The other evening I was watching a rather good TV bio of the Virgin wunderkind (not so much of a kid anymore) Richard Branson. I love “rags-to-riches” stories at the best of times, and while Branson was not really a “rags” case — comfortably middle-class, rather — the fact remains that he built the Virgin conglomerate from nothing into what it is today. And he wasn’t schooled, much, because he’s severely dyslexic and this in no small part caused him to leave school at age 16 and never look back.
And now he’s gone and cocked it all up.
You see, he’s bought into the nonsensical “climate-change-we’re-all-gonna-diiiieeeee” philosophy hook, line, sinker and rod, as have so many successful people of his ilk.
And I can’t help thinking that it’s because he’s uneducated. Now granted, in today’s world such stupidity can and has sprung from the academe (not to mention other Marxist ideologues), but that’s beside the point.
You see, without a proper education, someone like Branson is more likely to be swayed by plausible-but-still-nonsensical arguments, especially when uttered and backed by “experts” (scientists, doctors, academics, whatever) because uneducated people always give more credence to these mountebanks than the latter deserve.
This is why so many wealthy people buy into stupidity — they’ve been so busy making money that they’ve ignored a substantial amount of the real world (whether political, sociological, scientific or academic) unless it has a specific impact upon their business.
It’s also why the wealthy buy into the arrant bullshit as propagated by the World Economic Forum (WEF), because they feel as though only they have the power to move the lumpenproletariat (that would be you and me) into a direction that they feel is the “proper” way, regardless of whether the way is actually proper or not (mostly not, as it turns out). Add to this the naked and unashamed thirst for power by the usual Socialist assholes (most politicians) — who, by the way, already have the power to make the wealthy a lot less wealthy — and you have the hopeless naïveté of people like Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey who think that simply throwing money (their own money, to give them some credit) at a health- or education problem in the Third World is going to solve that problem, when they’ve never read Kipling’s White Man’s Burden poem (or if they have, they’ve misunderstood its actual meaning — that lack of education, again).
And just to be clear: when I say “education”, I mean it in its Nockian sense. Many of my Readers, for example, are highly educated despite not having university degrees; and many more have university degrees but have educated themselves way past their academic discipline. I was able, for example, to see right through the forecasting nonsense of the Greens, despite not (yet) having a university degree because I had earlier learned how algorithms work — and more importantly, how they are tested. When you realize that not one of the near-term doomsday prognoses of the Greens has come even close to being fulfilled, you will understand why their latest climate-change warnings are all pointed away from the near-term and towards times decades or more hence. (Traditionally, algorithms have had a terrible time in making long-term predictions because of the instability of the world in general, but that’s been conveniently and deliberately ignored by the climate doomsayers.)
Which is why Richard Branson and his cohorts have bought into the Green nonsense completely — they have no idea why (or even that) the forecasts won’t come true, but because “scientific consensus” says they will, they believe them.
They’re as gullible as the fools who bought products from snake-oil salesmen or Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop (serious overlap), but unlike the aforementioned, who buy the products for their own benefit, the Bransons believe that their wealth will help them become world-saving philanthropists.
Idiots.
