More on government and education

[Scott of Hyperborea]

Related to some things I was discussing with Harvey on IRC a few weeks ago:

The Hyperborean philosophy is that you can't have a sane government without sane people, and that once you have sane people, a sane government follows automatically unless you screw it up. This is the opposite of the philosophy adapted by most modern countries, which do their best to create a system of government that will still avoid total collapse even when large portions of the country are stupid, crazy, or evil. While this latter method, with its Bills of Rights, Balances of Power, Opposing Parties, and so on has met with significant success, Hyperborea has nevertheless chosen a different route.

Hyperboreans believe that all intelligent people will converge upon similar opinions, simply because one opinion has to be right and intelligent people ought to be able to figure out which one it is. Outsiders imagine this as a bit dystopian, as if everyone gets brainwashed to be clones of each other and suppress their true thoughts in order to conform to the Great Leader. But this is a misunderstanding. Hyperboreans who disagree are encouraged to do so loudly and make their voices heard, and social or political pressure to fall in line is absolutely forbidden.

No, the Hyperboreans believe government is a bit like science. The solution to the evolution-creationism debate isn't taking a vote, or striking a compromise. It's also not using force or discrimination to bully people into accepting one theory ot the other. It's educating people until they're smart enough to figure out for themselves that one side is right and the other one is wrong. And once an overwhelming consensus has been reached, then everyone just officially declares one theory true, and if you still don't believe it, they feel kind of sorry for you but otherwise ignore you.

The problem is that it takes quite a lot of craziness to reject well-supported scientific theories, but even tiny amounts of craziness can turn you into a raving political fanatic willing to fight for the death for your belief in communism or capitalism or secularism or traditional values or whatever and sure that everyone on the other side is a tool of the ice demons or whoever. This is why the Hyperborean education system is so unique. Most other countries use education as an tool to cram facts into a child. The Hyperboreans use it as a tool to suck the craziness out.

That's not to say there are no facts at all. Some things, like reading and math, are neccessary to allow further studies, to train the mind, and to make it possible for people to live in the world. But things like history, science, art, literature, and foreign languages are generally ignored. The hope is that once children are no longer crazy, they'll have the good sense to learn them on their own if they're interested, and if they decide they're not interested, they'll have made a sane decision and there's no sense cramming them full of stuff they're honestly not interested in.

In general, the curriculum is divided into the elithve and the ainaive - basically, how to be reasonable and how to be happy.

The elithve is the closest to ordinary book learning, a combination of math, science, ethical calculus, and philosophy that teaches people how to think extremely clearly using the scientific method. Basically this is OB/LW stuff. This is the essence of the attempt to make people approach policy decisions objectively and mathematically, but it may not succeed unless it's run on a properly prepared brain, which is where ainaive comes in.

The ainaive is mental training. Yoga (espec pranayama), meditation, and maybe some posture based stuff like the Alexander Technique for good measure. This gets pretty high tech - something similar to galvanic skin response is used to pin down the unconscious mind and measure progress. There's a lot of nutritional supplementation to encourage the brain to get into a relaxed, happy state, and a lot of muscle exercises to locate tension and eliminate it. In the advanced portions of the Ainaive, students move on to taking psychoactive drugs. The point here is not to permanently keep anyone in a drugged up state, but rather to achieve changes and insights on the drugs that remain after the drug has worn off. See Timothy Leary's research with LSD; psilocybin. The goal is to induce transformative mystical experience that causes a permanent rewiring of the brain to be happier or more compassionate. After this training is over, people should generally be able to take problems calmly and enjoy life, instead of being anxious, angry, or afraid all the time. They should also be able to make good decisions, instead of being driven by their neuroses into desperate choices necessary for psychological survival. Basically this is hi-tech yoga on steroids.

The hope is that well-adjusted, happy people are basically good, and if they're intelligent enough to avoid toxic ideologies, will stay that way and do basically good things. They will then be well-equipped to learn anything else they need to know for a trade or for their adult life.

Some of the most important political battles in Kai-Raikoth have centered around Hyperborean attempts to export this education system to the colonies. For their part, the Hyperboreans worry that the provincials are dooming their children to grow up ignorant, maladjusted, and crazy. And for their part, the provincials think the Hyperboreans are trying to indoctrinate their children into some sort of weird cult that leaves them completely different from the way they and their families have always been. The Hyperboreans have decided to wait and compromise. They introduce a few more Hyperborean ideas into each new generation, in the hopes that each generation will be progressively less crazy, and therefore progressively more open to exposing their children to more Hyperborean ideas. This process is almost complete in Bjorngard, but the Cimmerians are offering more resistance.

The Vankarha Su Mek (Stream of Light Foundation) is something of a Hyperborean missionary society, formed rather recently, that spread their ways of thinking to foreign lands. It has achieved some popularity recently, in the same way that yoga has in Europe and America, but the VSM sometimes despairs that most of their clients are in it for the drugs, the exercise, and the exotic character, and not really willing to change their whole way of life. Nevertheless, there are small VSM educated groups in several of Micras' more cosmopolitan cities.

The VSM had some success in Alalehzamin before they were banned from the county. Some of their original students are believed to be carrying on operations there undercover.

[Aurangzeb Khan]

Hyperboreans who disagree are encouraged to do so loudly and make their voices heard, and social or political pressure to fall in line is absolutely forbidden... once an overwhelming consensus has been reached, then everyone just officially declares one theory true, and if you still don't believe it, they feel kind of sorry for you but otherwise ignore you.

Fascinating as always but, as you do implicitly realise, from a libertarian perspective (the Hayek/Popper inspired one not the Jacobus "Don't Tread on Me" variant) this is, or rather would be in practice, a system that approaches Babkhan levels of evilness.