Experiences with People Outside of the Ivory Tower

Many people in this world do not have the breadth of experience which I have as regards close personal experiences with people from nearly the top to the bottom of social class, the variety of walks of life, and very different cultures in the world.

This is especially apparent to me when many people talk about their outlooks and suggested policies towards the world, when I think they are relatively clueless about what the actual results of that may be. It's most relevant as regards existential technological risks to humankind.

I lived the first 28 years of my life in a relatively protected and high class environment, through my university education and my first years in employment in high level jobs, especially in the Washington, D.C., region. The main exception is that I was bussed to majority black schools for the last 5 years of my education before going to the university, which exposed me to some stark contrasts.

An old slang phrase, "Ivory Tower", means a person of high educational class who lives their life in a protected high class environment surrounded by others likewise, and is oblivious to a lot of what goes on in society and the world, beyond what they happen to see in mass media and occasional encounters. As a result, they may have outlooks and suggested policies towards society which are unrealistic in the Real World.

My first small step out was when I became self-employed in the business of computer consulting at age 28. This still limited my exposure to people at relatively high levels -- who wanted computers, software, and services -- for a wide variety of applications, including very personal, many different kinds of businesses for-profit and not-for-profit, and various federal governmental applications. At that time, personal computers were new to society. One thing about the early years of migrating from a paper based society to a computerized one is that its adoption and changes involved the top directors of businesses who were more involved in the strategic designs of new systems than is typical of today, and it also got me into the guts of operations and how a wide variety of businesses operate from top to bottom. The broad exposures to a wide variety of people and operations was very heady and interesting.

For the next 7 years, most of my jobs were one day to a few days. The number of business engagements was very numerous, involving a diversity of people who needed me and often got very personal. I did have some long term contracts for part time work on government projects, but the vast majority of my work was small jobs, which I liked because I learned more about the world and people.

Due to the government applications, an association gave me an opportunity to travel in 1994 to the location of an Asia Regional Office, which was in Bangkok, Thailand. The Far East of humankind was about as big a contrast as I could imagine at the time from the West.

Starting in early 1995, I started engaging in computer consulting to purely private sector, multinational companies directed and staffed with non-Americans. Australians and British people were the main other expats at the top, though there were also many Europeans, and of course lots of Thais. The main companies were engineering and construction companies making factories, highrise office and residential buildings, and infrastructure.

However, it was during non-working hours that life was most interesting. I moved away from the expat center in early 1995 to an outer suburb, where there were not many foreigners, and my main means of transport back then to the city center was canal boats full of Thais. I immersed myself into the culture and language.

I also took opportunities to travel to other countries in Asia. My favorite pasttime there was not going to look at the famous landmarks, but instead going to ordinary places and just people watching. Just people watching... It also gave me time to read up a lot on Asian cultures and history, but watching current people and the rapid cultural changes between the generations was more of interest, as it was about the future.

I found my own analyses, the ground truth, to be quite different from what was being written and parroted and rehashed by many writers.

I would call this my second, and big, step outside the Ivory Tower.

The 1997 Asia Economic Crash resulted in my losing a lot of my work, and that is when I started a new sideline -- private investigations. That was my third step out, and turned out to be a real head-turner. Hmmm... where do I start ... I could write books but I can't or won't because so much of it is confidential. This work has continued to date, though I started to decline the more risky and stressful cases over the years.

A fourth step out was a real estate business I started up, which was conceived from my prior work with engineering and construction companies making skyscraper offices, condos, apartments, and housing neighborhoods, whereby my company served expats relocating for long term jobs, most of them with families who needed schools and other support. I would drive them around to look at a variety of properties, and also chit-chat along the way. Many of these were very high level people in business, but also government related (United Nations, embassies, specialized organizations) and some non-governmental organizations. As they say, the cream of the crop, chosen to run overseas operations. There were some really good people, but there were also some ruthless egomaniacs, and various other sorts ...

There is no question that if I had not traveled to Asia in 1994, that I would have become extremely rich in the USA because in 1994 I was at the forefront of the internet and had lots of ideas. At the time, I was a bit exhausted from work and thought I would take a break in Asia for 6 months to 2-3 years max, and then return. There was practically no internet in Asia at the time, and I got cut off from a lot that was happening.

However, I wonder what my outlook and understanding of humankind would be like if I had stayed in the Washington, D.C., area and built my own Ivory Tower company(s) with me on the top floor.

You don't need much money to live well in the modern world, and having much more money than I need has never been an interest of mine, compared to education and understanding things.

However, you do need money to get things done in the world, and this is the most painful thing to me -- how limited I am about helping the world in substantial ways.

On the other hand, I see so many extremely wealthy people speaking platitudes like they don't have much of a clue about most of the world outside their Ivory Towers, while blowing money and time on things which won't make much of a different for the Real World eventually.

  mark-prado.com > Human instincts and society > Experiences with people

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