Thursday 5 January 2017

Education and Truth

Why is it that so many people of recent generations have been so easily won over to the project of the inversion of the good and subversion of truth? After all, most of these people are no different to those who came before them, a mixture of good and bad like us all, and presumably would favour the good in most circumstances. Well, perhaps they would favour it if they knew it but they don't and have been misled as to what it might be. There are various reasons for this and they range from the decline of religion to the rise of materialistic science. There is also the fact that the demonic powers are mounting their most sustained assault on humanity yet, part of which involves substituting the materialistic egalitarian humanistic doctrine, or secular liberalism, for proper spiritual teachings which, by their very nature, are more subtle and less easily tailored to universal global application than the simplistic belief system that's been foisted on us today. The idea of spirituality has been corrupted to mean what gives happiness and reduces suffering in this world, and goodness has been diminished to the recognition of equality with evil the corresponding rejection of it. 

But why has this belief in equality become so pervasive in the world today when, despite its superficial and theoretical truth, it is so clearly mistaken when one looks beneath the surface? (As the Masters said men are by no means equal on the earth plane). Partly, no doubt, as a reaction to the excessive inequality of the past but chiefly, I would say, because everyone seems to want to think that they are as good as anyone else. No one is better than me. So my diagnosis is that, outside the ivory towers of intellectuals who don't really believe what they teach anyway, the modern belief in equality is actually founded on and sustained by egotism.

However there are two other factors which have helped in the dissemination of the project of subverting truth, and both of them are almost always regarded as good in the topsy turvy world of today. One of them is feminism. One of the reasons this has been encouraged (and, let's be honest, the soil was fertile because of the pronounced inequalities of the past) is that women are more likely than men to go along with the status quo and consequently much less likely to fight against it unless they have a very strong reason to do so, probably relating to their children for whom, rightfully, they will fight tooth and nail. But generally women are more likely to want to be seen as, and actually to want to be, nice. This quality is easily exploited for if nobody's feelings are to be hurt then all kinds of untruths will be allowed to flourish. As indeed they are now when nice has replaced true.

The second, and more profound, factor in this is education. It is a cliché but one founded in reality that frequently the more educated a person is the less he is guided by common sense. The more he can be made to live in a world of ideas and thought, the less he is in touch with basic reality. Mass education to university level has only really kicked in over the last fifty years which is precisely the time that more and more people have succumbed to the ethos of secular liberalism. That is basically an abstract idea with no grounding in any kind of spiritual truth. In fact, as man needs some kind of religious belief, it has replaced that for those who have lost their religion, and the universities have become the seminaries.

So education and the life of thought are largely to blame for the success of the project of dismantling spiritual truth. Does that mean we restrict education? First of all, that's impossible and secondly, it is undesirable.  But we should strive to create a form of education in which spiritual truths are front and centre. This might mean it was not so intellectually focused. The cultivation and development and training of intellect would still be highly important, of course, but it would be guided by intuition with each faculty used to check and balance the other. Now we have a situation in which the intellect is presumed to be the arbiter of truth and the highest faculty we possess for interpreting reality.  This has led to the illusions of the present day. Education will always be essential, that goes without saying, but we need to radically overhaul our concept of what it means and the end to which it is directed.

The unseen powers behind secular liberalism are going to force all people who are truly faithful to the values of religion into what will appear an extremist position.  Let us remember that, according to Tertullian, when Nero martyred the early Christians, it was on the grounds of hatred for humanity. We must be careful not to let the denial of real truth that is
 liberal leftism (resulting from using one aspect of truth as an excuse to deny the rest) drive us into a corresponding state of anger and hatred in reaction. That's just what the devil wants as it will (seemingly) justify his position and his purpose which is to make good appear as evil and evil as good.






4 comments:

Bruce Charlton said...

@William - Education is a weasel word!

Being on the books of an institution calling itself a college or university for a period of years (doing as little as possible of a very minimal set of requirements) and then being issued with a certificate, has no positive value in and of itself - indeed it is a net negative. Yet that is what education has come to mean for a large majority of participants.

Mass higher education - with a fourfold increase in student numbers over the past generation - is (or should be) regarded as a highly speculative experiment. The rationale was supposedly economic, yet the actual result has never been officially evaluated, and the appearance is one of a massive economic deficit - from lost years of work (in the prime of life) and a colossal waste of man-hours and the inculcation of many bad habits (e.g. idleness, habitual cheating, intoxication, promiscuity, and whining dependency).

in traditional societies, only about one present or less of the population attend higher education institutions full time (it was about 2 percent as recently as the late 1940s)- we now have about a fifty fold increase. The optimum would surely be much closer to the traditional levels.

William Wildblood said...

I agree, Bruce. Higher education should be aimed at specific purposes not something everyone should do. I don't have any experience from the inside but, as it has become today, it often just seems to corrupt the mind anyway.

David Balfour said...

I think this may also be largely associated with the corruption or abolution of real jobs and real vocational training programs leading to those jobs. Clearly technical specialists such as doctors, engineers and architects require prolonged specialist training but does a marketing or sociology degree do anyone any good? My brother works in marketing and by his own admission the area is completely fraudulent and requires little specialist training to justify an extended period of several years study. I might add he regrets having studied it at all but sometimes the choices we make (especially when younger) are not the best ones for us at many levels or we lack astute guidance. It seems largely a case of going to University is just the 'done thing' nowadays and young people are herded into it mindlessly like cattle.

Although it was before my time I understand people used to have real jobs like being a black smith or making things (eg ship-building) or *doing* something like being a fireman or a baker or a farmer or whatever. Of course such jobs do still technically exist but if you ask most people what they do nowadays it is some sort of IT job or selling mobile phone contracts or some other tech associated invention that if we are honest the world really doesnt need and is actively making the world a worse place. In fact, these kind of jobs (designing webshites, etc.) seem to pay significantly more than actually useful or valuable jobs. I'm sure that is not co-incidental either and it part of the broader project of destroying meaningful occupations for human beings. Bizarely many of these 'techies' seem to love it and feel it is a gloriously progressive enterprise?! The addiction business is in full swing and people are wandering around with smartphones permanently attached to their attention. Still, I have seen encouraging signs that people can become bored and disillusioned with the technology and choose to 'unplug' more and go for a walk in nature or talk to each other. Reeling back education would doubtless support this as Universities do tend to push a love of ubiquitous computer technology as obligatory and desirable.





William Wildblood said...

Good points, David. Of course, one of the problems is that everyone has to have a job nowadays so there are more and more pointless forms of work created.