Quote of the Day
There are only so many vacancies at the top of the pyramid. If you don’t change the shape of the pyramid itself to make it less hierarchical, the only thing you’ll accomplish by giving everybody a master’s degree will be to increase the educational requirements for dragging around a giant block of granite.
– Kevin Carson
we are ants. from a very high observational post, human activity, while very much technologically advanced simply because of our capacity for higher learning, is still the same as an ant colony.
the ants communicate. they spread word. they all serve finite functions based upon a pyrimad all in order to make the larger machine function for the continuance of existance. WE MUST MAKE BABIES. must be why sex and romance sells so well.
our own intelligence allows us to see the ultimate meaninglessness of any such system, but yet we play the same part in our own natural system. if no one followed anyone else, would we all kill each other? perhaps that’s the fundamental fear of anarchism.
we even write in ant language. we write code so that generic functions can be passed through to more specific implementations based upon their context of execution. each of these parts serves an ultimate purpose, built upon a hierarchy that goes up and up…0s and 1s to transistors and cpus to storage buses to electron gun commands to visual and audio creations for reasonable human interaction via learned symbols and sounds. if any of the parts doesn’t serve its function well, the machine is hampered.
ah, the philosophical implications of life and its desire to continue.
Well I think the point here is not so much to eschew the organizational tendencies (there are reasons to fight them, but that’s a different post), so much as to refute the conservative fantasy that there’s nothing wrong with our economic order, because “anyone can succeed if they work hard enough”, as well as to refute the liberal fantasy that more education solves everything.
Because while these things can be illustrated true on a case by case basis, it doesn’t hold for the society as a whole — because if everyone worked their hardest and did their very best, and if everyone got PhD’s — we would still be exactly where we are today. There will still be only a limited number of positions at the top, the world will still need people working at the bottom, and those on the bottom would still be paid starvation wages. The only difference is now you wouldn’t even be able to get the granite-dragger job *without* the PhD.