Studied Mediocrity - Akira the Don, Alan Watts

It’s instructive to go to a professional professors' meeting

In my field, which is philosophy, you got to a congress of philosophers

And you’ll find, when they all get together in the bar or in the restaurant,

in somebody’s room

The one thing they don’t talk about is philosophy

It is very bad form indeed to show interest in philosophy among your colleagues

The same is exactly true in clergy gatherings.

They don’t talk about religion

What they both talk about is politics, church politics and academic politics

'Cause it’s bad form to be brilliant on a faculty, because it outclasses your

colleagues

Therefor, faculty people tend to cultivat

The studied mediocrity

(Studied mediocrity)

The studied mediocrity

(Studied mediocrity)

And you gotta watch out for that

I mean, if you get mobs of students coming to your lectures

You get pretty black looks from your colleagues

But you see, what it is

It’s scholarship about scholarship, and not scholarship

Just as learning because learning is good for you is irrelevant to learning

The whole idea of improving yourself by learning is irrelevant to the learning

process

And in the same way, doing business

Is doing business

Doing business, such as manufacturing clothes, is a very good thing to do

I could conceive that it would be extremely enjoyable

Something one could be very proud of to make good clothes

Course you need to sell them, 'cause you need to eat, but to make clothes to

make money

Raises another question

Because then your interest is not in making clothes, it’s making money,

and then you’re gonna cheat on the clothes

And then you get an awful lot of money and you don’t know what to do with it

The studied mediocrity

(The studied mediocrity)

The studied mediocrity

(The studied mediocrity)