Presently, we are pleased to bring you the third installment of the opus by Mexican Poet & Philosopher Alberto Revés. In the last issue, Señor Revés adroitly illustrated the five reality filters of the self-organizing brainwash machine. We now continue with his perspicacious treatise.

Within all of the above realms, an overlying tactic is to falsely frame any debate in false terms. In any debate of two things there are four possible points of view:

Side A-Side A’s version of Side A
Side A’s version of Side B

Side B-Side B’s version of Side B
Side B’s version of Side A

Almost universally, media pundits frame the debate, presenting only Side A’s versions. They then say that both sides have been presented. Or often on political TV or radio programs that claim to present both sides, the person presenting the establishment point of view gets the last rebuttal in the segment. Or in editing, the segments are cut so as to misrepresent the other side.

The Black Art of Conformity

“May we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations or some epochs of civilization-possibly the whole of mankind-have become neurotic?”
-Sigmund Freud

John Taylor Gatto delves deeply into the Public Fool System and illustrates what its true functions are and that the perpetrators who initiated it have succeeded brilliantly in their mission. When private citizens complain that the schools are failing, it is true that the schools are failing at what they believe the schools’ purpose to be. However, the mission of the PFS is vastly different than what most people would imagine. Private schools are included in this category. Their structure is nearly identical, although they do generally succeed more at teaching academics to students. Following are the Seven Lessons of the Public Fool System:

Lesson #1-Confusion

A continuous train of facts is paraded before the children, with no regard for or discussion of magnitude or meaning. The child knows the facts but does not know why.

Lesson #2-Class Position

The child is told his place in the hierarchy. Envy the ‘bright’ students and despise the ‘slow’ students.

Lesson #3-Indifference

The student is taught not to care too much. Obedience to the schedule requires that enthusiasm for or interest in a subject be secondary to the superior logic of the clock.

Lesson #4-Emotional Dependency

Through rewards (stars, honors, prizes) and punishment (frowns, disgraces, lower position in hierarchy), the judgement of right and wrong, value and worth, is wielded by external authority. There is no intrinsic goodness, only what the teacher gives to you. The student is led to believe that self-evaluation is impossible.

Lesson #5-Intellectual Dependency

Only experts can decide what is good for the student to know. Good people wait for the teacher to tell them what to do. Successful children believe what they are told with a minimum of resistance.

Lesson #6-Provisional Self-esteem

Confident people make bad conformists. Self-respect must be dependent upon expert opinion. Students must be told what they are worth. Self-evaluation is rejected.

Lesson #7-No Privacy

The student spends most waking hours under surveillance. There is no private time or private space in which non-conformity can flourish.

“By pouring their derision upon everything we did, exposing every secret, however carefully hidden by the kids!”
-Pink Floyd

The student is told who, what, when, where and how. She is never told why any of it matters. She is told to learn it in order to pass the exams in order to go to college in order to get a good job, that is, conform as part of the economic system.

Worldview formation is so critical to the operation of the cultural and economic juggernaut of Western Civilization that no expense has been spared in the structuring of the conditioning system. While the reality filters work upon the adult generally, the seven lesson of the PFS works on the young minds. However, the real medicine begins as doses as soon as the baby is born, and possibly, if one incorporates quantum theory into the picture, while baby is in utero. You see, our worldview is administered to us as doses of ultimate truth through everyone and everything we come into contact with. A seemingly extreme example would be how you perceive a rock, whether you view it as animate or inanimate, whether it possesses consciousness or not. Your reaction will tell you more about the worldview given to you than any critical thinking ability you believe you may possess.

People operate at all times as products of their worldview, without even knowing it. This is because one’s worldview is so basic to their existence and so subtlely and gradually reinforced through daily doses that it goes unnoticed and is thus hidden in plain sight. Daniel Quinn calls it the “whisperings of Mother Culture.” Imagine our culture, in which frequency of events is considered a mere function of an impersonal probability matrix, versus a culture in which everything is a result of power shifting amongst spirits and gods.

While our worldview supports a linear perception of time in which inferior systems disappeared through a process of “natural selection”, we would conclude that a culture based on power shifting amongst spirits and gods was a relic of inferior logic that disappeared naturally. We would conclude that our present, supposedly rational and scientific Cartesian/Newtonian paradigm was, in fact, the distillation of the ultimate truth. Even if the “natural disappearance” of other worldviews was expedited through genocide, one could still conclude that the “truth” of social Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest was responsible for that disappearance. The messy business of death, disappearance, and displacement could then be categorized euphemistically as the unpleasant effects of the ultimately good cleansing process.

However, when one begins to dig and analyze with one’s good senses, and throw off the chains of their own myopic culture, events usually prove to be of a conspiratorial nature, with the powerful people advancing their agenda at the expense of the many. This thought generally causes more timid souls to pass wearily by the gates of knowledge, for to enter through the gates would entail an unstitching of the fabric of reality, of what your culture tells you is real. To be cast upon the sea unprepared might cause even brave souls to crumble. Prepared for the trip, though, an adventure awaits one willing to embark on the journey.

This article first appeared in the Sept 11, 2006 print edition of Backwoods Hipster.

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