The 1%

In many ways, the “blame the institutions” people create a self-fulfilling prophecy: they replace a nation of living, breathing individuals with a giant drone collective mind that conforms to its own notions of acceptable non-conformity. That’s what the Occupy Wall Street/”We are the 99%” protests are about.

Those protests are created by a herd that, having demanded equality and subsidies from its government, now has more demands. Its initial demands, from the 1960s onward, have trashed the United States as a functioning nation. Instead, it’s two groups: the mindless herd of proles, and those working around the system.

What it forgets is that our nation has always been made great not by the 99%, who attend jobs and buy stuff but don’t do much else (besides litter, vote randomly, and protest in the streets), but by the 1% who have had exceptional ideas and taken risks in order to invent or create new ways of doing things.

The 1% contains all of our captains of industry, our best artists, our thinkers and doers, our innovators and inventors, and our critics who could not be bought by pandering to some audience just waiting for validation. The 1% are the critical thinkers, the frontierspeople, the leaders and the creators.

When we hand our society over the 99% solely because that angry mob is certain that society wronged it, we give up on all things higher than the lowest common denominator.

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What we don’t need is another angry mob screaming demands they don’t understand in their fury to assign blame to someone other than the guilty party — the 99% themselves.