When I was a kid, I remember reading somewhere an
article about the ‘Talented Tenth.’ This
was a theory that said basically ten percent of the population was responsible
for most of society’s progress while the remaining 90% was sort of ‘along for
the ride.’ I have to admit that my
observations as I matured didn’t do much to contradict that belief; that is,
until I started looking more closely at how people behave.
After five decades of watching people in societies
around the globe, under all kinds of circumstances from almost idyllic peaceful
circumstances to the stench and bloodshed of war, I have come to the conclusion
that the ‘Talented Tenth’ theory missed it by a bit. My observations, admittedly anecdotal rather
than scientific, have led me to believe that people in groups tend to fall into
a Gaussian distribution (so called for German mathematician and physicist Karl
Gauss, who popularized its use to analyze astronomical data), otherwise known
as a Bell Curve or normal distribution because of its graphic shape. Basically, in a normal distribution, the
highest point in the curve, or the top of the bell, represents the most
probable event or situation, with all possible occurrences equally distributed
around it, creating a downward-sloping line on each side of the peak.
So, how have I observed people to sort themselves
out in the normal distribution? Like I
said, it’s not empirical data, but it seems to work out to a ratio of
20-60-20. That is, 20% on what I call
the ‘good’ or ‘productive’ side, 20% on the ‘bad’ or ‘dysfunctional’ side, and
the remaining 60% evenly distributed in the main or central part of the
bell. I guess you could say we 60% are
the ballast that keeps society on a somewhat even keel.
Now, on the ‘good’ side, we have the Einsteins, the
Michelangelos, the Mother Theresas, and others who come up with the new, bold
ideas; who go where no one has gone before.
These are the people who make things happen for the betterment of the
whole society. On the ‘bad’ side, we
have the Hitlers, the Jeffrey Daumers, and the idiots who change lanes on the
beltway without signaling, cutting in front of cars so close they cause them to
stamp on their brakes, creating massive traffic snarls and sometimes causing
fatal accidents. These are the people
who take guns to school and use classmates and teachers for target practice
before turning the guns on themselves.
While the ‘good’ side of the bell is busy trying to
help society progress, the ‘bad’ side is constantly trying to pull it
down. You might think that leaves those
of us in the middle 60% at the mercy of geniuses and madmen; but, you’d be
wrong. Like the ballast in a ship, we
serve to keep things from going too far in one direction or another. The geniuses are often so deep in their
vision of the future, they fail to solidly ground themselves in the
present. We dullards of the so-so 60%
keep them grounded in reality. At the
same time, our outrage when the ‘bad-siders’ go too far helps to keep society
from descending into total chaos.
As far as I know, no one has seriously studied this
phenomenon. If they have, I’d be
interested in seeing the results, just to see how far I am off the mark. But, I think that if one day this is ever
studied, my theory will be somewhere in the neighborhood of the reality. After all, under the rules of normal distribution,
it should be somewhere near the middle of the bell.
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