- First you learn
- Then you do
- Then you teach
In other words, we move from dependence to independence to interdependence. We move from needing others to get by, to being able to get by on our own, to helping others get by so that everyone can prosper. To stop early is to never learn how to be human, and never learn how to properly be an animal, and how to properly live upon the earth.
Dependence
You were born a child, helpless, in need of protection, instruction and nourishment. You were cared for and taught and fed and sheltered. This is the way of the child, and those of us who still cannot make our own way without the resources of others are here still, and thus still children.
Independence
Your mission, your task, your purpose as a child is to learn. You must learn to be an adult. To be an adult you must know how to think for yourself- to spot deceptions, to reason things through, to ponder, and think creatively. These are the marks of an adult- an active intellectual life. To be an adult you must be able provide for yourself, food, and shelter and clothing and tools that you will need. The mark of an adult it the ability to make or find what one needs to live alone. To be an adult you must also be able defend yourself and your home. What good is the ability to grow food, if a man with a sword shows up each day to take your food from you and eat it himself? What good is the ability to think great thoughts if a man with a sword can force you to turn you mind to making him a more effective conqueror? Thus you must defend.
Interdependence
As essential as those three things are, they do not make you fully an adult yet. Until you have used your skills to contribute to your community and connect into that web of interdependence- teaching and providing willingly to continue the community into tomorrow, you are only an adolescent. The skills are essential, giving those skills back is what completes the transformation from child to adult.
Some Simple Training Guidelines
Read books all the time. Read challenging books, especially non-fiction- and avoid Junk Reading. Read outside your comfort zone. Read books that disagree with your ideas and ask the three questions of it and yourself.
Seek out mentors. Seek to be around people smarter than you. Seek to be around forward looking people. Seek to be around people who are happy outside their comfort zone. Seek debate and for those willing to disagree with you. When somebody challenges you, thank them and ask them to elaborate. Seek out friends who are willing to call your bullsh**. Ask questions and listen to the answers. Shut off the 'I know instinct'. Ask questions to draw out more information.
Take classes, and seek to Constantly expand your skill set. John Maxwell's 'ACT' Note Taking System can be really useful here. Just add and ‘A’, a ‘C’, or a ‘T’ when taking notes: A= Apply this (Apply this to my own life), C= Change this (stop doing what I was doing and start doing this), and, T= Teach this (Teach my group this thing).
Remember the need for quiet time. Without quiet time you can't evaluate what you are exposed to. Without quiet time you are easily bullied and overwhelmed. Without quiet time you can't reflect and recharge. Reflect on who you are. Quiet time allows you to decide what you agree with and what you disagree with. Quiet time allows you to build your identity. Quiet time allows you grow and change who you are. Reflect on what you believe. Quiet time allows you to evaluate what you've read, heard and learned. Quiet time allows you to decide what you can prove and what you simply believe.
Use quiet time to center. Quiet time allows you to recharge your emotions and your mental capacity. Quiet time allows you to calm down and regain focus. Use quiet time to sort information. Quiet time allows you to evaluate what you know. Quiet time allows you to make connections between different things that you know. Quiet time allows you create new information by combining different things you have learned.
And finally, get out and try things. Glory in Doing something difficult that you can screw up. Glory in being outside your comfort zone. And glory in Making Mistakes.
The Problem
The basic ‘dependence to independence to interdependence’ structure of human community life has been broken. We begin in a state of dependence, because its pretty hard to be McGuyver when we still think technology ends with the hanging mobile and food production ends with the warm bottle. The problem is that we rarely progress anymore.
These days, culture is not set up to support us in our instinctual quest for independence. Bureaucratic systems from schools to corporations consistently punish creativity and critical thinking. Questions are not encouraged, and authority is unappreciative in the face of such questions.
We face a barrage of social conditioning, bent on making us discontent, impatient and certain of our own innate specialness. We are told not to create something of value, or to have the patience to work hard and earn what we want. We are told 'Go ahead", "You deserve a break" "Because you're worth it". And after a while, we start to believe it.
We are bombarded with information, and not given a chance to have alone time or privacy- and so (as with cult conditioning, which does similar)- we do not have time to develop our own fully formed views and ideas. Instead we are reduced to merely reacting to the views others tell us. 'Yes, I agree' or 'No, that's wrong'.
Very little of this happened intentionally. Most of the changes were made with the best of intentions. But complex systems often breed surprising results.
And so here we are: generation after generation of shallow, impatient, unfulfilled, egotistical, self-conscious, easily led sheeple. Calling us adults would be a joke.
The fact that most of our so-called adults mark their transition into adulthood by drinking until they risk alcohol poisoning should be a warning sign.
Most of us, around the point we are told we are adults, start to feel cheated. Often we don't know why we feel cheated, but life seems less than we were expecting. We should feel cheated. We used to become adults at puberty, we were expected to stand up and take our place.
Admiral David Farragut received his first command (a captured British Whaling Ship) at the age of twelve. At fifteen Benjamin Franklin was an apprentice printer and authored several popular articles under a pseudonym. By fifteen you could be a squire in the middle ages (or even a knight). We are told that the world is more complex and that it takes more time to learn about.
Do we really think that it takes less maturity to command a vessel in war time than it does to flip burgers? Do we really think that it takes less skill to author articles in a commercial newspaper than to text message incessantly? Are we really supposed to believe that they training of a knight was somehow less difficult than modern P.E. class?
The void that exists in modern life is an absence of adulthood. We have never been allowed to grow up- to become Men and Women. When we leave school we are helpless and adrift in a world that we are helpless to hold our own within. We must indenture ourselves to employers to survive. Skills that would allow us to stand apart from this are not taught to us.
We are not taught proper critical thinking skills in most cases. We are almost never taught useful survival or defense skills. We are left- deliberately I think- at the mercy of the world we have all created. Because, after all, who would flip burgers or or stock toy store shelves or fit shoes or man the technical help desk at 3am if they had another option.
We are a society of parasites, feeding collectively off of each other.
I am tired of being a child. I want to grow up. Peter Pan was a liar! You don't forget to fly when you grow up, you learn to fly when you grow up! The only reason we don't know this is because virtually nobody has grown up since the Second World War.
Genus Rex exists to help people help each other grow up. We need to regain the ability to stand alone. Because until we can stand alone, we cannot honestly stand together.
So your first job is to study and train and prep yourself as much as possible. This book will provide you with a guideline on how to train and what to study.
I need to learn arithmetic and calculations, but do I need to learn it in a classroom over twelve years and including things such as calculus and quadratic equations that very few people need to understand and fewer actually use?
I need to learn to read and write, but do I need to learn the difference between a Shakespearian or Petrarchan sonnet? I need to know the history of our culture and the changes and context that it will provide for understanding current events, but do I need to know who the commanders were at the battle of Leningrad?
I remember being tested on all of these things and I know that I answered most of them correctly on the test. I do not remember the answers to these questions now, although I remember that I was asked them.
Accounting, however, was an optional class and I was never given any lessons on the laws and paperwork that I have encountered as a adult. I was never taught, despite five years of career planning classes, how to deal with my taxes or my health insurance or any things that I would actually need.
There is a distinct benefit to schooling, but that benefit is for those people who wield the whips. When we emerge from schooling, we lack basic knowledge of how to manage in the adult world, and because of the increased work load and the need to do extra-curricular activities to earn scholarships and be accepted into post-secondary education- parents have very little mentoring that they have allowed to add. And thus the domesticated adult emerges from the womb of high school blind and hairless. He lacks the teeth and claws that are used by modern society and the knowledge of how best to defend himself with them. He is unable to hunt for himself and so is relegated to a subservient role within the pack- begging from scraps from more the alpha and other successful hunters.
"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor
is the mind of the oppressed."
Steve Biko- Activist
For twelve years, the developing mind of the young domesticated human is engaged in challenging and intellectually stimulating tasks- such as organic chemistry, the politics of Shakespeare's Macbeth, trigonometry, the history of the Russian Revolution, and how to dissect an earthworm. These tasks are deliberately challenging and seem very important. In this way, the mind of the young domesticated human is distracted.
Once they have grown out of their most active period of learning, the young can be discharged into the wild where they are easily captured and roped into the existing herds. They are domesticated humans now, and not wild humans. But when the wild submits to domestication- it also sacrifices its freedom.
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