Month: November 2019

Gulag Academia

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A study of the effect of hierarchy on academic freedom and our consequent perceptions of reality has been uploaded to archive.org and is available as a PDF here.

Abstract

Purpose: Exposing the deficiencies of institutional hierarchies in academia which limit the potential for human creativity and understanding.

Design/methodology/approach: This paper is the product of non-hierarchical, self-organised learning following the methodology of CoCreative Learning (see Section 9).

Findings: Academia’s institutional hierarchy perpetuates ignorance of the current political economy which functions as a mechanism to farm humans and harvest the wealth they create.

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Higher truth

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Introduction

Having become increasingly aware of the limitations of critical thinking, I’ve taken time out to reflect on how best to proceed on my journey of discovery.

Over the first 60 years of my life, I learned to “play the system” of the current political economy with variable success but remained, for most of those years, in a state of Trained Ignorance, as described in How We Live. Public and private education take us on a linear journey of learning through prescribed curricular, abstraction, erroneous assumptions and binary logic, which obscures the subtleties, ambiguities and contradictions in life and how everything is connected.

Abrupt changes in my life in the mid 1990’s started me on a journey of learning but I continued to “play the system” as best as I could.

However, as draconian limits were imposed on our freedom, due to the geopolitical and social upheaval, following the false flag attacks on 11th September 2001, I realised that everything I thought I knew couldn’t be relied on and needed to be questioned. The reality gap between my previous convictions and my lived reality fuelled my thirst for understanding.

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