Beneficial Programming
Posted on 29. Sep, 2009 by Ruda in Society
I’ve always been very critical of how people are programmed from day 1 to operate a certain way in our society. I had never really thought of the benefits this may have until this summer. I was back in India and had a lot of time to kill during the day so I decided to try and teach basic math to our maid. I spent about a week trying to get her to understand the concept of multiplication and it seemed as hopeless as ever. She could replicate answers to previous problems I gave her, but she couldn’t figure out any new ones for herself because she didn’t really have an understanding of how it all worked.
This made me think of how part of the conditioning society provides for us is our education. After seeing the poor display by our maid, this made me a little glad that I had been exposed to higher learning and had the luxury of thinking about the bigger questions in life. It’s hard to imagine someone who isn’t able to understand math being able to understand other abstract ideas. I think there is some point in our learning where the law of diminishing returns comes into effect. For example, getting a PhD will not affect my ability to reason as much as my kindergarten class did. So I assume that there is some necessary level of education that human beings should have which will afford us the luxury of thinking for ourselves and analyzing the ideas that govern our thinking.
The trick is to learn as we grow up but not take everything at it’s word. Instead of going to school and memorizing information to spit back at our parents, professors, and future employers, we should try to learn and understand the material for ourselves and think of what it means to us. That is after all, at least I think, the benefit of humanity’s ability to reason. If we don’t do this, then we really aren’t getting as much as we can out of our learning and instead of something that can help bring us to a higher plain of consciousness, we let it hold us even more tightly in the cages of society’s programming.
Hello! I suppose you couldn't resist trying to catch a glimpse of the person writing all this nonsense. If you want to learn more about me, check out the "About Me" page. Self-explanatory I guess.