Ask not for what the Architeuthis pursues... it pursues YOU!
Have you ever noticed how certain people always blather on about the need to Pursue Excellence? Bill Cosby gave all his kids names beginning with "E" to perpetually remind them of the need to Pursue Excellence. At my college, I had a professor once who kept moaning about how the school wasn't sufficiently Pursuing Excellence. (Bear in mind that this was one of the top colleges in the U.S.!) One of the deans even hatched a harebrained scheme to Pursue Excellence by declaring that all students would need 32 credits to graduate. Thus if you failed even one course, you would be forced to double up some other semester. (Unless, of course, you were rich enough to take an extra semester of college.)
Let's run this through the Architectonic Decoder Ring, shall we?
Coded text: "We should be committed, now and always, to the Pursuit of Excellence in all its forms."
Decoded text: "We should, like.... (vague handwaving)... you know, be totally awesome!"
You see, smart people have goals like, "I want to provide low-cost health care to the disadvantaged," or "I want to find a cure for cancer," or even, "I want to make a lot of money by becoming the CEO of an ad agency." Stupid people have goals like, uh, you know, man... pursuing, like, total excellence, dude! That's why whenever these morons try to articulate what they want, they use the phrase "pursuit of excellence." They're simply too stupid to think of anything else to say.
It's remarkable how pervasive this obvious bit of horse hockey is. If you want a good laugh at the expense of Homo sheepizens, just google "pursuit of excellence." There's even a Pursuit of Excellence Institute. Wow, imagine that- a institute that actually tries to pursue excellence! Excuse me while I write a quick email to the slackabouts at the Mayo Clinic to say, "Look to the Pursuit of Excellence Institute, thou sluggard, and consider their ways!" And I don't even want to think about www.pursuit.org. What on earth are they about? Let me guess: "We are committed to the pursuit of two things. Excellence, and the most dangerous game of all... man." (By the way, click a few of those links. Isn't it funny that so many of the organizations devoted to the Pursuit of Excellence in its purest form have folded?)
The remarkable thing about our species is that it's trivially easy to declare that you have some positive quality, and people actually believe it, just because you say so! Want people to respect your university? Just put "we are committed to the pursuit of excellence" on your webpage. Want people to think you're an honest politician? Name your campaign vehicle the "straight talk express." If McCain were really a straight talker, that would so thoroughly mark him apart from every other politician on earth that he would instantly get a reputation for honesty, and he wouldn't need to write "STRAIGHT TALKER" across his forehead. How many Nobel laureates do you really think go around using phrases like "pursuit of excellence"? Can you imagine Richard Feynman stepping up to the podium and delivering an hour-long speech on the need to pursue excellence? Of course not. Feynman actually has something to say. The people who talk about the "pursuit of excellence" are the ones too lazy or brain-dead to actually come up with specifics.
The most troubling thing about the Pursuit of Unspecified Excellence is that it is the foundation upon which fascism rests. Just look at Triumph of the Will. Hitler doesn't tell his followers that they need to kill Jews. He tells them that everybody is laughing at Germany, but Germany will show them a thing or two when we all Pursue Excellence! That was a little surprising to me, until I read about the experiences of Ron Jones.
Ron Jones was a high school teacher who got frustrated with the fact that his students kept asking, "Why did people join the Nazis? I know I would never do that." He decided to make a student group named "The Wave" which was, unbenknownst to the students, modeled on the Hitler Youth. But he didn't teach them to be racist. All he did was fill them with slogans about discipline and the need for excellence.
Of course, inherent in the Pursuit of Excellence is the fact that Excellence is totally undefined. It's one thing to say, "We're going to learn all kinds of interesting things about history this semester" or even "We're going to ace the SAT's this year." But Ron Jones convinced his students that the way to achieve excellence was to make sure that at the start of class, all members of The Wave got to their seats as quickly as possible. He would spend hours of class time on drills in which the students would walk from the hallway to their seats, over and over again, while he timed them with a stopwatch. Periodically he would declare, "We've just shaved another second off our personal best! Just think of how much class time we'll gain thanks to these drills!" (I imagine Jones must have had a pretty sardonic sense of humor. If the students actually had stopped to think, they would have realized that the drills were consuming a hundred times more classtime than they could ever possibly save. But, they didn't think at all. They were too busy Pursuing Excellence. Why not drill? It counts as much as anything else.)
Of course, if Excellence is undefined, then there is no goal which can ever actually be achieved, and no progress which can ever be measured. That's why the high-ranking primates at my college kept moaning about how the school wasn't Pursuing Excellence. By any rational measure, the school was doing great, but by their irrationally vague measures, no amount of success could ever satisfy them. And another factor came into play in Ron Jones' experience. If all the students in the Wave managed to get seated a full five seconds before everyone else, they still had to wait and watch those five seconds evaporate while all the non-Wave students got seated. When their Pursuit of Excellence was frustrated, they started pressuring other students to join the Wave. Eventually they started beating up non-Wave students, and in the end the violence took on a racial tinge. Why can't we achieve excellence? The Blacks and the Jews are holding us back because they're not with the program. And in Nazi Germany, their Pursuit of Excellence turned into an effort to kill as many untermenschen as possible. And why not? It counts as much as anything else.
Let's run this through the Architectonic Decoder Ring, shall we?
Coded text: "We should be committed, now and always, to the Pursuit of Excellence in all its forms."
Decoded text: "We should, like.... (vague handwaving)... you know, be totally awesome!"
You see, smart people have goals like, "I want to provide low-cost health care to the disadvantaged," or "I want to find a cure for cancer," or even, "I want to make a lot of money by becoming the CEO of an ad agency." Stupid people have goals like, uh, you know, man... pursuing, like, total excellence, dude! That's why whenever these morons try to articulate what they want, they use the phrase "pursuit of excellence." They're simply too stupid to think of anything else to say.
It's remarkable how pervasive this obvious bit of horse hockey is. If you want a good laugh at the expense of Homo sheepizens, just google "pursuit of excellence." There's even a Pursuit of Excellence Institute. Wow, imagine that- a institute that actually tries to pursue excellence! Excuse me while I write a quick email to the slackabouts at the Mayo Clinic to say, "Look to the Pursuit of Excellence Institute, thou sluggard, and consider their ways!" And I don't even want to think about www.pursuit.org. What on earth are they about? Let me guess: "We are committed to the pursuit of two things. Excellence, and the most dangerous game of all... man." (By the way, click a few of those links. Isn't it funny that so many of the organizations devoted to the Pursuit of Excellence in its purest form have folded?)
The remarkable thing about our species is that it's trivially easy to declare that you have some positive quality, and people actually believe it, just because you say so! Want people to respect your university? Just put "we are committed to the pursuit of excellence" on your webpage. Want people to think you're an honest politician? Name your campaign vehicle the "straight talk express." If McCain were really a straight talker, that would so thoroughly mark him apart from every other politician on earth that he would instantly get a reputation for honesty, and he wouldn't need to write "STRAIGHT TALKER" across his forehead. How many Nobel laureates do you really think go around using phrases like "pursuit of excellence"? Can you imagine Richard Feynman stepping up to the podium and delivering an hour-long speech on the need to pursue excellence? Of course not. Feynman actually has something to say. The people who talk about the "pursuit of excellence" are the ones too lazy or brain-dead to actually come up with specifics.
The most troubling thing about the Pursuit of Unspecified Excellence is that it is the foundation upon which fascism rests. Just look at Triumph of the Will. Hitler doesn't tell his followers that they need to kill Jews. He tells them that everybody is laughing at Germany, but Germany will show them a thing or two when we all Pursue Excellence! That was a little surprising to me, until I read about the experiences of Ron Jones.
Ron Jones was a high school teacher who got frustrated with the fact that his students kept asking, "Why did people join the Nazis? I know I would never do that." He decided to make a student group named "The Wave" which was, unbenknownst to the students, modeled on the Hitler Youth. But he didn't teach them to be racist. All he did was fill them with slogans about discipline and the need for excellence.
Of course, inherent in the Pursuit of Excellence is the fact that Excellence is totally undefined. It's one thing to say, "We're going to learn all kinds of interesting things about history this semester" or even "We're going to ace the SAT's this year." But Ron Jones convinced his students that the way to achieve excellence was to make sure that at the start of class, all members of The Wave got to their seats as quickly as possible. He would spend hours of class time on drills in which the students would walk from the hallway to their seats, over and over again, while he timed them with a stopwatch. Periodically he would declare, "We've just shaved another second off our personal best! Just think of how much class time we'll gain thanks to these drills!" (I imagine Jones must have had a pretty sardonic sense of humor. If the students actually had stopped to think, they would have realized that the drills were consuming a hundred times more classtime than they could ever possibly save. But, they didn't think at all. They were too busy Pursuing Excellence. Why not drill? It counts as much as anything else.)
Of course, if Excellence is undefined, then there is no goal which can ever actually be achieved, and no progress which can ever be measured. That's why the high-ranking primates at my college kept moaning about how the school wasn't Pursuing Excellence. By any rational measure, the school was doing great, but by their irrationally vague measures, no amount of success could ever satisfy them. And another factor came into play in Ron Jones' experience. If all the students in the Wave managed to get seated a full five seconds before everyone else, they still had to wait and watch those five seconds evaporate while all the non-Wave students got seated. When their Pursuit of Excellence was frustrated, they started pressuring other students to join the Wave. Eventually they started beating up non-Wave students, and in the end the violence took on a racial tinge. Why can't we achieve excellence? The Blacks and the Jews are holding us back because they're not with the program. And in Nazi Germany, their Pursuit of Excellence turned into an effort to kill as many untermenschen as possible. And why not? It counts as much as anything else.
posted by Wintermute at 2:21 PM
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