Great Ideas ranjeet on 07 Dec 2006 02:53 am
The Problem With Egos
(note : originally written in 2001)
Sometimes, when I’m bored, I’ll turn on the TV. I try and not do this during the hours of about 1 to 4 pm, however, because it is very difficult to find anything worthwhile to watch. I am pretty much forced to watch either daytime talk shows or idiotic children’s shows. Not even good cartoons like the ones I watched as a kid, but these lame syrupy/epileptic shows they have now that are mere setups for selling expensive action figures. But I digress….that could be a whole other rant.
I find the daytime talk shows to be infuriatingly stupid. Full of very stupid people in very stupid situations with very stupid problems. One time, I was in St. Louis for an ACerS convention and someone turned on the hotel television and started watching the Jenny Jones show. The inflammatory topic of that day’s show was something about “My kid is growing up too fast!” and essentially featured mothers saying that their daughter dated older boys and in general acted in ways that a 14-16 year old should not act. Then the girls themselves came out, predominantly dressed in revealing clothing of some sort or another, trying to be sexy. They all talked about how sexy they were, and how they could get boys to give them stuff because they were so hot. In case you were wondering what kind of cars and jewelry they got in return for their stimulating company, one girl (age 14) said that “she even got weed!” and another girl (16, I believe) got “Taco Bell and McDonalds”. Before they actually came out onto the stage, little intro videos were shown of each girl where she said her name and her exploits. In a real touch of class, the producers filmed this intro video with the girl twirling herself around a stripper’s pole.
So the girls came out and stated their case, and then Jenny took it to the audience, who had their own things to say. One particular member of the audience chastised the girls for wearing such slutty clothes, to which the girls on stage responded with “You just jealous because you ain’t got this.”(trust me, she had nothing that one would want) And then it hit me : the problem here is simply that these girls think too much of themselves.
Because of this revelation, I propose a new weapon be built for the arsenal of the National Guard : The De-Egoizer. Upon being struck with this weapon, the victim would feel a sudden loss of confidence in themselves and quickly begin to question the importance of their own comments. Thus, rather than tell us what they were thinking, they would instead think “They probably don’t want to hear what I want to say” and shut up. Rather than dress up in revealing clothing when they do not have the appropriate body type for such dress, they would dress more modestly. And most of all, they would not go on stupid daytime talk shows. Now don’t get me wrong : The De-Egoizer would not be used exclusively on women. I just centered on them because of that lone experience with the Jenny Jones show. There are plenty of men around who think too much of themselves; they were probably on Jerry Springer that day.
A ray gun sounds a little too naively futuristic (even for me), but I bet the same results could be done with a dart of some sort. Some hallucinogenic drugs make one feel invincible; there’s bound to be some drugs that make one feel like nothing. Such drugs could be effectively used to treat egoism in idiots. Such treatments could have unexpected positive effects on the rest of society. For instance, since these people will have shut up, we will hear more from new people, who perhaps put more thought into their words. Also, since people with superiority complexes often put others down, we won’t have as many people with unreasonably low self-esteems. And best of all, we will devastate the daytime talk show market, perhaps to the point where they will have no guests and get canceled. A giant black hole in daytime television! Well, if push comes to shove, we could bring back some of my childhood cartoons…