FAUST things FAUST:

Whether it’s the neoliberalism of U.C. Berkeley, the technocratic elitism of U.C.S.D, the positivism of Dartmouth, the dismissiveness of Yale, or some other set of inherited prejudices, higher education succeeds, as most dangerous cults do, in reinforcing the worst predispositions of the prodigious child’s ego, and the honours “track” in grade school affords us so much privileged insight into these predispositions that they are laughably characteristic when they appear in the graduate. These schools succeed in their project of (shamelessly literal) indoctrination not by simply presenting the(ir) foundational texts before the students AS THEORY, but rather by SUBMERGING the young mind in a close-knit echo chamber that is saturated with these unconscious prejudices by social suggestion, their survival becoming dependent upon conformity. This often happens when the child is for the first time separated from the family for a long time, often with the expectation of encountering the “real world” in which one’s every action is of consequence to one’s literal survival. And one sees it growing like a cancer, beginning with the freshman’s naïve love of novelty and ending in the senior’s fully actualized cynicism. By the time that one might be reminded by the likes of Socrates or Nietzsche that what is most important one has known all along, one has sacrificed too much for the ideals of the establishment, upon which one has begun slavishly to depend, to be able to transcend either one’s trauma or the fallacy of sunk costs. Like a gambler, the graduate continues to put more and more time and money into the method, only to lose more and more of his or her heart. It’s no surprise that a professor such as Martin Heidegger, operating in one of the most pretentious and strict societies in recent history, indicated that we do not create culture, but that it creates us, and we do not possess freedom or use technology; THEY possess and use US, respectively. Nothing is closer to a Deal with the Devil than Academia, and if one must defensively demand a citation as proof, I refer you to DOCTOR Faustus.

Dm.A.A.