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So I was thinking about this idea that people seem to have that they have no skills. I wouldn't say that this is a universal syndrome, but it's not uncommon. And it struck me that one could really go with this in two directions that this thread has already taken.
One is the possibly Pollyannaish view that but of course everyone has skills! Every one of us is good at something, let's think about what we're good at!! But this need not just be a feel-good exercise in I'm-okay-you're-okay, if one considers "procedural" learning and memory. People have talked about physical skills and how the learning of these skills was, in a sense, a process of making these skills second nature. You only got good when you weren't aware of them. Actually, I shouldn't limit this to physical skills because there's also Kit-Cat's example of reading, which is perfectly described as second nature --if you can read, that is. Obviously no one mentions reading as a skill for exchange, because everyone reads here.
So it's possible that people who say that they don't have skills are not low in skills, but low in skill-awareness. Because of the transparent nature, perhaps, of skills.
Or perhaps they don't have *unusual* skills, which sort of leads to my next point:
Do you think this could be a real effect of capitalism --i.e., that we actually do have fewer procedural-type skills? Cf. in the consumption and disillusionment thread, grant makes a link between an apparent slide in consumption and the slide towards a service economy. Which I think is a fact of capitalism? Do we think of "skills" more as something that produces goods, rather than as something that produces services? Or are service-type skills more incommunicable, unteachable? It's said that we live in an Information (Episodic) Age: if we can't keep up with the information side of things, then what's happening on the process side?
As regards your question, Byron... I'm sort of stuck on that. I don't know that I think that capitalism provides for a more varied life. I think it does make people more productive in the sense of whittling people down to perform more efficiently in the larger machine... but that means less varied, doesn't it? Then on the other hand, there's leisure time and that's... hobbies. Maybe it's all about hobbies... |
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