Even Primitive Farmers Need Grey Matter

Some guy

A certain elitist presidential candidate has made some waves in claiming that he— a non-farmer— could teach anyone to be a farmer since it doesn’t require any ‘grey matter’ (brains) to be a farmer, like it does to have a tech job. And farmers go on TV to say how wrong he is when it comes to modern farmers. But no one defends primitive farmers. And they needed brain power too.

Think of the primitive farmer working with crude hand tools. He had no weather satellites to give him advice on the ideal time to plant his crop. If he planted too early, he could lose it all. Too late, and not enough of the crop would be ready for harvest. He didn’t even have a farmer’s almanac or a calendar to go by! He needed to know the signs from nature that winter was really over and it was time to plant. Inexperienced or lazy farmers might not make enough of a crop to feed their family! Which was why young farmers worked with their fathers and grandfathers for years until they built up some experience of their own. 

Livestock farmers also needed brain power. Breeding to the best bull you could get was a good way to improve your herd— but not if your herd got so inbred to that one great bull that they were all half-sisters or cousins and you were getting a lot of undersized young animals because of the inbreeding. Livestock farmers with experience learned how to manage the breeding. They might use a less-than-great unrelated bull in the years after they had used a great bull of their own breeding as herd sire.

The primitive farming job that didn’t require brain power was not that of the farmer, but that of the farm laborer. The farmer would point his laborer at a field and instruct him to plow up the field, or plant barley in it, or hoe the weeds out of the crop, and the laborer would do it. The laborer didn’t need to know when the right time to plow or plant was. That was the farmer’s job. The laborer just did what he was told, and if he wasn’t a man blessed with a lot of brain power, he could still do the job.

Most lower-level modern tech jobs are like that. The boss tells you what to do and you do it. The only brain power you need is for finishing your high school or tech training classes because the boss won’t hire you without them. You often do not need to use your brains for anything, once you get hired, other than to keep your ears apart. 

A modern tech worker does not need much brain power on the job unless he gets a series of promotions and gets to tell other workers what to do. But he thinks he has brain power. He may be dim enough to be taken in by substandard political candidates that promise the moon but can’t deliver without wrecking the economy and losing the tech worker class their jobs, but he has been carefully convinced he is oh-so-smart because he votes for the fellow with the right— or left— letter after their name.

But highly intelligent persons— whether they are ancient farmers or modern computer programmers— are not important to the political process. There are just not enough of them to deliver the votes needed. So politicians must appeal to— or deceive— persons of lesser intelligence, and often do so by pretending those persons are smart.