The Inherent Drawbacks of Oral Tradition and “Higher” Education
Tags: Education, Anti Revisionism, Zhuangzi, Marxism, Revolution

Everything we know about hundreds of indigenous cultures comes directly from Oral Tradition. The skills they kept, as well as the ones they lost. The tools, the stories, the myths, legends, facts, explanations for natural phenomenon, geneology: the entire lineage of all human existence, all of what we know comes from Oral Tradition. It’s no wonder we’re as fucked as we are as a society now.

I thought about learning a new skill, so I went down to the Oral Tradition center and talked with the Oral Traditionalists about how I could traditionally learn something such as Astrophysics. And they told me I have to apply, through oral tradition at the help desk, forward to registration, have my money ready, and sign up to meet weekly or bi-weekly to hear someone use oral tradition to fill my head with all the wonders of such a science. Science. That is, the study of which becomes bias by the influence of human communication, measured with tools, numbers, and symbols correlating to reality beyond our capacity of speech — yes, of course… The most optimal way to study science is to listen to people talk about it, the same way cave people taught other cave people the nuance of spear-throwing.

So you go through with several years of oral traditionalism, and then it is your duty to condense it into the thing oral traditionalists have mocked since its conception: Written Word. And it is then up to the subjective speculation of the hypothetical reader to reward your interpretation of oral tradition condensed into the abstract written word is substantial enough to persuade them to award you Certification.

This “Diploma” certification then signifies to other people how you qualify, and in what regard, corresponding to the designated fields of education — as each and every subject has been subjectively compartmentalized into boxes so far removed from their context the students cannot be intellectually scaffolded without supervision by a trained expert in Oral Tradition. Post-Modernism isn’t the evil demon confused speculators like to portray, it is a very useful artistic tool. But scientifically, the removal of context deprives an object or instance of any potential understanding, and reduces it to Hume’s supposition: that any supposed cause cannot be discovered by its effect. So nobody really learns anything, except for the tunnel vision of seeking education for education’s sake in order to secure the certification.

Now you’re $50,000 in debt, and you have a piece of paper that says you certainly endured a series of trials in regard to Oral Tradition and its arts and nuance of it. It is too complex to reduce to a few words, which is why you have stacks and stacks of papers describing the entire adventure. After all this work, 8 years of arduous focus, and dedication, sleepless nights, trials, folly, ups, and downs amounting to no more ceremonial an approach than a tribal person ascending to the rank of warrior after listening to the holy sermons… Finally, you can get a job. Not a regular job, no. One that requires you to think on your toes constantly or end up losing everything.

You climbed the ladder to the tightrope and now you must walk it. The ringleader tells you to pay no mind that it’s a circus, just that you won’t get your daily bread if you can’t jump through the hoops. Your life value, reduced to words on paper: distorted oral tradition.

How do we know that the fundamental basis of our society amounts to the rubber link of oral tradition? Because cops don’t have lawbooks in their cars, and they don’t throw books at you. They scream words at you, regardless if you are hearing impaired, and then they subdue you, too often lethally. When you get a job, the paperwork is the screen, but the verbal interview is the clincher. If you cannot practice your “primitive” culture’s oral tradition then you are not going to be employed, even at the lowest level. It is accurate to call any culture primitive because our most advanced features are by definition the newest and most primitive examples of their expression to be found in nature.

Applied post-modernist disassembly renders everything humanity has ever done up until this point meaningless because there has been no outrageous advancements. As though all education proves itself to fade into dust. But to account for the context and history, we have the same ancient basic approach to everything, it is admittedly refined. We are rediscovering ancient things time and again because we need more practice and more refinement to achieve the essential understandings of things we’ve barely scratched the surface on. Our language has more rules, miscommunication happens, but the tools are there for correction.

The hilarity is when people proclaim to have ascended the mentality of the modest human, as though to dance around the fortress walls and proclaim it is the plateau to the ultimate holy structure. We’ve yet to build the city we’ve claimed to conquer, and we’ve yet to achieve the republic we call obsolete. The soviets grappled and lost their own advancements over the limitations of basic human understanding, misinformation, and uncritical destruction. Revisionist usurpers made themselves at home in the chaos of the confusion of stopping treason. The historical revolutionaries have successfully built beautiful wells, time and again, and time and again those wells have been poisoned.

The tiniest seedling still exists which is an idea, planted by Enver Hoxha. It was described as a great unwavering red oak, but as the nearest advancement in human thought it is our most primitive and undeveloped defense against the insanity of self-destructive policies. It is called Anti-Revisionism, and it requires development as a socio-economic theory. As it stands it is as confounding and inapplicable to reality as the first locomotives were before rails were installed. This is where it is important to critically assess without assault that conventional education falls short. We must educate ourselves and educate each other. It takes a massive group to hone the most basic of ideas. It took a village to develop the wheel and it will take a massive amount of collaboration to create what will reduce suffering in our lives. But we’re stuck using the same primitive Oral Tradition to convey the lessons crucial to overcome its limitations.

Higher Education is therefore just another form of oppression when subjective skills are conflated with more objective sciences. An arts degree can cost as much as a medical degree, or business degree. Commercialism takes the same dedication to study as all the Humanities yet is rewarded at an insanely higher rate. There is a battlefield, and all studies are competing, based on oral tradition. This is the sickening part. There is no human knowledge more or less valuable than the next, because it is all interconnected and betrays the existence of the next piece of knowledge.

What we witness now is the breaking down of walls, whereby the trained experts in oral tradition, teachers, professors, educators of all stripes will have their burdens lifted, their chains disconnected, and their passions unleashed in order to pursue whatever knowledge they so choose in order to present it in any manner they should be so inclined. Internet video sites, like Youtube Tutorials, have become a trope because now you can learn anything from anywhere if you are dedicated enough. We don’t need to force a bunch of uninterested yuppies into a room to be talked at for hours on end so that they can learn the proper way to write a Restaurant menu. We can give educators their lives back, and even give them a real living wage. Educators need to be employed where it is important, yet all the money goes to middlemanagement and ceramic sex toy workshops. Because this all makes sense with Oral Tradition.

Well, Oral Tradition is as obsolete as all the hobbyist gardening tools we use. People can be left to use it in their own home, but for the flourishing of the nation we need to Industrialize the process, in a humane way, the way we never had the capacity to anymore. We need Digital Tradition, Virtual ‘Tradition’ above the Metaphysical Traditions.

It is our epoch which will build the next culture. We must be wise about it.

We cannot claim to have achieved anything if we’ve yet to grasp the meaning we set the words out to grasp.

“The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish, and when the fish are caught, the trap is forgotten. The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten. Where can I find a person who has forgotten the words, so that I can talk to them?” — Zhuangzi