On Writing and Being Human

I began work this week.  I am tired.  I wanted to write about it a little bit however.  I am delighted to have money coming in while I finish my book, but I really long for the world to return to a time when people like me--with educations obtained during the time when you had to actually KNOW something to get a degree--could earn a decent living with the fruits of our minds. 

Believe it or not, the Internet depreciates writers.  Anybody with a keyboard can start a blog.  It doesn't matter what their actual writing skill is. It doesn't matter if they have something to say or not.  This situation juxtaposes the lyrical stylings of a Phil Rokstruh with the inane hyperbolic prattle of News Max.  The uncritical notion that all of this text out there has equal value needs to be challenged.  It is not all the same.  Not all the writing on the web is authoritative.  Some of it is merely opinion unencumbered by facts of any kind. Actually, a lot of it is opinion. 

For us, humanity, to make the right decisions going forward, we need facts and analyses to draw from.  We have seen what basing policy on opinions can do.  When Alan Greenspan admitted that he was "misled" by basing his economic policies on the prattle of Ayn Rand, that was an example of just what I am writing about.  Ayn Rand wasn't an economist.  She wasn't even a deep thinker.  She was a deeply disturbed woman who believed that mankind's highest good could be reached through self indulgence.  That is just hedonism in prose clothing.  It is not a sound philosophy for leading life and certainly not one fit to base a society or policies upon.

Good policy balances the interests of the many against the interests of the few.  In that balance, there will always be some party with an unfulfilled wish.  Those with these unfulfilled wishes will complain.  SO WHAT?  Stiglitz recently said that it is time to ask: "What is an economic system?  What is it supposed to do?"  I think that we need to be asking these questions, not just of economic systems, but of society in general. 

WE WRITERS SHOULD BE ASKING THOSE QUESTIONS AND BEING HEARD.  Our voices shouldn't be lost in the cacophony of belligerence and conflation that the web has become.  We need to be asking the timeless questions of mankind:

Why are we here?
What can we do to make things better?
Who is God?
What is good?
What is bad?
Why is Snooki even on television?