By Nemo
“Firing on all cylinders” is a metaphor of the machine age that means that everything is working at its optimum capacity. It refers to the cylinders of an internal combustion engine in a gasoline-powered automobile, which provide maximum power when all of them are firing in perfect synchronization. This requires the vehicle to be well-maintained and finely tuned to near perfection.
It has been observed that most great scientists, who are almost exclusively men, make their greatest discoveries when they are unmarried and in romantic relationships with young women. There seems to be something about young love that simultaneously energizes a man’s creativity and relaxes his anxieties. He then can focus his mind almost exclusively upon his work, for his body and his spirit are at ease. He labors to experience the joy of creation and wastes no thought upon the avoidance of pain.
This phenomenon is not unique to science. The ancient Greeks went so far as to deify ideal young women in the nine Muses of antiquity, who were held to inspire men and women to create in the fields of poetry, history, astronomy, song, dance, and drama.
Older and wiser cultures once exerted pressure upon young women to marry young men with promising talents in useful fields of human endeavor. Wealth was often more desirable than talent, but a young man with “prospects” was often a close second to a young “man of leisure” in the esteem of society. It was assumed that his success would create enough wealth to satisfy the needs of his bride. Even a casual survey of Victorian literature reveals this as a recurrent theme.
Sadly, this ancient wisdom has been discarded by modern society. Today women are “empowered” to choose their own mates as soon as they reach legal adulthood. In practice, it’s next to impossible to rein them in after they reach puberty. By and large, they choose the young men with the highest status in adolescent subculture rather than adult society.
Athletes, movie actors, rap artists, and above all else “bad boys” are desired by young women. Poets, historians, astronomers, and playwrights are not even on the radar of the modern young lady. Engineers and computer geeks are actively avoided. Purely rational men of science and technology have the same level of appeal to nubile women that garlic has to vampires. Emotional and unstable men have “passion” and are a hot commodity among women who have no constraints upon their own desires. Like seeks like.
As a result, we have a chronic shortage of muses. Young men who are inclined to be an asset to society rather than a liability are, by and large, shunned at precisely the age when they should be making their greatest discoveries. Albert Einstein was 26 when he invented the theory of special relativity. Can anyone imagine a hip young urban lady in modern America dating a patent clerk with bright ideas?
At the same time that we have a shortage of muses, we have a superabundance of banshees. Some women who are nearing their reproductive expiration date will hold their noses long enough to marry a rational man, but only if there’s enough money in it. Few of these marriages are happy or durable, because women who crave passion and have sampled it from dozens of men are rarely content to settle down and stay faithful to one boring, tediously logical man. Some will fake it just long enough to become “fully vested” and cash out in a divorce with the maximum alimony and child support.
In the meantime, life for their husbands is fraught with strife and turmoil. Almost every man has, at some point, put in a bad day’s work because a woman has added stress and strain to his psyche that exceeds even the most stoic man’s limits of endurance. On a personal note, I once donated blood a few hours after an argument with a female and was shocked to discover that my pulse was still racing at 100 beats a minute rather than the usual range of 56 to 84. Men who are badly stressed before they arrive at work are poorer performers. They also age faster – most married men turn gray years before their bachelor counterparts.
There is a price to be paid for this. Innovation seems to be slowing in most fields of science and technology, and the West is slipping backwards in some areas. The “Next Big Thing” seems elusive, and the current candidates are a scrawny lot. Facebook is valued at twice the market capitalization of Boeing, which appears to violate common sense and is an indication of the distortion of not only our financial values but also our societal norms. NASA needs to bum rides from the Russians to get astronauts into orbit. We are even having trouble maintaining existing technology, such as the electrical grid that is the skeleton of the information age.
Failure to inspire the creativity of our young men, which is the prime impetus for progress in a technological society, causes our entire civilization to fail to fire on all cylinders. Economic malaise leads to social crises and civil unrest. Other nations such as China seem to have their act together better than Europe and America, and we are falling behind them in a relative sense and may soon fall behind them in an absolute sense. Their economies and societies are firing on all cylinders and catching up to us. In ten or fifteen years, the West may be passed by as our engines of innovation and growth sputter and blow clouds of smoke.
Perhaps, someday, a generation of women will be re-taught the ancient wisdom of the Greeks and the more modern customs of the Victorians and rediscover the charming attributes that elevate a mere female into a celestial muse. Until then, our young men will be forced to endure the scorn of the banshees and must persevere to advance society in spite of the opposite sex rather than in the cause of our womenfolk.
