I’m a pretty average guy. My SAT was 1010, I earned a 2.7
GPA as an undergraduate and 3.0 for my MBA. Since college I’ve launched half a
dozen startups, none of which, made it very far… An objective assessment might
suggest my intelligence is slightly above average and my entrepreneurial
capabilities somewhat below. When all is said and done, I probably balance out as
basically average.
That’s troubled me for years…but probably not in the way you
think. I’m not troubled that I’m basically average, I’m troubled by what I must
be getting wrong vis-à-vis the world around me.
I say wrong because there’s an entire universe out there of
people who are by every objective measure exponentially smarter than I am, but
who think exactly the opposite of the way I do on practically every single
issue. Guys like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, Pierre
Omidyar, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Craig Newmark and so many more.
These guys have more money than God. They all probably
scored perfect or close to it on the SATs. They’ve created companies that
employ hundreds of thousands of people and generate hundreds of billions of
dollars a year in revenue. They’re showcased in magazines like Forbes and
Fortune, lionized on TV and are the subjects of books and movies and of course,
success memes.
This is where the trouble comes in. These guys are really
smart. They’ve succeeded in ways few human beings ever have. They’ve become
rich and powerful beyond belief. And they all did it in the United States…yet
they support policies that are not only antithetical to traditional American
values, but they also actively subvert the framework that allowed them to
succeed in the first place.
America may be a flawed place, but it is the place where
Microsoft, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, eBay, Craigslist and countless others were
founded and found success. Interestingly, most of them employ large numbers of
immigrants, despite their success being rooted in America, not in India, China,
or Europe.
Their success was not because of government programs,
regulations, or largesse. They succeeded in America because government
regulation was relatively low for startups. They succeeded in America because
that’s where capital came to find attractive returns. They succeeded in America
because of well-trained STEM graduates who brought them a unique set of skills
and experiences they couldn’t find elsewhere, because our market is the most
dynamic on the planet and the most open to new ideas. And perhaps most of all,
they succeeded in America because of our fundamental constitutional rights
protecting private property—including intellectual property—and free speech,
which foster the exchange of ideas, and because of our fundamental notion of
entrepreneurship where anyone can start a business and succeed by creating
something sufficiently compelling to entice consumers to freely to pay for it.
These factors don’t exist anywhere else in the world and, as
a result, for 100 years, America has created more prosperity and increased the
worldwide standard of living more than any nation in all of human history…and
it’s not even close. And these mavens all pretend to support increasing
prosperity and decreasing poverty.
However, now that they’ve found success beyond imagination
thanks to the American system, they’ve decided that the fundamental rules that
allowed them to prosper should no longer apply. So-called emergencies like
“Climate Change,” “Institutional Racism,” “Gender Equity,” and “Global
Inequality” supersede the 18th century anachronisms of the American
Constitution and individual rights.
No longer can Americans be allowed to decide how to heat
their homes, fuel their cars, or protect their property. No longer can they be
allowed to enjoy an American-centric foreign policy or manage America’s economy
in a way that empowers Americans. No longer will common miscreants be held
responsible for their actions, even as those who challenge mandates are
crushed. No longer will students learn objective facts or study the Western
canon, but they’ll be taught to change their gender on a whim. Whether it’s
algorithms controlling what Americans can say or see, regulations about what
they can or must do, or what products or services they are allowed to purchase,
these enlightened elites graciously inform us they are applying their
intellectual brilliance to make our lives better, and so too the rest of the
world. And they should know what’s best because look at how smart and
successful they are.
However, these “One World” billionaires’ alleged compassion
for the world’s less fortunate is pure fiction. How can you tell? Because their
solutions for worldwide inequalities isn’t to encourage struggling nations to
adopt the freedoms, protections, and systems that led to their success in
America. Instead, they push to erase American borders while championing the
policies of Communist China and the increasingly despotic EU while encouraging
us to adopt edicts from tyrannical organizations like the UN and the WHO and
proffered by Bond villains like Klaus Schwab at the WEF.
And thus my conundrum. If I, with my relatively limited
intellectual capacity, can see as clear as day that it was America and her
Constitution that drove prosperity’s march for a century and allowed these
intellectual giants to succeed in spectacular fashion, how is it that most of
them are hardcore leftists whose policies will kill the goose that laid the
golden egg? What am I missing? Am I really that dense?
Maybe, but a better explanation might be that these guys believe themselves to be the self-anointed leaders of a new cult. This cult, which replaces traditional religion, has as its God the fiction of Nirvana on earth, which can only be accomplished through the policies of the enlightened elites from Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington. They know more than you do, have done more than you have, and achieved more than you have and, therefore, are much better equipped to make important decisions for the “less fortunate.”
Naturally, they may not live by or be constrained by the
commandments their new religion dictates, but that’s because, while they were
smart enough to navigate and survive a world fraught with free-thinking
individuals and potential catastrophic failures, you’re not. You’re too busy
with your “God, guns and family” to be equipped to see the big picture.
Individual freedom makes for bad collective decisions they’d say, but from the
elevated perspectives their intelligence and success allows, they can help you
people make better decisions and avoid mistakes…
Nevermind that it’s the lessons learned from failures that
often lead men to success, or that it’s often after hitting rock bottom that
individuals reach their highest peaks. No, none of that matters because they
know best, just ask them.
At the end of the day my SAT scores and bank account may
suggest that I’m not quite as smart as those guys, but at least now I
understand why…I’m a mere mortal, they’re demigods.