How The Intelligentsia Will Save Us From Ourselves!

99.95% of the population lives by the rules, regulations and laws set in place by the intellectual rigour of 0.05% of those amongst us. Where would we be without these people who toil away in splendid isolation in the laboratories of their minds, their academic towers and the purism of their linear models. It is the clarity that disconnection from context and quarantining from the pollution of real world compromise affords them, that creates the opportunity to develop new ways to inform the rest of us of what we are doing wrong and how to right it. Spurred on by their restless intellectual boredom to search out solutions – even when we didn’t know a problem existed – they save us from ourselves creating more and more instruction for how we must do things ‘better’.

One such case has been raised recently as something that retailers must add to the growing list of priorities for new legislative behavioural correction.

An insidious practice – termed “Lookism” by a prominent University academic – has been highlighted in a recent article that appeared in the Age newspaper. In this article, the head of one Government’s Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission was described as being fearful that the practice of some retailers to request a photograph of a prospective employee is being used as a “sifting mechanism on the basis of physical appearance” leading to discrimination.

“I don’t think there’s anything you can do to prevent a request for a photograph to be sent … but we would be really concerned if they were going to be used to exclude people simply on the basis of physical appearance.”

The Age quoted research findings from the academic‘s yet to be published study that highlighted that for retailer’s selecting customer-facing staff, the “right appearance” (85 per cent) was found to be more important than “qualifications” (44 per cent) and “previous experience” (78 per cent). The “right personality” rated the highest at 97 per cent.

Clearly retailers have it very wrong. In the U.S.A. for example Best Buy hires people who look like nerds because they give customers the confidence that they will be able to solve their complex I.T, problems and Abercrombie & Fitch hire human mannequins who walk around the store giving an aspirational view of what the clothes look like on human beings rather than plastic dolls.

Very wrong indeed, but of course capitalists have always been driven by the relentless quest to be more efficient and more profitable, hence they are not paid up members of the social engineering club. They obviously need to be brought into line at all costs.

Discrimination of this ‘Lookism’ kind is really a very polite code for the disgusting pursuit of free choice. Unfortunately what supports this free choice pursuit is the 30,000 years of human evolution that has led to a state of affairs where up to 92% of a customer’s purchase behaviour is determined by emotional, sub-conscious and non-rational triggers and seen people cluster in mini-tribes of shared magnetic interests.

The Intelligentsia have long argued that the 90% of people for whom the system works should be normalised to the level of the 10% for whom it doesn’t so that everyone can be made to feel ‘adequate’ and that functional rationalism should be the basis for all decision making. This particularly applies to the horrible issue of ‘Lookism’.

Taken to its logical extreme, Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ should be squashed down to one level. By way of example, we only really need garments for physical protection, comfort and to make sure our physical appearance is ‘normalised’ – no obvious big sticky-out bits or signs of obvious beauty on show. I for one am looking forward to receiving my wardrobe full of grey cotton drill workers coveralls and black leather boots sometime in the not too far distant future.

In fact it is now abundantly clear that the Communistas had it right in intent. They just lacked the firepower to execute the necessary social engineering and to pull off the disciplined execution in a sustainable way. But the Intelligentsia has solved this one for us also. You see today, we know so much about the human brain that we could literally turn off the 92% of the brain that is not used to make sound decisions based on functional rationalism. Further, where the Communistas were hampered by the need to contain their rules and regulations to those that could fit into the little red book, we now have the capability of hot wiring a hard drive, physically smaller than the little red book, but with a storage capacity of more than 2 terabytes of information.

The Intelligentsia are now hard at work creating all the new and additional rules, regulations and laws to exploit the memory capacity and behavioural conditioning capability they now enjoy so that every one of us can act exactly the way we should act to create a perfectly grey world. A world where everything is normalized. Where there is no free choice or discrimination. Where retail is pure functional rationalism – eventually leading to one giant warehouse and a single Internet access point selling one item in every category or department. Clearly this non-discriminatory approach to functional rationalist thought has worked very well for the airline industry already.

This will save us all the waste of time and emotion spent on surfing the net or browsing the mall in the socially negative pursuit of free choice, individuality and personal expression.

We are all very bad people and retailers in particular strive too much to over-achieve. Retail uses too many colours, thrives on emotional attraction and uses an approach similar to casting a film or stage production to ensure that people that face customers align with their sub-conscious and emotional triggers to engender confidence, enjoyment and productivity.

Thank you to our comrades in the Intelligentsia. Down with ‘Lookism’ and the quest to be different. You save us from ourselves and you redefine what we in the 99.95% of the population need to be to be normal.