor of their holdings to make up for their losses. The second direction is to put a stipulation that any money spent on the campaign must be matched to charities, taxes, et cetera. At least this way, all the money thrown into an individual’s election would be providing some service to the general public because right now the commercials just annoy me rather than provide any sort of service.
I doubt any sort of policies along these lines will be accepted any time soon. Still, I think they could greatly improve the usefulness of presidential elections. While the Roman bureaucracy had plenty of corruption, they use to make individuals fund their election campaigns on their own. Then when they served in office, they received no compensation. This was because it was seen as the responsibility of the more fortunate to provide and care for those without as much. I think there are times when this vision is lost in our current politics. The United States Constitution was founded on these ideals. Every individual involved in the Continental Congresses and the early national conventions were well educated in the politics of the Greeks and Romans. Maybe our school systems need to spend a little more time focusing on these aspects than telling us how bad the cold war era was.
This is the first of a series about presidential campaigns in the United States. Quite frankly, there’s a lot of things about them that bother me. Today, I will discuss the pointlessness of the campaigns. Afterall, the entire intention of the campaigns is to allow the common populace to learn about the various candidates that they might make an informed decision for the next President of the United States. How do the campaigns accomplish this? They use a handful of debates accompanied with a billion commercials.
Now the commercials I must say serve absolutely no purpose other than to line the pockets of the advertisements’ producers and the media companies which distribute them to the masses. Most of the time, these commercials consist of a load of lies and slanders. I cannot say that I have ever learned anything about an individual from a commercial. Commercials are useful for brand(name) recognition. Everyone already knows the names of the presidential candidates. If they don’t, they shouldn’t be voting in the first place. Commercials do not inform the masses about the character of the company in the advertisement. For this, we go to other sources. So what other sources do we have to get to know our political candidates?
The candidates travel the country competing in a series of debates aired on national television. Once again, money pours into the hosting city, the hosting venue, and the media. At least in this case, most of it does not come directly from the presidential candidates themselves. At least it could be said it provides a small boost to the economy. However, how much is learned from these debates? Many times, our candidates get so caught up in competing with their counterpart that their focus ends up more on attacking the last thing they said than speaking truthfully of their opinions on the topic at hand.
Honestly, we could probably learn more about the candidates by having them write a weekly blog. It would be cheaper (I will get into the monetary considerations in a later blog). It would also allow the masses to learn more about the political topics of the day than a few hours of debate. Think of it in another light. When you take a college history class, you are assigned a textbook to read. You do not listen to two professors debate whether the Greeks or the Romans influenced western civilization more. I would prefer to read a well-organized explanation of a candidate’s viewpoints on the “War on Terror” than let them bicker for an hour about how each intends to remove US involvement in a timely manner (whatever that is supposed to mean).
These are the reasons you will find I hardly follow the presidential campaigns. I could spend hours upon hours to learn very little that is likely false the moment the candidate is elected anyways. For this reason, I spend my time working on more constructive projects. For now, the best option I can offer is making the best guess one can on a candidate and then to let the individual’s actions in office speak for an future opinion I form for the next election.