American Arrogance

Canadians are so messed up. The metric system is a joke. Why on earth would anybody want to use such an inferior system of measurements?

Actually, I already know why. If you would have bothered to read the title of the post, you should know that I feel that a lot of America’s decisions are based on arrogance. The metric system is a good example of this because it’s a more logical system of measurements than what we are using and is widely accepted as the standard in the world of science. The only reason that we think that it is inferior is because we don’t use it.

Here’s the logic behind our views of measurement. Since this is America and America is the best country around (not my personal viewpoint), anything American is better than the alternatives. This makes our system of measurements superior to metric. Anyone who uses metric must be inferior for using an inferior system of measurements, and we shouldn’t stoop to their level.

I will let you sort out the flaws in logic behind that paragraph.

This isn’t the only example of our arrogance. Yes, I’m going to go my usual route and show my hatred towards our anti-educational schooling system. The bottom line is that we are spending close to a trillion dollars a year on this process. It used to be less. We determined that the schools weren’t succeeding at what we want them to do, which is opposite their true purpose. We couldn’t possibly be wrong about the schools. We figured that we had to be failing to push the process hard enough. We poured more money into the process. Again, we established that the schools weren’t doing us any good. We decided to push even harder. We gave them more money.

You can sort out those flaws in logic as well.

This has become a cycle that is still going strong today. There has always been a push to increase our reliance on this process despite all of the evidence that it is harming society. We just can’t admit that schooling was a mistake because that would mean that we were wrong.

We are investing a fortune in the biggest mistake in the country’s history. Do you know what that means? It means that we have nothing left to invest in anything that actually works. It’s not just the schools. Our arrogance has convinced us to focus funding on horrible ideas while we neglect anything that is actually beneficial. Personally, I think that we have it all backwards. Rather than build off of our mistakes, I would rather correct our mistakes and build off of good ideas.