Business and Biology teach us that nature is fickle. You can have an excellent business idea and it falls to the ground with a resounding thud when you discover that you cannot market it or, for some reason that you had not foreseen, no-one is buying it. The businessman has many ideas and reaps the rewards of those that succeed. Biology is similar, giant dinosaurs walk the earth, lords of all that they encounter and then an asteroid strikes and the "fittest" are suddenly the warm blooded mammals that cowered in holes in the ground. In business and biology it is the diversity of ideas and forms that leads to success and survival. This is an organic world.
Life at school is the opposite of the Business and Biological model. School teaches us that the world can operate according to fixed rules that, if followed, can lead the student to qualifications and success in the world. It is little wonder that those who graduate from school would believe that the way to govern a country is to have a headmaster in charge with a staffroom full of advisors. The institutional approach to governance, whether it be Nazism or Communism is very attractive to the older child because it is all that they know. It is no coincidence that communism occurred along with the introduction of mass education in Europe.
What the child misses is that, in free societies, the institutional government in schools is a creation of those who live in the world of business for the protection and development of their children. They divert the profits that they make from their struggles with the randomness of nature into a safe environment for their children but the actual world is not safe or predictable.
If institutional governance is applied to whole countries they must inevitably collapse. Anyone who visited the ex-communist countries in the nineteen nineties could see this collapse. Many of these countries had done little more than repair the war damage since 1945. The reason that these countries collapsed is that they were based on the belief that the world could be predicted and the economy commanded from the top (eg: on Marxism). Any businessman or biologist could tell you that this is an impossibility, indeed, only a child could believe such a thing.
I see the persistence of communist ideology in the West as a form of Stockholm Syndrome where the child, having been captive in the protected and regulated education system, adopts its values as if they could be applied to all of their life. Any problems in the world at large lead the child to retreat to the institution rather than to find a real solution. Perversely the communist child sees themselves as a rebel when nothing could be further from the truth - the communist simply fails to grow up. Scarcely anyone nowdays becomes communist later in life, it is the ideology of schoolkids, students and academics, especially of professional students for whom it is a justification for their "failure to launch".
All schools, colleges and civil service offices might have a sign at the door that reads "Not to be confused with a viable way of life"!
Schools can cure this disconnect between education and reality by including competition in their activities as a gentle lesson in the ways of the real world. Students can learn that if you train faithfully and are blessed with an excellent physique a slightly strained ankle can deprive you of the fruits of all your hard work in a sports competition. Unpredictability hurts and deprives and we must learn how to cope with it. It is interesting that socialist governments tend to ban competitive activities at school further increasing the disconnect between education and reality and recruiting more of the innocent to their institutional politics.
The institutional mentality is also at work in the move towards globalisation. There are global risks such as terrorism and nuclear war so the globaliser, egged on by Machiavellian international business interests, believes that the solution is to have a single global government which, being somehow omnipotent, predicts all the risks and suppresses them before they can hurt anyone. What the institutional mentality cannot understand is that the world is inherently unpredictable and, like the communists, the global government will eventually crush all freedom to prevent risk. In fact globalisation is an embryonic form of global institutionalisation, like communism, and should be stopped.
As in business and biology, the answer to risk and unpredictably is freedom and diversity. This freedom and diversity can be coupled with the rule of international law to regulate the relations between states to prevent terrorism and war. This is an organic world, it needs the light touch of the gardener, not the iron boot of the nineteenth century ideologue.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the education system and communism is the way that so many political comedians and academics from the humanities espouse this faith. The average political comedian would be arrested in any communist state and any uppity academic would find all paths to advancement blocked. This shows how the education system has got so deeply embedded in the minds of some children that they become bankrupt of any alternative ideas and cannot even see the paradox of thinking they are a 'rebel' when they support an inherently tyrannical system of government that would regard them as an enemy.
The school history curriculum might also be amended to include the appalling record of the communist states (internationalist socialism) as well as the disaster of nazism (nationalist socialism).
See
Communism did not deliver what it promised
Communism and the education system
Life at school is the opposite of the Business and Biological model. School teaches us that the world can operate according to fixed rules that, if followed, can lead the student to qualifications and success in the world. It is little wonder that those who graduate from school would believe that the way to govern a country is to have a headmaster in charge with a staffroom full of advisors. The institutional approach to governance, whether it be Nazism or Communism is very attractive to the older child because it is all that they know. It is no coincidence that communism occurred along with the introduction of mass education in Europe.
What the child misses is that, in free societies, the institutional government in schools is a creation of those who live in the world of business for the protection and development of their children. They divert the profits that they make from their struggles with the randomness of nature into a safe environment for their children but the actual world is not safe or predictable.
If institutional governance is applied to whole countries they must inevitably collapse. Anyone who visited the ex-communist countries in the nineteen nineties could see this collapse. Many of these countries had done little more than repair the war damage since 1945. The reason that these countries collapsed is that they were based on the belief that the world could be predicted and the economy commanded from the top (eg: on Marxism). Any businessman or biologist could tell you that this is an impossibility, indeed, only a child could believe such a thing.
I see the persistence of communist ideology in the West as a form of Stockholm Syndrome where the child, having been captive in the protected and regulated education system, adopts its values as if they could be applied to all of their life. Any problems in the world at large lead the child to retreat to the institution rather than to find a real solution. Perversely the communist child sees themselves as a rebel when nothing could be further from the truth - the communist simply fails to grow up. Scarcely anyone nowdays becomes communist later in life, it is the ideology of schoolkids, students and academics, especially of professional students for whom it is a justification for their "failure to launch".
All schools, colleges and civil service offices might have a sign at the door that reads "Not to be confused with a viable way of life"!
Schools can cure this disconnect between education and reality by including competition in their activities as a gentle lesson in the ways of the real world. Students can learn that if you train faithfully and are blessed with an excellent physique a slightly strained ankle can deprive you of the fruits of all your hard work in a sports competition. Unpredictability hurts and deprives and we must learn how to cope with it. It is interesting that socialist governments tend to ban competitive activities at school further increasing the disconnect between education and reality and recruiting more of the innocent to their institutional politics.
The institutional mentality is also at work in the move towards globalisation. There are global risks such as terrorism and nuclear war so the globaliser, egged on by Machiavellian international business interests, believes that the solution is to have a single global government which, being somehow omnipotent, predicts all the risks and suppresses them before they can hurt anyone. What the institutional mentality cannot understand is that the world is inherently unpredictable and, like the communists, the global government will eventually crush all freedom to prevent risk. In fact globalisation is an embryonic form of global institutionalisation, like communism, and should be stopped.
As in business and biology, the answer to risk and unpredictably is freedom and diversity. This freedom and diversity can be coupled with the rule of international law to regulate the relations between states to prevent terrorism and war. This is an organic world, it needs the light touch of the gardener, not the iron boot of the nineteenth century ideologue.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the education system and communism is the way that so many political comedians and academics from the humanities espouse this faith. The average political comedian would be arrested in any communist state and any uppity academic would find all paths to advancement blocked. This shows how the education system has got so deeply embedded in the minds of some children that they become bankrupt of any alternative ideas and cannot even see the paradox of thinking they are a 'rebel' when they support an inherently tyrannical system of government that would regard them as an enemy.
The school history curriculum might also be amended to include the appalling record of the communist states (internationalist socialism) as well as the disaster of nazism (nationalist socialism).
See
Communism did not deliver what it promised
Communism and the education system
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