Crusader War College

Via the February 2 print editon of PC Magazine, John Dvorak forsees the revival of the dot com boom after the Google IPO offering, and offers some advice to avoiding getting fleeced. He sagely observes that the state, usually full of idiotarians, is prone to fads:

Many fads begin in California, so you have to understand California culture. Some fads become fashion; most do not. One that crept into the collective unconscious of the trend-crazed California citizenry was the dip into self-actualization movements, beginning in the late 1960s and continuing strong until the mid 1980s and even the early 1990s.

California has long been clogged with all sorts of New Age training systems and methodologies. Even today, the state is crawling with crackpots promoting weird schemes designed to make you a better person. The successful ones do the best job of separating you from your money.

A prime mover years ago was a character named Werner Erhard, who developed mind control– based "training" techniques to help people improve themselves. Erhard Seminars Training (est) was popular among go-getters looking for success in life and in business.

Erhard's est established a thought process that still permeates California culture and the business investment environment. Most Erhard audio tapes were full of reassuring commentary about how est was fabulous and how it worked better than anything else. Often heard was the comment that people who say est is bogus simply "don't get it."

What is the "it" that someone "doesn't get"?

This idea is key. The rationale is that people don't get it because they cannot see or understand a paradigm shift (another key phrase). This simple notion permeated est and also permeated the dot-com revolution.

Dvorak gets personal:

I was lucky enough to host the TV program Silicon Spin in the midst of the dot-com phenomenon. Executive after executive would come on the show and say that "people don't get it," to explain how online grocers, for example, not only were going to be successful but would dominate their market. The execs would throw out some numbers but make no connection between the numbers and reality.

Pets.com, for example, came about only because people buy a lot of pet food. The investors made a ludicrous leap of faith in assuming that people would begin to buy pet food online and have it shipped via FedEx. Why? Because there was a paradigm shift. If you said Pets.com was a crazy idea, you were told that "you don't get it."

Here's where Dvorak strikes gold and comes up with the insight worthy of inclusion in this blog:

The "you don't get it" retort serves only one real purpose: to stop a conversation. You can use it as a ruse to end any debate or argument. It's uniquely dismissive, and nouveau-management decision making has been heavily influenced by the concept.

Read the rest of the article for his take on "California style group think". Given the number of idiotarians out there it was probably to be expected that such practices would have escaped the social and political spheres, and start invading the commercial and technical spheres. If you "don't get it", don't let THEM get your money.

Often, while battling trolls, Idiotarians, and LLLs, they'll trot out variants of "You don't get it": You don't understand Islam. You don't have any compassion. You don't know what it's like to (fill in the blank). You don't know what it's like to be (fill in the blank). You don't know how hard it is to be a (fill in the blank) in America. You can't see the bigotry of Americans toward (fill in the blank)s because you're not a (fill in the blank).

In the end, the purpose of using these as arguments is, as Dvorak has astutely noted, "to stop the conversation." They'll "use it as a ruse to end any debate or argument." In typical liberal "blame anybody except the perpetrator", when they're losing the argument, they'll trot it out to blame YOU for an inability to "get it", while excusing themselves from having to prove "it". It's not THEIR problem they can't argue themselves out of a paper bag and are losing ground when debating you: YOU not "getting it" is the REAL problem in their eyes, with an explanation that involve them being really smarter/better/more virtuous than you are, or you being dumber/worse/more evil than they are.

To be forewarned is forearmed: I think I would state, out loud, that "not getting it" is attempting to shift the blame, and that the burden of proof rests with the person already "getting it" and trying to convince me, the person who "doesn't get it", to "get it". You may come up with a better counter.