I recently had a conversation with a 30-year-old doctor who was revelling in the relief of finally finishing his exams, and achieving his long-awaited ‘specialist’ status.
He noted that this was the first time in the last 25 years – since he was 5 years old – that he had not been actively studying and preparing for some kind of exam. Of course he will have no shortage of future hoops to jump through, in order to maintain his medical status, licensing, and insurance, but that’s for another article.
This mild yet persistent mental torture which he has experienced over this last quarter century is only a slightly more extreme version of something that we all deal with in our modern civilised, industrialised society – that is, from a young age we are brainwashed into unknowing compliance through an on-going decades-long near-relentless process known as ‘testing’.
While school is sold to us broadly as ‘learning’ – and while we may walk away with some practical skills like writing and basic arithmetic – it is this procedure of regular examination which serves and the primary driver of behaviour and compliance throughout the schooling process.
Testing = Training
Just as a dog is given instructions, and then either rewarded or punished based on its response and compliance, so too is the student in our modern schooling system – all the way from kindergarten to university, through to masters degrees and beyond.
Instead of a dog treat, students get colourful stickers, praise from adults, status over peers, approval from parents, and ultimately access to ‘better’ universities and therefore (theoretically) access to higher-status, better-paid and more rewarding jobs… all in the corporate world of course.
Testing is the on-going mechanism used to extract compliance – and ensure that the Government-issued curriculum being pushed in the classroom is mentally retained and obeyed, rather than ignored and immediately forgotten as useless or irrelevant information.
But aren’t tests merit-based? Aren’t they a record of your performance, ability, preparation, aptitude, accuracy and correctness? Well, maybe.
What’s wrong with rewarding the ‘correct’ answer?
In some cases – setting aside implied fundamental biases for now – this can be legitimate. Two plus two, according to the agreed-upon rules of our mathematical system is four, and answers of ‘four’ should ordinarily be rewarded.
Unfortunately, even with such a seemingly clear-cut example, this is not always the case. As ‘Common Core’ mathematics is implemented in US schools, other aspects such as ‘group cohesion’ are factored into account when assigning marks. For example, if three students are assigned to calculate 2+2, and one boy writes ‘4’, while the other two write ‘5’, the former can be marked down for not ‘co-operating’ properly with his group mates.
Outside of mathematics, things get even trickier.
If the curriculum says Columbus first discovered America, then that’s the ‘answer’. Any other answer is not correct, regardless of the truth or ‘reality’ of the situation. If the curriculum this year says that men can fall pregnant – for example – and you say that they can’t, then that’s a zero for you… and maybe a free session with a mental health counsellor. Now, repeat this exercise ad nauseam for any single point of contention in biology, history, geography, culture, public policy, economic theory and so on.
Given this, exams are only really an aptitude test in the sense that they test the student’s ability – and willingness – to accurately repeat what was previously told to them by an authority figure as ‘the answer’. The most faithful regurgitation performed gets the most ticks, the most points, and ultimately the most ‘opportunities’ to rise up through the education system. This leads to more exams and tests in other institutions, where they can further prove their ability to comply, in evermore sophisticated ways.
Professional regurgitators
Consider the reams of information that a medical student needs to retain over the course of their years of study – drug names, drug protocols, ‘safe’ dosages, medical procedures, hospital policies, and so on. A medical student who can regularly process, retain and appropriately regurgitate such a quantity of information over such a long period – especially while dealing with chronic sleep deprivation – is especially suited to working in a hospital setting where the institution specifically wants tireless and compliant operators.
The hospital doesn’t value cowboys and rule-breaking renegades ‘who get results’, despite what television shows may suggest. What hospitals do want, are technicians who will reliably conform to exact procedures and specified ‘standards of care’. These ‘standards of care’, it just so happens, are laid out by pharmaceutical company donors and are – just coincidentally – also required by the policies of all large insurance companies.
A short tangent on insurance
This practical reality is that doctors are covered by their insurance policies as long as they slavishly follow these pharmaceutical-company devised protocols (ie. ‘standards of care’), regardless of how many people happen to die on their watch. The riskiest thing a doctor can do professionally, then, is deviate from those protocols, even if their behaviour was intended to – and even literally results in – saving a patient’s life.
As a generalised illustrative example: if a protocol dictated that a certain drug should be administered at a certain frequency and at a certain dosage – even if the doctor suspected that the drug was indeed killing that patient – they could safely (legally speaking) continue to administer the drug to a patient until death, without fear of financial penalty. If the same doctor instead had a pang of conscience and decided to stop administering the drug – even if that action directly resulted in the patient surviving – that doctor could now be personally liable for medical injuries that patient had suffered thus far.
These are perverse incentives indeed, and contribute to reinforcing the entrained mindset and behaviour of these thoroughly ‘tested’ professionals.
It’s spreading!
This dynamic of procedural control of course applies to all sorts of key industries throughout modern society – affecting the roles that just so happen to be so well paid and desirable as to be almost universally encouraged by conservatively-aspirational parents. Accountants, lawyers, engineers, finance and so on. In this way, large numbers of people in key functional roles are conditioned to behave very consistently without needing to be reminded – precisely because they are the ones who got into those positions, by successfully demonstrating a high level of capability to obey.
So what’s the problem? Isn’t this a good thing? Don’t we want our accountants and airline pilots and skyscraper engineers to be following the rules? Doesn’t that make us… safer?
The down-side
Thalidomide to help with your morning sickness ladies...
Where was this army of exam-acing scientists and experts while all these poisonous and dangerous products were being developed, tested and foisted on the public? Oh.. that’s right.. they were obeying. And why wouldn’t they? That strategy of blind obedience had already served them so well so far. Obeying had paid for cars, houses, holidays and even private school educations for their virtuoso children to follow in their acquiescent footsteps.
The problem with these learned intellectuals, then, is that at no point during the process of their development, were the fundamental presumptions of their ‘knowledge’, ever properly questioned.
And why would they be? As we all know, there are no smiley-face-stickers or 98% exam scores or scholarships or internships or medical residencies or corner desk promotions getting handed out to the people who question the foundational premises of the gravy train that everyone around them is riding on.
And even if they wanted to.. when would these people have the time? Any precious bandwidth spent trying to research alternative theories, interpretations or realities… is time that could otherwise be spent memorising the ‘correct’ answer… an answer that could be relied on to lead to social approval, money, apartments, boats and so on. Large institutions aren’t in the business of handing out rewards – financial or otherwise – to people who prove them wrong.
As a result, we exist today in a world managed by millions of obedient administrators, their belief systems predictably moulded by a hierarchical network of ‘credible’ institutions.
The ideas which fill their minds do not arise from an organic ‘peer-reviewed’ process, but rather originate from a tiny number of compromised men, of which the recipients will likely barely even know the names.
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.
Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda
But how is this possible?
‘Educational’ leverage
The printing press – along with the enforcement dimension of testing – allows for the written words of a few, to be foisted on the many.
As is standard practice through medical education: a single medical reference textbook which is studied by millions may be written by only a couple of dozen doctors, with the writing of each chapter attributed to just two names: a pair of supposed subject matter ‘experts’ in their particular narrow field. That is presuming that those doctors even wrote those chapters themselves in the first place, and didn’t have the material provided to them by a publishing agency working on behalf of a pharmaceutical company, along with a fee for their ‘participation’.
To see how this same principle of leverage works in the entertainment (ie. propaganda) world: we can start with a single book – seemingly written by one man, which tells the supposed origin story of Mark Zuckerberg. This book then gets adapted into a screenplay by a famous screenwriter, then produced as a hit film by an A-list director, which is then watched and ultimately believed by… millions. And why wouldn’t they? The movie is based on a book, isn’t it? And it’s a ‘true story’, right?
So some guy wrote a book… which he claims is accurate.
And there we have, the broadly accepted ‘canonical’ version of the Zuckerberg story, created through movie magic.
Mass consensus
In this way – with sufficient funds and control over institutions of education – a perceived mass consensus of ‘truth’ can be engineered on essentially any topic.
From here – with the ‘correct answers’ having now been established across the board – the mechanism of mass testing can apply its immense and universal pressure on students to take up and absorb these ideas – if only ‘temporarily’ and for the purposes of passing a test.
Over time then, we see the generation of millions of predictably-behaving automatons who aren’t even aware of – let alone interested in questioning – the limitations and boundaries of their own understanding.
And why would they be? These people are very successful and earn good money, because – in their own minds – they ‘work hard’, they are ‘capable’, and they ‘are smart’.
Do you think a millionaire doctor would like to sit down and listen to ideas coming from a man or woman who did not go through the traumatic near-decade-long process which they had to endure, in order to attain their current expert status?
Do you think they’d be interested to look at results or entertain evidence which demonstrated that the practices that they make a living from, are useless or perhaps even harmful?
Ancient wisdom
Of course, this system of hierarchical hypnotic mind-control is nothing new. Kings, emperors and dynasties going back into antiquity have known that longevity of power required a systematically trained hierarchy of subordinates who wouldn’t even think to change the game or make a run for the throne.
We know these people as ‘eunuchs’, and non-aristocratic parents were only too happy to have their childrens’ genitals removed in order for them to rise up the ranks and perhaps one day achieve some kind of servantile job in the court or palace. Imagine the kind of bragging a poverty-stricken parent could do, knowing that their neutered offspring was working in close proximity to royalty.
Today, our system is much more humane. It’s considered a mark of social progress for a population to be so well-trained that brutalism no longer required. When muslim countries successfully eradicate the practice of theft – such that the hands of pick-pockets no longer need to be lopped off with a sword, that marks a level of sophistication for their governance. It demonstrates that the carrot and stick has already been embedded – subliminally – in the minds of the populace.
Likewise, when millions of lawyers, doctors, accountants and engineers can spend entire multi-decade careers not even considering the falsehood of their state-trained presumptions – our control system too, can celebrate a job well-done.
Today, we don’t have literal eunuchs walking around corporate boardrooms, municipal governments and hospital advisory boards – we have mental eunuchs. Though they may not consciously recognise what they are – which is actually an added benefit – the successful among them do know intuitively what their behaviours and opinions should be, without needing to be reminded.
The best servant is one who knows exactly what its master wants without needing to be told, and just as the ancient monarchs the world over knew only too well, eunuchs make fabulous administrators.
