The last post immediately jumped to the top of the blog statistics, and from the comments I seem to understand what point I have touched. Still, the principle was clear. Usually when this peak of interest occurs it means that I have touched a widespread sensation, of those that we carry around but we cannot detail.
Let’s start from the beginning. The government exists to govern, that is, to make decisions that impact citizens. The more decisions he makes, the more he governs, the fewer decisions he makes, the less he governs.
The trouble is, the government doesn’t have a monopoly on decisions. There are other bodies that want to make decisions about the lives of citizens. There are religions, for example, who want to do the same, and usually agree with the state to cooperate. But there are also the economic lobbies, to say, that are not joking. The fact that the state is the dominant military power in a given territory causes everyone to try to ally with the state. Good.
But there is a problem: what happens if every citizen starts making decisions?
It happens that the government struggles to impose its own, because no matter how much military power it has, it cannot force all citizens to do something. But the government wants to lead, so it has to make sure that citizens DON’T make decisions. In this way, the only decision is that of the government, and it does not conflict with that of the citizen because the citizen CANNOT DECIDE .
Let’s focus now on this statement: “the citizen does NOT know how to decide”.
Faced with any problem that requires a decision (a determination to do something, followed by the relative material behavior ) the citizen can enter into two modes: the decisive one and the imitative one.
- in a decisive way, the citizen decides which data to take into consideration, decides how to make the decision, takes it and implements it.
- in an imitative mode, the citizen decides that … he cannot decide. So, he’s going to imitate someone else’s decisions. I say he will imitate because it is not necessary to force him, so if he adopts the government’s decision he does so by imitation.
Consequently, the government must let the citizen in in imitative mode. One way is to use force. But this way produces rebellion, hatred, distrust and more. You can take away the information you need from the citizen, but this silence, this censorship is easily recognizable, produces mistrust and rebellions in turn.
There is therefore a third way: that of filling citizens with useless information and methodologies for making a decision. In that case, the citizen believes he is informed, but fails to make a decision, so he loses confidence in his own means and decides to wait for the state’s decision . He says “I can’t decide, so I’ll stick to other people’s decisions”.
But bringing the citizen in these conditions is difficult, because it is necessary that this mistrust, this lack of self-esteem in one’s decision-making capacity is instilled since youth. And therefore, the government begins by providing useless schooling: teaching Assyrians to a middle school child is completely useless, since there is no decision that can only be made if you know two or three things about Assyrians. But cutting out all the uselessness of education is difficult, so I will proceed in reverse: noting how many subjects would be USEFUL to make decisions in material life, but are NOT taught in schools.
- health education. We all have health and presumably we all want to live in good health. Having said that it would be obvious that the school should teach everyone at least a couple of useful decisions. I’m not saying that all graduates must be doctors (even if reaching the level of first aid course in my opinion in 5 years would be feasible), but if we take the 50 most frequent pathologies, we will probably be able to explain in 5 years that “if the symptom is this you have to call the doctor, and immediately do A, B, C but NOT X, Y, Z “. This would likely allow you to make right and early decisions. But precisely, it is the state and the pharmaceutical companies that want to make those decisions: if the citizen decides “it’s a simple flu, at 30 he’ll pass me in bed in two days”, like you fill him with 100 euros of useless drugs for a cold? Better to spend a year studying Assyrians, Babylonians and Egyptians. What decisions can be believed only by knowing about the Babylonians, do you know? Give me an example of a useful and profitable decision that you made because you knew about Ashurbanipal, and that you would not have been able to make without knowing it.
- legal education. Again, the purpose of “maturity” would be to build adult citizens. Good. Since we all fall under the rule of law, it would be nice if everyone knew at least the principles of law. I want to say that even without being a jurist it would be useful to know that in Italy the process is still defined as inquisitorial (instead of accusatory as in the USA, UK and other places), that there is a civil code that is not a criminal one, that those who cause unlawful damage is required to compensate it, that a contract can be canceled if a hierarchically superior source of law conflicts with the contract (no, you are not obliged to kill your neighbor just because they made you sign a contract that obliges you), the difference between renounceable rights and inalienable rights, and other things useful for making decisions such as “I sue him for damages”, or “I sue him! “, etc. Instead, it is preferred to teach Greek, Latin and other nightmares to anyone with a little dyslexia. Because “they teach to reason”, they say. I studied Latin in high school, but I can’t remember a single useful decision that I could take only because I translated short pieces of Tacitus, and which I could not have taken without. (After all, if I had listened to Tacitus I would not be living in Germany, a choice of which I am happy).
- financial education. All students will find themselves dealing with money. It would be nice if they had some financial education. Know what an investment is and what it is not, instead of buying assets that lose value over time using a loan that pays interest, knowing how to calculate an ROI, knowing the difference between capex and opex, knowing that a budget is made starting from expenses , etc. Instead we have entrepreneurs who use the credit line (which pays interest) to pay fixed costs (rent, electricity, etc.). And some principles of risk management. But if we did that, we wouldn’t have seniors putting all their savings into the same investment from the same bank. Better to teach Charlemagne. We all made financial decisions that we could only make because we know who Charlemagne was, right? Give me an example of a financial decision that you could only make by knowing who Charlemagne was, but not without knowing it.
- food education. We all eat. It might be interesting to discuss whether it is part of health education, but in my opinion it is a separate dimension. With a population unable to understand that there are no superfoods , there is no chance that a glass of anything will “detox”. We have people who can’t tell me that olive oil contains ~ 100% fat, because an oil is a liquid fat, but they think it’s weight loss and they can’t read the label on the products. For example, to understand that a bottle of coke contains the same sugars as two pasta dishes. Besides, he doesn’t understand why he gets fat. For the government and the food industries it is certainly better to have studied Ciullo D’Alcamo, but I do not remember the times in which I survived food poisoning just because I sang what my heart dictated.
- logic education. We will all find ourselves making decisions. And if you make a decision, it’s false to say you didn’t make it. Having the information you need is essential, but if you don’t know what to do with it, it becomes difficult to make decisions. The sense of helplessness of those who have the information but cannot come to the conclusion is called “confusion”. And no, philosophy does not help: it does not have the purpose or the task of reaching conclusions, much less making decisions. Knowing the difference between a sufficient condition and a necessary one, and knowing at least the main logical fallacies, the main logical laws, is much more useful. Unless you can give me an example of a useful decision that you only knew how to make because you knew that according to Hegel the universe is rational, and that according to Leibnitz we live in the best of all possible worlds, but you could not have made it without knowing it . The truth is that most people today get lost in indecision because they do not know how to reach conclusions despite having the necessary data. And this is very useful if you are the government and you DO NOT want citizens to make decisions for themselves.
- choice of sources. All students will read stuff after they get out of school. I am not saying that everyone should become a champion of exegetics or scientific epistemology, but knowing the difference between a credible source and a Ron Hubbard book might help. Being in 2020 and hearing that 99.7% of scientists believe in global warming so it’s true you can’t feel it: in reality, 99.7% of publications with data and peer reviews say it. The opinion of the scientists is irrelevant, what matters are the experimental data. But today we hear people (who consider themselves educated) use the number of scientists as a supporting argument, rather than the amount of data collected. But if someone knew how to distinguish a source from a non-source, he would know (for example) that the Bible is NOT a source, and this is not very popular. Instead, it is preferred to study religion, as if in your life you had never made a useful decision knowing that Elisha asked God to send two bears to kill 42 children who teased him because he was bald, (instead of asking to have his hair back: not even he could make useful decisions, it seems).
In reality, it could be continued by showing how the school floods children with information that is NOT USED to make useful decisions for themselves , systematically omitting all useful ones.
The result is a confused citizen, who cannot distinguish a useful data from a useless data, who remains hypnotized by a useless data such as GDP (can you decide on your shop / company on the basis of GDP? serves this purpose), who cannot understand that the employment rate and the unemployment rate are not complementary in the whole population able to work, (one can change without the other increasing), people who believe that the cow produces more ‘methane than what would come out of the decomposition of the same dead grass (due to the exact same bacteria that decompose the grass inside the cow) and accuses them of global warming, and many other things that would not pass to an anticazzate filter.
But the aim is not only to build an anti-bullshit filter: even having the relevant and truthful information, it is necessary to put them together with a reliable method to build a decision. But even in this case, the school will have filled the students’ heads with nihilism, idealism, lullism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Marxism, which sometimes contain logical rules, but not systematic methods for making decisions.
So you get a citizen who does not know what information to choose in the river that is thrown on him, and when he finds himself with a problem he stops because:
- not sure if he has the right information.
- not sure if the method it uses is working.
A citizen who feels unable to make a decision is the perfect citizen of any government that wants to make decisions FOR HER.
And it is precisely the case of those who cannot decide when it is time to stay at home, given their state of health, their age, mortality statistics and the number of free places in resuscitation:
- he does not know why precisely these data, and not what happens in Topania Montana, and not a statistic on how many dead were Marxists and how many Nicians, and not the number of ambulances per capita, and not the others. He’s not sure he picked the right data.
- he does not know why to use a propositional logic but not Hegel’s or Marx’s thought, since at school they taught him both, and as if that weren’t enough they also told him that they all have the same effectiveness. (which is true because their effectiveness is always zero).
- he doesn’t know HOW to use those methods they taught him in school. Even assuming that Llull’s thought may be useful, no one has explained to the student how to apply it to this situation.
In this situation, the citizen KNOWS many things of which only very few are useful, he cannot distinguish the useful ones from the others, even when he succeeds he does not know how to get a decision out of us, he enters the condition of “I DON’T KNOW”, and this brings him into mode ‘imitative, I mean … waits for someone else to make the decision for him.
The perfect citizen, who came out of an educational system designed for this.
Which is precisely why the government gives them this education. Teaching confusion and uselessness is the way in which the government holds the citizen in imitative mode, which allows the government to make decisions without resistance.
The citizen who, faced with a logical conclusion, asks “but how do you KNOW it”, instead of asking “but how can you UNDERSTAND it”, simply because he cannot understand that the knowledge necessary to make a decision can be GENERATED, and not simply learned from who made the decision for you.
