The ‘democracy’ we are permitted is one in which we can vote for a handful of wealthy ‘representatives’ of business, wealth or professional power every four or five years and then spend the rest of the time watching them on television or reading about their democratic exploits in the news. We cannot vote for a different system, ‘the government always gets in’; we cannot vote against its expansion, against growth, progress or prosperity; and we cannot vote for anyone who can meaningfully change the system we do have. We can usually count ourselves lucky if the vote isn’t rigged, although we’ll never really know if it is or not.
We can be sure that monumental efforts go into forming people’s minds in a ‘democratic system’ so that they’ll be sufficiently confused to vote in the correct direction (see myth 9) or sufficiently distracted and atomised to not cause a fuss if they do perceive the sham. And we can be sure that, should anyone get onto the ballot paper who might resist the demands of the market, there will be ‘a crisis of democracy’ which the system will use every power under its command to manage. ‘Democracy’ is good for business. If business suffers it magically becomes ‘undemocratic’.
Finally we can be sure that if, by an even more unlikely stroke of chance, a government gets elected which is interested in actually representing the people or is the slightest bit hostile to capital, those who hold power in society will instantly drop their support for democracy. They will buy off corruptible leaders, wage economic warfare and, using the organs of force and coercion they possess non-democratic control of — the police, the army, the media, the law-courts and so on — they will smear, undermine, ‘destabilise’ and, sooner or later, obliterate the ‘threat to democracy,’ which is to say; crush the ridiculous idea that the government is supposed to take care of the interests of the people when, in the ‘real world,’ the purpose of governments, democratic or otherwise, is to extend national boundaries, gain control of resources for business, defend the interests of business, protect property rights for the business class, provide labour for business (including the right kind of educated labour), hand massive sums of subsidy money over to business, manage infrastructure for business, fix deviants, through imprisonment and diagnosis, back into the system and take care of the interests of those in power. The idea that government should look after the interests of the people or nature is useful for public relations but has zero influence on policy. Unless said interests are forced upon the ruling classes; then small concessions will, to much fanfare, be made to diffuse the threat.
The most common and effective way of dealing with ‘threats to democracy’ however is to simply let participation in the system grind down whoever wishes to make significant changes to it. Democracy doesn’t just legitimise authority and provide a little hierarchical mobility within the system (see myth 5), but it usefully deflects revolt into manageable channels1. When decent folk with even moderate aspirations to make changes to the system enter democratic structures, they find they can achieve, effectively, nothing (Podemos, Syriza, Lula, etc, etc.). This was well understood by the industrial architects of the modern system who realised that the terrifying revolutionary power of the new urban working class could be moderated and dissipated by absorbing popular discontent into institutional hierarchies, particularly trade unions, the rise of which castrated early modern attempts to dismantle the system (see myth 31).
We do not, then, live in a democracy; nor can we when the power of money, property, professionalism and technique, not to mention the mass psychosis of easily shaped ‘public opinion,’ completely overwhelms that of the fabled ballot. But this doesn’t stop writers, academics, politicians and campaigners on the right and the left, striving to reach the promised land. The idea is that once we have a true democracy, of whatever kind; socialist, capitalist, Marxist, anarcho-syndicalist; once ‘people power’ conquers money-power, property-power, technical-power and so on; once the well known small-minded stupidity of huge numbers of emotional people thinking as one has been overcome by the enlightened ministrations of professional educators and the absence of professional mind-manipulators; then our political, social and ecological problems will be, more or less at an end; because true democracy,2 the modern system tells us, is the only rational way to fairly and freely organise society. Anything else is fascist madness. That democracy promotes irresponsibility, psychotic groupthink, the destruction of spiritual independence and shallow mediocrity; that it is inherently oligarchic, divisive and cruelly competitive3; that it suppresses individuality, spontaneity, mutual aid, independence and intelligence; that there might be a source of truth, intelligence or awareness that we don’t need democratic decision-making to discover4; that friendships, sweet love-affairs, happy families and well-functioning societies throughout pre-history are neither democratic nor authoritarian; that nobody in their right mind accepts democracy in any matters of importance if the vote doesn’t go their way; and why should they, if they are right? that democracy inevitably entails exclusion (those who cannot be trusted to vote the right way; criminals, children, foreigners, ‘madmen’, etc.) and policing (enforcing the will of those who can); none of this can be considered without sounding like you’ve drifted in from one of Neptune’s blue moons.
The most inhuman element of democracy however, and the reason that it is revered by both inhuman elites and their dehumanised dependents, is that, like the law it is inseparable from (see myth 14), it eliminates personal responsibility.
Who is responsible for global warming? Who is responsible for ‘the sixth mass extinction’? Who is responsible for the horrendous conditions in Chinese and Bangladeshi factories? Who is responsible for rising fascism? Who is responsible for the love going out of the world? Who is responsible for our unhappiness? Who is responsible for the death of culture? Who, god-damn-it, who is responsible for Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran? It can’t be the politicians; they’re ‘representatives of the will of the people’, not to mention slaves to the market-system. It can’t be the people themselves; they’re not in charge of anything, are they? It can’t be managers or ceos; they have a responsibility to their shareholders, and if they put anything nobler than profits first, their company would go under.5 It can’t be the shareholders either; they don’t control anything. It can’t be the journalists; they’re just reporting the facts. It can hardly be the policemen, the teachers, the lawyers or the doctors; they’re just doing their noble, noble jobs, under very trying circumstances; nor can it be all the technical specialists who develop and operate the system; anything beyond their particular domain of competence is clearly someone else’s affair. It can’t be the pimps, pushers, pornographers and movie producers; they’re just giving the punters what they want. It can’t be the mentally ill, the murderers, the polluters, the paedophiles or the thieves, because their illness made them do it. And it can’t be Ed and Justin; they’re just regular kids, having a good time. In fact, it can’t be anyone, because, ‘look, I didn’t choose to be me!’
So nobody is responsible. Phew! No need for any of us to worry about doing anything about our lives or about our world then. We can just consume, exploit and produce to our heart’s content and let someone else — someone who, insanely, is taking responsibility — do something about it all. If such a loon can be found.
But hold on a moment, that can’t be right. There must be someone who is to blame here. As it obviously isn’t me, or any group which I belong to, who can it possibly be? Why, of course! It must be them! It’s the fascists, the Brexiteers, the remainers, the government, Bilderberg, the Muslims, the Jews, the blacks, the commies, the capitalists, the anarchists, the West, the East, women, men, sexists, snowflakes, feminists, mum, dad, millennials, boomers, Catholics, immigrants, the establishment, the unwashed masses, the bourgeoisie, aliens and arseholes. Anything but me. Anything but the system.
It is the system which has power, power over and within all people. This power, it is true, is for the benefit of those at the top — for elites and their managers, who share and repress the largest share of guilt for the system. But our emperors and mandarins unconsciously created a democratic machine which would carry their conscious responsibility away, and then decorated it with mighty slogans — justice, equality and progress — so that we wouldn’t perceive the inhuman monstrosity of its power and our total, humiliating submission to it.
This personal humiliation guarantees the creation of excuses and scapegoats. Because the system infuses the self so deeply, it is able to support those at the top through the thoughts and desires of those at the bottom — through ‘public opinion’ and ‘common sense’6 — and through the imposed needs of the technological-bureaucratic interzone through which all must pass, in the daily grind, to get their bread. By having to worry about what the neighbours think, what the boss thinks, what your friends think, and by having to go to school, drive to work, register your dog, pay your taxes, get your shopping, replace your kettle and upgrade your operating system you are more effectively domesticated and disciplined than you could ever be by an Orwellian state, a secret police or the whims of a mad king. But because all these pressures and indignities arise, at least partly, from your own fears and desires, from your own self, the system remains obscured, impossible to look at in the face. Much easier to blame over-population, corrupt politicians, a decline in traditional values, neoliberalism, terrorism or the lizard people of Beneganeth IV.
The system manufactures excuses and scapegoats at the same almighty rate as it pumps out addictions — all of which work in concert. Feel guilty? There’s a charity for that, or a yoga-class. Feel rebellious? There’s a t-shirt for that, or a march. Feel unhappy? There’s a diagnosis for that, or a support group. Feel purposeless? There’s an ideology for that, or a video game. Feel ordinary? There’s a special identity for that, or a promotion. Feel lonely? There’s a Facebook group for that, or a whore. Feel bored? There’s an app for that, or a pill. Feel like it might all be your fault? You silly! Have a chat with your mates; they don’t bother themselves with such mad ideas. And then, when we poison the world we can point to our donation, our prescription, our t-shirt, our belief, our club and our phone and say ‘look! I’m doing the best I can!’ or ‘I’m sorry, I have to let you go’ or ‘it’s all their fault,’ or ‘sorry? what? I wasn’t really listening.’
The Myth of Democracy first appeared, surprise-surprise, in ancient Greece.7 It was those insane inventors of money and law (see myth 14), those frauds and fools who first conflated consciousness with thought, those worshippers of rapists and sadists, those haters of women, those slave-owners and pederasts, those thieves and despoilers; it was they who first invented the nightmare illusion that the fools-paradise of irresponsibility is based on; the democratic mass. They did it! Blame them!
Today the same illusion, as prevalent as ever, is used to justify every form of violence, addiction, selfishness and repression. All responsibility for ‘mental illnesses,’ all responsibility for genocide, all responsibility for the innumerable indignities and deceits we daily suffer are all passed on to something else. Nobody is really happy, everything is dying; but none of that is my fault.8 This works for everyone, but particularly for the owners and managers of the system. You may have noticed, for example, in ‘late-stage capitalism’ that nothing really works. This is deliberately planned — as crippling bureaucracy, widespread ineptness, frustrating interactions and omnipresent shoddiness are good for business — while, at the same time, simply allowed to happen. Some of the most appalling crimes against man and woman today are committed by allowing the system to replicate and organise itself shoddily and for its operations to unfold haphazardly, in agonising slowness. Those who can do something, simply don’t. Thus money and power roll up the Magic Mountain as the people who are deprived of both are ground down, dismantled piece by piece, without anybody ever being responsible, with nobody to blame, nobody even to be found. Under such circumstances it’s not surprising that loopy ‘conspiracy theories’ arise while the system itself gets off scot-free.
‘A Constituent Assembly is the means used by the privileged classes, when a dictatorship is not possible, either to prevent a revolution, or, when a revolution has already broken out, to stop its progress with the excuse of legalizing it, and to take back as much as possible of the gains that the people had made during the insurrectional period’. Errico Malatesta, Against the Constituent Assembly as against the Dictatorship.
Political democracy that is. Clearly discussions, federations, assemblies, reaching a decision with people you disagree with, and so on can be called ‘democratic’ — but this is not the political meaning of ‘democracy’ — rule by the people via majority vote. See Crimethinc, From Democracy to Freedom.
See Bob Black, Debunking Democracy.
‘Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?’ Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.
In addition, although ‘the boss’ certainly does exist, a great many of his disciplinary functions are diffused across the system, further obscuring his responsibility. As Ivor Southwood puts it in Against Precarity Against Employability: ‘The boss is dispersed across a whole network of abstract institutions: not just employer but recruitment agency, welfare advisor, landlord, credit card company… all of which are combined in an internalised virtual authority which oversees and audits one’s attempts to act as a responsible, hard-working, ‘employable’ citizen’. See myth 4.
‘What is done to all by the few always takes the form of the subduing of individuals by the many: the oppression of society always bears the features of oppression by a collective’. M. Horkheimer & T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Not a lot of love here for ‘the Ancient Greeks’ is there? Needless to say, I hope, that I have absolutely nothing against the magnificent Greek people of today or of antiquity. This term refers to a movement, an ideology, a point in time and space when a connected series of values, which we are all now responsible for, first arose.
Not that we are guilty for our responsibility of course. Guilt is just another self-indulgent trick of the self. Or, to put it another way, ‘I think that everything that happens to us is our fault… but that’s not our fault!’
17. The Myth of Education
One of the most unequivocal findings re childhood from the ethnographic record is children learning their culture without teaching. ‘Navahos abhor the idea or practice of controlling other beings in the course of everyday life’… Inuit ‘parents do not presume to teach their children what they can as easily learn on their own’… An egalitarian ethos also contraindicates the inherently hierarchical act of teaching… Deciding what another person should do, no matter what his age, is outside the Yequana vocabulary of behaviors. There is great interest in what everyone does, but no impulse to influence — let alone coerce — anyone. The child’s will is his motive force… [Aka] respect for an individual’s autonomy is also a core cultural value… one does not impose his/her will, beliefs, or actions on others [including children]…
David F. Lancy, The Anthropology of Childhood
Education means compulsory schooling in a world of artificial scarcity · · · Schooled activity stunts maturity, punishes experience, corrupts initiative and cuts the individual off from the world, making self-sufficiency and self-confidence all but impossible · · · The most schooled people on earth are generally the most stupid; the most heavily indoctrinated, the most insensitive, the most conceited and the most helpless.
The purpose of education is to socialise human beings into a life of complete institutional dependency. School teaches you that justice must come from someone in institutional authority, that meaningful activity must come from a ‘career path,’ that if you want to express yourself you must first gain access to centralised speech platforms1, that if you want to do something, you must first of all gain a licence or a qualification and that, above all, your own desires and instincts are invalid.
General incompetence, self-alienation and permanent childishness is the purpose of education; indeed the stated purpose. The designers of the modern school were chillingly explicit about what school is supposed to do2. Self-knowledge, self-confidence, peace-of-mind, sensitivity, spontaneity and autonomy do not figure; indeed they are existential threats of the highest order which must be repeatedly exterminated.
The purpose of education is to train students in techniques required by the market-system; managing large amounts of useless data, doing the same thing over and over and over and over again, doing things you don’t actually want to do, under extreme time pressure, for no better reason than because someone in authority tells you to, paying no attention to the world around you and unquestioningly accepting given myths. So called ‘objective’ exams fulfil this purpose perfectly, weeding out those who insist on doing things their own way, in their own time, without any need of overt coercion; although there are plenty of other ways that systemic threats and defective units can be identified. Inability to sit still, staring out of the window, refusal to do ludicrous assignments, hatred of authority, bunking off, asking the wrong kinds of questions, ‘inappropriate’ behaviour and offensive language are all grounds for suspicion, tranquillisation, ridicule, failure or expulsion.
The purpose of education is to postpone the entry of workers into a crammed labour market — forcing them to accrue debts which can only be alleviated by more work — and to give hundreds of thousands of useless intellectuals something to do; namely, go from twenty years of being subjected to education to forty years of subjecting others to it. Institutional brochures exhorting those who have finally escaped school to do something ‘inspiring’ with their lives by re-entering it don’t tend to focus on teachers who inspire their students to do what the fuck they love (or, even more inspiringly, love who the fuck they fuck).
The purpose of education is to transform human beings into continually assessed, continually observed ‘cases’. Naturally, teachers are not expected to rate subservience directly or explicitly; the syllabus, rather, is structured to reward, with good grades and positive references, those who check faculty attitudes and faithfully reproduce them in their work, who do not rebel or cause problems and who yield willingly to the ‘hidden curriculum.’ Such students — usually middle-class — are destined for superior professional jobs. They can be trusted to direct their curiosity, creativity and critical minds in profitable directions without seriously questioning the entire exercise.
The hidden curriculum exists in the experience of attending school, rather than what is taught in it; in having to spend most of your life there, in being continually measured and disciplined and in suppressing your finer instincts for years on end. Reformist critics (see myth 31) focus entirely on the subjects that are taught in school, how students’ progress is measured, teaching styles, classroom management, financial cost and so on and so forth. These are permitted topics when talking about education. The purpose of being there at all is never considered. Just as you may criticise individual politicians, ‘fat cats’ and corporations, but must never, ever, critically examine the system itself, so, in school, you are encouraged to question what the teacher says (at least in the ‘better’ schools you are), but to question the point of being in class at all is heresy; and to actually do something about your confinement — leave the class, study what you want, say what you feel — is intolerable; in fact, in many cases, it is a crime.
The purpose of education is to squash initiative, self-sufficiency and self-trust. The superficial means by which this is effected is through punishing any serious attempt to cross disciplines or to reject the syllabus which, by virtue of the fact that all socio-economic activity depends on the values and credentials it produces, makes all learning outside of its confines worse than useless; craft, self-knowledge, social responsibility and general non-credentialised competence, all become non-pedagogic in an intensely schooled system, and the entire world beyond the curriculum becomes non-educational, not to mention unreal3. Schools and universities must, at all costs, be completely separated from society. The idea that students can meaningfully contribute to society, learn from those who do or rely on their own will to determine their development, is preposterous, utopian; because a total revolution of society would be required to ‘teach’ students in the manner that they have been ‘taught’ for millions of years, through their own inclination, and integrated with an educational society.
The purpose of education is to make students less intelligent. Ignoring real life and preventing children from having anything to do with it is enough to stupefy them, but if they still persist in being enthusiastic, sensitive, perceptive, creative and intelligent, the school can, and will, effectively extinguish these dangerous instincts from children by imprisoning them in a room for eight, ten, twelve hours a day, by forcing them to compete with each other, by ignoring their unique characters (or, at best, doing almost nothing to allow them to develop) and, above all, by replacing doing with a weird activity which goes by the name of ‘learning,’ the breaking up of activity into a series of stages or ‘skills’ which are fed from above to the student who then labours eternally up the Sisyphean mountain of competence. Every step up is rewarded, every fall punished, thereby inculcating, deep within the student’s psyche, a fear of uncertainty (and therefore of experimenting) and a veritable obsession with ‘the right answer’.
The purpose of education is also to prevent ordinary people from being able to communicate with each other. This is achieved by using professional academic discourse to generate a technical jargon, invested with the quasi-religious authority of Scientific Truth, that usurps key terms in ordinary human speech, but has no power to express life as it is actually lived by those who actually live it. Ordinary speech is now peppered with terms, like ‘energy’, ‘justice’, ‘paradox’ and ‘conscious’, which you have to be a qualified expert, or professionally coded computer, to use ‘correctly’. Even words like ‘love’, ‘god’, ‘beauty’ or ‘reality’ carry with them the subtle unspoken sense that one must be a professional expert (psychologist, priest, artist or philosopher) to really understand or use them. As for expressing yourself in a public forum on topics such as politics, art, history, psychology and so on without having the proper credentials, this is a form of presumptive mania which only fraudulent maniacs and laughable naifs engage in.
The purpose of education is to generate scarce opportunities and foster anxiety about securing them, to reinforce class by providing prestigious degrees to those with sufficient financial and cultural capital to acquire them (see myth 5), to breed snobbishness, cruelty, boredom and functional illiteracy (the inability to do anything useful outside of capitalist structures), to level out nuance, to homogenise the world in the name of ‘multiculturalism’ or ‘diversity,’ to make entry into productive life dependent upon market credentials and to perpetuate this credentialism throughout a life spent in dependence on ‘education’ and ‘training’ which, like medicine, law, consumption and the spectacle must cover every aspect of life in the system. Ideally, in the ‘perfect’ education system, everything human will require a series of qualifications and licenses; cooking, child-rearing, speaking, cycling, walking, sex, all that we do will exist on a graded hierarchy of ‘competences’ each unlocked, as in all centrally or remotely managed virtual experiences, by obtaining enough points from the programme.
Finally, the purpose of education is to fix students into the mechanism of society, to determine which of a handful of system-serving tasks the student is fit to do and to reward her for doing them. If she is unfit for any task she is to be humiliated and rejected. If she is particularly ‘gifted’ (a mixture of technical expertise, ambition and obedience) she is to be rewarded and shown how to manage the system and the human cogs, belts, diodes and processors which comprise it.
Those who make their way through decades of education — both schooled and informal — are unable to really do much and unable to really understand anything. They don’t trust their own instincts, they are afraid of nature and strangers to their own bodies. They are notoriously uncreative, repressed and unhappy while gripping on to what little they know — an ideology, a few facts — and what little they like — a hobby, a narcotic — like their lives depend on it. They sound the same, they look the same. They are trained for a life of desperation, frustration, loneliness, intense mediocrity, humiliating subservience and complete pointless futility trying to find one of a handful of grotesquely unpleasant jobs in a world that falling apart in front of our eyes.4
Or to artificially distributed networks, and the system-friendly popularity, or ‘likes’, which they are founded upon.
See John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education.
