The Tree of Knowledge

have we ever considered a pruning?

I failed. The overdue “article” I’d visioned did get some intense effort, but I could not put the ‘there’ there. If one goes about making a suggestion based on an allegory, one had better be “damn sure” the allegory is very well thought through. Thought through to a true demonstrable understanding of the real world situation the allegory represents. Then and only then, can the allegory be crafted, if one can muster the required imagination.

So I am going to take Inspector Kemp’s advice, be “damn sure”, and put the thought far at the back of a high and dusty shelf.

But a persistent sub-thought behind the “prune the tree of knowledge” theme remains. It is the wonderfully scented phrase “follow your dreams”.

How often do we step back and look at the depth and breadth of what follows some time period after offering the platitude “follow your dreams” to the aspiring? What happens long-term when such a phrase is the fuzzy guiding principle for educational and career decisions across a population? We have data around here somewhere, yes? How long has the utterance of “follow your dreams” tacitly supported whatever is the underlying advice? I would offer an estimate of perhaps fifty or sseventy years. Since that golden time post WWII when the US had the worlds only functioning economy. Since that dream time full of the promise of the atomic age, flying cars, all that bit. Looking back it appears there was a large contingent who smoked up the dope of pure optimism, and it was a far more powerful and addictive drug than our finest social scientists and psychologists could imagine. If a reader can cite a paper indicating anyone saw this coming, I happily stand corrected.

Oh, thank you reader, the paper is by Dr. Kcops. Entitled “Alternative to ‘Follow your dreams’, as a north star to guide Americas students”, it remains universally ignored. So here we find ourselves, in the darkness of the most absolute and total repression of Dr. Kcops hypothetical paper. The repression would include not only the original work, cited above, and but all thinking, analysis and introspection which would follow. The repression does two things. First, it denies us any ability to make course corrections should it be shown “follow your dreams”, and the various accompanying mantras, have not produced the wonderful outcomes the purveyors “sort of” promised, wink, wink. The other thing: we are denied is justice. Justice for what? How about setting young lives on a course doomed to crash. All the more sad because of the non-accountability accompanying ignorant, witless counseling. Justice for the crime of misdirecting the innocent and vulnerable. The crime of bolstering ones credibility and popularity by whispering in young ears what wants to be heard, instead of what needs heard.

So just for fun, let’s consider an example of an alternative motivational catch phrase, a counterpoint to “follow your dreams”. How about “No one gives a shit if you fail, work hard and hope for luck”. Hmmm…not such a nice ring to it. No easy way out. No one to blame if you fail. Real tiger Mom-ish.

There may be other sweeter alternatives to “follow your dreams”, but the “no one gives a shit….” one works adequately to at least vision an alternative modern reality, and the utter irresponsibility and ignorance of uttering those disgusting words, “follow your dreams”.

And so, let’s go there. Let’s take a look at yet another generation with large numbers of college graduates with a worthless degree, and in significant debt. OMG! Did he just say “worthless degree”? Are not all degrees equally worthwhile? NO. No, God-damn it, NO. Let’s look at “Doomers”, the modern incarnation of quiet desperation, but not alone. Doomers are merely the latest flotsam, to join the accumulated copusculance of previous post WWII generations.

As an aside, and a research item for ones list, one must wonder if there was a similar accumulation and multiplication of this aimless flotsam as the agrarian lifestyle gave way to the industrial revolution. And if, at those times there was a trickle down of the tendency to assuage the uncertainty with slogans like “follow your dreams”.

Returning to the present, the transition from the most recent incarnation of the industrial revolution to the information age, we have again, in abundance, uncertainty. The notion that one can follow their parents path to a job union assisted job security is positively quaint, so clearly dated. More to the present, we have such a high speed, highly interdependent, chaotic environment that few if any can see, let alone offer advice about, the future.

Yet somehow our culture, a composite answer to individual needs, demands hope that there will be security. And to the masses goes the “fyd” (follow your dreams) mantra. It somehow goes along with public education, and softer studies. Not completely though. Of course it can apply to dreams which require rigorous work, but those aspirations can be serviced through “ngas” (no one gives a shit…). After all, rigorous pursuits by definition require the hard work be done. Softer prusuits allow for carefree partying through 4 years of Spring Breaks, secure in the hallucination that everything will be OK when one graduates.

And how does fyd vs ngas apply to those counting on a high school education getting them through life? Poor them, with dreams of being a sports or pop star, perhaps an influencer? And here we are, seemingly people who care, acting as people who care, knowing 99.9% of “poor them” have no hope of acheiving anything like their dream, yet we droan on, “fyd”. We give them false hope, keeping their spirits up for a while, until we can pass them to the next grade, through school, on to the streets. And if they didn’t get a whif that “fyd” was a spritz of cheap perfume on a pile of rotting garbage before they hit the streets, they sure do when they start to feel hunger and envy.

What is funny about this is that each generation seems to forget who it was that built up their hope. The mechanism of this “forgetfulness” appears to be: do not challenge the premise that one is entitled to dream and acheive their dreams. Rather, it is far simpler to accept the narrative that one was cheated away from their dreams. That the happiness and security to which they were entitled has been coopted by others. Far easier to find someone to blame than admit being a fool. Simple like that, and powerful!

So, I argue against promising that which cannot be guaranteed. Against optimism itself. More of us should see it as a cheap trick to con people into giving political support. Let’s see optimism as a very short sighted grift to support what sociologists and economists call the “free rider” problem. We have accumulated an unprecedented (in this particular human epoch anyway) number of these “free riders”, and they are positively insideous in their distribution throughout and permeatation within our economy. All chiming in, knowingly and as useful idiots, with the “follow your dreams” chant.

It is a (perhaps the) human failing of most severe consequence, which allows all manner of naive and innocent individuals (the young are particularly vulnerable) to buy in to this mechanism of accumulation of disillusionment, built on un-grounded promises, which should be seriously considered as a major component in the collapse of civilizations. Despite rhetoric to deny limitations of production in a given economy, limitations are real. There are only so many fields to be cultivated, and they have limits. We can extend the limits through technology and have been doing so for millennia. Any technology is intertwined with an economy as complex as the technology, and make no mistake, if either the economy and/or it’s technology falters, very real people go hungry, starve, or are otherwise visited by the four horsemen.

We somehow have developed in our age some protections against the inevitable and obvious free riders. But what about less obvious ones? The white-collar free riders? The bits of free-riding we all do off other peoples, and the environment? And, how do we manage to evolve a system where the percentage of free riders keep us near the margin, just this side of failure? Let’s not look in this rambling essay at the dirty, pointy, foul end of the stick, the four horsemen end, the poverty in the ghetto or the new apalachia. We’re looking at the clean and polished handle of the stick. The part where we weild many unsubstantiated optimisms, “follow your dreams” being the one presently picked out.

If what has been partially described is indeed “how we roll”, then really, what we have collectively fooled ourselves into believing is that we are somehow more advanced than microbes in a petri dish. Add a little sustenance, and the population explodes. If mutations allow certain microbes to use more available resources to reproduce, there you have it. And this is what “follow your dreams” is, a mutation, a meme in the original “Dawkinsian” sense of the word, before coopted by the cartoonish internet friendly version.

And now we are left to ponder something. Is it our destiny, to have our future determined by “how we roll”, cheating, free-riding, bombing the planet with people we are not educating or conditioning to be productive or respectful? Yes, for now, yes, it would appear so. This latest epoch of homo sapiens is one in which our technological and systemic prototypes have evolved into such marvilously intricate displays for the ages. And it appears all appears governed in the most uncaring way by forces of our nature. Pity that. When our technologists and the underlying economic systems have become so incredibly advanced, there is still that underlying flaw. It is right there, we can see it, but we seem powerless to envision solutions, or we lack the collective will. And the clock, it ticks, for now.

In conclusion, I advocate for a collective immortality project. This would be in keeping with the summation of soothings of our individual neuroses becoming in aggregate the vast house of cards we call “our time”. Let’s stop building and marking individual tombs, that last futile gesture of the old. Instead, a single massive ode to our particular epoch, garnished carefully with shout-outs to previous epochs, acknowledging the bits of preserved learning upon which we built our beast. Think of it as a public works project, giving various free riders a means to finally show they have earned their bread. A massive time capsule, naturally embelished with each of our eight billion names. Indulge the absurdity of it, the irony, that the final gesture of our civilization is a monument acknowledge, finally, as a group we are still no more capable than insects or microbes.