Ask A Genius 578 – Baths and Boy Scouts
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/25
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Rick Rosner: So, I’m in the tub today. Under lockdown, baths in the tub are still something you can take. My wife takes a lot of baths, and then I use the water before it cools down. I was thinking about how in America we tend to warehouse our old, which has been part of the Covid problem.
Because when Covid gets loose in a senior living center then it devastates roughly 80 percent of the US Covid deaths have been among people 65 and older. I was thinking about how other cultures treat their old differently. Treatment of old people varies widely.
But in the US, if we have the money or if the grandparents have the money, enough money to get stuck in senior living, then that’s probably where they’ll go. I was thinking about, is this a selfishness problem among people who aren’t old?
Because old people they take a lot of attending. They’re not as young; they can’t deal with the tech and they don’t. Anyway, my theory is – I ran it by Carol, who said, “It’s so obvious as to not be a theory.” But she says that about a lot of my shit.
I’ll tell her like most of my jokes are just, “Meh.” Sometimes, I’ll come up with a pretty good one and I’ll run it by her. Often, I’ll get from Carol, “Yes, but anybody could have come up with that joke.” That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad joke.
Not everybody or anybody did, I came up with it. Just because it is made up of familiar components doesn’t mean that it’s not a good joke, so, anyway, my idea is that now compared to 50 years ago. We all suffer from a time crunch because ‘me time’ has become so much more precious than ‘we time.’
Deal is, now, everything’s awesome. Entertainment is awesome. Personalized information feed via social media is awesome. It takes up a lot of time and it’s great, relatively. We want to spend as much time as possible doing that instead of anything else.
So, anything like dealing with an oldie that takes away from that. This is resented, makes us feel time pressure. You look back at the 70s when pretty much everything sucked, except for sex. Back then, sex was only for cool people.
So, people had all these hours of sex. So, it was when your life is filled with just sitting around vaguely bored and resentful. It might be possible for you to be more altruistic because the time you’re sacrificing isn’t worth as much.
And that’s the theory. I threw it up on Twitter and there actually only one guy who called me out saying, “No.” Because if your theory were true, it would be true across all nations, since all nations have the same tech and the US is more selfish than a lot of other nations. I go, “Okay, yes, I acknowledged that there are other reasons.”
He threw some of those reasons. We’ve talked about these reasons. The American mythos of rugged individualism. I was thinking about the Evangelicals, the politicization of Evangelicals, which has been going on for 40 years. The deal is, in order to make Evangelicals a useful political tool, you have to divorce Christians from Christian values.
And the way it has been done is to tie political action to Christian things that are made to seem as if they overwhelm anything else, that if the whole nation is going to hell, then the ends justify the means. You can elect the most godless president we’ve ever had if he’s doing things in the service of saving the country from going to hell and also saving America from aborted babies.
The United States is sinking into depravity and abortion means that any normal everyday morality or everyday moral considerations have to take a backseat to fighting those things politically. That’s the jujitsu that’s been done on Evangelicals.
That you have to forget any moral qualms you have. It has been freeing that you can go ahead and be a fucking immoral dick if you’re working for a greater or a more desperate morality.
There’s that, there’s the fear, the selling of the idea that any collective action is socialism or communism or is opening the door to such that anything other than unfettered capitalism, that unfettered capitalism allows all Americans to discover their greatness through capitalistic struggle and entrepreneurial struggle.
Anything that eases Americans away is fucking socialism and is stealing my tax dollars for people who don’t deserve it because they don’t have gumption. It’s an old tune, but it’s been played very successfully, recently.
To underpin the thesis of this thing, which is that Americans are fucking selfish now, I would say that more Americans than ever before, more people voted for Trump. Seventy-four million people that have ever voted for any other candidate who has lost a presidential election by probably 10 million votes.
A lot of people voted for a guy who’s obviously a corrupt, do nothing, incompetent, lying asshole. That speaks to an America that’s willing to be lied to, manipulated. Because it somehow aligns with they’ve been taught to believe is their self-interest.
That’s pretty much it beyond the things like the ongoing eroding of the institutions that were more collective, that had more focus than even industry. Corporations back in the 1950s when CEOs made only 20 times what the average worker as opposed to a thousand times.
But the head of Disney making 12 million bucks per year. Corporations used to exist for the betterment of or used to care about their workers. Used to, I thought they were bringing good products for the improvement of life, American life in general.
I’m sure there was always some craven capitalistic considerations. But they weren’t as the shift has been away from workers and towards management owners and stockholders. We’ve talked about that. I mean, everybody knows that.
The loss of religion is something that you could look to for daily guidance, moral guidance. The loss of things like the Boy Scouts to cynicism and there being better things to do and more entertaining things to do as a 12-year-old or a 14-year-old than going on camp-outs. Also, the molestation there. We’ve talked about that. Anyway, all that we’ve talked about before.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes, they’re in like a lawsuit that may lead to bankruptcy, too.
Rosner: Yes. I was a Boy Scout for half a second. I was a Webelos, which is in between Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts for like two years. I regret that I didn’t stick it out and become a fucking Eagle Scout. There’s still merit in being guided through a multi-year program of developing some knowledge and expertise in a number of different fields, which is really what the Boy Scouts are about.
They picked a bunch of meritorious areas to learn. Every time you learn enough or do enough in that area, then you get a patch to put on your sash. When you get enough patches for your sash, you can become an Eagle Scout. Some excellent people have been Eagle Scouts. I know more. I mean, maybe, it’s still going in some areas, but, I think, it would be a rare and a weird thing to be an Eagle Scout. Age 17 now, that’s all I got on this.
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