On Cynical Manipulation, Self-Sufficiency and the Value of Human Death

If nothing else, I hope that this essay reveals the immense power that a single Calvin and Hobbes comic strip can have.

I love that line: “You’ve taught me nothing except how to cynically manipulate the system.” I don’t know if there is any better description of education today than this. You see, education is not actually focused on the process, that being learning itself. Instead it is focused on the result. In primary school, the objective is to advance to the next grade. In high school, the goal is to graduate with a diploma and get into college. In college, the purpose is to acquire the credentials one needs for their future field of employment, usually in the form of a degree.

With these ends in mind, a fairly uniform system is created as so to determine when one “deserves” to be awarded with that end. Success is measure in terms of passing and failing. If you pass, you move on. If you fail, you don’t. Passing and failing themselves are typically determined by grades. One must have a certain minimum grade in order to advance to be considered to have “passed”. Thus the GPA becomes the most important (though not necessarily only) measure of success.

And how, exactly, are grades determined? This is where one might say that “diversity” is introduced into the system. Exams, tests, quizzes, papers, projects, homework assignments, assessments and all sorts of other tools are employed. Sometimes even the abstract concept of “participation” is introduced. Anything that can be assigned a numerical or letter value is employed.

For the student who desires “success”, thus, ensuring that they do well on these tasks is everything. The focus turns to passing the test, acing the exam, writing a good paper, and saying enough things in class to get a decent participation grade. The late-night cram session is born.

There is, of course, something lost in all of this: learning. As Calvin says, all he has been taught is how to cynically manipulate the system in order to get a favorable thought. He has not actually learned how to do anything else. As long as one can retain the information long enough to do well on the quiz, that is considered good enough.

I don’t think I fully understood just how cynical this system was until I arrived on a college campus. Perhaps this sentiment is just stronger here than it was in high school. I don’t really know. At any rate, to illustrate my point I will use the example of my Introduction to Arabic course that I am currently taking. The course is a five credit intensive that meets four days a week. Nominally, there is a homework assignment due every class, although few students actually complete them (I myself stopped working on them after the midterm). The students instead focus on the three quizzes and two exams (midterm and final) that make up the vast majority of the course grade (78%, to be precise).

Today’s class fully expressed the absurdity of what I am talking about. The class had had a written quiz on Friday, which many students (myself included) felt they had done rather poorly on. This was only confirmed by the actions of the professor. He opened the class by asking how many of us had been given a “shake” (to use his term) by the quiz. He then proceeded to hand out a worksheet to use in order to go over a specific topic featured on the quiz. (It should be noted that we rarely were given worksheets during the semester up to this point.) In addition, we conducted the oral portion of the quiz today. It was evident that the professor very much wanted to find ways to give us as many points as possible on this, likely due to the poor performances on the written portion. The harried nature of the quiz would best be described as a rapid fire “say a few sentences in Arabic and leave” speed quiz.

The professor’s concern, of course, comes from the fact that the final exam is this Friday. His students are evidently unprepared for this exam. In addition, the class will be moving on to a different professor in the next level for next semester. It will not reflect well on him if his students arrive seemingly unprepared.

Lost in all of this, once again, is the actual goal of, you know, learning the Arabic language. It was primarily for this reason that I stopped completing the homework assignments or studying for the quizzes: is it really worth doing if its sole purpose is simply to get the grade? I say no. Unfortunately, most students would say yes.

That being said, it is apparent that students are not exactly satisfied with this arrangement. It is more than evident that most students (at least at my school) would probably prefer to be doing something else, and are only here to get credentialized. This would go a long way toward explaining why colleges have such problems with alcohol use (especially binge drinking), drug use (there is a legend that the floor of my residence hall once housed a cocaine ring) and sexual assault. These behaviors are more or less coping mechanisms: a way for the college student to make themselves feel good in a milieu of disenchantment.

Cynical manipulation, of course, is not exclusive to our schools. The workforce is completely riddled with this behavior. The vast majority of people do not like their jobs. However, it is a necessary evil: one must acquire money in order to survive. Money is to work as grades are to education. One does not generally work for its own sake, just as few students attend school for the same reason.

This is, of course, an absurd way of living. What has in essence happened is a ceding of individual self-sufficiency. In truth, one does not require “society” in order to survive. Plato’s Republic is indeed incorrect on this point. The perfect case in point is Henry David Thoreau, who lived a self-sustaining life as detailed in his seminal Walden. Thoreau laments this loss in the following passage, while simultaneously taking a swipe at what was then just being established as modern education:

The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. "But," says one, "you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads?" I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life; — to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month — the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this — or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers' penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?... To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation! — why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.

We have learned, in essence, to let others do many things for us. What we ourselves do is (generally) to make money in order to purchase the labor of others. Our labor, meanwhile, serves to enrich a separate group of people entirely. This process does nothing more than dehumanize us. We lose all connection to that which sustains us. To put it this way, for thousands of years humans hunted and gathered in order to acquire the food they needed to survive. They ate the product of their own labor. With the neolithic revolution, however, more and more humans began eating the product of someone else’s labor. Today, we have gotten to a point where only a small percentage of humans actually produce the world’s food supply.

This is a further development of what I spoke of before as the “illusion of progress”. Technology, supposedly, has made human life better. So has civilization, and written language, and all of the other sociological “advancements” of the past several millennia. What purpose, however, does all of this actually serve?

I put forth two answers, both of I which I believe play some role. The first is that this progress serves power. Through the processes of specialization and division of labor, humans can be arranged in a hierarchy of class, race and gender. Thus some humans can be better off at the expense of others. At some point, however, technology threatened to topple this system. To continue reading Orwell’s 1984, as discussed in the previous essay, we see this passage:

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.

Thus the role of technology has been usurped by power. Rather than being used for purely benevolent purposes (such as eradicating disease or ending hunger) it is being used just as much for malignant ends: conducting war, surveilling on populations, producing personal and corporate profit, and so on. These ends serve to divert resources while simultaneously reinforcing, not breaking down, the system of power. In turn, the technology that has been purported to save mankind is far more likely to destroy it; see the threat of global climate change and the potential for nuclear holocaust.

The second, and perhaps more important reason for the continuance of human “progress” is our obsession with death. What has been dubbed Ultimate Terror Theory has quite a bit of sense to it. Religion is largely centered on explaining what happens after death. Human actions, whether it be acquiring food or water or protecting oneself from the elements, are designed to prevent or at least delay death. The same could be said of our preoccupation with medical treatment. Of course, it is also true that this preoccupation with preventing death interferes with serving power. Hence the dilemma posited above and earlier.

There is a question to be asked: what is the purpose of death, and is it worth trying to prevent? I think the easiest way to begin to tackle this question would be to look at it a different way: what would be the value of human immortality? When one looks at it that way, things start to appear quite strange. Without the fear of death, what would be the need for food or water or shelter or clothing or warmth or good health or anything else that provides us with sustenance? They would mean nothing if starvation or dehydration or hypothermia or disease could not kill us! Given that our lives are currently preoccupied with acquiring these things, it is hard to imagine what humans would do with themselves if they did not need them and would live forever regardless.

This is a strange paradox indeed: we fear death, but death is what gives life its meaning.

One must then ask themselves, what good would a techno-utopia be? I give Hobbes the final call on this one: