Vankarha Su Mek

The Vankarha Su Mek (Stream of Light Foundation), is an educational institution based in Tala, the administrative centre of the Duchy of Raikoth.

Originally the Foundation was established as an overseas missionary organisation intended to spread 'Hyperborean' values amongst the cultural elites of major powers of Micras, as part of a strategy on the part of the Raikothlin to slowly exert a civilising influence on the southern barbarians whom they deemed to be pitifully deranged and incapable of overcoming their own, culturally imposed, cognitive biases.

Eventually with the bankruptcy of the ruling esoteric non-government on the island, funding for the missionary work overseas dried up and those missionaries who did not assimilate into their host societies eventually made their way home. Vankarha Su Mek therefore shifted its focus from proselytising abroad to preserving the faith and culture at home.

Principles

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.

Curriculum

The curriculum is divided into the elithve and the ainaive which both aim to teach graduates how to be reasonable and how to be happy.

Ainaive

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.

Links

Original article by Scott Alexander, Oct 09, 2009[1]