Education
On an addiction scale from candy to crack cocaine, Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired, describes tech as “closer to crack cocaine.”
Rotten STEM: How Technology Corrupts Education
We indoctrinate our citizens to the horrors of mazes early and often.
Our first step is to imprison our children, starting from around the age of five, for the bulk of their waking hours. During that time, all of their behaviors are tightly controlled, and they are taught that their success in life depends on satisfying the arbitrary demands of the person put in charge of them, who will mostly use negative selection to determine outcomes. When asked to justify doing this, the reply is typically that if you do not do this to your child now, your child will be ill-prepared to be subjected to increasingly intense versions of it as they progress through the educational system.
You had better suffer and kill your soul now, or else you won’t be prepared to suffer worse things later.
Once taught that life is about obeying arbitrary dictates and doing work with no object level application whatsoever, giving most of your life over to arbitrary schedules and demands, and gathering together credentials and approvals necessary to get the labels that get others to give you status and compensation, where everyone is on the lookout for reasons to put black marks on your record, you are ready to work in a maze without recoiling in horror.
This process also saddles its students with massive debts that force them to then take jobs they hate, and gives them credentials that give them an advantage in narrow rent extraction in one area, preventing choice or exit.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/01/25/ten-causes-of-mazedom/
All of this the parents will accept, as canceling out years of their children’s lives, which otherwise would have to be genuinely lived, with all the risks that genuine life must run. It also frees the parents. They may, with a clear conscience, go forth bravely to be what is called “themselves,” along with millions of others who are being themselves, working at jobs that don’t need to be done among people they don’t really like. That is the Real World, and the routine of the school day and the night of homework prepare us for it.
Anthony Esolen: Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
Mangement
See, once you are at a certain level of experience, the difference between a vice-president, an executive vice-president, and a general manager is negligible. It has relatively little to do with ability as such. People are all good at that level. They wouldn’t be there without that ability. So it has little to do with ability or with business experience and so on. All have similar levels of ability, drive, competence, and so on. What happens is that people perceive in others what they like—operating styles, lifestyles, personalities, ability to get along. Now these are all very subjective judgments. And what happens is that if a person in authority sees someone else’s guy as less competent than his own guy, well, he’ll always perceive him that way. And he’ll always pick—as a result—his own guy when the chance to do so comes up.
(Location 1013, Quote #87, Moral Mazes) More
China
Jin Ping Mei
Hsi-men Ch’ing’s literary knowledge is barely sufficient for dealing with his business documents, he cannot read an official letter without assistance. He nor his friends have the slightest interest in art, literature or other intellectual pursuits, and neither have their women.
Thus in the description of their sexual relations the author had to confine himself to depicting a rather inarticulate, carnal love. Hsi-men Ch’ing has a kind of jovial affection for his women, but pictures of deep passion, let alone passion accompanied by spiritual love, would have been out of place in that novel.
Robert van Gulik: https://www.amazon.com/Sexual-Life-Ancient-China-D/dp/9004126015
Filial Piety
But the effort to divest the supernatural implications from an ancient religious cult was not altogether successful. One evidence is the classical procedure of sacrificial vigil and meditation to induce the religious experience of communion with the spirits. But the critical proof was the retaining of the supernatural notions of the cult by the vast majority of the people, including a good portion of the traditional Confucianists. In interpreting the secular or religious nature of the cult, Hsun Tzu had to distinguish between the Superior Men and the common people, with supernatural belief causing a gap between the two. Neither Hsun Tzu nor subsequent generations of Confucian rationalists put forth any suggestions as to how to close the gap so that both the Superior Men and common people would take the same nontheistic, enlightened view.
The Confucians seemed to have realized vaguely the modern psychological and sociological views that symbolization of certain moral values by such cultic representations as belief in the soul is instrumental in the perpetuation of these values as a stable popular tradition.
[C.-K.-Yang]-Religion-in-Chinese-Society_-A-Study
Oh for tuna 