Autopsy of an Education

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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.

Germany Still Waiting For Economic Miracle

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The Gynocratic Nobility

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My Generation, Baby

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Chatbot Overturns 160,000 Parking Tickets

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Iceland Elects Historian

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Since Iceland jailed its bankers, leaders the world over hope you won't notice that "Iceland is on track to become the first European country that suffered in the financial meltdown to 'surpass its pre-crisis peak of economic output.'"

European Jewish Congress Wants United Europe

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Industrial Farming Unsustainable

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Academic Apostate Doesn't Hate His Roots

“I could see the same pattern in the many failed left-wing revolutions of Latin America and elsewhere. By combining actual travel with the historical study of socialism and revolution, I succeeded in disabusing myself of the utopian notions that fatally attract people to leftist ideas.”

Closing Borders Will Drive Germans To Incest

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Sweden Baffled By Too Many Men

In the natural course of things, there are usually slightly more women than men in a given population.  This standard has been established over millions of years of evolution to be about right for the needs of the species.  The country of Sweden has a curious case on their hands, where the natural order of things has been upended, and for some mysterious reason there are more men than women now.  No one knows why.

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.

Multipolarity is Orthodox

While the Catholic Pope Francis calls walls unchristian and washes the feet of migrants, the Russian Orthodox Church makes the ethical argument for sovereignty in the face of the financial and cultural pressures of transnational elites.

"9/11 Was An Inside Job!" Say Saudis

Almost fifteen years after the event, the terrorist attack on the WTC in New York is still being used by all parties as a political weapon in a dangerous war of words.

The Canadian Lückenpresse

If you live in the CBC matrix, you are living in a bubble that will soon be pricked by reality. A reality that even the CBC cannot hold at bay. Your trusted information gatekeepers will not be able to stop the truth from busting through and overwhelming you. The shock will render you bewildered and paralytic. You will not be able to make sense of what has befallen you, much in the way that the establishment media pundits are dumbfounded by Trump's success. How could this happen?

Belgian Police Warn Against Liking Things

Facebook's helpful new feature allowing users to react with greater nuance has the coincidental effect of providing deeper data on user mental states, allowing algorithms to tailor the selection and placement of advertisements to take advantage of their moods.

Criminals Paid to Move to the Suburbs

The plan is to make the bad part of town move to the good part of town to make it good.  It didn't work in the test case, but that's still the plan.