The Age of Kid Rock

 For better or worse, social media has blown up the talented 1%  assumption, aka this concept that there's this hyper-exclusive club of ppl who are just born with a talent, and the rest of the world is just here to pay rent on this earth and watch the talented 1%. My scroll shows me so many amazingly creative and artistically dynamic ppl around the world in the arts, science, cooking, fashion, modeling, etc, that I've wondered if it 1% talented or just 1% given access?" What if it's actually 10%, 20%, or 50% who have genius-level talent for something, or even higher... but only 1% are given the keys to the training and pipeline to higher-level opportunities. There are hilarious ppl doing sketches in the Samoan Islands, amazing musicians performing in sub-Saharan Africa, and unbelievable dancers in the Baltic countries who can penetrate my world b/c they have a phone and wifi. I see kids with no training who have a higher ceiling in certain talent, but I know they will never reach that level because they don't live in NYC, London, or Paris. They don't live in a cultural hub where gatekeepers determine who is special and who the audience is. Many of these talents live in a third-world country or in a rural area, so they will never have access to develop those skills, and even if they do develop them, they have no pipeline outside of social media. 

I think we are taught in school this romanticized perspective that there is some special treasure within an artist that makes them the talented 1%. And then schools and universities reinforce that concept by offering exclusionary programs for the .001% of the 1% so they have more access and opportunities. And then b/c that .001%  is given more opportunities, they have a wider window to succeed. And many do succeed. Then professors, teachers, and people all the way down to the parents go 'see I knew they were born in this exclusive club.' And it makes the teachers feel proud: they found the diamond in the rough and molded it. But it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, no? 

What if talent isn't a gemstone in the heart or an artist, but it's an antenna? It is something that just has to be tuned to the right frequency to pick up the genius intuition that is flowing out there like radio waves. What if talent isn't this thing an artist dispenses from their soul, but it's a Brita water filter: it's a vessel you pour raw data into, and then talent is the filtration system that separates the impurities from one's aesthetic preferences and then holds the purified and best substance of you in one container. And, of course, every once in a while, the filter of intuition needs to be changed, or the water in the vessel becomes polluted. 

It's disconcerting and humbling. What if I were just given the right tools to tune my antennae, but the same genius is out there for anyone?

 Let's expand this out beyond the arts...

In the early 1900s until the 1960s, many medical schools had a hard cap on Jewish students. Regardless of test scores and grades, they would only allow 5-10% of the student population to be Jewish. But there were far more Jewish students who wanted to be doctors than there were slots in medical school, so many medically inclined Jewish ppl became pharmacists. So there was this thought 'oh Jewish ppl aren't meant to be doctors, they don't have that capacity BUT they have a natural talent for pharmacy.' And then that medical school cap went away, and it became obvious that all of these ppl were medically talented, but white male Christians were given MORE access to being doctors. The same holds true for the large number of black women who are nurses. 'Oh well that's just their talent.' No that's their access level within the field of medicine. As barriers were removed, the number of black women becoming doctors surged. So many of those black nurses back then would have been doctors, gotten paid more, had more wealth to distribute to the community, but society denied them access and then came up with the excuse, 'well, that's not your talent. You're just better at this job that pays less.' Now the trend is that hospitals are seeing Filipino women from poor areas as nurses. "Oh they're just more nurturing at this job that pays them less."

So what happens when a field is suddenly flooded with talented people who now have access to maximize their potential? The old guard doesn't like it. First off, the old guard thought they were special, whether it's artists, doctors, or engineers. The old guard was told that they were meant to be doctors and Filipino women were meant to be nurses, and that's just the way it goes. No, it has nothing to do with privilege. True democratization is scary because it rips a hole in the theory that underpins exclusive tribes that form within a large society: I naturally deserve this more than you. I'm just smarter and better at this thing than you. Don't complain or look to balance things out. I am the talented 1%.

Democratization pulls down the 1% theory. And then it rips a hole in the tribe member's ego: what if I'm not a doctor b/c I'm smarter than the POC nurse? Then everything I've based my ego on is a lie. And if that's a lie...then who am I really?

Ego doesn't like that train of thought. Ego thrives on exclusivity. Ego feeds on being 'the special one.' If you tell a person, 'you're not genetically special, you're just culturally privileged, ' the ego lashes out to preserve exclusive status. It screams DEI when it sees a black pilot or doctor. It feels deeply harmed by democracy. If the club isn't exclusive, then what's the point of being a member? After all, part of the joy of an exclusive country club is that most people aren't allowed to attend. You are the special one.

Next is the backlash. Ego punishes outsiders who have succeeded at becoming their best selves. It fines them, passes new laws to limit their success, and -in many cases- egos will kill that exceptional outsider for merely moving into their neighborhood, living on their block, wanting to go to the same school in Little Rock. There is this deep volcanic violence behind exclusivity. But there's also a slick salesman who reformulates this violence into a new lie: we need to preserve 'our culture.' I don't hate you. I just need you to stay away from my school or my block. I'm sorry I killed your child, but he shouldn't have looked at me and scared me. The ego looks for any signs of imperfections in new members as a sign of inferiority, and that becomes the excuse to lash out, kill, and restrict. Meanwhile, the ego is totally blind to the imperfections of the club's members and the gross corruption of the old guard. 

What's going on with MAGA isn't exclusive to white Americans. It exists in all cultures of exclusivity and violence that believe their own propaganda. They're not special and deep down inside they know it. So they must deport b/c 'they're stealing our jobs.' They must rollback civil rights because the club is beginning to feel a bit less special. We need to preserve our culture by having Kid Rock perform at the Super Bowl, not Bad Bunny. Right, because Kid Rock is more talented than Bad Bunny?!?

The backlash is the downside of social media. We are living in the age of backlash. There will be rollbacks, backlashes, budget cuts, excuses, and tons and tons of mediocre men promoted above their talent level who will do an incompetent job. There are many Kid Rocks who will bop around on the stage and other Kid Rocks will be promoted to Secretary of War or Health and that leads to death and harm. Those Kid Rocks lead to plummeting vaccination rates, and epidemics, and planes crashing, and farms going bankrupt. This is where we are right now: we are living in the age of Kid Rock. The backlash is today.

The upside is that today does not last forever. Eventually, medical schools got rid of the caps on Jewish doctors because the hypocrisy became too stupid and obvious to ignore. And once the lie goes away...you have better doctors. You can have better pilots, better art, and a better society if you get rid of this romantic lie of the 'talented 1%' in arts or medicine or leadership. If we stop listening to the ego, we can have true democracy.