(The Following is a draft for the March 7, 2019 editorial of the Wet Mountain Tribune).
“I do not know,” is a sentence that most of us do not like to utter to someone else, to expose ourselves to the ridicule that was incubated in the classroom as children. I cannot speak to cultures outside of the United States, but here, in the culture I was raised in, saying “I do not know,” got you an F on a test. I have to speculate that as a nation of public school graduates, we have developed a phobia of admitting that we do not know.
To make the narcissism of certainty even more problematic, we obsess over facts, idolize truth, and even fetishize certainty. We believe that knowledge has the power to free us from our humanity, that if we horde enough knowledge, we can eliminate all ills of the human race.
Saying “I do not know,” signals that the person uttering those heretical words will not be involved in the progress of society, they will not help evolve mankind into a better more “scientific” future of truth. Perhaps though, they can scrub the toilets.
The idea that formal knowledge causes progress, that classroom education causes prosperity, is embedded in America, in Colorado, and in The Wet Mountain Valley, the place I call home. But we have the arrow backward. Progress allows for knowledge, prosperity allows for education.
The history of the Valley is one of people bravely yet blindly striking into an unknown world hoping for a better life. The first humans in the Valley were decedents of a population from what is now Siberia that had crossed to North America. For 10,000 years the hunter-gather natives found success in the Valley with no classroom education. They hunted and brought down the largest mammals in numbers so large that many species went extinct. Not a single university degree has found amongst them.
The German settlers in the late 1800s might have been better classroom educated than the natives before them, but it was hardly of use in an untamed Valley full of willow swamps and beaver damns. It is rumored that most of the Germans failed at farming in the Valley and it was factory jobs in Pueblo that saved many.
The English to the north end of the valley had more success but from large cattle herds and a lack of barbwire fencing (the technology had not been massed produced yet). Miners dug mines and a few struck it rich. Only a few engineers came towards the end of the mining boom and nearly all the dangerous deadly work was by uneducated labors looking for fortune.
Schools started small, were not staffed well, and consisted of a single room. The money to pay for the teachers and building came from a newly formed State of Colorado, school properties, and the newly formed property taxes. The wealth that came from the taxing of the land was made possible by bold risk-takers, not educated experts.
When the mines died, and the railroad left, education continued to grow, but the population of the county declined with each passing decade, and so did it’s wealth. Chance and a few risk-taking land developers revived the economy here in the 1990s. For the Valley at least, knowledge did not proceed progress.
The main point that I am driving here is that it is a mistake to think that prosperity, that progress, can only come from education, from knowledge. Formal knowledge and education are useful to a point, but it would be hard to say that this community’s investment in education and experts will lead to the hallowed prosperity of increased economic development. A back of envelope calculation shows that adjusting for inflation, the county has spent a quarter of a billion dollars on education in the last forty years.
Many of the core assumptions handed down to us from the “experts” have the arrow of causality backward. It was the hardworking yet unsung heroes* that built the foundation of prosperity we now enjoy in the Valley. It was the cowboys, the ranchers, the miners, the railroad men, the shopkeepers, the accountants, the dentists, the grocers, the truck drivers, the carpenters, the concrete workers, and so on. Prosperity comes from action, from taking real and serious risks of business owners. It is a decentralized and bottom-up prosperity, and nothing, ever, will come from a centralized committee of experts that do not take risks and try to serve their fellow man with a product or service of value.
We get the arrow backward.
Fortunately, those that say “I do not know,” and take an irrational risk, like starting a business, they are the true foundation of our prosperity.
*These heroes are indirectly sung about in folk music that makes up the foundations of bluegrass and county music. Local musician Ron Thomason sings the mournful tale of what happens when a town losses the unsung heroes in his song “Aragon Mills”
End Notes:
The arrow of causality, or the arrow of education, was introduced to me by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his Book “The Black Swan” and “Antifragile.”
John Gray is an influence on the unfounded belief in human progress.
