Custom & Customer (Part 2)

Mere Credulity

‘We willingly reduced ourselves to our conscious or subconscious desires and trying to satisfy them at all times. We have forgotten that being human is a lot more than that.’

(Zsolt Babocsai)

In his summary, critique and practical lessons from Adam Curtis’ ‘The Century Of The Self’, Zsolt Babocsai comments:

‘Bernays showed American corporations how to sell a product (or service) to a consumer’s emotions rather than his intellect. He played the central role in a concerted effort by American corporations to transform America from a “need-based” to a “desire-based” society in order to increase goods consumption - linking products to the irrational forces in the human subconscious. The exact same methods were applied in politics.’

Those exact same methods were also applied via Progressive Education Philosophy, Theory & Pedagogy to the conditioning of generations of teachers in their credentialing process and the formation of school pupils through the imposition of Affective Learning throughout their curriculum:

Cognitive Education was deliberately vilified & purged from Schools under Progressive Education Philosophy. For more about that read here:

https://twitter.com/thepalmerworm/status/1672596641621200897?s=61

and watch here:

With Education predicated on affective engagement, students are not only conditioned to passive stimulus-response gratification, but also, inculcated into a pernicious assumption, then expectation, now demand, for a curriculum which is entirely Self referential:

A Social Justice curriculum which grooms them, through emotional manipulation & Maoist Thought Reform techniques branded for Western consumption (see the above link to John Dewey’s role in creating preparatory Pedagogy for this, eliminating resistance and enhancing receptivity in generations of teachers & students).

Edward Thorndike (below) understood how to condition ‘pleasure’ & ‘gratification’ response, key for advertisers to manipulate in consumers. Why was this necessary to implement in Education Theory & Pedagogy? Because in order to uphold National Governance enabling & safeguarding Individual Liberty (not the same as ‘Democratic Freedom’!) the requisite Education for students was one that they needed, but not necessarily wanted:

‘This thinking favours more a society which operates on the basis of gratification than on the basis of reason or responsibility’

The Customer As King (Selfism/Immanence) is a terrible Education Philosophy for a pupil whose capacity to maintain focused awareness, sustained attention, logical reasoning skills, discernment, comprehension, articulate expression and considerate civil dialogue are all lacking - as we’ve seen with the Woke mob rants recently illustrated not only in protest brawls, but also Elite School Formal Debate, a consumer (self-referential) mindset as Education Dogma is the path to hysteria, barbarism and tyranny. As it was designed to do by Education Theorists throughout the past century:

As Paul C Vitz identified in; ‘Psychology As Religion: The Cult Of Selfism’, the primacy of Self Esteem raising and Personal (then post 60s, ‘Collective’) cut students off from the very methods of learning, comprehension & expression necessary for healthy development as functionally literate, rounded, responsible, independent members of the Republic. They could no longer access the intellectual & cultural heritage of the country they lived in, or the cultures which for centuries had shaped it.

Their history (and with it their foundational metaphysic, philosophy & bodies of knowledge) had been nullified by the all consuming solvent; Social Science, heavily financed (and staffed) to gut out & reorient discrete curriculum disciplines. To bind and orient them to the Progressive Geopolitical purpose of Globalization by means of the ‘attainment’ of Social Justice, Decolonization (and now Equity).

A few islands of sanity have retained their autonomy to deliver a traditional, classical curriculum; schools and colleges not dependent on Government funding. So why have their graduates not been a much louder, more impactful force for pushback against the overwhelming decimation (now prohibition) from Education of that which enriched Them, furnishing Them with the requisite development and accomplishment for flourishing? I think I’m out on a limb here, I don’t see anyone else saying this but here goes; because their engagement with heritage bodies of knowledge and expression was perhaps undertaken as mere custom; This Is What We Do, Because We ‘Ought’, Because It Always Has Been Done, Because It’s Aesthetically Pleasing. That is not in essence different as rationale from the Stimulus-Response Selfism consumer gratification of Progressive Curriculum. It’s beautifully presented cuisine, without the necessary nourishment needed to assimilate & digest what that beautiful package was originally created to convey. Thereby, no cultural transmission of legacy, no inclination toward preservation in the face of other pretty packaged curriculum ‘experiences’. Ultimately no ability to fulfil the responsibility and duty of everyone who benefits from a knowledge rich curriculum, in a well ordered, inspiring learning environment/community - TO PASS THAT TO THE NEXT GENERATION, UNCORRUPTED. But perhaps many of these fortunate beneficiaries of a Classical Education over the past century didn’t actually benefit (apart from entryism into a Circle conducive to “Career Success” in purely material & status terms - terms which, if required, even saw them assisting the demolition of the very Education Philosophy & Pedagogy They’d benefitted from). When the Education you’ve had remains mere custom, cosmetic rather than functional, why and how would you even begin to understand how to fight for its preservation and renewal? What utility is a mere custom in the shiny New Age of Globalism?

Perhaps you secure tickets for the Opera, the Symphony, the Gallery but your engagement goes no further than the virtuosity of the performers. Maybe you’re a member of a Book Club with a mission to ‘read the Classics’, but why? What has any of that taught you about navigating the current (and past) Cultural Wars and the tyrannical control of domestic population through the Education System at large and the Media? How has that oriented your own consumption of Ideas, Ideals and Belief?

How did your ‘Classical Education’ equip you with the necessary Philosophical Understanding and the strength of character to resist the tyrannical brainwashing and coercion of the last 75 years? It should have because content wise, it’s all there in the traditional bodies of knowledge. Something however, appears to be lost in ‘Instruction’ and in ‘Application’, because……..yet again….here we are, in an epidemic of Mere Credulity…..

As the Polish anticommunist dissident Czeslaw Milosz warned: