Your Guess Is as Good as Mine

[Guest guest]

http://www.alternet.org/story/29645/

 

 

 

 

Your Guess Is as Good as Mine

By Kurt Vonnegut, In These Times

 

Posted on December 15, 2005,

http://www.alternet.org/story/29645/

 

 

Most of you, if not all of you, like me, feel inadequately educated.

That is an ordinary feeling for a member of our species. One of the

most brilliant human beings of all times, George Bernard Shaw, said on

his 75th birthday or so that at last he knew enough to become a

mediocre office boy. He died in 1950, by the way, when I was 28. He is

the one who said, " Youth is wasted on the young. " I turned 83 a couple

weeks ago, and I must say I agree.

 

Shaw, if he were alive today, would envy us the solid information that

we have or can get about the nature of the universe, about time and

space and matter, about our own bodies and brains, about the resources

and vulnerabilities of our planet, about how all sorts of human beings

actually talk and feel and live.

 

This is the information revolution. We have taken it very badly so

far. Information seems to be getting in the way all the time. Human

beings have had to guess about almost everything for the past million

years or so. Our most enthralling and sometimes terrifying guessers

are the leading characters in our history books. I will name two of

them: Aristotle and Hitler. One good guesser and one bad one.

 

The masses of humanity, having no solid information to tell them

otherwise, have had little choice but to believe this guesser or that

one. Russians who didn't think much of the guesses of Ivan the

Terrible, for example, were likely to have their hats nailed to their

heads.

 

We must acknowledge, though, that persuasive guessers--even Ivan the

Terrible, now a hero in Russia--have given us courage to endure

extraordinary ordeals that we had no way of understanding. Crop

failures, wars, plagues, eruptions of volcanoes, babies being born

dead--the guessers gave us the illusion that bad luck and good luck

were understandable and could somehow be dealt with intelligently and

effectively.

 

Without that illusion, we would all have surrendered long ago. But in

fact, the guessers knew no more than the common people and sometimes

less. The important thing was that they gave us the illusion that

we're in control of our destinies.

 

Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership for so

long--for all of human experience so far--that it is wholly

unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all

the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on,

because now it is their turn to guess and be listened to.

 

Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is

going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid

information that has been dumped on humanity by research and

scholarship and investigative reporting.

 

They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they want

standards, and it isn't the gold standard. They want to put us back on

the snake-oil standard.

 

Loaded pistols are good for people unless they're in prisons or

lunatic asylums.

 

That's correct.

 

Millions spent on public health are inflationary.

 

That's correct.

 

Billions spent on weapons will bring inflation down.

 

That's correct.

 

Industrial wastes, and especially those that are radioactive, hardly

ever hurt anybody, so everybody should shut up about them.

 

That's correct.

 

Industries should be allowed to do whatever they want to do: Bribe,

wreck the environment just a little, fix prices, screw dumb customers,

put a stop to competition and raid the Treasury in case they go broke.

 

That's correct. That's free enterprise. And that's correct.

 

The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn't be poor, so

their children should pay the consequences.

 

That's correct.

 

The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its people.

 

That's correct.

 

The free market will do that.

 

That's correct.

 

The free market is an automatic system of justice.

 

That's correct.

 

And so on.

 

If you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be

welcome in Washington, D.C. I know a couple of bright seventh graders

who would not be welcomed in Washington, D.C.

 

Do you remember those doctors a few years back who got together and

announced that it was a simple, clear medical fact that we could not

survive even a moderate attack by hydrogen bombs? They were not

welcome in Washington, D.C.

 

Even if we fired the first salvo of hydrogen weapons and the enemy

never fired back, the poisons released would probably kill the whole

planet by and by.

 

What is the response in Washington? They guess otherwise. What good is

an education? The boisterous guessers are still in charge--the haters

of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated

people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations,

even Harvard or Yale educations, to become guessers. If they didn't do

that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on

and on.

 

Please, don't you do that. But let me warn you, if you make use of the

vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are

going to be lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you--and now I

have to guess--about ten to one.

 

Kurt Vonnegut's works include " Slaughterhouse-Five, " " Breakfast of

Champions " and " Cat's Cradle, " among many others. This essay was

adapted from his most recent book, A Man Without a Country. He is also

a senior editor for In These Times.

 

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/29645/