When Humans and Reptiles Collide

It is the creed of our educational system, where the focus of education itself has been redefined in terms of training, career networking and monetary success, rather than critical thinking or self-reflection. It tries to install in us the right sense of priorities, the values of the corporations it has come to serve. It is the physical manifestation of the ethos of unfettered capitalism, making all of us victims of psychopathy according to Dr. Hare.

An Education for Reptiles

In his 1967 essay, Education After Auschwitz, Theodor Adorno wrote that the purpose of education should be to make absolutely sure that another Auschwitz would never happen again. To do this he argued that education must teach the societal play of forces operating beneath the surface of political forms. “This would be possible only when it devotes itself openly, without fear of offending any authorities, to this most important of problems,” he says.

If values were not taught more than skills, Adorno believed that another Auschwitz was always possible. Instead, education has done the exact opposite, marginalizing, defunding, or abolishing the humanities and everything deemed financially useless. The teachings of morals and values have been pushed into the realm of the trivial and the irrelevant, as deans, professors and university board members are showered in endowments, consultant fees and corporate paychecks.

Skills and utility are everything in college today. It embodies the words of the industrialist Richard Teller Crane, who declared that no one with, “a taste for literature has the right to be happy,” since, “the only men entitled to happiness … are those who are useful.” It is through this ethos that we have come to produce hoards of amoral system managers. These managers have become the insurance company employees who use pre-existing conditions to deny your treatment and health coverage for the sake of profit. Or the Goldman traders who had no problem in selling AAA rated securities that were privately labeled as POS: Piece of Shit. “The human consequences,” writes Chris Hedges, “never figures in to their balance sheets.”

All education has come to pursue is analytical intelligence, based on ready-made answers to rigid and specialized answers that we regurgitate to be useful. We are socialized to obey and to never challenge the status quo. We are trained to be gullible, to believe the words of intellectual and moral midgets like Summers, Greenspan or Bush – a graduate of Yale and Harvard business school – without question. The unlearning of the mammalian values of compassion, social justice and critical thinking through education is one of the main reasons why we were unable to see how reckless lending and derivatives trading would destroy jobs, livelihoods and our capacity for moral choice. We are taught to fix a broken system, never to challenge it when its operation becomes too odious to take part.

After Valerie’s resignation, team Scooter decided to fight back through Youtube. Like hoards of North Korean news anchors employing the verbal tactics of Mean Girls, they continuously talked about how they were offended, sad and speechless in what they called a personal response of a coordinated smear campaign. They are clearly unaware that the white supremacists of the 1960s were also offended when the coloreds fought for their equal rights, as were the Islamists who firebombed Danish embassies worldwide over a couple of cartoons.

For the student union, the personal seems to be completely interchangeable with the political, as is the case with Putin’s Russia or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Like the tea party republicans, team Scooter lives in a bubble of wishful thinking and misinformation. Not only cutting themselves off from reality but also accelerating their own infantile regression, where a challenge to the structure of student politics has been rendered as a personal offense.