I have just come from a long conversation with two university friends. On Thursday, I also had a very long conversation with another like-minded person. All of us are males in our 20s. And there was one direction in which both conversations flowed towards naturally.
When we look at our environment, we see things being operated at bureaucracy mode, i.e. keep the thing running, quality of output is not a concern. Our academia is running at bureaucracy mode. Our corporations are running at bureaucracy mode. Our government is running at bureaucracy mode. This mode of keeping the things running as they are, requires that affairs be operated by people who are submissive to the existing processes and resistant to new ideas, i.e. people who switch off their brain. Academia is exactly producing such people, and is very good at this job.
The result of this situation is that we live among people who have long switched off their brain, or at-least the part of brain that thinks new thoughts. The society may apparently continue to function this way, but not for long. Because the most dangerous effect of it is that people who do not think have no principles to stand by. Whenever they'll have a hard decision to make, they will take out their moral compass, look at it, and act upon it, without ever realizing that it's being influenced by the dominant magnetic field of their bureaucracy. The days of such a society are numbered.
The realization of this situation is very depressing. But this is what we see when we look around us. Naturally, a thinking person thinks of academia as the part where the process starts and so he thinks of attacking it first. But he realizes that among this chain of academia, corporation, and governments, academia is the longest surviving institution. Although government bureaucratic structures stays same, at-least the political process on the surface level keeps changing names with the electoral process. Some new corporations do emerge, and some do die out. But, academia, if you think about it, is the longest-held monopoly on a system. How do universities or educational systems die out? They just don't. And it's not because they adapt with the changing world so rapidly and so well that they never die, but it's because by design their simply is no mechanism for them to die. Or at-least we don't have a mechanism to declare them dead and build something new.
So attacking academia seems futile. It can't be changed.
So next comes corporations. The way you fight with corporations is by competing with them in business with a different mode of operation, an example of which is startups. This smaller, faster, and innovation-based mode of business operation will be able to outcompete corporations in all areas where free market exists. Now, there are two bottlenecks in spread of this newer business model, I don't know which one is narrower, but eventually one will become a problem when the other is fixed.
Digital space by nature was a new area less governed by governments, and that is why startups have naturally sprung up there and flourished. But in physical space, government bureaucracy is still halting the flourishing of startups. In competing against the governmental friction, startups either burn out and fail, or if they do survive, they do so by eventually picking up the same weapons, and becoming a corporation. For innovation-based businesses to win in physical space, government bureaucracy must be fought and defeated.
The second bottleneck in prevalence of this newer business model is that given this academic system that enables sucking away of smart people by corporations and government bureaucracy, where will the smart people to start start-ups come from?
And maybe this is also linked to the problem of fighting government. How can it be changed if the masses of people and government are aligned in this principle of only keeping things running without doing anything new? We need people who do not believe in this principle and thus don't want to be governed by a government who believes in this principle. Who will be these people?
My answer is: our children.
If thousands of years of evolution and survival of fittest, has given rise to human beings who have conquered the skies, moved mountains, and built thinking-machines, it is not an unsafe bet to claim that people who welcome change have higher odds of surviving than people who don't. The way things survive is by evolving, not remaining static. So if my chain of reasoning is not flawed, we have to remain steadfast on our path, and create small pockets of environments where our children develop the same principles of nature, and the future is in safe hands.
I also believe in human will and autonomy, and I do believe a lot of people raised in the change-resisting institutions will also develop their own thinking and start challenging that mode of operation, but still, that is something we can't fully rely on, unless we also think of producing a progeny that lives by principles of nature i.e. of change.
But, our children won't develop these principles by default in the currently existing environment created by bureaucracies. It will take a conscious and sustained effort on our part to create small pockets of environments that allows our children to develop the strength to withstand the downsliding and to overcome the inertia.
Technology is an amplifying media. All things decay in stasis. Brain rotting through huge consumption of addictive content is simply an amplified or sped up version of natural rotting of a static mind. Similar technology also amplifies the learning process of a young mind by accelerating the process of their natural explorations.
A car can be harmful in two ways. 1) it is standing on a steep hill by default, and it starts moving downhill if you don't take any action. 2) the car is on a level road but if you wildly keep accelerating, it goes out of control and causes an accident.
This is the technology our children will gain access to when they are born, and they would have to be taught how to drive it safely, and then we'll have to let them explore. I'm not just talking about cars. I'm talking about technology.
So, we have established technology is not our enemy. Our enemy is defaults. Our children find themselves in a car which is sliding downhill, and the children have no idea the danger they are in. Academia is not going to solve it. Corporations are not going to solve it. Governments are not going to solve it.
But this is not an unsolvable problem. It just requires conscious sustained effort on our part.
So, summarizing my chain of thought, without people who can think for themselves, we will never have people who can stand by their principles, and a society where people don't stand by their principles will inevitably be led to conflicts and disharmony, and such a society won't survive for long. There are three forms of bureaucracies, that are leading production of people who can't think for themselves : 1) Academia, 2) Corporations, 3) Governments. All these three forms of bureaucracies, by their design, resist change and innovation. The way to fight with them is to 1) create or work in smaller and innovation-friendly modes of businesses such as startups that outcompete corporations, and 2) take learning of our children in our own hands instead of academia, and give them an environment that allows them to develop their own thinking and follow their natural curiosities, so that we produce a progeny that can think for their own, and thus by mechanism of natural selection, allow prevalence of people who will build better systems for learning and keeping societal order than the ones we have now.
[That is where my chain of thought has went to, uptill now. The first part about choosing modes of creating economic value other than corporations is something I hadn't thought of in this framework before I started writing this. So, I have yet to contemplate further on that part. The reason I had started writing this was because in the second part of solution, I had gotten stuck at a point, the explanation of which I will do in a separate piece, as the preface or description of the context has grown larger than I had expected, and this preface is I believe a more important piece, and the problem I had in my mind was only a specific sub-problem within the context, so it should be described separately. I will link the next post here.]