Please, Please Let it Be Dead

Alright lets kill this lumbering, convoluted beasts. I've written about education, I've written about testing procedure, all under the auspice of discussing the status quo. Now, that's a term that gets bandied about quite a bit in various contexts, but all it really means is the way things are. The problem arises (as it often does) when we try to normalize those things.

We can't help but seek to maintain what we consider to be normal for ourselves, its a basic function of the human mind and it can be quite helpful. For instance, if you can maintain an "abnormal" behavior, like exercise or regular study, it becomes normal and you develop a positive habit, a new status quo. However, there is also a natural inclination to believe that the way things are for you is also the way things ought to be for everyone else. It's a reaffirmative impulse, if other people live the way you live and value the things you value, not only are you apparently more likely to be living "right", but you have an easier and clearer point of connection with other people. Community building is great, empathy and support and whatnot, but we live in a world that is conceptually large enough that our communities require a relatively high degree of diversity to lubricate global relations and counteract exploitation.

Here's the rub though, standardizing education has difficulty when forced to engage social or creative fields, which are key points in diversification. Things like science and mathematics are naturally organized for standardization, but art and social sciences are highly nuanced fields that are both vital to the development of well rounded, well informed people, and almost impossible to effectively prioritize value metrics.

There's also the issue of establishing behavioral recursion, like deference to police authority causing police to expect blind deference to their authority causing people to be expected to defer blindly to police authority. But we've gone on quite a bit about how fucked up cops can be lately and I really don't want to get back into that right now, so if you're curious refer to previous posts.

Reliance on the status quo causes lag in progress, but its lag that is usually mitigated by curiosity and the inevitability of progress in general, so there's nothing wrong with a bit of normalcy. The trouble is that everyone has a different normal, and some people's normal is really disappointing. Since many of those people aren't capable of functioning on the level of some others, we play to the lowest common denominator, we make the weak the standard. People who want to rewrite history, or push poorly veiled fundamentalism as science, or assign political bias to reality (seriously fuck those guys), are seeking to make their normal the Status Quo for everyone. It goes from mitigating an existential fear and building communities to manufacturing consent and silencing opposition. I kinda hate to imply conspiracy, because I don't think its organized enough to qualify, but I do think its a bit too insidious to be allowed, and certainly too damaging to continue. Unfortunately, any solution to this issue starts to look worryingly like "sinking to their level" or worse, treading on any of various misinterpreted freedoms. So fuck it, knowing is half the battle or whatever.