What If You Have 'Good' Ideas?

I recently watched a video recommended by a fellow Wall Street Bear Chat Board long-time member, in which the demise of the American Dream was portrayed, and the cause or blame placed more or less on decades of bad ideas, political and moral.

On the one hand, if a true reflection of what has occurred, then it is testament to the power of ideas - at least the negative power of bad ideas, certainly.

I find that in warmer zones, I have almost
exclusively Italian tailoring, and not Savile Row!
Most job interviews I have ever been to, I start by saying:
"you can't afford me." Jobs are a bad idea. Don't get involved with this
kind of nonsense that modern 'society' pushes.  

I suppose we all believe that we know what constitutes 'good ideas' of course; I know I do.

My presumption is also filtered through years and years of formal involvement in an Eastern European philosophical school - not one which we need to disclose in detail right here and now, but I will say it is Eastern, in the sense that it goes back possibly to ancient Phoenicia... And so I say I do know what good ideas are based around, and what they must metaphysically 'look' like in order to be correctly termed 'good.'

But might we be able to say that if we held 'good' ideas, then at some point 'our' society or societies will take on the forms of those ideas and become, themselves, good societies?

How might this work if we ourselves live inside of a very vicious and flawed, as well as corrupted yet large and powerful society - even whilst we try to hold in our minds some ideal of moral and social and human 'good' that we attempt to live by?

An ancient philosopher once reckoned that the happiness - or, as we modern era socio-economists like to term it, 'units of happiness' - that a tyrant or despot experiences is far less than what a free man experiences. And by 'free' the philosopher meant mentally and intellectually free. At the same time, the opposite was held to be also true, namely, that the fears and anxieties and pains that the evil man experienced were far higher than those the free man felt. In a world of unbridled materialism and materialistic objectives and idols, this concept appears quite unproven.

Until we qualify materialism.

I am of a mind to start a new segment within this blog, that I intend to call 'Destination Materialism.' I am not one of those religious people who perceive of an ethereal paradise beyond, where good people ultimately go, in order to enjoy absolutely nothing. Why, if anything, that is surely the heaven for today's academic specialists, who, in the words of the British comedian Kenneth Williams became so astute at being ever more specialized in smaller and smaller parts of things, that eventually, one of them became the world's greatest expert, in absolutely nothing at all.

The quality of things is the thing. The substance of a particular thing is key to that thing.

Unfortunately we do not live in world in which going to a job interview holds substance any more, if the quality and productive meaning of jobs no longer exists in any realistic human and social or sociological (at least) sense. We have what Professor Stephen Keen calls 'unproductive complexity' going on.

Young people face bleak and uncertain times.

This was created by an actual designer...
And most car companies cannot afford them.

The processes by which they become economically viable even at subsistence levels is complex.

I do not agree with the nostalgia about 'dressing for success' in job interviews. 

One of the great mistakes that many people make today is that they don't envisage that there in fact certainly are pockets of liquidity and real cash wealth around! In spite of the clear paucity of monetary circulation velocity and the enormous margin debt in play. Or they go to the wrong places having been overwhelmed by the illusion that size equals substance. 

Young people ought to acquire skills and hone talents that are in tune with the social currencies in those pockets of liquidity. Never before in the history of the whole human race has it been more true than that people casually assume craft, medicine, health, education, knowledge, food, materials and textiles, fabrics and liquids - are all easily accessed by the broad consumer channel. Product substitutes are easily available for most things. But most actual things that should be around at this time in history and human progress, are not available at all.

I watch, for example, in horror, at the local Chinese Kung Fu schools - some, or in fact most of which, are run by people I personally know and watched as they grew up under the tutelage of older Masters decades ago. I do not have students that I personally train and this is largely because I have not come across anyone I observed might have had the necessary application and focus and even frankly the interest or the desire. Yet in some of these present day schools, thriving as they are, the classes are filled with high fee paying, sloppy-actioned, and utterly misguided people and young people. I barely - barely - recognize the things being taught. But whatever is being taught it bears no resemblance to what we all had to learn those many decades ago. The old Masters are spinning in their graves.

Long gone from YouTube was the very first black and white, Super Eight film of the 23-year old Tibetan Kuten wearing the 120 pound war god headdress and floating all across the small clearing... 

Nod nod, wink wink.

You don't know what is possible.