The Tale of the Socialist Professor 2025-12-02 18:02
A story from my misspent youth. It turns out that University was never for my kind of people.
A story from my misspent youth. It turns out that University was never for my kind of people.
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Understanding society, political science. | |
| In retrospect, it was a course on socialism. | |
| Now the professor gave the students an option. | |
| For your final grade, you could write a really boring essay. | |
| Or he also gave us the option of participating in some social activism. | |
| So of course, I picked the latter. | |
| Now the activism in particular that we were engaged with was trying to establish more funding for halfway houses in the city. | |
| So we went out and we interviewed some of the men at these halfway houses who outright said that while they didn't have everything they wanted, it was a lot better than living on the street. | |
| Which to my mind at the time said, well, we're doing our due diligence by these people, aren't we? | |
| We're getting indigents off the street. | |
| What more do you want? | |
| Should they be getting flet mignon for every meal? | |
| And it wasn't until years later, just recently, that I figured out that that was a test. | |
| A test that I failed. | |
| A test that I'm proud to have failed. | |
| Let's talk for a moment about the different, the three different types of people you'll find on this planet and the three different ways of apprehending knowledge. | |
| The Hilaks, the psychics, and the pneumatics. | |
| Or the appearance of reality, the symbolic reality, and the true reality. | |
| Now your Hilak can only see what's right in front of them. | |
| They mistake the map for the territory. | |
| And so they embrace these truisms as if they're true. | |
| They embrace their sensory impressions as if those sensory impressions are reality itself. | |
| And so the Hilak might say something like, if you don't work, you don't eat. | |
| And they'd look at these halfway houses and be quite upset about it. | |
| Another one might say, it's our duty as a society to take care of each other. | |
| And so they want more funding for these halfway houses. | |
| But that would be the full extent of their pondering on the matter. | |
| What you see is what you get, with no understanding of what symbols are. | |
| So now we get to the psychics. | |
| We get to those who do understand that there are these abstract symbols which can be manipulated. | |
| There's the reality as we perceive it. | |
| But if we manipulate the symbols of reality, then we could look at it another way. | |
| A lot of the empty platitudes and affirmations of the New Age movement, a lot of this fits into symbol manipulation. | |
| Instead of a negative experience, it was a growing experience. | |
| These are the people that become very clever with their words, very good at being manipulative with their words. | |
| They make fantastic attorneys, but they're unaware of the truth behind the reality. | |
| The pneumatic is where you understand that there's your sense perception. | |
| Your sense perception which can be encoded into symbols, symbols which can be moved around, rearranged, experimented with. | |
| But behind these symbols is the true reality itself. | |
| There's what we perceive, there's how we draw meaning and symbol from it, and then there is the truth. | |
| And thus you get the half-wit, midwit, Fulwit meme, where the Fulwit and the Halfwit often have far more in common with each other than the Midwit, who just plays around manipulating symbols. | |
| Now what's the point of talking about this? | |
| does this have to do with some socialist professor trying to raise money for poor people? | |
| You see, at the time, at the time, I thought he was just a misguided socialist. | |
| Right, maybe a died-in-the-wall socialist. | |
| And there are complex arguments. | |
| There's quite a bit of space for the psychics to have arguments about whether we should do a free market capitalism or a protective socialism. | |
| There's times and places for both. | |
| You can argue till the cows come home. | |
| I thought it was just an intellectual disagreement that I had with this professor. | |
| And of course, I myself and you align far more with the school, where we realize that there is this world of inequality. | |
| There is the symbol of money, which is an abstracted form of wealth. | |
| But behind that, past that, is production. | |
| That you cannot have wealth without people producing. | |
| And simply playing around with these symbols, moving them around, moving money from the wealthy to the poor, is not going to increase production. | |
| All it's going to do is make everybody broke. | |
| I thought that was the disagreement I was having with this professor. | |
| That this misguided old socialist was simply trying to help people that didn't need help. | |
| It never once occurred to me that this man does not give a damn about old loser men in a halfway house. | |
| No, what this professor was doing was scouting for talent. | |
| The Hilux, which is at the time, 20 years ago, it's probably worse now, probably about 30% of the university students at minimum. | |
| They just go along to get along. | |
| You know, a professor tells them something is good, they believe it's good. | |
| The psychics would be aware of counter-arguments. | |
| And so they would have performed this project to come up with good counter-arguments to people that don't want their tax dollars being taken away from them. | |
| These people were ready to be middle management. | |
| But what he was really looking for was the pneumatics, the people that could see the truth behind the argument. | |
| And I guarantee that he identified me as one of these, but the wrong type. | |
| I'm the type, you're the type, that we see this nonsense fundraiser that's not going to help anybody. | |
| And we say, you know, maybe instead of having a diversity seminar, what we should actually do is open up a textile plant in the poor country. | |
| Maybe the textile plant will help get those people out of poverty as opposed to the diversity seminar. | |
| You say that as a student who's hoping to be recruited, well, you just said the wrong damn thing. | |
| No, what he was looking for was the people that figured out that he didn't give a damn about the impoverished indigents, but that there was a lot of money to be made pretending to care about them. | |
| That every time there's a transfer of wealth between the productive to the unproductive, there's somebody in the middle getting a paycheck. | |
| And if you're really smart about it, it can be a very large paycheck indeed. | |
| That's what he was looking for. | |
| A protege in fundraising, a protege in charity manufacturing, somebody that he could work with to transfer even more funds from rich to poor while siphoning out of the middle. | |
| I've often felt as if, well, to be fair, I didn't work as hard as I could have in university. | |
| I did treat it as a free dating app to a certain extent. | |
| I got by in my intelligence a little bit too much as opposed to actually working and studying as I ought to have. | |
| But even if I'd done that, even if I had busted my hump, university was never for me. | |
| University, increasingly, Is not about studying history to explain it to the public. | |
| It's about getting a sinecure. | |
| It's not about becoming educated on social systems so that society can thrive. | |
| It's about learning tricky language so you can get yours while pretending to be a good person. | |
| University is not a place for people like you or me. | |
| Quite frankly, folks, it's a place for parasites. | |
| And the game was rigged from the start. | |
| You're not going to get ahead pursuing a humanities degree or a political science degree. | |
| It's not for people like you. | |
| If we want to see a change, we're going to have to use that ability to perceive and apprehend truth directly, our noetic capacity to create hyper-sigils that alter reality itself. |