The tutelage of genius

The apathy and ineptitude of the younger generations to carry on the legacy that we have so striven for is a blinding and relentless glare. There's only one problem. They do not exist to carry on our legacy. They exist to build their own. Just as we have done. And only for a few short years beyond the span of their existence. Just as ours will be. Firstly, the frustration, disgust, and all of the blame for the actions and convictions of the new generations lies entirely upon the shoulders of those who have taught them. Upon the generation before them. Upon us. And secondly, and most importantly, is that each generation forms the world for themselves. They don't form it for us. I'm sure there was a great decrying of people, at one time, who could not shoe horses. But who will imagine and create the automobile if not for the one who will dismiss the prevailing sentiment of the importance of education in the shoeing of horses? Will you profane those who come after us because they're not like us?

Our job is to teach them all we have learned. And every generation has failed at it. Somehow they learn anyway. And reinvent their own cultural existence. I remember when the war broke out with Iraq and Afghanistan, and many said that the current generation could not handle such a conflict. Their contentions were proven definitively imbecilic. We each create our own future. This is the ancient secret, story, and blessing of cultural evolution. I'm not in any way diminishing the power of the past. But parts of the past must be sacrificed for the sake of the future. If you don't know where you have been it's hard to know where you are going, but evolution is like that. It's not a straight line. And it is not always for the greater benefit of humanity according to our present version of it. It just happens. The best thing we now can do for the sake of the future of our children and their children is to impart wisdom upon them. Because wisdom and reason and truth are the only constants in this humanity and the evolution thereof.

The great misconception is that generations will grow wiser overtime. That is a fallacy. The corpus of human knowledge increases, but the only thing that grants wisdom is the age of a single life. Aptitude of instruction of wisdom is another matter entirely. And we must carry it out fiercely and succinctly for the sake of those who follow us. We must teach those after us of how to think as much as of what to know. For what we know of shoeing horses will not relevantly apply in the following stages of cultural evolution. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were all respective students of the other. Is it coincidence that three of the greatest minds of history somehow studied under each other? It is not only the instruction of what to know, but it is most importantly, the result of proper instruction of how to think about what you know. Wisdom can be taught. Genius is the application of that wisdom within the context of relevant knowledge. The great frustration with our younger generations is nothing less than the manifestation of our own generation’s ineptitude to do so.