Autopsy of an Education

~~~
I considered framing this as a selfless and objective account. I told myself (as I would tell you) that it wasn't a petition for pity, not a rant rooted in ressentiment, nor a humblebrag, nor a piece of excuse-making. Those are lies. The truth is that I am sad, and angry, and I do feel unfairly deprived of my privileges.  I can only bring myself to admit so because I suspect I'm not alone in this feeling.

The question lurking behind the present storytime is "How many?" How many young men like me had every reason to believe they were going places, so they did their best, only to discover that the system was not interested in their contributions?  How many have given up, and shut down, as I have?  Finally, what are the results for a society if this happens on a regular basis?

Speaking from my own experience, grade school gave me the sense of being singular, at least among those kids within busing distance.  My alleged smarts were spoken of like sorcery, a strange mysterious power conferred on me by the Fates. A classmate once asked if I had eaten a dictionary. I finished Grade 8 Math with a final mark above 100, which might say more about my math teacher than myself. All of which is to observe that the ear of one's ego has to bend toward something. It wouldn't have been sports. It couldn't have been church. Lord knows, it wasn't Canada. Not having a tribe of my own or a healthy and harmonious family, I could only take pride in my numerically-quantified academic accomplishments as an atomized individual.

So I was a student. A good student. A very good student. I would often like to protest that I didn't work that hard, only as hard as the projects apparently required, yet that minimal standard seemed to exceed that of others.  Completing these mostly pointless and stupid assignments, and watching others struggle with them, undoubtedly warped me in all kinds of ways.  I only wish that inflation and distortion of my character might have been harnessed for good.

This may be where I went astray. I never got to a point with math or science where it was anything more than rote learning. If you understood the principles and followed them correctly, you always found the right answer. Maybe I could have been a great mathematician, but I could think of nothing less interesting. The practice of science looked similarly thankless, long stretches of dull routine broken up by occasional excitement.  I made the choice to go into arts and humanities instead as soon as I had the option.

What was the essence of that choice? Was I moving toward understanding humanity, expressing myself, and thinking creatively, or was I just fleeing from the boring business of keeping this shit show running? I surely revelled in the maverick move of not doing the obvious, and I really hoped to find engaging shades of grey demanding messy interpretation, but I was also lazy, and worn-out from a decade of busywork while my peers were having childhoods. I think I had legitimate grievances against the status quo, against war and waste, corporatism and kakistocracy, but did I actually believe that I could not operate within the establishment without compromising my principles, or did it just look like too much trouble? I'm trying to recount the ways my education failed me, but I can't get past my own complicity. I could be a rich doctor right now, instead of a destitute dreg. Sometimes smart people are improbably stupid.

On that note, I eventually chose to attend Trent University. They had a department of cultural studies, and Maclean's magazine said they wore Birkenstocks and sometimes went to class in pyjamas there, so that's the school I picked. The highfalutin hand-waving the program used to describe itself sounded good enough. Of course there are power imbalances in society. Of course there's injustice. Who wouldn't want to make the world more just and fair? It did all sound a little airy, but the program promised workshops in the arts.  I would learn practical skills.  If not a professorship, I could go into film or theatre.  Three career tracks in one degree! What could go wrong?

I must pause at this point to draw out another animating idea for this bit, and that's the good faith assumption of a functioning society.  You want to believe that your elders and superiors have guarded against decadence and decline. You want to believe that expensive degrees have value. It looked on the surface like cultural studies might be an indulgently speculative enterprise, an ivory tower endeavour far-removed from reality.  I knew that to be the unschooled assumption of retrograde country bumpkins.  It simply wasn't conceivable that so many smart people could be caught up in a lie.  If the Emperor had no clothes, someone would have said something, and that cultural studies department would disband in shame.

Of course, they had no shame. I was told about the pathological propensities of my people to want a happy family and a strong leader, and I was told that another people were the supreme paragons of moral virtue in human history.  I figured out that I was only being very poorly taught how to put on a play or make a movie so that I could advance the social theories of my professors. Despite my efforts to avoid the drily predictable patterns of rationalistic quantitative analysis, there was still only one right answer, and what was worse: it didn't even agree with reason. 2 + 2 was always 5.

My experience of cultural studies was akin to gaslighting. The hostility to anything normative seemed to come out of nowhere in second year, after I had committed to the major, yet all the students and professors treated it as established, proven, and beyond debate that we should all be Marxists disassembling the dominant culture. I looked around the table and couldn't see anyone as confused as I felt.  Maybe it was me.  Maybe I was mistaken.  Maybe I was mad.  The alternative was a lot worse to contemplate.

I never kept my grades up for their own sake. The mark was a measure of the degree to which I had committed myself to understanding and embodying the principles conveyed. I could feel good about myself because I was playing along.  I was learning the ropes so that one day I might captain my own ship in a vast armada. Together we would do great and glorious things, noble things we can't even imagine.  All I had to do was listen to the words of those older and wiser than myself, apply what they had taught me, be reasonable, and speak the truth. Speech is social, and justice is true, so I thought that I was on board with social justice.

I never expected that my degree would end with an epic moral quandary.  I was just a few papers away from earning my Honours, papers that I had imagined would be the culmination of my learning, tying it all up in a neat bow that would point to what the next step should be.  Instead I was more confused than at the beginning, not to say that I didn't have more ideas in my head.  I knew the sociopolitical bullet points that I should work from if I knew what was good for me, but in truth, I had not been convinced of them.  I could fake it, I was sure of that, but I wasn't sure I would emerge from that process the same person. A little part of me would die, the part that wants my reason, actions, and conscience to be in accord with one another.  The very part that torments me to this day, but I keep alive anyway, in the hopes that one day I'll find a worthy use for it.

The body of humanity.

When Jared Taylor Came To Town

Your Favourite Viola Player is an Evil Wizard

Big Buts: My Intellectual Journey

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When I was six years old, I saw a flashing electric blue rectangle descend from the night sky.  I thought it over, and decided this was not the sort of thing I should talk about to anyone ever.  Because I couldn't talk about it, I gradually forgot about it.  This is the story of my intellectual journey.

When I was thirteen I bought Fingerprints of the Gods.  I discovered in that book that humanity's past might not be a single simple linear ascent to greater sophistication.  So I took Ancient History in high school, where I was told that humans began as apes, and civilisation began with pyramids.  There was no acknowledgment of any uncertainty in this story, so I kept my mouth shut.

I tried LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and synthetic phenethylamines, dextromethorphan, salvia divinorum, and a weak preparation of dimethyltryptamine.  These helped me to apprehend that every person has a spark of divinity within, an eternal consciousness watched over by an absolute awareness that precedes the universe.  It's not the sort of thing you talk about, so I didn't.

I went to university for three things: film, theatre, and the critical examination of culture to determine what the hell is wrong with the world.  I learned how to use a primitive camera for greater authenticity, how to pretend that a wooden box is really a chair, and how to place the blame for all the ills of the world on straight white men like myself.  Marx and Freud got together with Adorno and Marcuse to say that I was a born oppressor whose guilt was proven by my denials, a pathological sort of person who must be repressed to encourage tolerance.  I saw the mental dressing down that occurred when you didn't agree this was all brilliant stuff, so I gave up on participating in seminars.

Disillusioned with academic cultural studies, I applied my philosophy education to the perils and opportunities of the internet.  What could be gleaned from those who spoke only to niche audiences, or took advantage of anonymity?  I found that most every time there was a subject considered too crazy to countenance by polite society, there was at least a kernel of truth to it. Every time, too, there was someone who took that truth too far.  I didn't want to be a fool or to be thought one, so I didn't even begin to engage with any of these interesting topics, except to study them.

The Earth is almost certainly round, but I haven't been to space or studied the physics of planetary formation, so I have to take someone's word for it.  The return of flat earth theory is likely being helped along by intelligence interests for the study and manipulation of the population, but as a thought experiment it's a peerless gauge of a person's capacity for challenging their assumptions.  No, the Earth isn't flat, but all it would take is a vast intergenerational conspiracy to deceive you on the matter.  It's a valuable exercise to consider the inconceivable for a moment or two.

Vaccines are described as safe and effective, but their inserts list serious conditions as side effects.  The unconscionable opinion of the science-denying anti-vaccine Dr. Andrew Wakefield is that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine should be issued separately at different times as three generic vaccines instead of one patented product at once with a greater potential for adverse effects.  This is why people have tried to silence and destroy him.  Vaccines may claim credit for the benefits of nutrition and sanitation, but the basic theory is still sound.

The elite meet in secret to party away their cares and perform ritual magic to absolve their consciences, but they always have, and the world hasn't ended yet.

There is strong laboratory evidence for mostly weak but almost universal powers of precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis, but the people claiming strong powers have more reason than most to fake them.

JFK wanted to limit the power of the central bank, tell the people about UFOs, and cooperate with the Russkies to go to the Moon, so everyone got together to kill him, but he was probably Abraham Lincoln in a past life, so he may already be back.

Crop circles are mostly faked, but the people who regularly make them feel compelled to do so by an unknown force.

Stratospheric aerosol geo-engineering seems like it might be a real thing, but if we're all being contaminated by metals falling from the sky and seeping into our brains, then the people saying that necessarily have addled brains, and shouldn't be trusted.

Bread and milk are very bad for you.  You shouldn't eat them.  But they're delicious.

9/11 was executed by Saudi terrorists with help from Mossad, the CIA, and members of the Bush administration, but everyone fucking knows that.

Some people are absolute jerks, and when the delicate equilibrium of your brain is tipped so that you stop breaking down endogenous DMT at the normal rate, you spontaneously trip out on your own brain juices and your asshole boss turns into a lizard.  But that still doesn't prove there aren't reptile people.

Unidentified Flying Objects are a mixture of psychological, social, optical, and piezoelectric phenomena coupled with the observer effect operating on chimeric projections of consciousness grounded in other layers of reality, distorted by terrestrial psy-ops instigated by boys with toys they want to keep secret.

But before I had found all of these qualified positions, I was willing to throw myself into one.  Dr. Steven Greer said that he could use a combination of remote viewing protocols with Vipassana meditation to call down these UFOs.  I had just read some relevant books, and I dimly recalled seeing something in my youth, so I decided to reverse engineer Greer's methods and see me some UFOs.  With a vague sense of addressing myself to interdimensional star people, I continually asked in my head for a period of several months if I could please see some saucers. It worked, but what do you say about that?

After years of coping with the psychological fallout of seeing a fuckton of flying saucers on request, I came to terms with the mystery of our perennial interaction with others from a distant land, whatever the truth of it is.  I made my peace with the unspeakable at last.  I had weathered the gauntlet of conspiracies and the occult, of all the impossibly crazy ideas a person can consider, and I had emerged half-sane and not completely unreasonable.

It was around this time that it was pointed out to me that the critical theory I had read at university as an apparent critique of "our" own culture was actually disproportionately written by members of an ethnocentric tribe that considers itself as distinct from, and superior to, our deplorable culture.  It wasn't sober self-criticism at all.

It was then that I realised that actually paranormal phenomena are relatively easy to discuss.  You may accept or deny them.  Jews can only be praised or ignored.  To do otherwise is to invite accusations of stupidity and evil, for having the misfortune of asking a question that has been rendered curiously cartoonish.

This has been my intellectual journey thus far.

Further Questions of Culture

This blog was created with the vague, perhaps competing notions of showcasing a portfolio of original creative and philosophical thought on the one hand, and venting the unspeakable on the other.  It's not impossible that an intellectual idiom can be hammered out by the white-hot fire of frustrated logic, but dissatisfaction with the discourse of peers, friends and family does not guarantee a more successful expression in angry isolation.  Highfalutin obscurantism is an inviting refuge for the disappointed intellect.  Striking a balance between the limits of the herd and the excesses of nature's dangerous experiments may be a fool's errand, but how else do society and the individual proceed forward together?

I safely and lazily retreated from either honing my craft or sharpening my knives. It seemed sufficient to simply mark the passing absurdities of our day, as if they could speak for themselves, but the pace of unbelievable things has accelerated beyond my means to document.  The things that are shocking, ridiculous, unprecedented, ingenious and idiotic have become too numerous to even point to, much less comprehensively comment upon, even less still to interpret into any sort of artistic form.

We are living in a self-generating satire, a comic construction so sublime as to offer proof of the Divine Comedian.  Parallel realities compete for dominance, gods and priests old and new battle for people's souls, and history is upended.  Opinions are cheap, truth is costly, evidence is abundant and arguments are counterfeit.  It is a comedy of errors, if only to observing disembodied eternal spirits.  It's frequently a hellish slog for those of us who must navigate it on the ground.

It's my preference and inclination to locate these incompatibilities of meaning in the airy arena of our thoughts, values, and culture. This has been my cultural and academic education.  The magic dirt of Canada makes us all Canadian.  My Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon heritage makes me see the world in a certain way, but I could see it differently, if not for the last several thousand years, and I would still be the same person.  Given enough time and the right presentation, any true idea can be communicated to anyone, once the language barrier of culture is overcome.  Right?

The idea works well enough on its own, but it does not permit expansion.  Where did the culture come from?  The people.  Where did the people come from?  The environment.  These values permitted these people to persist in this place.  Such adaptation is not arbitrary, but it may be more or less suitable to a different environment.

But what actually is an idea?  Where does it come from?  Does it bubble up from the neurons, or float down from the ideal world?

If the brain produces consciousness, and the brain is a product of evolution, and every other product of evolution expresses variance based on environment, it would be reasonable to expect different capacities to conceive, communicate and comprehend ideas among groups that have developed with different social and environmental pressures.  As an opposable thumb permits one to grasp an object, there are many heavy, slippery, misshapen ideas that one must exercise extra mental appendages in order to pick up.  Why should that capacity be universal?  The human form is highly variable in every other way.

If psyche and soul are indeed one, and all our thoughts emanate from a voice that ultimately resides in a higher realm, our truth must be found there too.  Assuming greater control of destiny attendant to a greater perception, our souls might be expected to shop for vehicles with the features necessary to satisfy our way of driving.  Speed, handling, gas mileage, all must be considered by the discerning driver.  A soul with any self-knowledge would pick the brain best-suited to its personality.  Even accounting for the possibility that we all have the same origin and destination, we are nonetheless taking different routes at our own pace.  Even the most cosmic perspective problematises universalism.

These are the further questions of culture.  Are perception and action profoundly informed by cultural differences?  Certainly.  Does that culture exist in a special space containing nothing but culture?  No.  Acceptance of either a biological foundation or spiritual roof to the house of culture forces the consideration that cultural perspective cannot be the fundamental source of difference.  Perspective comes from where you stand, and how tall, and how good your eyes are, not only where you turn your head.  You can try to walk a mile in someone's shoes, but you can't wear their feet.  If culture does not exist in a vacuum, it must be tied to things more or less tangible.

Whether biological animals invented culture to connect as a group, or God invented culture to separate into individuals, we have arrived at an impasse.  There is a traffic-jam of meaning, and road rage is getting scary.

This is very uncomfortable business.  The residues of old religions and the seeds of new ones overlap with science and politics in ways barely perceptible.  Knowledge of history and understanding of philosophy are inadequate to the volume of our rhetoric.  Passionate displays of moralising mask ignorance and apathy.  Some are emboldened, others terrified.  It is the best of times and the worst of times for truth.

It's a time for new stories, new ideas, new voices, new media.  The format will continually evolve, but this endeavour cannot continue as a quixotic catalogue.  My need to practice word-using must be brought to the task of considering the challenges of this crazy age, and to engage with them in a mode more real than bemused observation, sarcastic astonishment, or detached horror.

Humanity Got High After The Fall

Some of the most recent studies included in the database suggest that the herb entered the archaeological record of Japan and Eastern Europe at almost exactly the same time, between about 11,500 and 10,200 years ago.

Amor fati

Climate Change Spurred De-Urbanisation

The Indus Valley Civilisation has been pushed back at least 2500 years, with evidence of a pre-Harappan civilisation going back a thousand years more--enough time to develop bustling cities with basic amenities, trade, and a written language, and then lose them.

Graham Hancock’s Magicians of the Gods

In a very real way, it is this eclecticism (in higher education it is referred to as “border crossing”) that causes academics to dismiss his work. The boundaries between the academic disciplines are furiously guarded, and a researcher from one discipline, working outside of their home discipline, or more importantly criticizing, another discipline is considered a “breach of etiquette”. By using that criterion, Hancock is an extremely rude man.