A Nation of Vicarious Innovators

Two Smarter-than-a-5th-Grader
words appear in this post's title:
"vicarious" and "innovator".

If you recall your high school SAT study guide, one of the meanings associated with "vicarious" is that of "delegating" to others (to your vicar, if you are king) an accomplishment that you later pretend to have had yourself.

Our public discourse is filled with vicarious "we" talk.

Example:

"If we are to remain the strongest nation on Earth, we must remain the most innovative nation on Earth"
--a 2012 US Presidential candidate.

Another example:

“None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be, or where the new jobs will come from. Thirty years ago, we couldn’t know that something called the Internet would lead to an economic revolution. What we can do – what America does better than anyone – is spark the creativity and imagination of our people. We are the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It’s how we make a living.”
--President Barack Obama, The State of the Union, 1/25/11

Indeed, there are some
who believe "innovation"
naturally grows on a forest
full of many fruitful trees,
all placed there by
the "ingenuity"-rich "we".

They believe that a band of
terrifying "trolls"
then run amok through these forests,
plucking the otherwise "naturally" occurring fruits
and hording the same for their greedy selves.

[W]e have created a [broken] patent system that gives innovators a temporary monopoly over what they create, which encourages them to hoard their knowledge, lest they help a competitor.
--Joseph Stiglitz

For you see, there is no "inventor" inside of "inNOvation".
It is the ingenious "WE" who vicariously create all the "inNOvation".
"Inventors" are merely greedy hoarding trolls who take false credit for what the ingenious "WE" vicariously created through mental manipulation of their robot bodies.

They deserve nothing.
"WE", the vicarious "innovators" deserve it all.
Bwaaahaha.

(... post is still under construction)