Resonant Constellation

I got an email today that said I should take a survey. I’ve got plenty of better things to do, so I decided to take the survey. I discovered to my chagrin that it was a painfully obtuse survey about ‘leadership,’ which is one of those overused buzzwords like ‘diversity,’ which has lost all of its meaning and has become completely trite. For example, they asked two functionally identical questions about “what leadership means to you” right next to each other. I answered: “Leadership means management, administration, and organization. You just asked this question, I think you need better leadership.” I answered the questions honestly though, and I think my disdain for the idiocy displayed shone through, but just to be sure I left an additional comment on the end:

Please enter any additional comments you may have after taking this survey.
Based on my answers you may think me a bit of an egoist and rather ornery. I assure you, this is an entirely correct assessment. I do not feel this way without reason-empirical experience has made me what I am. I came to college as an optimist and the sheer stunning stupidity I find myself surrounded with daily has turned me into a bit of a pessimist. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a personal optimist. I can and will succeed in my chosen field of study, of that I have no doubt. However, I find it hard to believe that the people with whom I regularly interact outside of my peer group (my peers are scientists-astronomers and physicists) are capable of much more than breathing, reproducing, and the drinking of massive quantities of bad beer. Yes I do realize that these are a sample of the smarter half of the bell curve. This is precisely why I am so pessimistic.
You see, I don’t feel I belong to any group; city, state, country, religion, species, etcetera. When taken as a whole, groups of people are intensely stupid and rather disappointing, even people who may be individually wonderful. I marked myself as a political moderate because that is neither liberal nor conservative. The truth is that I have my own ideas about how the world works and I dislike the thought of being squeezed into somebody else’s paradigm. So I live my life in a bemused sort of detachment, watching (as a great man once put it) a once promising species circle the drain ever faster without even noticing where it is, much less where it’s going.
So I hope you understand my responses a little better now. I feel that this popular buzzword “leadership” is really just another symptom of an increasingly vapid society more concerned with talking about things and giving themselves a pat on the back for it than actually doing anything.

Cheers.

As you can tell, I had a hell of a lot of fun, this is why I always take the surveys. Try it, being honest is sometimes very entertaining.