Some thoughts on schooling, the PR industry and trying to grow up rapidly for an era of energy descent. 

I just watched A Century of the Self - Happiness Machines.

It's really one of the best doco's I've seen and that's just the first part of 4.  (You can download the whole series at archive.org) It's made by Adam Curtis who made the equally wonderful history of fear-based politics, The Power of Nightmares.  I like how Curtis treats the origins of a lot of nasty, even terrifying businesses such as the neocons and the public relations industry, as having been based on some understandable (if not entirely agreeable with the benefit of hindsight) ideas and concerns initially — and traces the path of their corruption.   The creators of the PR industry, he argues, wanted to control the dangerous sides of human nature, to prevent unconscious desires being unleashed as barbarism, as witnessed in WWII, and earlier in Germany. 

The film is a history of psychoanalysis, propaganda, group psychology and the creation of consumerism.  Apparently Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew, creator of the PR industry and one of the most influencial men of the 20th century, seems to have considered most people, and certainly the masses, 'stupid'.  He and those others who have treated the masses this way have been quite successful over the last century, manipulating our emotional needs to create conformity (where it counts) and tying self-expression to consumer choice. 

So what does this mean for energy descent planning?  How do we approach people, enable people to act in a way which better benefits themselves and the wider society? It seems perverse to ask, but what needs does consumerism currently fill, which can be filled instead by relocalisation efforts?  (Perverse because consumerism presumably filled — or promises to fill — voids left by the loss of community which came in part with the car and consumerism itself.)  

I wonder if perhaps what works at a mass level can be overcome to a large degree at a local level, where we have direct human contact, and can express ideas and passion, which can be more powerful than even these sophisticated mass marketing methods.

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So people that treat the public as stupid have been very successful at manipulating them/us/me.  But is stupidity something innate or something created? 

At a recent seminar I heard an international healthy cities promoter say that he had to unlearn his medical training to understand health.  Richard Douthwaite, author of Growth Illusion once told me he is a "recovering economist".  He described economics as a "disabling discipline".  Could it be that all institutional schooling has some similar effects on us, makes us stupid from an early age?

I just came across this book which is available online.  I imagine it's actually quite well known: 'The Underground History of American Education' by John Taylor Gatto, who wrote it at the end of a long and distinguished career as teacher.  In fact he was New York State Teacher of the Year when he quit and started writing this book.

In the prologue (I've copied a section from it below) he talks about creating 'dumbness'.  He writes that, historically, until the formal school system, there was no concept of 'adolescence'. Young people were considered mature, and given meaningful ways to engage in society much earlier than they generaly are today.  He believes schooling stunts our psychological and intellectual growth, keeps us immature our whole lives.  Ie. schooling makes us stupid, not smart.  And he has lots of stark evidence that it is designed to be that way.

For instance this from first mission statement of Rockefeller’s General Education Board (1906), who were putting more money into public education in the U.S. than the government:

In our dreams…people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple…we will organize children…and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

That's just a sample.  The book is really mindblowing, each page a revelation.  Like Curtis, Gatto doesn't portray the creators of this system as evil, simply responding to conditions — namely the problem in the U.S. of ruling of a nation of libertarian individuals in an industrial age where acceptance of fairly meaningless jobs was a necessity for business.   Like the creators of the PR industry, they believe they might make people happier by taking away their responsibilities, freeing them from too much thought. 

We could think of schooling as industrial, energy ascent culture.

I can't help but think of the blue eyes / brown eyes experiment performed by former teacher and anti-racism activist Jane Elliott.  She makes people feel and act stupid and inferior simply by treating them that way. 

Another point relevant to energy descent, Gatto talks about professional people, kept stupid in some regards, but tricked into thinking they must know something of worth.  I guess that's about knowing a lot about something narrowly, rather than holistically;  a false sense of completeness which keeps you closed to certain types of new information and perspectives.

This forced infantilisation doesn't stop at school.  The media treats people patronisingly, talks down to us as children.  So the system doesn't stop at schooling.  I don't know if any of you remember the Dole Army shenanigans on Today Tonight and A Current Affair.  (A group of folks — including me one night — pretended to live in drains, collect dole money, and feed the poor from dumpster diving, while complaining about the 'Toorak bludgers'.  The next day we came out publicly that it was a joke, to the embarrassment of the networks who had to go into damage control.)  But anyway, I remember watching channel 10 news the next night and the announcer said "Yesterday a group of teenagers played a naughty trick…"  Normally, I realise now, the commercial network news readers talk to you like you are about 12 years old.  But this was more like you were about 5 years old — so it really stuck out and I wondered how I'd missed it the whole time.  Talking to us like we're stupid, makes us stupid — or in this case keeps us infantile. 

So while lack of understanding and dependence are encouraged, one of the good points of childishness, playfulness, is discouraged — in children as Gatto explains, but especially in adults, who are almost defined as those who don't play.  But playfulness is a form of engagement and experimentation — active learning.  The Dole Army was playful engagement, so they were labeled 'naughty teenagers' (neverminding that no teenagers were involved).

A friend of a friend in Italy is an artist who used to go into shopping centres and push toy cars around, making broom broom noises.  People would act really concerned and eventually the security guards would often drag him out!  The main form of play not being with the cars, of course, but with this convention. 

Anyway, this from Gatto:

The New Dumbness

Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness. It’s a religious idea gone out of control. You don’t have to accept that, though, to realize this kind of economy would be jeopardized by too many smart people who understand too much. I won’t ask you to take that on faith. Be patient. I’ll let a famous American publisher explain to you the secret of our global financial success in just a little while. Be patient.

Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.

Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is a reflection on the phenomenon, warned us that prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the effects of schooling because they are promised more lifelong comfort and security for yielding wholly:

Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment….The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by…the word of experts.

The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil.

Ellul puts it this way:

The individual has no chance to exercise his judgment either on principal questions or on their implication; this leads to the atrophy of a faculty not comfortably exercised under [the best of] conditions…Once personal judgment and critical faculties have disappeared or have atrophied, they will not simply reappear when propaganda is suppressed…years of intellectual and spiritual education would be needed to restore such faculties. The propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda, will immediately adopt another, this will spare him the agony of finding himself vis a vis some event without a ready-made opinion.

Once the best children are broken to such a system, they disintegrate morally, becoming dependent on group approval. A National Merit Scholar in my own family once wrote that her dream was to be "a small part in a great machine." It broke my heart. What kids dumbed down by schooling can’t do is to think for themselves or ever be at rest for very long without feeling crazy; stupefied boys and girls reveal dependence in many ways easily exploitable by their knowledgeable elders.