Differences in Outcome

The headlines tell us "CEO pay is 847 times higher than workers" without mentioning whether ambitious and capable youths interested in earning the best income are trying to develop skills needed to be a CEO, to the extent those traits are not innate. Perhaps they will spend several decades, including their most vibrant, angrily protesting about the unfairness of life or society instead of quietly becoming successful.

Other fields have the same vast distances in salary. Professional basketball players can make over $20,000,000 a year for their participation in a game, while the hard working moppers who keep sweat off the court make only $21,000 a year, yet are essential for the event.

The talented athlete makes a thousand times more money than the mopper, at least before sweat mop endorsements are considered, but they are both called equal, and the superstar is seen as oppressing a fellow human into clearing away his perspiration because of his luck in becoming successful.

The star athlete is suspected of cheating the system because he has developed skills that anyone could have achieved from talent and years of playing a sport, except they haven't. They say putting a ball in a hoop is low culture that contributes nothing of considerable value and thus shouldn't be rewarded with wealth, yet mopping up the sweat of that entertainer is important and an essential mark of high civilization deserving statues and an endowed research chair for empowerment and awareness.

With nature's diverse traits banned from consideration, we are forced to devote our search for an explanation of varying outcomes to a secret conspiracy that, if you squint your eyes into strained strabismus, could explain differences between success and failure.

The assumption that superstars are common and trivially replaceable makes it possible to imagine conspiracy and oppression everywhere, promoting some superstars while keeping others down for magical reasons determined at the weekly meetings of secret elites, but not published on their web sites.

Oppression works in mysterious ways we can never understand, yet we surely recognize it everywhere when we need a supernatural explanation divorced from rational scrutiny and evidence.

Narrow assumptions shape and affirm popular conclusions by constraining logic to a repetition of false premises. The rhetorician makes an insane assertion, and then uses that assertion as proof for the conclusion, which is essentially the same as the assertion. There are even entire debates where two or more sides are governed by assumptions that consider truth entirely out of bounds, creating inadvertent comedy with serious looking debaters on stage essentially arguing about precisely how flat the earth is, or how many witches are practicing witchcraft in the town and what methods should be used to get them to stop flying their brooms at night.

Perhaps we should consider whether businesses starved for superstars would scramble at the opportunity to harness the skills of unrecognized superstars by paying them half the going rate and giving them a chance to prove themselves while adding another superstar to their team?

And yet, no unrecognized superstars emerge when called and sought out, and too few exist at the top ranks. It seems we only find those that already exist, although we could cultivate more if we recognized their value and truly wanted more of the best.