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Revolution, not resolutions

I say this often and it’s frankly not the best note to end the year on, but we are the most coddled people in the history of people. Or maybe it is a good note – liberating to realize just how trivial are so many of our chains.

Drone panics. Cruise ships, generally. Online gambling. Vaccines: How do they work? Masks: you’re not the boss of me!

Meanwhile, the inability to even countenance any sort of reckoning with the climate crisis as it is in motion and been in view for three decades represents just a haunting boredom. Nothing else to do, all needs met, no entertainment quite good enough, hey – let’s allow the most craven, unqualified people imaginable to be in charge just to see what happens.

Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

Just as someone in pain is linked by his groans to the present moment (and is entirely outside past and future), so someone bursting out in such ecstatic laughter is without memory and without desire.

All churches, all underwear manufacturers, all generals, all political parties, are in agreement about that kind of laughter, and all of them rush to put the image of the two laughing runners on the billboards advertising their religion, their products, their ideology, their nation, their sex, their dishwashing powder.

To see the devil as a partisan of Evil and an angel as a warrior on the side of Good is to accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are of course more complicated than that.

Things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things (a Moscow-trained Marxist believing in horoscopes), make us laugh. In origin, laughter is thus of the devil’s domain. It has something malicious about it (things suddenly turning out different from what they pretended to be), but to some extent also a beneficent relief (things are less weighty than they appeared to be, letting us live more freely, no longer oppressing us with their austere seriousness).

If you go away from a row, you can still come back into it. A row is an open formation. But a circle closes up, and if you go away from it, there is no way back. It is not by chance that the planets move in circles and that a rock coming loose from one of them goes inexorably away, carried off by centrifugal force. Like a meteorite broken off from a planet, I left the circle and have not yet stopped falling.’

Between austere seriousness and falling, find a place to dig into the oppression – and your role in perpetuating it. How does a better you relate to a better world? If that’s an embarrassing question, we’re too scared of humiliation and hide behind the wrong things that never saved anyone. Don’t be afraid to get it wrong; try something not in the book. There is plenty that should be rejected, just find somewhere to start.

Pro tip: It’s always the night before Christmas.

Image via Bloomberg, but they’re only the messenger.

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Young Places

Looking for something else by G.B. Shaw, I came across this essay, Treatise on Parents and Children. This is from a mid to early section, What We Do Not Teach and Why.

To my mind, a glance at the subjects now taught in schools ought to
convince any reasonable person that the object of the lessons is to
keep children out of mischief, and not to qualify them for their part
in life as responsible citizens of a free State. It is not possible
to maintain freedom in any State, no matter how perfect its original
constitution, unless its publicly active citizens know a good deal of
constitutional history, law, and political science, with its basis of
economics. If as much pains had been taken a century ago to make us
all understand Ricardo’s law of rent as to learn our catechisms, the
face of the world would have been changed for the better. But for
that very reason the greatest care is taken to keep such beneficially
subversive knowledge from us, with the result that in public life we
are either place-hunters, anarchists, or sheep shepherded by wolves.

But it will be observed that these are highly controversial subjects.
Now no controversial subject can be taught dogmatically. He who knows
only the official side of a controversy knows less than nothing of its
nature. The abler a schoolmaster is, the more dangerous he is to his
pupils unless they have the fullest opportunity of hearing another
equally able person do his utmost to shake his authority and convict
him of error.

At present such teaching is very unpopular. It does not exist in
schools; but every adult who derives his knowledge of public affairs
from the newspapers can take in, at the cost of an extra halfpenny,
two papers of opposite politics. Yet the ordinary man so dislikes
having his mind unsettled, as he calls it, that he angrily refuses to
allow a paper which dissents from his views to be brought into his
house. Even at his club he resents seeing it, and excludes it if it
happens to run counter to the opinions of all the members. The result
is that his opinions are not worth considering. A churchman who never
reads The Freethinker very soon has no more real religion than the
atheist who never reads The Church Times. The attitude is the same in
both cases: they want to hear nothing good of their enemies;
consequently they remain enemies and suffer from bad blood all their
lives; whereas men who know their opponents and understand their case,
quite commonly respect and like them, and always learn something from
them.

Here, again, as at so many points, we come up against the abuse of
schools to keep people in ignorance and error, so that they may be
incapable of successful revolt against their industrial slavery. The
most important simple fundamental economic truth to impress on a child
in complicated civilizations like ours is the truth that whoever
consumes goods or services without producing by personal effort the
equivalent of what he or she consumes, inflicts on the community
precisely the same injury that a thief produces, and would, in any
honest State, be treated as a thief, however full his or her pockets
might be of money made by other people. The nation that first teaches
its children that truth, instead of flogging them if they discover it
for themselves, may have to fight all the slaves of all the other
nations to begin with; but it will beat them as easily as an
unburdened man with his hands free and with all his energies in full
play can beat an invalid who has to carry another invalid on his back.

This, however, is not an evil produced by the denial of children’s
rights, nor is it inherent in the nature of schools. I mention it
only because it would be folly to call for a reform of our schools
without taking account of the corrupt resistance which awaits the
reformer.

A word must also be said about the opposition to reform of the vested
interest of the classical and coercive schoolmaster. He, poor wretch,
has no other means of livelihood; and reform would leave him as a
workman is now left when he is superseded by a machine. He had
therefore better do what he can to get the workman compensated, so as
to make the public familiar with the idea of compensation before his
own turn comes.