Right- it’s all relative, and if general knowledge and test-taking abilities increase, it doesn’t mean that suddenly everyone’s smarter than our forefathers. What it means is that the test was probably appropriate for them, and inappropriate for us for some reason.
I don’t for a minute believe that people in the recent past were significantly dumber or smarter than we are; it’s all the same genetics and more or less the same nutrition going on; it’s something to do with the testing.
As for the OP, I don’t know if “intriguing” is what would go on, but I do know that if we had an entire society made of say… Richard Feynman level intellects, there would be a LOT of profoundly unhappy people out there. I mean, there’s only room for so many Feynmans or other high-level jobs, and they’re not likely to be happy at all being one of those people you see on “How It’s Made” gutting fish at a break-neck pace 8 hours a day, 220 days a year. Or being someone who does data entry.
I’m a smart guy (not Feynman level), and I get bored and dissatisfied very easily and very quickly with routine and mundane tasks, and I can only imagine how it would be worse for someone smarter than myself.
You want a task done efficiently, you give it to a lazy person.
When we think of the great inventors of history, people like Archimedes and Leonardo and Tesla and Carver, none of these men were mental slouches - they were extremely intelligent. And they’re the ones that came up with many of the inventions that would save time and effort, some of which are used today still.
Huxley (and you seem to be following him in this) make an interesting observation - that intelligent people cannot be satisfied unless they are given no menial labor and only given the appropriate about of intellectual stimulation. But history is replete with people who did some of their best thinking while working on menial tasks, or took odd jobs between their successes. There’s a difference between “I’m too good for this” (which I think Huxley is wrong that all intelligent people would say) and “This needs to be done” (which I think most intelligent people would recognize as a worthwhile goal). If the work is truly beneath the smart people, then that person will find a way to automate it - you only have to look to find the stories of a bored guy with minimal skill automating his IT job and then playing Quake 8 hours a day.
Why are people assuming that those who do menial jobs now are necessarily “dumb”? And the ones who aren’t, are all “smart”?
Sure, there are dumb-bunnies ringing up your purchases and cleaning your toilets. But not all of these folks were born “dumb”. People who are educated poorly–as poor people usually are–don’t grow up to see themselves as “smart”, usually. If everyone treats you like you’re an idiot capable only of doing menial work, you internalize this. You accept this. It doesn’t matter what your brain looks like or how well you tested on an IQ test relative to an ancient contemporary.
Yeah, you might be unhappy in your menial job. Has there ever been a time period when people weren’t unhappy shoveling shit? Are people now happy doing this kind of work? No. But people work because they have to. Not because it makes them feel good.
There are plenty of “smart” people who are doing menial jobs now. They aren’t fomenting rebellion or flinging themselves off of bridges. They are either smart enough to know there is not point in doing either or they are creative enough to find happiness in the midst of tedium.
The influence of social conditioning shouldn’t be underestimated.
We’ re not talking about highly intelligent people as we know them but about Alphas – and that’s why I called it a chicken-and-egg situation: any sociological experiment the World State launched would be pre-contaminated by the subjects having already been subject to decanting and conditioning (otherwise how would you know they’re Alphas?). Obviously from the in-universe experiment they understand that Alphas are capable of ordinary labor by assignment (and if a civil war broke out, then they were capable of insurgency, which is pretty rough work).
However, properly conditioned Alphas will not just prefer to sell drawings on the boardwalk in order to think and create in peace while living simply – their society, their breeding and raising are designed so they will not. Those who arrive at that anyway can leave for the islands. The in-book experiment was defective, designed to confirm what they had already decided.
And yet, life around the world has gotten better and better over that same time period. This suggests that people working for themselves in a greedy fashion can, in fact, be incredibly beneficial to others. Further, people working together for abstract ideals of society’s betterment can have dreadful consequences, everything from pogroms to stultifying caste systems and mindless adherence to tradition.
To the OP, Mond was wrong, as others have already articulated nicely. He assumed a direct link between intellect and refusal to do menial labor that just doesn’t exist, and failed to anticipate innovations that would eliminate the need for much menial labor.
To be fair, I did not address your point about conditioning and I see where you’re going.
I don’t think the conditioning makes much of a difference. Take a bunch of people that want to be leaders, tell them “Whichever one of you produces the most/the fastest/the best gets to be leader”, now there’s that much more drive to innovate.
Plus, I don’t think the conditioning is a magic wand, much like getting your EMBA doesn’t mean you’re suddenly ready to be the CEO of a major corporation. Part of leadership is being able to follow, and part of leadership is learning the practical aspects while being a follower.
Now, it may be as you say, and the World Controllers purposely made an experiment designed to fail so they could maintain their superiority. Too bad Huxley doesn’t let the protagonist argue with Mond about that, since Mond just gets to pontificate about his perfect society.
I bet many of the people lurking and posting on this thread right now get pretty bored at work. Why do I say this? Because we are goofing around on a message board when we’re supposed to be doing whatever “smart people” work we’ve been assigned. Such undervalued geniuses we must be.
One of the least boring jobs I’ve ever had was the most menial. Sweeping streets at an amusement park. When people are vomiting funnel cakes every five minutes and your boss is screaming at you to pick up the pace, you don’t have much time for existential angst and ennui. I hated the job, but it was pretty much all I could do given the skills I had at the time.
If you restrict access to skills to a select few, it doesn’t matter how smart the population is. People do whatever work you tell them they are qualified for, as long they can eat.
I think Mond is wrong on a much larger reason in that he thinks that there is a single way to quantify and design human intelligence. It takes all kinds.
Of course, Mond’s metric of a “good” society might not mean “productive” or “innovative” but rather “stable” and “sustainable.”
On the one hand, they need to suppress labor saving innovations because otherwise the lower orders won’t have enough work to do. On the other hand they have to produce hordes of lower orders because the Alphas won’t do the scut work. And on the third hand everyone has to be conditioned to consume all kinds of pointless crap, otherwise there won’t be enough work to keep everyone busy.
The answer is that the book was written in 1931. Factories had to be filled with workers. Even though Huxley was aware that labor saving devices would make productivity increase wildly, he didn’t understand the implications of that increased productivity, that we would need very few people working on the factory floor or plantations or mines, and that whole categories of work would become nearly obsolete in a few generations.
In the real world we still don’t know what to do with people who would have made decent factory workers or farmhands but aren’t suited to white collar jobs. In the World State they could just not decant those types of people.
Plus in 1931 there was the rising phenomenon of political extremism. You know, the fascists and communists were taking over and whole countries were going off the deep end. It seems to me that a lot of this political upheaval was because people were plain old bored. Going out to political rallies and parades and pogroms was a way to pass the time because people didn’t have TV and the internet and games waiting for them back at home.
I trust we can all agree the 1980 film adaptation missed the fucking point. Indeed, the screenwriters must have pored through the book carefully so they could find every point, however subtle, and be certain of a deliberate miss.
The world has improved because of greed or in-spite of greed? China, for instance, keeps its’ population repressed even though they have become more wealthy overall. India, despite the higher classes having access to more and more wealth, hasn’t moved the lower classes up the indicator all that much. Why? Because it’s against the ruling/wealthy classes’ (respectively) self-interest to prop up the lower classes by giving away their excess.
The US’s situation improved because of circumstance and not because of greed by itself. North America rebuilt Europe and the US/US Corporations entrenched themselves in many places, creating wealth for North America. Some of this flowed out into where the US had a presence, but a lot of this was locally mandated (you must use xx% of local labor) and not a result of the US’s efforts. The US Corporations were especially aggressive in making sure that they had over-representation with the powers-that-be where they had a presence. Laws went their way and represented their interests, not the interests of the locals. Wage laws, especially, were a target to keep them in line with what would maximize profit and at the same time keep the workers just above subsistence.
Greed and self-interest did not cause the uplift we have seen. The progress we have made overall did, along with generous contributions by people expressing the opposite of greed and self-interest: Generosity. Not only with money, but with time and effort in a lot of cases, too.
I think I’ll find most people willing to contradict how absolute I made these points. I should have given service to the fact that it’s kind of a rough mix that can’t be completely dominated by any particular creed, but that the guiding spirit should be generosity and benevolence instead of greed and self-interest.
As noted above, one of the island experiments tried automating away much of the Delta-Epsilon level work.
Perhaps the experiment would have worked better if it had also adjusted the population mix to include fewer Deltas and Epsilons. The fact that this obvious patch wasn’t tried suggests that the experiment was predesigned to fail. That said, I think it’s more likely that the Controllers unconsciously sabotaged the tests as a result of their own pre-conditioned belief that society as it existed was the best of all possible worlds and should be left alone. They didn’t really have a reason to deliberately set up faked experiments to justify the social order to others (everybody else already took it as given, except for a few oddballs who could be shipped off to islands) – but perhaps they needed to do the subconsciously-rigged experiments to justify it to themselves, because a Controller-level Alpha Plus needs enough mental leeway to be able to seriously contemplate alternatives.
Because of greed, but not only greed. It’s necessary but not sufficient.
Greed, without a legal framework that requires people who want to prosper do so by providing goods and services that benefit others, just begets bloody conquest. But, with the right mix of laws, a state powerful enough to enforce them, and the potential for money to be made, you get the wonderous golden age of the past 150 years or so.
I don’t know much about India (though I’ll read anything you link), except that they did have a socialist government in the recent past that also failed their poorest citizens, but in the case of China, the repression has much more to do with the Communist regime keeping itself in power than greed as such.
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The US’s situation improved because of circumstance and not because of greed by itself.
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Right, not greed by itself (hence my writing that greed can be beneficial to others, not that it always is). As stated above, there are other preconditions for this effect to work, but where those pre-conditions exist, it sure seems to work. Greed makes the shopowner develop more and more efficient processes for sales and distribution that drive down prices. Greed makes the manufacturer add features to and improve the quality of his products. Greed makes the farmer buy machinery to plant and harvest crops, making groceries incredibly cheap. I, the humble consumer, benefit immensely from the greed of others.
[QUOTE=Farin]
North America rebuilt Europe and the US/US Corporations entrenched themselves in many places, creating wealth for North America. Some of this flowed out into where the US had a presence, but a lot of this was locally mandated (you must use xx% of local labor) and not a result of the US’s efforts. The US Corporations were especially aggressive in making sure that they had over-representation with the powers-that-be where they had a presence. Laws went their way and represented their interests, not the interests of the locals. Wage laws, especially, were a target to keep them in line with what would maximize profit and at the same time keep the workers just above subsistence.
Greed and self-interest did not cause the uplift we have seen. The progress we have made overall did, along with generous contributions by people expressing the opposite of greed and self-interest: Generosity. Not only with money, but with time and effort in a lot of cases, too.
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Said wages were more appealing that what could be had outside the newly-built factories, typically farm labor in nearly medieval conditions (notably, in the case of China, in a society designed to benefit everyone and not reward greed). The locals benefit from the greed of the corporations, just as the corporations benefit from the greed of the locals, trying to maximize their incomes. We can quibble over the ideal figures, but bear in mind that but for greed, there’s no factory, no jobs, and no uplift.
Lastly, you contrasted people working for their self-interest with people working for society’s betterment. That certainly sounds noble and righteous, but what might it look like in practice? Is it necessary better for the average person?
It depends on how much Deltas and Epsilons differ from the garden-variety dumb people we all know. If their conditioning mandates that they can’t be free of menial labor for long without a total breakdown, which isn’t true of all dumb people, then Mond is right that society must be the way it is…but only because the flaw he’s indentifying has been deliberately introduced into the dumb people. So, as applied to our society, he’s wrong, about the clever and the slow alike. As applied to his own society, he might be right, but only because it’s by design.
There are different sorts of boredom and/or different ways of defining it.
One kind is the “not having enough to do and staring at the walls” style, but another, more insidious kind is the “I have plenty to do, but everything I have to do is boring.” kind. As in, you constantly have a lot of monotonous, mind-numbing stuff to do, but none of it is challenging, interesting or piques your interest in the least bit. The kind of thing where despite having plenty to do, you find ways to shirk doing it because doing anything else is preferable and less boring.
Employers frequently mistake the term “boredom” with the first one, when it’s usually the second type that loses them employees.
Your sweeping job sounds like it had none of the first and a huge dose of the second.
Yes, but the last 50 years has seen that protectionist legal framework eroded. We are moving away from “some greed, in combination with generosity as a guiding principle” to “greed is the guiding principle”. The wealth disparity has widened a lot in the last 50 years. Greed as the guiding principle isn’t working.
Greed includes power. It’s not just money. If Obama comes out tomorrow and says “I will take $1 per year in compensation if you make me your dictator!” would you consider him greedy? I would. The most common term for this is “power hungry” which is just greed for power.
At the expense of others, you benefit. People get paid wages that are barely livable, even compared to other wages in the area. In general, the wages paid aren’t “Better” except in a very few cases, mostly to do with oil companies. Most companies will pay whatever the lowest they can get away with is. I don’t see, for instance, people in China getting paid about half of the US minimum wage. If you made Chinese wages, you’d make $675 a month. They are only getting paid what is absolutely necessary to retain workers. If they could pay every worker assembling widgets 1c per day, they would.
But the corporate greed gave you a cheaper widget, so…it’s a betterment?
As a simplistic picture, recall olden scientific progress and the Enlightenment in general. A lot of our progress came with the fabulously wealthy would support scientists and artists (in a very few cases, royalty founding and then funding academic institutions for some number of years) and let them design and invent. In some cases, great inventions came out, in other cases, they got nothing much. It wasn’t two lines on an expense sheet and attempting to drive an ROI out of the expense.
People used their wealth to advance science and art in addition to a harem of cyber sexbots bent on their personal pleasure.
But now? Most researchers fight tooth and nail to get funding out of the grant system in the US and personal/corporate donations for research are about getting them increased ROI.
Shareholders and Stock Brokers constantly groan and moan and complain when a company misses their target stock price by even a penny.
That’s not true. Most inventions in history are made to solve a problem. Need to water crops? Hauling a bucket sucks. Digging irrigation ditches with a gate next to the river makes it better. Need to dig a lot of irrigation ditches? A hoe helps out immeasurably. Need to dig way more/way bigger irrigation ditches? A backhoe really hits the spot.
As a society we are focused on greed and self-interest. What will this X bring me? Income? Wealth? Power? Women/Men? A Hawaiian Island? That is how people approach their life, and it shows in our culture as a whole. Caring about others has overwhelmingly become something that happens when others are around to watch, but not when they aren’t around.
I think that more broadly, Mond was claiming that society had to be one-ninth elite and eight-ninths* workers, because by definition the elite has to be the people giving orders and the non-elite those who obey them. All elite would be no elite. By that standard the ultimate society (if the term applies) would be a single super-intelligence guiding an army of expendable drones, like the Selenites in H. G. Wells’s First Men In The Moon.