Order, Acknowledgment, and Inconsistency

How do you feel when you’ve done work that you were promised compensation for and all of a sudden you realize you’ve been lied to and all your hard work wasn’t acknowledged or compensated? Frustrated, betrayed, bothered, angered, disgusted, disappointed, depressed, pissed, annoyed, boiling inside, wanting to get back at those who lied? It’s basically a feeling of powerlessness and abandonment, which are both things that people definitely don’t like feeling. It can be very hard to mitigate these feelings, especially when these injustices are done by the people who you thought you could trust and you had faith in to be a friend. These cases become extreme when people put all their eggs in one basket and when someone gets their hands on that basket, throws all the eggs out and they all crack on the floor. Then that person has to start from scratch. This kind of situation can cause people to get very mad and/or depressed. This is because when you only have one source where you get your financial, social, and emotional nourishment and that source is cut off it tends to put a person in dire straits. When our stupid, bloated, and ineffective education system tells people to just be employees and then there are mass layoffs that’s what tends to happen.

Invisible Strings

Let’s take the biological analogy of an umbilical cord to explain just how toxic the education system has become. At one time, we were all attached to the umbilical cord of our mothers, which acts as the conduit that provides our sustenance. At the same time, we also have absolutely no control over the kinds of sustenance that we receive from this cord so the decisions our mothers make in that phase of development can have deep positive or negative implications for the rest of our lives. This is a case of something that’s not in our conscious control affecting us and there’s nothing we can do about it because there is nothing to do about. It’s simply a biological fact of life. What most people don’t realize is that you are attached to a whole bunch of conceptual umbilical cords once the physical one is removed. These umbilical cords are, broadly speaking, financial, social, and emotional. They come from your parents first and foremost (in some cases your family at large), then your school (if you’re not home schooled) and then society you live in. Now since you are conscious, these cords are no longer cords that will passively provide you with what you want and need. You have to perform for and please these cord holders to get the desired rewards from their cords. Parents will buy you things, schools will give you social acknowledgement for work accomplished, and society has the stores that provide you with food and water because if you’re in the city you can’t filter your own water or produce your own food.

The Dystopian Lie

Now, you might wonder, what does all this have to do with order, acknowledgment, and inconsistency? The answer is that when we’re young, we’re guided and the ones guiding us give us orders and when we follow those orders we are acknowledged that we’re on the right track for following them. The inconsistency occurs when these orders are not acknowledged and not rewarded - when we have been conditioned that way growing up, we don’t have any other metric to go by. School provides us with a certain order and provides us with the acknowledgment that if we follow that order we won't be treated as an outcast or pariah within the system at large or by our peers because we are following the rules. We’re expected to cut the financial umbilical cord that we rely on from our parents for a brand new financial umbilical cord that comes from a “job” (mind you some of our parents are attached to that exact same umbilical cord). This means that if we want to keep our sustenance we must do what we’re told or we are under threat that our parents can cut the cord when we’re 18 and if we don’t have a way of making an income by then and if that new cord isn’t there we’ll have a hard time making anything good of our lives. After that we’re told that there are cords that provide us more and better quality sustenance than others and to have access to these better more prestigious cords we need to jump through more and more hoops.

Blind Leading the Blind

Since we want to live a worthwhile and happy life and we want these cords to provide for us, many of us act like good little boys and girls and do exactly what the system wants from us. This is in order to make sure that we have a sustenance source once the one that we have from our parents either runs out or gets cut off. In Pavlovian fashion, school conditions us to get rewards from them in the forms of letters - both paper and alphabet. We’re told that the “yellow brick road” of these papers with letters on them will determine our quality of life, specifically how easily we can move from the umbilical cord of school/parents to that of employment. This “yellow brick road”, as it turns out, is nothing more than a road to hell that is paved with good intentions (as the old saying goes). As young people transition into adulthood, they soon discover that the incubated bubble of learning called school (and it has nothing to do with education) is the antithesis of the real world. The order is that you need to do well on the test, the acknowledgement is that you’ll go to university. Then the order is that you’ll do well in university then the acknowledgement is that you’ll get the degree. Now here comes the doozy - inconsistency.

Illusions Shattered

Remember yourself on graduation day - standing in a cap and gown, getting that piece of paper you worked so hard for and wanted so badly. Yet, as you shake that person's hand, you realize that the entire bubble becomes obsolete at that point. The cord has been cut. I felt as if I was thrown into an ocean of confusion, frustration, and desperation with no compass. It just amazed me how all these things that I worked on in the past didn’t equate to any kind of future of success at all. It felt so sickening that I basically had to beg for an umbilical cord and compete for a low level umbilical cord with a university degree until I finally got one. Even worse than that was the fact that at least in the schools you’d understand the order and the acknowledgement. The inconsistency is that when you apply for jobs it’s like you’re mud wrestling in the dark and you don’t even know who you’re mud wrestling against, and when you lose you don’t even know what the hell happened. You just find another cord to compete for. There’s no order and there’s no acknowledgment. It’s just a low-down, dirty, dark, unclear, and slimy mud fest, and when it’s over you just feel like you lost and you don’t know why. You’re just stuck with a gigantic question mark and feeling like you’ve been abandoned.

Looking for the Man Behind the Curtain

After rolling in this mud, fighting for a cord to hold on to, I began to ask myself why the hell am I feeling like I’m inadequate in a system like this? The system produces the mud and garbage in the first place. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “garbage in garbage out”. I came to the realization that the other end of all these cords are hooked up to a septic tank and the filth goes directly into your system. It felt like all of those years were stolen from me by people who had no idea what they were doing. Not only that had those cords attached to those same septic tanks they extended those cords and gave those cords to us. What comes out of these cords is toxic. Toxic ideas about finance, social situations, and dealing with emotions (figuring out who you are). So these people who hook us up to these septic tanks of sustenance (hey something is better than nothing right) are not held accountable and who they are is shrouded in secrecy and the public is almost completely unaware of how they operate.

The Wild West Job Market

One of the worst pieces of garbage to come out of this septic system is something called ghosting. This is usually done by unreliable, irresponsible, and ignorant people. For some context: in school it went you would get a specific task from your teacher, do that task and then either get a reward or some kind of acknowledgment that moves you to the next level (5th to 6th grade) if you do that task well. This was essentially guaranteed. Ghosting on the other hand is when you get vague task to complete such as “get a job” and “fill out an application” and where there is no acknowledgement of the work you’ve done and you are faced with the inconsistency of no responses and/or canned responses with no tasks to be done after.

The Breakdown of Sense and Reason

Life was so simple before: You had a teacher to give you orders, you knew the homework assignment and you also knew you had to be there tomorrow and the teacher (or a substitute) would show up tomorrow. You’d also be in the loop of what’s happening the next day and you’d be given a syllabus and an agenda. Everything was perfectly planned out and logical. Could you imagine the chaos that would ensue if a teacher that didn’t show up? Or if they did show up but the homework wasn’t announced and you’d have to guess what it was? Then, even if you did what you thought the homework was you could still end up with an F if you couldn’t guess, with little to no context given, what the teacher had on his/her mind. Then just to rub salt in the already festering wound, you’d want to know the reason you got the F and they’d tell you that it’s confidential. What kind of reasonable, rational, and logical human being could ever navigate let alone prosper under those chaotic conditions? Yet somehow, if you just replace “education system” with “job market” and we call the equivalent of students in it “job seekers” that’s when the situation became socially acceptable. I’ve already spoken to my fair share of ignoramuses who are too numb and socially conditioned to see these blatant inconsistencies in these systems. Almost all of them respond with your run-of-the-mill shoulder-shrugging and victim-blaming until it finally happens to them and that’s when it becomes a priority.

Removing the Blindfolds

So where am I going with all this? I’ll tell you: I sincerely believe that when authority is unaccountable, the potential for abuse becomes exponential. We’ve seen this happen plenty of times in “authoritarian” regimes. We’re letting these bureaucratic buffoons control everything that our children are exposed to. Most of the systems and policies in government and society are antiquated processes that don’t work in the modern world. In previous blog posts, I thought that it the education system could be reformed. I thought maybe there are just some bad apples mucking up an otherwise good system. Now I just think it’s like this by design and it’s no mistake that it’s happening like this. I’ve become more of a realist in recent times than I am an idealist. I see things for what they are and not what I want them to be. I can clearly see the malicious, vicious, and sociopathic entities and the people who run them. They are the ones who prey on the most vulnerable among us and lay waste to the dreams and hopes of the youth who have potential to change the world and leave a positive legacy. Why would they do something like this? It’s simply because they’re too stupid to be interesting, creative, and innovative themselves so they maintain their iron grip on power by making sure that no one can pose a threat to their authority. They use their resources and power that we unwittingly give them through their corrupt and nepotistic systems and they bemoan when they are questioned. They have incredible nerve and gall to proclaim that the way they abuse and misuse the forthcoming generation makes them enlightened and benevolent. They believe that their pursuit to “help” “guide” and “educate” the children should be honored when it’s nothing more than a theatrical sham. In that case they use these cords to tie us down from our true potential and our passion. Then they threaten to cut us off if we don’t perform.

Let the Revolution Begin

When you trace these cords to their source you don’t find a loving mother on the other end but a heifer from hell. It’s the cords’ poisonous milk keeping everyone docile, numb and dumb. What can we do in that case? It seems like a crazy long shot but to get out of the trance can’t just make the schools “better.” We have to recognize that it’s like this by design. We can’t get a rotting gangrenous corpse, stand over it, say a few incantations and watch it rise from the dead hoping that it won’t infect us again. No, it’s time that we stopped trying with our failed attempts to put lipstick on this disgusting, gluttonous, and wild pig. These malignant narcissists have no place talking about how children should learn. It’s about time we cut all these cords once and for all and we became autonomous - that’s the solution. We can reclaim our freedom in a new day and age from our technocratic oppressors who care nothing for us other than to harvest our minds and bodies for the machines that perpetuate their iron grip on power and keep us distracted with bread and circus. It’s time that we reclaim our humanity and do away with this tedious insanity. A wise man said that if something isn’t working instead of trying to fix it create something better.

Building a Better Tomorrow

I must’ve rambled for the longest time about this problem and I’ve presented what I think should be reform solutions. I’m done with that now because someone who I know, trust, and has become somewhat of a mentor to me has created a solution and I saw it and I think it’s awesome. Let me also say that I’m not talking about useless mentors that I feel would ghost on me any second and that I would have to walk on eggshells with. I’ve had my fair share of those relationships. I’m talking about a person who gives his time, energy, and dedication to see the potential in others so they can make something extremely significant with their lives. To add to that, the people I’ve met in this course, which is a very in-depth solution to the severe educational, social, emotional, and especially financial crisis facing society, have been incredibly thoughtful and who actually have the capacity for critical thinking. It’s not only about that though it’s about making the most out of your circumstances by understanding what you can utilize to create the life of your dreams on your own terms. It’s what most people forget is a possibility. I’ve already had success in closing deals and doing things I never thought were possible. It’s up to you now to see the potential in this and to see that you have to get back in touch with what schooling wanted to take away from you - your sense of adventure and curiosity when you were a child. Most of us were fearless as a child because anxiety isn’t natural. It is learned from years and years of conditioning us to be weak among our peers when all we really want to go for our dreams, express ourselves, or even just voice our opinions. Since you are readers of my blog I can give it to you for a special discount. Now the ball is in your court - will you make an investment in your future self? If you've answered yes take a look at this.