I have historically valued and lauded intelligence and education and knowledge. If someone has a PhD or 10 years of experience in something, that seems the most amazing. I then make the leap that they can see things with incredible nuance and discernment. That last step is not quite accurate.
I've seen and discerned how many "educated" folks aren't careful and aren't trustworthy. They know the vocabulary to a large extent. They know what other people know. They know lots of facts. But I have also seen them prone to shortcuts. Prone to anti-intellectualism. They are nannies (status quo rule followers) rather than nerds (investigators of how things work and how they can break). With stature, that gives them an excuse. "I know a lot, so just trust me on this one". I had a very senior economist from MIT glibly say that "energy efficiency doesn't work" to dismiss a line of inquiry. How can you trust someone as an umpire and gatekeepers who would be so uncareful in their words?
Education and deep experience is rare. This is true for Masters degree holders as well as Master Plumbers. And just using that title, which takes a lot of effort to get, it would seem like finding people of deep education is very rare. In the USA, this is probably about 1 to 3% of the population who have Masters or are masters of something.
But heedfulness is rarer.
This is puzzling in a way because heedfulness is cheap and requires no special equipment or tuition fees. To get a master's degree or to become a master tradesperson, that typically requires 12 years of normal schooling and then another 6-10+ years is specialty schooling. But, to be heedful, one might even have no schooling. One needs to look, observe, and act carefully. That is enough. If your job is to gather water from the local well, doing that job heedfully means taking it seriously and doing a good job. One can even have fun with it. But one can't use fun as an excuse to be non-heedful, to excuse mistakes and carelessness.
And, that's part of the thing with society. Modern society, with it's consumer siren song, celebrates carelessness and mistakes (that you get away with). Ancient society did similar things, so it wasn't a world where "things were so much better before XYZ". Very few cultures have emphasized heedfulness. In a weird way, all the religions and all the cultures that promoted "duty" to family or tribe were teaching some elements of heedfulness, albeit inadvertently. So, I do agree (also in a weird way) that the reactionary Christians in America are actually (inadvertently) teaching some heedfulness when they try to promote "traditional Christian values". Or, if I were looking for heedful kids, I'd find more coming out of a church then coming out of an Instagram feed; even a progressive Instagram feed.
So heedfulness is rarer than erudite education. I'm not sure on the number, but my guess is approx 1 out of 1000 or less.
These days, I am trying to hone my heedfulness meter so I can find these folks. My main difficulty is that my heedfulness meter is biased to people who are heedful in the way I am. If they are heedful in a way that looks very different, it's very easy for me to miss them.
Lastly, and Topeka and Cornell has taught me this, heedfulness is not very correlated with education or social status. You can find a lot of unheedful people who are doctors or policy makers. They are probably good enough for their jobs, but I wouldn't trust them to be gentle or careful when tempted by pleasure, greedy, or revenge.
Uudr
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