Rising to One's Own Obsolescence

My longtime Dear Readers know that I will not outright blog anything that will have political overtones, is not MY place to blog about, or may be misconstrued. Though I try to avoid these issue, it still happens.

What I have been thinking about lately are elitists and people who feel they are ahead in their field of expertise. What happens to people when they become the leaders or the elite of their field? Well, in my professional field, there is a joke that these people rise to their own obsolescence. They become so learned that they cannot become any bigger, which is an implied state of stagnancy. They also tend to become management types where they are removed from the actual work instead of within their technical expertise so they become ineffectual in actually promoting the work because they do not actually do the work. They become PAPER PUSHERS, instead of active workers. A paper pusher is someone who pushes the organizational structure, instead of the actual basis of the group. For example, they become managers, that are responsible for things such as budgets, personnel matters and public relations. They are out of the loop.

It is of my opinion that at that point, the leader(s) have the responsibility to try to pass on that knowledge and experience. But, how many really do? People are human. People have egos and tend to surround themselves with others that will tend to agree with them and propagate that expert's isolationism by continuing to stoke the leaders' ego. I am very guilty of it myself. I have a tendency to put these people on pedestals and/or go out of my to align myself to a person's given point of view at the expense of my own. Thankfully, I am working that out.


"And so what they did was got rid of the lawmaker and kept the law. And so the conceived the universe in terms of a mechanism. Something, in other words, that is functioning according to regular, clocklike mechanical principles. Newton's whole image of the world is based on billiards. The atoms are billiard balls, and they bang each other around. And so your behavior, every individual around, is defined as a very, very complex arrangement of billiard balls being banged around by everything else. And so behind the fully automatic model of the universe is the notion that reality itself is, to use the favorite term of 19th century scientists, blind energy. In say the metaphysics of Ernst Hegel, and T.H. Huxley, the world is basically nothing but energy--blind, unintelligent force. And likewise and parallel to this, in the philosophy of Freud, the basic psychological energy is libido, which is blind lust. And it is only a fluke, it is only as a result of pure chances that resulting from the exuberance of this energy there are people. With values, with reason, with languages, with cultures, and with love. Just a fluke. Like, you know, 1000 monkeys typing on 1000 typewriters for a million years will eventually type the Encyclopedia Britannica. And of course the moment they stop typing the Encyclopedia Britannica, they will relapse into nonsense.

Speak No Evil, See No Evil, Hear No Evil

And so in order that that shall not happen, for you and I are flukes in this cosmos, and we like our way of life--we like being human--if we want to keep it, say these people, we've got to fight nature, because it will turn us back into nonsense the moment we let it. So we've got to impose our will upon this world as if we were something completely alien to it." Alan Watts, The Nature of Consciousness

I know this has to do with my recent conversations with my beloved about the Nephesh but since I am in no way a leader or expert or elite or "Chief" within that area, I cannot yet put it into my own words...