End Times: The "Why" Makes Us Actually Fix It
- Nicholas Linke
- Apr 2
- 3 min read
The more people one convinces to change their behavior, the more the science alters the very system it studies. The prophecy alters the outcome, possibly preventing the doom. One can either ignore, abstain, and be proven right about the end of times, or intervene, have an impact, and be proven wrong.
One cannot have this cake and eat it, too. The more one engages and participates, the more hyperbolic and alarmist they will appear. Recommending action during the pandemic to change the outcome made the recommendation appear unnecessary. The climate crisis will unfold the same way.
Improving the world disproves your prediction.
Ultimately, parents, guardians, and teachers simply want their children and students to be happy, healthy, and safe. As argued many times by Jason Kander, in the heartland, another essential focus is for the family to be nearby. This does not imply that families in the coastal regions of the country do not desire to have their children within close proximity. Rather the emphasis of nearby is a reflection of the movement of students and children from homes in the heartland to the areas with opportunities.
Again the heartland falls victim to the self-fulling prophecy and cyclic exacerbation of the issue of students and children moving toward resources and areas of assumed prestige and opportunity. The heartland hollows itself by advocating for students to pursue their dreams and leave their hometowns in search of these chances for upward mobility.
Education must be rebranded as collaboration and investment rather than replacement and exodus. This requires empathy and equity that addresses the same issues education has embedded in its culture, which is focused on hometown survival through every outlet except academics. Academics are scholarships and competitions to run to the coasts for a better life.
Instead, sell Public Education as a Product to save the hometown rather than help your kid leave. Marketing research about what the heartland needs and rebranding the message to how public schools can save our small hometowns and the entire heartland is how we show empathy and equity.
This helps find the students' why.
In a 2009 TedTalk, Simon Sinek asked: Why is Apple so innovative? The argument is that successful leaders communicate and act in a way that is opposite to the traditional approach. His insight was published formally in Start with Why and became known as the golden circle, simplified below.
All companies know what they do, some companies know how they do it, but very few know why they do it. The organizations and companies fail to define their reason for existing. The talk argues that customers purchase motivations, emotions, and passions and not processes and products. They buy the why.
People don’t buy what you do they buy why you do it.
As the TED talk concludes, Martin Luther King Jr. is acknowledged as one of the greatest orators in history. However, King’s speech was the tipping point in the civil rights movement. The audience was there to show their beliefs, passions, and swell of support. People did not attend to see the speech. People went to confirm their existence. They went with the pressure from peers and self-affirmation.
It was a collective logotherapy. It was a discovery of their shared motivation, an expression of their own passion, and a declaration of their own purpose.Students have to advocate for keeping their hometown alive and improving it.
Still, they are encouraged to leave instead of inspired to seize.
To provide agency and actualization, self-fulfillment must return to the heartland.
Students must initiate innovation. Students must be the researchers of how to rebuild. This process of rebuilding requires student empowerment and networking.
The students who often are encouraged to leave their hometowns must be inspired to stay and take advantage of the sustainable opportunities to innovate the solutions to the problems they face growing up rather than abandon and desert the growing desertification of the interior of their country.
Learn more about the memoir by Nicholas Linke: Tangents.
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