If You Don’t Have a Degree, Your Opinion Means Less Than Mine
It’s time we started showing more respect for educated people
Can we just quit playing games for a minute? Republican cancel culture likes to attack the opinions of educated people and dismiss them as being “elitist.” At the same time, Republicans will turn around and say things like, “burger flippers don’t deserve the same wage as nurses.”
How is it that saying a degree matters is considered “elitist,” but demanding people without degrees should be paid less is just “conservative common sense?”
Conservatives will rage all day long about how the opinions of people without degrees should matter as much as those that have them. But go to a company owned by one of these people and ask how many people they hire without degrees. You’ll find the only people they hire to the critical, high-paying jobs are the ones who went to the best schools. So, I guess it’s the conservative businessmen who are truly the elitists right?
So much of the conservative message is designed to give people information that’s blatantly false. They like to claim degrees don’t mean anything. The truth is, they want to discourage people from pursuing degrees so that they can hoard all the wealth and opportunities for themselves. They hit you with the “elitist” label because they want to coerce you into selling their toxic message to your own children.
Don’t fall for it.
America celebrates idiots
Wouldn’t it be nice if we showed a person’s qualifications before they spoke on the media? We could qualify all comments on social media with a person’s highest education level and their grade point average.
Facebook could certainly do this if they wanted to. Do you think it would make a difference if the names that scrolled by on your feed gave you a snapshot of the success a person had achieved in life?
Michael Carlisle (Harvard medical school, four children in college, 812 credit rating, 3.84 GPA): “Please get vaccinated.”
Buck Chet (high school drop out, divorced, 112 credit rating, 1.1 GPA): “Take horse dewormer!!! DERP DERP DERP!”
But we don’t get this. Buck Chet gets to be the poster boy for the message of idiots. He’ll get his own television show on Netflix about how he goes out into the woods and poaches animals out of season. The right will defend him like some rural messiah.
They’ll just ignore the doctor. They’ll dismiss him as “elitist.”
Hardwired thinking
Why is it too much to ask that we have a little bit of respect for people who have worked hard, studied, and achieved in an academic field?
We demand that we show respect for the elderly for their experience. How is it any different that we demand to show respect for the educated? The educated also have experience. What incentive is there for people to learn if we insist that everyone’s opinion is at the same level?
You’re probably reluctant to agree with the title of this article. You probably sucked in air and said, “Well, education doesn’t always mean a person is intelligent.”
If you thought that, then you’ve been brainwashed.
Sure, there are some educated people that are stupid out there. But there are a LOT MORE uneducated people that are stupid. If you’re willing to admit that educated people can be stupid, why are you unwilling to admit that uneducated people can be absolutely, stunningly, incompetent at everything?
Education doesn’t always make people smart, but sometimes it does. Not being educated ALWAYS makes people stupid. Your life experience counts as part of your education. If you fail to educate yourself based on your own experience, then you’re probably voting for the Republican party.
At what point does education matter?
A couple years back I got into a social media argument with a former conservative friend. This was back when I still wasted my time talking to conservatives in the hope that I could instruct them not to be such anchors against the progress of the human race.
We were discussing something related to Physics. Now, I have a background in Physics. It was my minor in college. I’m certified in the state of Wisconsin to teach Physics. I’ve studied it. I know a little bit about it.
Yet, this guy insisted that my position on the matter of debate was incorrect. It didn’t matter what I did. I dug up textbooks, I made diagrams, I showed him the calculations using ten different methods.
“Nope, nope, nope…”
Finally, I just asked him, “At what point do qualifications matter? I am qualified to offer this opinion. You are not qualified to dismiss it.”
Of course he had an answer for that too, he had an answer for everything. But his answer was asinine. He was wrong. He was an arrogant, entitled idiot who dismissed the opinions of people who actually put in the time, effort, and energy to learn something.
Your intuition sucks
The best lesson I learned in my Physics classes was that human intuition is absolutely terrible. This lesson got hammered home again and again and again.
Our professors would pose a question, we’d consider it. Based on our understanding of reality, we’d predict a certain result.
We were ALWAYS wrong.
We weren’t just a little bit wrong. It’s not like we guessed 90 and the answer was 86. We’d get things wrong in a way that stunned us into disbelief. We’d assume things would evaporate into flame, only to have them emerge unscathed. We’d think a ball would fly in a straight line only to witness it dart off at a sharp angle.
We’d stand there watching with our mouths open unable to believe what we’d witnessed was possible.
It’s impossible to convey the gap between what we expected and what we experienced. Our uneducated minds were abject, ultimate failures. Our uneducated opinions were useless in the best case scenarios, and dangerous in others.
When you actually have the work-ethic and the discipline to educate yourself, you learn to have contempt for “common sense.” When you actually do the work, you see that your common sense is a complete disaster.
It’s worthless.
Shut up.
Don’t talk about it.
You’re literally making everyone around you dumber when you speak.
It takes a couple of years of being humiliated again and again before you start to figure things out. At first you want to resist the results of the experiments. You want to insist “that can’t be right.” But eventually you find out what you’re observing IS right, the thing that’s wrong is your lazy, entitled, uneducated mind.
So you improve it. You get better. You learn to THINK!
You go to share your discoveries with other people and they say, “Well, that can’t be right! You must be a moron! We’re going to vote for Ted Cruz.”
Conservatives preach the opposite of learning to think
The opinion of people who are educated on a subject means more than the opinion of people who are completely ignorant on that same subject.
The fact that this is a controversial comment shows the deplorable state of thinking in the United States.
How about if we start taking it upon ourselves to show a bit more respect to people who have worked hard and figured out how to better themselves intellectually? Let’s stop dismissing these people as “elitist” and listen to their hard-won, good advice.
Conservatives want to get on their pulpit and insist that the deeply held convictions of loser alcoholic child molesters who were dishonorably discharged from the military are at the same level as sober people with good jobs and a clean record. Somehow they get the loser alcoholics on television. We need to work to change this trend.
Let’s start showing a little bit of respect for the people who can actually prove they know a thing or two.