Interlachen Road

I take a short cut through Edina with the company van when I have to work in the western suburbs on a Wednesday morning. Gridlock shuts down Highway 110 going north so I bail on 50th street, working my way to Interlachen Rd which eventually comes out at Highway 7, my shortcut for getting to the Western suburbs.

I use the road weekly but this past Wednesday was like I saw the street, really saw it for the first time. This rich enclave of rich Edina, for a mile or so, is graced with million dollars homes--maybe more--that have walls all around the yard. Some of them have done the same thing with shrubbery.

One would have to be hammerheaded not to notice how unusual such a degree of privacy that is demanded here. Most suburban houses in Minnesota may have a wood fence in the back yard to hold in small children and pets, but it is unusual to detect 6 foot wood fences between houses running to the front sidewalk or the front curb. You can drive for blocks in Bloomington and not observe such a fence.

I think I know what is going on here. The rich or very upper class are more individualistic. Their superior abilities or superior work ethic has made them more exceptional and less normal. Their wealth has launched them out of the middle class group-living routine--of course these are general remarks with many exceptions. Still, excellence in money-making, in high professional status, or celebrity status gained as a writer or inventor--these blessing carry the price of making the high achiever more isolated and more of a loner, relatively speaking, than the average achiever.

What does the severe privacy demanded by those residents on Interlachen Road tell us about human nature? It informs us that semi-individuated people, like the millionaires along that road require more privacy and separation from the herd. They require it, they want it, and they get it.

For me, this discovery of such concentrated, emphasized individualism on display right here in Minnesota is an empirical corroboration of my own philosophy that predicts that very high achievers become inevitably isolated from the masses, and they want to be so isolated, and their personality gravitates towards living alone. It also suggests that living alone triggers the tendency to seek to self-actualize.

If we would fence off all our houses on all sides from the neighbors, these neighborhoods would be cold places, but the level of communal achievement would skyrocket.

Now, if you drive around Lake Harriet and observe that those millionaire mansions are open on the front to the rich people living there being viewed by thousands of walkers, drivers and bikers going around the lake just 200 feet away. This seems to disprove my theory just as Interlachen Rd. supports it.

My guess is that Minneapolis was founded and run by British Isles types, the Scandinavians and the Germans. Their sense of civic pride and involvement over 100 to 150 years ago may not have nurtured that level of the pursuit of individualism.

If the homes on Interlachen Road came much later-say 60 to 70 years ago-- the neighborhood mores may have been utterly different from the Park Avenue in Minneapolis where the rich were not secluded from their neighbors.