New Book by @johanknorberg called
tells us the address 10 reasons why we ought to be positive about the future.
Question is:
In the #posttruth era, in which "my feelings beat your facts", can the masses be reaches by the facts in this book that contradict how people feel about their lives, right now?
Do they even read?
This is a bone I'm nowhere near ready to give up.
There will always be some
seeking knowledge, tradition,
meaning, & even #truth.
I'm with you.
The article in today's Guardian newspaper is the type of violently patronising shit we've unconsciously become accustomed to as being proper UK journalism, yet itself flies in the face of many of the qualities of the industry's self appointed standards of definition of "decent" journalism (also known simply as "journalism").
Having been post-school educated by renegades & mavericks, such as the movement known by some as "the Norwich Bastards", then onward, through the rejection of quantitative bollocks by a school of research we just uncritically branded "postmodernism", I've always been scathing of people who present themselves as academics, or thinkers, without doing the work required to be one. However, what the real academics & thinkers have firmly convinced me of, is that education and truth are a matter of perspective, and that everything is up for discussion, as long as deductive processes are applied.
Simply, knowledge is a pursuit, and this pursuit is less reliant on the presentation of dead answers, as it is on the positing, discussion and answering of questions.
A psychiatrist with whom I once worked suggested that nothing of any real importance had been given to us by the so-called "social sciences", compared to the "pure", or "hard sciences".
He surprised me by his assertion, because he appeared to that point to have dedicated his life to his self-confessed futility. I was saddened, one year, to return from college term recess to be greeted at the train station by the Dean, who told me my psychiatrist friend had died at the age of only 39, on the last day of the semester, from a sudden heart attack.
Once we've dug ourselves out of the manufactured media "truth" hole, we're finished if we think we should sit back & permit those who manufactured & perpetuated these falsehoods in the first place to now explain them to us.
The truth is, they can't, because they don't understand them.
Read the Guardian
newspaper article
There's also a trend against individuality in university teaching - jeez, don't I know it! This is due to cultural mindthink, the pervasive dominance of quality systems and departments which are increasingly required to safeguard institutions against being sued. The whole drive towards standardisation of courses in mass higher education is necessitated because lots of presenters are needed to present to large numbers of enrolled students. This "lectures" need to be planned and scripted. This is another discussion but stems from viewing higher education as a mass consumer service so more money can be made. It also attempts to devolve power & control away from the individual academic who can be easily replaced by another speaker. It also effectively requires an academic to effectively hand over at least part of their intellectual capital to the institution.
We need to consider what the implications of these developments are. If the wrong kind of knowledge were being purchased by very few people, with only limited relevance to their actual, future careers, there's only surely a certain amount of time before the results speak for themselves? I'm getting not to get sued, or fired, so I'm treading carefully for wisdom's sake. But I'm getting to engage you in a discussion ;one I think we really need to have, even if it's only a case that we are the ones with a more sensible way forward. That's even assuming that we're even considering any merit at all in helping ordinary people to take control over their own lives, assuming that they really want it.
I know this 5 parter is a jumbled, stream of consciousness, but I hope you enjoyed reading it half as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Having said that, I understand much more the folly of knowledge being based on artificial ideologies and that ideological people are not only a pain in the arse to deal with (unless you agree with everything they say), but are also quite dangerous in terms of where their non experienced truths take them & anybody that gets in their way. The Tory, capitalist right are the worst & seem to presently comprise much of the business university recruitment pool.
In the end, truth is subjectively constructed. It is a social construct arrived at by the individual, regardless of what the "objective" evidence suggests. The problem is that the academics as agents of the truth need to thoroughly investigate and arrive at evidence - based reason. The advent of the new role in teaching universities of the "course presenter" is definitely a step away from this need.
Course presenters have arrived in teaching universities because of the employment of nascent academics who aren't developed properly to do research and incorporate it into their own teaching. This is partly due to research not really being a money maker unless you can get commercial companies to fund it, and there's not much of that going on for some of the more employment related fields.
(stay tuned for the final part 5 coming soon)
Remember that we're not here at The Gonzo Lecture just promoting politics and all kinds of other ideology. What we look for is the truth - mostly the uncomfortable truths that the established system wants us to ignore in order that the unnatural order of things might be maintained in their best interests.
