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  • 14 de January de 2025
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Educational goal: the voluntary servitude

Educational goal: the voluntary servitude

Educational goal: the voluntary servitude

The educational system has been involved in this aim for several decades

Muhammad Afzaal. / Pixabay

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Xavier Massó

 

It is increasingly evident that the current hegemonic social engineering has been for decades instilling a teleological charge into our educational systems, which, through the primacy of the “emotional”, seeks to achieve what La Boétie (16th century) had already called “voluntary servitude“.

For La Boétie, beyond any repressive force, the acceptance of servitude is ultimately voluntary because it presupposes consent on the part of the subjected to his subjection. In the 19th century Marx will point to this in terms of alienation: the “false consciousness“, duly primed with the required doses of “opium of the people“.

In the mid-20th century, Aldous Huxley understands that the objective remains the same, but since a few centuries have passed away, the scenario for its achievement was much more complex. Until then, submission had commonly been accompanied by the delayed promise of a transcendence wich provided the necessary consolation in a world where misfortune and suffering were considered a cosmic fate.

Huxley lucidly perceives his time and the change of “strategy” that occurred there. Now the point is trying to find the formula of the perfect dictatorship, the one that no one notices, nor perceives as such, and the slave, not being aware of being one, feels satisfied, “happy”, being so.

But, once transcendence has been definitely left behind, it is required to eradicate the deterministic idea of ​​cosmic “fatefulness” from the future servant’s mind, because it was inherent to an element of “resignation” that could not work without the consolation exercised by the promise of a transcendent beyond which, since it eventually has become immanent, and this not the sphere for which it had been conceived, it woul not then be only functionless, but could easily become dangerous due to the frustration over meeting expectations: so, we must therefore throw out millenarianism of any kind. And what means will be then reality mediated by? No problem: the possibility of mediation will also be suppressed. In the end it has turned out not to be “empower imagination”, but “empower immediacy” instead.

It is therefore a question of recovering the voluntarism of the Laboetian servant, let’s say its «will to servitude», but duly adapted to the new scenario. That is why Huxley tells us in his ‘Brave New World Revisited’ that it is not the Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’ that works, but his ‘Brave New World’: nobody wants to leave it. Some because they cannot even consider it; others because they panic just thinking about it.

The question is how to achieve this in a world that is becoming increasingly skeptical and disbelieving. That is to say, once any idea of transcendence has been left behind, it’s projection on the mundane also falls away. Conformity cannot therefore come from such an instance, but from its opposite: immanence in its fleetingness, in the immediacy of the “here and now” as unique referent. And to do this, it is enough to universalize disbelief through ignorance. Achieving it may certainly be a bit more complex: it requires putting psychologism at the service of social engineering; that is, at the service of sociologism. Quite a paradox, but extremely effective.

There has been devoted enormous efforts to this aim, with no regard to the posible damage that its achievement could cause. In some cases even playing the sorcerer’s apprentice and in good faith; with a touching naivety without the slightest doubt, and a more than doubtful utility insofar as they have served to whitewash a predatory social engineering project for which they also serve as food. As they say, hell is full of good intentions…

And as prosaic as it may seem, everything indicates that the formula consists of dismantling the enlightened model by proceeding to its deconstruction, stripping it of the spirit that animated it and metamorphosing it by placing it under the influence of emotional alibis, which do function under the primacy of the here and now inmediacy –the Latin «hic et nunc»–, safe away from any conceptual mediation or abstraction that supposes the slightest hint of criteria.

The target is therefore to destroy the very foundations of the Enlightenment, the ashlars on which the last two centuries of our history had been built on, with greater or lesser success. But we are left, certainly, with the instrumental resources and progress that it has brought us, now under a new logic, detached from the spirit that animated them: the motto of sapere aude symbolized by Kant, and the degradation of the no less Kantian categorical imperative to a crude, prudish and doctrinal slogan of secular catechism, instead of what it really is: the condition of possibility of morality. So humanity returns to the intellectual minority from which it had barely managed to emerge. Now not under the tutelage of God, but perhaps that of AI. It is even possible that it has already thought about it and decided.

For the servant to feel happy in his immediacy, it is essential that he CANNOT even remotely think on aspiring to anything else. And for this, certain horizons must be placed completely outside the range of his conceptual reach; It is therefore essential that the individual lacks criteria and, logically, that the purpose of education does not consist of providing him with tools to form it, as well as inhibiting him from any hint of a spirit of improvement, otherwise the emotional fit of the individual in his relationship with the environment would crack: the dream of bloodless lobotomy made reality.

Educationally, it is about providing the student, individualized in his irreducible singularity, with the psycho-emotional mechanisms of vindication of his own identity, extrinsically induced, in a sense that facilitates his instrumental functionality within the productive and social machinery. Nothing more. That is, adapting his psyche to his social integration so that he’s functional as a labor force and as a consumer, and that he does not create any problems.

Yes, we are on the way to forced voluntary servitude. The educational system has been involved in this aim for several decades. And it is progressing appropriately…


Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons

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