Wal-Mart, Benefactor of The Unintelligent?
Well, if I go into too much detail here I shall get into trouble of the PC sort; but the main idea was, that any society ought to offer useful and productive lives to its epsilons—i.e. to citizens over on the left-hand side of the Bell Curve. The postindustrial West has been depressingly bad at this. Our basic approach to our low-IQ fellow citizens has been “Let them eat cake.” It’s hard not to get the impression that we have been busily building a society of law-school elites, by law-school elites, and for law-school elites—the “Yale or jail” society. Wal-Mart, with its simplified, stripped-down training programs that concentrate on a few easily-mastered skills and disciplines, is a small reversal of this deplorable (to my mind) trend.
Whatever you think of the society imagined in Brave New World, at least there was a place for everyone in it, bright or dim. That is not the case with present-day Western society, except in pockets like Wal-Mart. ~John Derbyshire
Note that comparing Wal-Mart to an aspect of Brave New World here is supposed to be a compliment of sorts: it gives dim people something to do. I leave it to the Friends of Wal-Mart to determine whether this sort of argument does more harm or good to their cause.
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