No culture was ever created to discover and disseminate truth. None exists for that purpose today. A culture exists to promote a group’s existence. American schools, and perhaps those elsewhere too, are tasked with producing compliant citizens, not citizens who know or even care to know the truth. Graduates are the drones, workers, and soldiers of the human hive. What they learn is the culture’s conventional wisdom, but conventional wisdom is rarely wise and seldom true. Schools everywhere are madrasas!
Those who use Internet media to rightly point out the lies and misdeeds of both the government and the propaganda press are indefatigable in their efforts, having, it seems, adopted the maxim that says the truth will set us free. But it won’t! It never has! It never will! The claim is a legendary lie. Too few people care enough about truth for it to matter. Common people are too busy fulfilling instinctive tasks such as acquiring sustenance, shelter, and reproducing to trouble themselves with esoteric questions. So, as any social critic knows, critical efforts fall on deaf ears and blind eyes. The truth, when brought to light, is merely ignored.
In fact, no culture was ever created to discover and disseminate truth. None exists for that purpose today. A culture exists to promote a group’s existence. Cultures are instruments of preservation. Cultures are defined by myths. Unless a culture’s myths are known, it’s nature cannot be understood.
The myths, although obviously false, are often considered as historical truths, and a culture’s institutions are used to inculcate them. Once inculcated in the minds of people, the myths are almost impossible to expunge. Ears are deafened and eyes are blinded. The social critic is neither heard nor seen. The culture uses its ability to ignore the social critic as a defensive tactic. Ignorance defends the culture, and the culture’s educational institutions promote the ignorance. The institution cannot be divorced form its culture. In any culture, truth is something to be avoided and kept hidden.
Schools in America teach students that,
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . . .”
These words are cited even today as defining who Americans are. But did the Colonists believe them? It is inconceivable! The Colonists knew they were not all created equal. They knew no one had an unalienable right to life. They were not stupid. But the myth persists as if it were true.
Strangely enough, however, schools do not teach students what Jefferson also wrote about merchants who “have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.” If this observation were also taught to the same extent as the words of the Declaration of Independence, would Americans continue to venerate the economics of the free market and policies like globalization? Would they send their young to fight and die to preserve market economics for merchants who have no country? Maybe not.
What a culture’s schools teach is what the culture approves of. What they don’t teach, the culture disapproves of. So before anyone can begin to understand a culture, knowing what its schools, colleges, and universities do not teach is more important than knowing what they do.
Most of what is taught in schools consists of how to do things. Pupils are taught to read and write, for instance. They are taught to calculate in various ways. Some are taught how to treat illnesses; others, how to prosecute and defend miscreants. Still others, how to build things. But schools do not teach students how to shoplift or pick pockets, or smuggle even though these are common occupations. These occupations contribute nothing to GDP. When not teaching students how to do things, schools teach them what to believe, the myths that form the culture’s core “values,” the myths that define who they are.
Not too many decades ago, pupils were taught how to be self reliant. Girls studied home economics and boys, shop and mechanics. Those students learned how to be frugal, how to cook nutritious meals, how to sew to make alterations and their children’s clothing, how to make simple household repairs. There was a time when almost every teenage boy had a jalopy to ride around in and tinker with. No more! Self reliance is now a disapproved method of behaving. Why? It reduces commerce. What a person can not do for him/herself must be purchased, bought from a vendor. A purchase is a contribution to GDP; something self-made is not, and increasing GDP is more important in this society that the welfare of people who now dine on fast-food and hire contractors for even the simplest of tasks.
Other things that are not taught in schools, colleges, and universities are revealing. The United States has several “war colleges.” It has no peace college, not one! War is an approved activity; peace is not. Departments and schools of theology are common; yet not one department or schools of atheology exists. Religious belief is approved, unbelief is not. Market economics is taught in every American school and university; socialist economics and Islamic economic jurisprudence are not. What was once called communist economics is quietly forbidden in American classrooms. Any search for economic truth must be done within the bounds of market economic dogma. Why do economists continue to promote economic practices that have never brought prosperity to any nation’s people? For the same reasons people continue to ask God to bless this country and Baptists go to church every Sunday. They are conventional practices which are culturally approved! Truth has no role in them whatsoever.
American schools, and perhaps those elsewhere too, are tasked with producing compliant citizens, not citizens who know or even care to know the truth. Graduates are the drones, workers, and soldiers of the human hive. What they learn is the culture’s conventional wisdom, but conventional wisdom is rarely wise and seldom true. Schools everywhere are madrasas!
But the most important subject that schools fail to teach is morality. People cannot earn degrees in morality. Moral behavior is not an approved way of living. Not in America or anywhere else that I know of. People are never taught to be good. This lapse has brought humanity to a state of continual war and the brink of self-destruction.
Conventional thinking usually holds that the evolution of humanity is part of the history of primates, in particular the genus ‘homo.’ The areas concentrated on are the brain’s development and activities like tool making. What would be learned if the concentrations were changed to attitudes? Would the finding be that humans are much more like ants and bees that chimpanzees? Are human beings constrained by instinct to be drones, workers, and soldiers whose only real function is to protect the “queen” and promote the hive? Although human beings look like primates, aren’t we perhaps more like insects? How shocking would that conclusion be?
Not much is really known about human nature. Perhaps, as Otto von Bismarck once said, “better not to know how the sausage is made.” Would trying to answer the question, What evil lurks in the hearts of men?”, bring us face to face with the black hole that lies at the core of human existence? What would human beings do then?
John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site’s homepage.
