Popular ideas are not always wise or intelligent...

Here are a couple ironies....regarding globally impactful books that changed many lives and altered the way a HUGE majority of people think and act.......pretty much ALL for the worse...
Just maybe we ALL would have been far better off had none of these books been written....but it's a lesson for those who wish to jump on the latest bandwagon of thought and who see themselves and pioneers in thinking.


**The guy who wrote the best-seller and culture-changing book "I'm OK, You're OK", was Dr. Thomas Harris, in the liberal 1960's.
This book and Dr. Harris changed society - as the book basically convinced people and educators to proclaim that everything you do is "OK" - that even when you fail - we ought not tell you that you failed - we should still pat you on the back and say that you didn't really fail and that you are OK...
In general - education of an entire generation followed many of this book's themes.

Even behavior in kids that has always been defined as BAD was suddenly considered "OK" but an entire generation of teachers, school administrators, psychologists, and the like who bought into Dr. Harris' trendy yet stupid propositions.

Thus much of an entire generation or two were raised thinking their really bad behavior and bad choices were just fine - go ahead and keep making them...
By the time he died in 1995, Dr. Harris was able to see how horribly bad his advice was and how hurtful it was to a self-centered and self-indulgent generation of people who blindly followed or who were led to follow his teachings...

Guess what -- we now have the "Me-Generation" and Gen-X people who want everything handed to them and cannot survive even the tiniest discouragement or failure...and the entirety of society is filled with every imaginable life-destroying sin that people simply call life-style choices - despite the ruined lives, suicides, broken marriages, and especially the far, far worse problem with troubled kids.
Everyone sees the end results - a selfish society, lazy people, plenty of folks always wanting a handout or choosing to be dependent on the government - wanting everything for free - even an easy college education..etc..
So - thanks Dr. Harris - it would have been nice had you denounced the folly of your opinions before you died, instead of greedily choosing to double down on them even when you saw their failure - so your family could continue to profit from your book's sales.



Then we had the society-altering 1970's book by Jim Fixx "The Complete Book of Running" ...that changed everything and started the running craze, with the promise that within a generation or two everyone would be way, way healthier!!

Well..again, that bombed out and sadly Jim Fixx didn't even live long enough to even see the beginning of the failures he proposed.
Jim Fixx dropped dead of a heart attack just after age 50 - pretty much the garden variety of hardening of the arteries that his running recommendations were supposed to delay or prevent claimed him.
And now 40 years later, even though some people enjoy running and some benefit from it...many have gained absolutely NO BENEFIT, have wasted enormous amounts of time, and we now have an entire generation of very young people looking for joint replacements because all that running wore out their knees and hips.
Most knowledgeable experts now say that the degree of running Fixx promoted is almost always bad and harmful for any extended length of time.
Oh well - just another faulty fad that I am thankful I never bought into.



Lastly I'll mention a book I read in the 1970's when it became a phenomenon and was required reading in many schools and psychology classes.... and thankfully I immediately saw the life-destroying guidelines the guy was promoting.
The book is "Pulling Your Own Strings" by Wayne Dyer. In this book he searches out just about every single impediment he sees to living a Utopian life...
Even little things like having to take out the garbage, saying thank you, being polite and friendly, or even just clean and not what we call a slob or a bum...

Every tiny factor in life that might cause discomfort or minuscule inconvenience, every personal interaction where someone else expects something from you, and every life situation where you might find yourself feeling some obligation to help someone else or do something for someone else...was explored...then he told you the right way to deal with every one of these situations and his advice was always just to be as completely selfish as possible and just do what YOU WANTED - which was generally the laziest and most obnoxious choice.
In other words - PULL YOUR OWN STRINGS - don't let others pull your strings - don't ever let someone else determine the actions you take - just live the way YOU WANT!

Dyer proceeds to tell the reader the proper response in every life situation is to simply do what YOU want to give yourself the quickest and most selfish end result.
If you are at a wedding and are tired - then leave and go home to take a nap.
If you are invited to dinner and feel like snoozing after the meal - just depart to some hidden location and nap.
If you wish to burp, fart, or scratch somewhere - then do it and damned be anyone else who might find your actions rude or troubling...
Just always elevate yourself to the position of most important organism or thing in the universe and act accordingly.

In other words -- live your life only for yourself and for your own pleasures and satisfaction, and ignore politeness, etiquette, and decent behavior.
Any rules, religion, codes of ethics, or even any behavior deemed proper, friendly, or polite were to be ignored and just do whatever you wanted!
Wow - this guy had to be the biggest ego there ever existed! And if he followed his own plan he must have had zero friends - but his book did sell and become a fad and sadly it probably made some readers into real jerks.

I don't think a whole lot of people took Dyer's advice - but Dyer did stick around a couple decades promoting his really stupid, selfish ideas - pretty much discrediting himself in the eyes of most intelligent people as an idiot and a loony sociopath who nobody really cared to hear.
His books now sell on Amazon for as little as one cent...and in a perverted way of drifting even further towards kookie opinions, Dyer is now promoting absolutely ridiculous and schizophrenic spiritual ideas that have cost him pretty much any further chance of ever being taken seriously.
But if one thing can be learned - you can always make money if you promote even the stupidest and preposterous ideas. Buyer beware!



THEN --- Here's sort of a joke but in reality it IS the way some people think and they don't even see the absolute silliness of their thinking...

Here's how it goes...

**One message board poster says something like this...
"Being completely BLIND seems to reduce one's ability to play golf at the top level and be able to hit the ball into the hole"
...This, of course, is such an obvious TRUE statement that only some maniac would actually dare refute it, but....

**Then a 2nd message board poster who apparently stalks the boards for just about anything he can find to argue says this...
"NO - you are dead wrong because I searched like hell and found one single example a few years ago of a BLIND GOLFER who made a hole in one...
Here's the proof..."
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500183_162-3193608.html

**Then the original poster replies --
"so what -- you can always find some scarce exception but if it is so rare for a blind guy to get a hole-in-one that you have to do a Google search and find one obscure example from years ago - while every town and every city has people getting holes-in-one every single day - who CAN SEE...then I think your response is actually powerful confirmation that my original statement is solidly CORRECT!"

**Then the arguer doubles down on his ignorant logic by saying...
"I just did a thorough mathematical trileptal tangential meta-analysis using delta-Q-wave-formulations via the Hochstetler degradation curve...
and I found that a BLIND GUY does have a 201,025 times harder chance to get a hole-in-one than a sighted guy -- but that's not outside the realm of everyday possibilities - in fact, in my opinion it is actually "quite probable", and undoubtedly happens every single day somewhere if you include the entire infinite universe!"

...OK -- I'll conclude with that - but you see the typical pattern of argument like this every day on message boards -- people claiming that a 1 in 200 probability is a reasonable chance that it's going to happen in each and every argument...but so it is....it makes discussions on message boards interesting to say the least....