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Hrvatski Noahid:
All these things required taxes, which required higher productivity from workers, which required more planning from corporate bureaucrats. Combined with the kind of competition found in Western capitalism, which emphasizes price and resource efficiency, the result is an over-systematized and overworked population lumped together in cities where nobody can agree on what will make them happy. Yet, because humanity is believed to be making “progress” because it invents new things, this race to the bottom, as it has been characterized by some business leaders, shows no signs of slowing down.

In contrast to the West’s present offering, one viable alternative to the industrialized, centralized, and socialized economy now “enjoyed” by modern Western societies would be a distributed agricultural economy. Characterized by the founding fathers of the United States as the ideal model for American life, such an orientation would ensure that each household is in control of its own food supply, would offer sufficient open space to raise healthy and active children, and would avoid many of the tragedy of the commons scenarios now endemic to modern city living.

For example, whereas gardening is considered a luxury activity by many modern workers, whose long hours and intercity commutes rob them of the time they would otherwise need to tend to their natural environment, an agricultural society would have no need for the pork industry, no need for the poultry and egg industries, no need for much of the produce industry, and therefore a reduced need for the transportation infrastructure that supports those industries and the sub-industries that support the maintenance of trucks, planes, highways, and supermarkets.

The high modernist desire for progress, the single-variable mindset that focused exclusively on profitability and efficiency for centuries, and the delayed effects of the societal costs are one of the roots of the crises identified by Vervaeke, Patten, and other researchers. However, as believers and participants in high modernist systems, and arguably some of the greatest beneficiaries of its bounties, most career academics are unwilling or unable to properly identify the philosophical rot underneath the false notions of progress espoused by Western nations. Indeed, the prospect of rolling back the clock two centuries to rethink the industrial economy is simply not feasible for populations of people now scrambling to stay focused at work and make ends meet at home.

Although the Western world has since developed a dim awareness of industrialization’s unintended impacts, the momentum of the industrial machine, combined with the limited perspectives offered by state education and mass media, prevent most people from ever seeing past their current predicament to better potential futures. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 41-42)

Hrvatski Noahid:
Instead, the high modernist delusion that more science, more planning, and more optimizations will somehow wrench utopia from the jaws of destruction keeps Western citizens dutifully focused on trying to “fix” systems that just can’t work.

While the nineteenth century saw the centralization of goods production into factories and other manufacturing centers, the twentieth century witnessed a consolidation of information processing and distribution into the mass media. This was a significant change from pre-industrial agrarian settings, far removed from newspaper distribution channels, where the stories, customs, beliefs, and teachings unique to specific regions, called folklore, was the dominant source of information.

Indeed, with most of the Western population located in cities by the end of the nineteenth century, the hectic pace of city living, along with the printing press and radio, replaced flows of diverse folkloric information with monologues facilitated by editors, journalists, and politicians. Over the course of generations, traditional knowledge like home remedies, family recipes, and even ancestral memories faded away, replaced by “popular culture” and endless streams of news, further standardizing populations already subjected to bylaws, policing, and state education.

The news and entertainment broadcast daily to the masses, directed largely by personal aesthetic judgements, vested interests, and paranoia on the part of bureaucrats and media moguls, has facilitated the development of a shared social reality that has been evolving to this day. Daily rhythms of approved information, fed to people at breakfast tables, in living rooms, and during highway commutes, gently permeated the modern psyche with things to think about, important topics as decided by producers and editors, and other “useful” information, keeping everyone on the same page and ensuring that dangerously unorthodox opinions are kept to the margins.

Subject to the same high modernist forces and values that have corrupted every other industrial endeavor, the mass media was, and is, biased towards novelty and scandal. Despite its illusion of choice, it offers an anemic entertainment environment motivated by economic concerns and trendy moral lectures rather than artistic excellence, and facilitates the centralization of narrative-building abilities into the hands of well-funded players with vested interests in maintaining the status quo. In many respects, this environment can be considered a kind of consensus reality, maintained by the implicit assumption that if something were “real” or “newsworthy”, then it would merit coverage in the mainstream.

While most Western societies would credit the mass media with the proliferation of information and the raising of national consciousnesses, in truth the mass media have enacted a series of thin simplifications on a societal scale, privileging some narratives while discrediting others and removing most Western populations from direct contact with reality. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 42-43)

Hrvatski Noahid:
In the present day, the mass media have gone so far as to put themselves forward as arbiters of truth under the guise of “fact-checking”, relieving Westerners of the burden of having to do their own research and come to their own conclusions. Moreover, the comedy offered by mainstream sources has degenerated into thinly disguised therapy, offering audiences weary of conflicting perspectives consolation and affirmation instead of the kinds of provocation which made comedy an enduring part of Western culture.

A terrifying example of the mass media’s ability to create consensus realities can be seen in the consequences of the radio, which afforded the creation of real-time audio broadcasts and allowed for an even greater sense of group unity within cities and countries. By allowing a single speaker to address entire nations at once, this medium arguably facilitated Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, a testament to the hypnotic power of the spoken word amplified to unimaginable proportions. Similar uses of the radio were documented as catalyzing the Rwandan genocide, and even Western media have used genocidal rhetoric to demonize unvaccinated populations, contributing to the current political tensions over that issue.

The radio was later joined by the television, which offered a similar cadence of daily shows, news broadcasts, and other messaging that was carefully curated and highly centralized due to the prohibitive costs of television production. Media behemoths with their roots in the beginnings of communications technology, most famously Walt Disney Corporation, provided not only entertainment for the masses, but propaganda during wartime and a pantheon of pop culture characters for children to learn about instead of their ancestors. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 43-44)

Hrvatski Noahid:
The rise of advertising, perhaps more accurately phrased as commercial propaganda, introduced the concept of brands to Western life, offering people petty differences to squabble over instead of building community and solidarity against colonial systems. Modern marketers even happily refer to their customer bases as tribes, too ensconced in their high modernist perspective to realize that they have been contributing to the West’s slide back to barbarism. Today, branding is such a consideration in all public communication that political campaigns like Justin Trudeau’s 2015 effort have won advertising awards for their ability to influence voters.

In his afterthoughts to a book on narcissism, American historian Christopher Lasch refers to the modern media environment as a world of flickering images, and credits the West’s focus on style, appearance, and popularity with the rise of narcissism and narcissistic behavior. Similarly, media ecology luminary Marshall McLuhan warned that whereas physical tools are an extension of the human body, electronic technology and mass media are extensions of the mind – and to use them carelessly is to invite schizophrenia upon oneself. Decades later, researchers investigating the links between mental illness and social media use have come to essentially the same conclusions, although without the appreciation for Lasch and McLuhan that a consilience-based perspective enables.

Most unfortunately, the needs of the colonial-industrial system extend beyond raw materials such as timber, ores, and money. Indeed, people are needed to work in the mines, grow the crops, oversee the machines, fire guns at the nation’s enemies, and manage the bureaucratic tasks necessary for nationbuilding. This means that from the perspective of the state and the corporation, the forces of high modernism quickly became directed towards everyday people, who are seen by states as mere resources to be developed, used, and eventually discarded.

The first person to realize these implications of the high modernist worldview seems to have been Frederick the Great of Prussia, who instituted the West’s first mandatory state education system in 1763. Although some critics of the educational system attribute Frederick’s innovation to the Industrial Revolution, this early endeavour predates the popularization of the steam engine by several decades and was primarily driven by the complexifying needs of the Prussian state. The advantages of mandatory education quickly became clear, and such systems were instantiated in the United States and other Western nations in the decades following the Prussian debut.

Much like how the centralization of “news” and other information in the mass media facilitates a kind of collective consciousness or consensus reality, delivering a standardized education to children, with the curriculum set by the state, quickly became a subtle and vital component of the high modernist project. Although every generation has its innovators who urge systems to refocus on the learner’s needs, the growing need for literate and numerate workers, bureaucrats, and soldiers has always taken precedence over the unique needs and abilities of each child. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 45)

Hrvatski Noahid:
Most unfortunately, and in true high modernist fashion, the future economic utility of the child is often the primary consideration of education-related decisions, with performance measured through standardized testing – a method of assessment that is generally hated and mistrusted not only by students, but by educators too.

If these systems were working even remotely as intended, their continued existence would be defensible. However, an examination of the learning outcomes achieved by Western education, and particularly North American systems, reveal persistent and catastrophic underperformance. For example, it is estimated that half of Americans cannot say with confidence whether the Earth orbits the Sun, or vice versa. Even in universities, studies suggest that most graduates could not be considered skilled – or even proficient – with language or numbers.

Even worse, the much-lauded capacity for critical thinking, long considered a product of the Renaissance and the crown jewel of Western education systems, is rather scarce. Studies conducted over the past several decades have indicated that there were no appreciable gains made in critical thinking between the first and final years of a university education, and that half of students make no progress in critical thinking ability in the first two years of their degree. Distressingly, many educators struggle to define what critical thinking is, let alone teach it, suggesting that Western education has been veering dangerously off-course without the people in charge being aware.

Finally, researchers studying human lifespan development have identified a key capacity called selfauthorship that drives not only academic and workplace success, but parenting ability, capacity to handle ambiguity and complexity, and a host of other important life skills. Not only have they found that Western education systems generally fail to produce this quality in their graduates, but that simple training and development interventions can do so reliably. This suggests that not only are state-employed educators failing to deliver on the fundamentals, but they have also proven themselves unable to capitalize on powerful curricular content that is well within reach. The result is a population where two-thirds of the American population do not have a written plan for their life.

In addition to the fact that schools do not adequately teach important contemporary topics like coding or business the product of these systems are generations of progressively more illiterate and confused graduates, completely dependent on systems they do not understand, complying vigorously in the hopes of being granted a decent standard of living, or even a raise.

These issues are not new or unknown within the education sector – indeed, there have been dire warnings from twentieth-century luminaries like Hannah Arendt, well-known innovators proposing radically different philosophies and systems, and pioneers like Maria Montessori and Laszlo Polgar demonstrating incredible levels of success with unorthodox methods. However, the vested interests of high modernist systems have prevailed for over one hundred years, with each generation of students receiving a more confused and shallow education from the poorly-generated cohort of teachers instructing them – somewhat like a society-wide game of Telephone. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 45-46)

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