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how did it ever come to this?

October 5, 2008 by Anonymous, 1 year 4 weeks ago
Comment id: 32267

A french chef once remarked, that had the Neanderthaler eaten Fliegenblätterpilze, we simply won`t be here today.

And the old RedIndians were not to pleased with the survival skills and practical abilities of their youngsters back home from schooling.

But it still smakes a bit of the silly and in a sense racist Edle Wilde fallacy. The savages may have been brilliant in many ways, but they can`t help us and why should or would they?

Our real problem is not with the abilities of others or this strange beast, "the other", interesting as they are, but our own lack of knowledge and of the practical abilities even our parents and grandparents still had.

We are now underachievers in everything that ever mattered to humans in history, because of our economy, industry and order of society, our power to buy things we can`t do.

All our clothes and all our food could be delivered readymade even to the poorest, all are to be treated equally.
And most of the müsli crowd ranting and rioting against the golden arches of utopian capitalism does not really want to learn to produce their own food and clothes from the bottom up.
Even the poor, in the welfare state, have a right not having to learn to count their money. So no need to learn maths in the head or to cook.
But this revolutionary and in a sense human attitude keeps people also in dependency, slavery.

Hegel knew that pure power means absolute rule and so industry has to destroy all pre-capitalist abilities.

With a counting machine the king no longer counts out his money, hamburgers rule and blackbird pie ,in the sky and elsewhere vanish. Wissen ist Macht is reduced to Learn to Fit.

The degradation of work (harry Braverman) has to start in school, now even in pre-kindergarten: play is strictly verboten, kids might get ideas.

The Victoria&Albert site shows a teen` s textile work from around 1800, with a sentimental motto in perfect english.
No school today would orders such work to be done, of course, but it thus orders the kids to not utter or even understand this or any other perfect and elegant english, german,...sentences. Or to have expressable sentiments.

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