In Candor
I hope that revealing these usually interior thoughts may be of interest or even of value to you, if only some reassurance that you’re not the only one with non-standard thoughts and feelings. Anyway, here goes:
Me
I’m scared of doctors, not just because they sometimes don’t know but because we’re all just one blood test from a death sentence.
My fear of dying usually keeps me between vigilant and terrified. Therapy didn’t help, reading hasn’t helped. The only thing that has helped: distraction, staying busy, for example, caring for others.
My worry-wart, bald face is off-putting.
I’m a worrier in part because I crave stimulation, even though I know it’s to my detriment.
I rarely change people’s opinions — I’m too intense, too know-it-all, impatient when loud-’n’-proud people assert what I believe are inferior ideas.
I’m exuberant ever less often.
I vacillate between thinking I’m brilliant and that I’m far from it.
I’m usually happiest when alone with my thoughts, writing, reading, and taking a walk.
I am genetically predisposed to intelligence and to anger.
I value the practical over the spiritual, much so.
I value efficiency because it makes the most of our precious time.
I am sad and befuddled as to why I have few readers and viewers.
I refuse to play the dishonest game of one hand washing the other: I’ll tout you, expecting you to tout me even if you’re not enthusiastic about me.
I sniff at the frou-frou: fancy restaurants, wine, jewelry, clothes, and cars like Mercedes and BMW, which require more service and break down more than Toyotas do. There’s nothing prestigious about standing on the side of the road waiting for the tow truck.
I get plenty of novelty without travel: people, places, restaurants, videos, books. I believe that far-flung travel is too rarely worth the cost, hassle, and time.
Starting with the Beatles and acceleratingly, I find pop music to be more annoying than musical. Laugh at me but I love the beautiful orchestral arrangements of easy-listening “elevator” music and Josh Groban.
I shake my head at people whose heroes are performers, athletes, or politicians rather than, for example, scientists who developed GPS, the iPhone, and the birth control pill.
I like humankind, people not so much.
Some claim it takes a village but I’ve had better results in mainly trusting myself. After all, millions of Germany’s citizens supported Hitler and his genocide of the Jewish people. That helps me realize that many people have the potential to do or at least condone evil. I tend to follow the rule offered by my dad: Respect but suspect.
People
Too many people are undeservedly pleased with themselves. Most successful people are self-critical, questioning themselves, ever trying to improve and be more productive. But these days, even virtuosity is questioned, mainly by low achievers. Aspire to excellence.
People are more interesting than nature is. People are less static.
Today’s mantra, at least among the young, is, “We’re not human doings; we’re human beings.” I couldn’t disagree more.
Patriotism is shallow. We should care as much about someone in Bangladesh as in Bakersfield.
It is disempowering to externalize responsibility for one’s failures. There’s an ever-growing set of excuses: childhood trauma, racism, sexism, elitism, capitalism, and now gaslighting. Sometimes, the “victim” is simply wrong.
Smilers can be evil.
There are limits to how honest you can be, even with loved ones.
“…til death do us part” is an awfully demanding promise.
For many people, a promise isn’t a promise. If they don’t keep one, they may just shrug.
Weak job-search candidates are more likely to resort to sleazy tactics, which shall go unnamed here. More worthy candidates thus are denied rightful employment. Not only does that hurt them, it hurts coworkers, bosses, buyers of the products or services, and in turn, all of us. Employers, get your candidates mainly from trusted colleagues and choose mainly based on simulations of the job’s common but difficult tasks.
Tech will, net, make the world better, the masses and their leaders, worse.
In the abstract, we readily acknowledge that genes are prerequisite to environment’s effects — You could tune up a VW Bug perfectly and it won’t beat a Porsche. In a different sphere, every mom knows that her baby has enduring predispositions discernable maybe even in utero. A more rigorous data point: studies of identical twins raised apart such as this vividly demonstrate genes’ potency. So we may be wise to accept our basic self, yes tweak, but accept your foundational self. Yet self-help gurus imply that we’re infinitely malleable: “Dream it and you can do it!” “Power Pose!” “Just have a Growth Mindset!” Incorrect.
Understanding the genome offers powerful new hope for curing diseases, physical and mental. With sufficient ethical guardrails, gene therapy could also allow us to improve human altruism and problem-solving, thus accelerating our solving problems such as climate change and providing good government while reducing our trillions of dollars of debt.
We’re told to not be judgmental but I believe we should be more judgmental. Judgment or its more acceptable synonym, discernment, is a hallmark of civilized society. It’s detrimental to us as individuals and as a society to venerate “it’s-all-cool” acceptance of people, cultures, and arts. Give me a wise person over an overconfident one. Give me a culture that values restraint and hard work over a feeling-centric, do-it-now culture. Give me the overture to Gypsy over Black Sabbath’s War Pigs.
Policy
First, a quote from Bill Clinton: “Our willingness to believe the worst about everyone outside our bubble is growing and our ability to solve problems and seize opportunities is shrinking.” Thus, in creating the following list, I’ve prioritized ideas that fall outside of Medium.com’s most touted postings.
I am saddened by today’s truncation of debate about society’s core issues, for example, capitalism, global warming, illegal immigration, gender, and especially race. The best solutions most likely will accrue from free exchange in the marketplace of ideas. Alas, today, positions that dare veer from the orthodoxy are ever more subject to what I call the 3 C’s: Censure, Censor, and Cancel. Those three are short-term feel-goods to their wielders but long-term reduce society to an ever-lower common denominator.
I used to respect journalists but now, most live in a bubble, impervious to and annihilating of most views that dare oppose yet more redistribution — very short-sighted. Beyond providing a basic safety net to all, redistribution from those more likely to contribute also causes society’s degradation.
Our tax dollars are so abused. For example, the U.S. Department of Defense has $824 billion in expenses not fully accounted for. Despite an 80% decrease in the use of U.S. Mail, the Postal Service added 190,000 more positions. In 2023 alone, illegal immigration cost the taxpayer $150.7 billion. The number of laws and regulations has ballooned from 9,745 pages in 1950 to 186,000 in 2019, and the General Accounting Office found $248 billion of fraud and waste in 2022 alone — I doubt that either trend has reversed. Can any politician honestly say that we receive even decent value for our tax payments?
Most corporations are a net good: Their efficiency and expertise enable even low-income people to afford most things: from food to iPhones. Corporations developed everything from GPS to the birth-control pill.
New laws can punish an employer for not hiring a felon. How do you think a law-abiding citizen feels in losing a job because s/he wasn’t a felon? It isn’t in society’s best interest to punish the law-abiding to reward the lawbreakers.
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If you’re successful, our hyper-progressive taxation makes it difficult to enjoy the rewards of your ability and hard work. According to the Tax Foundation, the top 1 percent of earners pay 40% of the federal income tax; the top 10% pay 72%.
The world is making trillion-dollar commitments to try to control the planet’s climate. The dollar cost and pain to our daily life are large and will only increase, for example, sitting in ever more gridlock, paying more to fill our tank and to heat and cool our home.
To expand on merely one example: government’s efforts to force us out of our car and into mass transit, even though it can be hard to get to it and from the transit stop to our destination and back again. But oh the government’s machinations: For example, the transportation dollars stated to go to roads should be used to build roads and lanes to reduce the blood-pressure-busting traffic. But too often, it’s spent on reducing lanes, for example, replacing car lanes with little-used bike lanes, or shrub clumps, blocked-off streets, which increase traffic, and million-dollar-a-piece, traffic-causing, accident-causing, multi-entrance roundabouts. Then there’s the increasing government-imposed costs of driving — Climbing gas taxes (over $10 in tax just to fill my Prius), usurious parking tickets ($100) hundreds of dollars for a red-light ticket, and soon, cameras will automatically ticket us for speeding. Tolls were supposed to expire when the bridge or tunnel was built. Instead, they keep rising with ever more lanes requiring a toll, notwithstanding the marketing-derived term, “Express Lanes.” Liberals claim to care most about the poor, yet the increased cost of driving is most painful to them.
Will all this make enough difference to the climate? Unlikely given that, for example, developing nations and China are building coal-fired plants fast and furious because it’s much cheaper, thus helping to save their people from destitution.
The wisdom of imposing such costs on us all requires that all of the following assumptions be true:
— The net effect of the projected 2.7-degree increase in average global temperature over the next 75 years is a net negative, outweighing, for example, the increased arable land in cold climates and that many more people die in cold weather than hot.
— The proposed spending and restrictions on our use of oil and gas would drop the average global temperature enough to make the spending and restrictions worth it.
— The world’s 195 countries will continue major green spending and greatly reduce their use of fossil fuels indefinitely despite the aforementioned powerful reasons that countries have to deprioritize green in favor of keeping their populace from destitution. China alone emits more CO2 than the entire Western Hemisphere.
— New technologies such as nuclear fusion, hydrogen power, sodium batteries, and safe-enough nuclear won’t sufficiently address the problem.
The joint probability of those assumptions is too low to justify the costs, including the opportunity costs: what the money and restrictions on human freedom could otherwise buy, for example, an all-out assault on cancer. Regarding climate change, it’s wiser to make just modest incursions on human freedom such as increasing gas-mileage standards and instead, invest in long-term clean energy research on sources I just mentioned.
Most “privilege” is earned. “Surrender your privilege” is anti-merit, ultimately anti-gross world flourishing.
We can less often count on merit trumping other factors. That’s particularly visible in the life-and-death medical school reverse-discrimination admission policies and in discordant-with-reality portrayals of demographic groups in TV shows, movies, and commercials. For example, increasingly, when I see a Black person on screen, it’s almost always a positive character.
Today, hiring and promotion are much affected by race and gender. I base that assertion largely on having been career counselor to more than 6,000 people of diverse race and gender. Many of my clients have insisted they were passed over for a worse candidate who was of the “right” demographic. If the legacy of slavery, unconscious bias, and systemic racism are causing the intractable, long-standing wide Black vs white vs Asian achievement gap, then why, for hundreds of years, in countries that had and didn’t have slavery, colonized or not, majority Black or not, are Blacks low in achievement, high in crime, and other groups visibily different like Asians and Jews, despite long-standing prejudice, even if poor are low in violent crime and high in achievement?
Are men so bad that we’re fine with bashing them? For example, men do the grungy, dangerous jobs that few women will: from roofer to sewer to infantryman. We wouldn’t criticize women, let alone BIPOCs. If we did, we’d likely suffer the 3C’s: Censure, Censor, or Cancel. Atop that, in so many news shows and especially movies, TV shows, and novels, a spunky, smart woman triumphs over an evil or clueless guy. Rarely do we see the reverse. And when women have a deficit, say “underrepresented” in science, there’s massive redress and sometimes, reverse discrimination. Yet when men have the ultimate deficit — They live six years shorter than women, their last decade in worse health, and there are more than four widows for every widower, a review of 60 years of PubMed, which indexes most medical journals, finds hundreds of percent more studies with the keywords “women’s health” than “men’s health.”
I am dispirited by the media’s and some people’s visceral support for societally deleterious ideas such as 4B: “Don’t touch men” — half the population. The world would be worse. Besides, would we dare say, “Don’t touch Blacks?”
If a Martian descended on Earth and observed the news and entertainment media, it would conclude that white males are the Earth’s scourge and others are its savior.
The world is tough and when we come home, we don’t want to face a “buster” of either sex.
Education is America’s most overrated and overfunded product. The U.S. spends near the top per student worldwide yet, among developed nations, scores near bottom. Merely from 2021 to 2024, the U.S. Dept. of Education has spent more than a billion dollars just on race-based hiring and DEI programs. Head Start cheerleader Barack Obama, seeking support for yet more spending on it, commissioned a metaevaluation of Head Start: an evaluation of many studies. The result: no enduring difference. Liberals continue to pitch for Head Start and education in general because it sounds good to voters, which aids their re-election.
A major nationwide study, Academically Adrift, found that in the core competencies of writing and critical thinking, between freshman and senior year of college, 36% of students grew not at all. Many studies have demonstrated universities’ ever-growing bias. For example, in New England states, the ratio of liberal to conservative professors was 28:1, up from just 5:1 two decades earlier. Yet the Robin-hooding sticker price for four years at a coastal brand-name private college is over $300,000, and many students take five years or even longer. And even graduates often find it hard to land a decent job. The Atlantic reported that 53% can’t find a job better than one they could have gotten without the degree. A recent Wall Street Journal reports that even many Harvard MBAs struggle to find jobs. And all those music, art, and theatre majors? A cottage industry thrives in working with wannabes fighting for the too-few even-decent paying arts jobs.
Dare we ask our child’s teacher to do more for our bright child, the common unspoken message is, “S/he’s privileged. We must focus on the least among us.” Meanwhile, our child’s significant potential to improve society goes too unrealized. And there s/he sits stultified in the now de-rigueur, redistributive, mixed-ability class for 180 school days each year for a decade, a decade! Most of us get frustrated at being bored for just a few minutes.
Despite all the redistribution from high- to low-achieving students — for example, eliminating classes for the gifted while mushrooming the spend on low-achievers — the achievement gap remains as wide as ever while taxpayer wallets are ever lighter.
Natural intelligence is already, in some cases, trumped by artificial intelligence and the gap will grow. One example: Notwithstanding the teachers union prioritizing teachers’ jobs over children’s learning, AI-assisted and eventually AI-taught students will be the norm, enabling all kids to have world-class individualized instruction, in any language, at any pace, in any style — auditory, visual, kinesthetic, etc. Already, AI instruction is being trialed.
Imagine that two people are lost at sea, with only enough food for one. One is a promising cancer researcher while the other, to be polite, has far less potential to improve humankind. Most people would wisely give the food to the cancer researcher. Yet the fashionable “Effective Altruism” movement does the opposite, focusing on “the least among us.”
Each dollar, each minute of effort that we redistribute from greater contributors to others causes societal decline, a reduction in gross world flourishing. This includes condoning, even encouraging illegal immigration. That pool is overrepresented by people unsuccessful in their home country and, by definition, willing to be a lawbreaker to sneak into another country. Ultimately, that’s bad not just for the receiving countries but even, ironically, for liberal activists — Money spent on illegals’ welfare, healthcare, housing, education, crime, and substance abuse means less of our tax dollars for other liberal causes: things Green, poverty programs, radicalizing education to focus on DEI, and giving to “developing” nations.
It’s harder to get an appointment with a doctor let alone the one you want. In part, that’s because the system is trying to provide free healthcare to everyone including non-payers, legal and not. And fee-for-service has largely been replaced by Medicare and private insurance, both of which often deny payment.
Israel is subjected to a vicious double standard, compared with, for example, many Muslim countries’ brutal treatment of women and LGBT, and expelling of non-Muslims. The double standard is ironic in terms of Israeli accomplishment including in “social justice.” Imagine a terrorist group committed to America’s destruction and for 30 years bombed everything from buses to weddings. Then that terrorist organization, duly elected by its populace, took 200 hostages, killed 1,200 people, including infants, and tossed around killed women’s breasts like a football. Would your response be just proportionate or, so it couldn’t rearm and terrorize more, would you destroy the terrorist organization that embeds its military operations in hospitals and mosques, so they can show wailing mothers to the Leftist media to promulgate? Yet the world, led by the media and whipped-up college students, blames Israel.
Choosing when to die is the most intimate decision, yet government’s long arm makes it illegal or onerously difficult.
One liners
Life goes fast.
Most hard workers are heroic, not workaholic.
Family is overrated.
Be judgmental. It’s central.
Stop looking back. Take the next step forward.
Nearly all is part genes, part environment.
Self-esteem encourages complacency.
Status is the enemy of contentment.
Unproductive people may make excuses but some of them are simply lazy.
Ideological diversity should trump melanin diversity.
Global warming fears are too fevered.
Men deserve better treatment.
The loud-and-proud should be quieter.
In conclusion
Any credit for having been candid with you warrants tempering — When you’re old like me — I’ll be 75 in June —you have less to lose. I just hope that you find this of some benefit and you don’t hate me too much.
I read this aloud on YouTube.
Marty Nemko holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley with specializations in the evaluation of innovation and educational psychology. He is the author of 34 books including A Dose of Reality. You can reach him at mnemko@gmail.com
