Jester Naybor (@JesterNaybor)

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/12/14/despite-high-vaccination-rate-amtrak-suspends-vaccine-mandate-the-background-tells-a-story/ "If the always dependable shift-worker who never misses a day of work; the person who is always dutiful, diligent, trustworthy and can solve problems independently; the person who goes the extra mile and is proactive in planning their responsibilities, does not show up with the keys to be the switch operator, well, then the switch doesn’t get operated. And, that person is very hard to replace." Those are the people who are worth their weight in platinum in any successful organization. People that I have come to greatly respect, as a degreed engineer, instead of looking down my nose at them. The problem is that – particularly when it comes to independent thinking and proactively managing their lives such that they have the reserves to take the economic hit when Irish Democracy is called for – they are a VERY rare breed. Our social-technocracy discourages such diligence and initiative … and self-sufficiency, in both the white-collared as noted by the author, and the blue-collared. It instead encourages a submissive trust in those deemed the “elite” and assumed to Know Better ™. Trust at a Flounderian level … as in “You f___d up, you trusted us”, which is the only thing our condescending elites can say with honesty these days. We sell ourselves short in that Flounderian trust … that our own, proximity-and-consequence-informed insight and common sense are inherently inferior to the book-learning and culturally (cultish?) validated “elite wisdom”. And by doing so, not only make ourselves vulnerable to the frailties of these all-too-human notables, but effectively unplug much of the informed, closest-to-the-problems distributed intellect in this nation from the processes of problem-solving. Instead, we have centralized decision-making by an elite few, who come to believe that faceless, industrial approaches and economies of scale can be applied to solve problems with up to 330 million living, breathing INDIVIDUAL variables in this nation alone. That’s akin to trying to text on your smartphone with a sledgehammer. If we want to reverse this lemming parade we are on now and make it stick … getting us ordinary people to QUESTION the world around us, then build trust in our own insights and NOT delegate our decisions to others – even if that looks like more risk and effort for us – is essential to diminish the power of this Pedestaled Elite and engage that distributed intellect. That is how more of us become that rare breed that make things work … and attain the ability, by not going with the flow, to stop an organization, an enterprise, a society in its tracks, when we see it is about to go off the rails and get stuck in stupid for generations. Which is an ability that is sorely needed right now.