It’s proof that practicing psychologists with PhD’s at the end of their names are only in it for the money if they don’t spend at least a few hours of study a week on Twitter, just taking notes, as its non-paying patients go through their paces.
If you want to understand Twitter’s outreach just go to Top 500 Twitter Profiles by Followers and draw your own conclusions, which, incidentally, is the sub-text of this article, since one of Twitter’s results, if not intended purposes, is to make it more difficult for its followers, subdivided by age groups, to do exactly that…draw their own conclusions.
Top 50, Top 500, you can see where most of the Follow-traffic occurs. Celebrities. Of the Top 50, I counted 32 entertainment celebs, 3 sports, 4 Media, (CNN twice, New York Times, BBC) 2 businessmen (Musk and Gates) even Twitter (@Jack) itself, and 3 world leaders, Obama #1, Trump #7, and Prime Minister of India #37??)
Since the Top 500 ends in the 8 million range, you can get some idea of the rarefied air of even the top 50, or 5000. And by checking the number of people they follow, you can also begin to consider what might be their purpose to be on Twitter. Obama follows over 600,000, which means, for one, he doesn’t personally attend to the site and doesn’t use Twitter as means of open communication. On the other hand Donald Trump only follows 46, who no doubt are people whose opinions matter.
So while therapists may be spending two hours a day studying you, you can, if you want, spend a few hours a week, just by searching publically-available information through, say Google (#94) so you can also study Twitter users, and probably make some interesting findings. (I think Twitter would just as soon you didn’t do this, by the way.)
Bottom line, without having the professional degree to say this, I can still say with the authority of common sense that a lot of people are obsessed with Twitter. And not just Millennials. And certainly not only people of the Left, although their leftish training does appear to compel them to go to illogical extremes “less exceptional” minds like ours on their right seem able to resist.
And that is why I even bother to visit Twitter. To study. For you see, when I go to Twitter I’m observing other people who, like myself, only drop in from time to time, as one might the county sanitarium, to offer some elderly advice, a little Christian direction and solace, even prayers, and even, in certain moments of anger, confusion and turmoil, to provide myself a relief, per Mark Twain, “denied even unto prayer”; i.e., a good soul-cleansing curse.
But there are those who are clearly living inside a cocoon created by Twitter, where they receive their daily nourishment and rejuvenation. It’s inhabited by many people who are “certifiable” as shrinks once call them in my day.
@HuffPo for instance has over 11million followers, which seems reasonable since few of their writers can write words that contain more three syllables and most of their readers’ attention span doesn’t extend beyond 280 characters.
GK Chesterton, wrote in 1932:
“….the world has improved in everything except intellect. I think that most modern people are much stupider than they were in the days of my father, and probably very much more stupider than in the days of my grandfather. It illustrates my point that the modern reader would hardly listen to (or read) a long process of reasoning.
“…I could prove this if people were only patient enough to listen to my proof.”
Do GK’s math: Born in the 1870s, when all there were were books, newspapers, magazines, and lectures, Chesterton was referring to the “reduced attention spans” of people in the 1930s, when radio and film had been introduced, lamenting the decline of thought. He compared his time with two prior generations, back to about the crowning of Queen Victoria, a century earlier, concluding that people “thought better” because they read and listened better.
So simply extend that loss of attention spans forward another three generations to 2020. Here we are almost a century later, and it does seems GK was a diviner of sorts. Dying in 1936, still in the radio-film era, television sped his world up but also into neat, compartmentalized 30-and-60 minute segments, with well-timed commercial pauses where “hidden persuaders” of all sorts were implanted, even unto children with visual images named Tony the Tiger and a leprechaun named Lucky. There was also introduced music that could be condensed into 2:30-minute songs, and listened to on small 8″ celluloid discs that could be purchased for $.59 each. Or on a larger machine where they could played for a nickel, and sung, danced and even smooched together with friends.
Just 30 years after Chesterton died in 1936, young people were already moving away from sermons, lectures, books (without pictures) and finding textbooks on standard subjects dull and boring. And the commercial universe encouraged them to do this. And the young complied.
Of course in your own memory you know how lightning fast that fast world changed in the 1990s, with computers, the internet; giant corporations reducing their names to big-lettered acronyms, ostensibly so they could be “logo’d” or branded, but also so the young would recognize it more indelibly. Twitter would not enter their world until around 2008, when they would be able to speak entire complete thoughts, covering the span of human existence from Milton to Red Hot Chili Peppers, total FRDM taking on a whole new look in 140 characters. LBRTY too. STFU, DM, FB, BTW, ICYMI, IMHO, LMAO, LOL, and the only one I recall from an earlier era, SOB, which got my mouth washed out with soap. (A separate lesson there; not the word, but the thought…which GK would understand).
My question now: Are these Gen-Y Millennials shown in the photo (above) from 10 years ago or are they Gen-Z teens from last month? My son, nearly 50 now and a swim coach to both generations of elite suburbanites, for 25 years, probably would know, maybe by the colors of their shoe laces. But I can’t. And he is far more optimistic about this new batch, whose parents, incidentally, would be sired by his (GenX) generation, while Millennials’ parents would be the progeny of my waning Boomer generation, supposedly ending in 1964.
Makes a difference. The Law of Generations.
If you divide this young world today into:
1) the self-indulged, who, like as not, stay perpetually hyped on some artificial substance, from (prescription?) drugs to university laboratory conditioning with various social and media bells and whistles,
and
2) the self-absorbed (see the museum photo), who crawl into an external electronic cocoon, unaware, oblivious, but still demanding a quiet space where they do not have to hear any discouraging words, and can tantrum themselves into getting it.
They are different, but by how much?
Since they represent the upper 20% elites, who then, of their generation will marry and bring into the world the necessary 2.3 new infants needed to reseed the lost stock of their parents’ passing plus the random (but growing) gay or transgendered community that will bear no replacement fruit at all? And who will teach their children the necessary skills to keep their House afloat for yet another generation…if all these spawn have to pass on is their seed while letting other institutions tend to their children’s educations, which incidentally, was how Chesterton’s English gentry passed themselves from the Victorian era through thr1960s, then suddenly collapsed?
This is only a question based on my observations, but it becomes more scary, as we have been witnessing in Portland…if we stop to ask that maybe this is the second, not the first generation, of this prototype being field- tested in America?
For it does seems that many of the parents of these children, shown above, allegedly our best-bred and brightest, were the Christine Blasey-Ford’s of the 1980s, who even today, their sleep-around habits long past, and settled in to what, on the surface, appears to be fine professional careers, can still be suddenly stopped dead in their tracks at the sound of a silent dog whistle, and march back to war just to lie before a Senate panel.
Is this as good it can get under current conditions? Or are there things we’re missing? Where do we turn to find rescue when our best-and-brightest have turned rotten.
Or have they really?
Surely, these aren’t “Alphas”.
* * * * * *
The America-born “alpha-mind” isn’t quite like the English. Ours do not automatically arise from the aristocracy, as it was drawn up in the 12th Century (by the French. Go figure.). In fact, quite the opposite. Simply because of its composition, America, like a lake, “turns over” on a regular basis, where the bottom and top switch places. Aristocracies hate picturing this in their minds, even though it’s rock-solid Science.
So you’ll find that even as our society is made to believe we steer our “alphas” to become lawyers (nee politicians), conglomerate executives, and university professors, and then imports our engineers and technical alphas with H1-b visas, since none of our elites seriously pursue those studies in America any longer (see the photos above to ascertain why), Nature simply won’t allow this sort of incest to go on for very long. Three generations, tops, the same amount of time it takes an “out in the boondocks” retailer named Sam Walton to grow a good idea and small retail business into a giant enterprise, then for his grandchildren and their rotating syndicate of lawyers and branders to pick it clean, where it will begin, with a slow-but-accelerating slide to be replaced by yet another bright “alpha-mind” who still has his own skin in the game, just as Sam did the Kresge retail empire (K-Mart) 50 years earlier.
Why this occurs is that, as we already can see, the “alpha” part of the modern legal professional, corporate exec, and university scholar, world markedly slumps qualitatively downward itself, from “alpha” to “beta or less” in just 50 short years…an observation not lost on those hungrier, better-educated technical “alphas from abroad”, who even as early as the 1990s, with the fall of the USSR, saw America as a goose just begging to be plucked. (They also don’t know the role Nature plays in America’s make-up.)
I’m not being fatalistic here. So, take heart, the body of the Alpha-minds in America are still here, the last repository of the intangibles of which real men and women are made of; unyielding integrity, un-buyable loyalty, courage, honesty, and foremost, common sense, all upon which Nature declares that free societies must be built in order to survive and grow. Donald Trump is living proof that this instinct has been alive and well for a long time. And he has relit that lamp, what I’ve called America’s “next Great Awakening”.
The bulk of America’s alphas are still alive and well, only outside the four-corners of the organization chart of world order as most insiders now see it. They are everywhere; only minding their own business; in small business, and teaching, especially where they see bureaucracies as tools instead of crutches. Even in retirement. If young and healthy enough, they need to step forward with a view toward 2022, 2024, and beyond, to wipe the slate clean of all the “betas-and-less” that have infested out institutions for two generations now.
Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump have blazed this trail, politically.
America’s greatest asset was not its “alphas” but in the common sense people who can recognize them.
