We’ve all heard the mantra that knowledge is power, but this saying is not entirely accurate. The Hagakure, an ancient text written in the early 1700s in Japan about the way of the warrior, states, “Having wisdom and talent is the lowest tier of usefulness.” Though many people may be confused by this statement, it merely means that wisdom and talent without direction and purpose is useless, much like knowledge without application is useless. Institutional academia today imparts knowledge that is not even of high utility and that is useless due to the lack of an application component, but specifically in the arena of business education, they teach students knowledge of low utility that has low to no applicability in the real world. For this reason, in 2024, many students, even those that have gained admission to top universities, are increasingly electing to forego the excessive $234,000 cost of a Harvard MBA (a cost that would be even higher without the assumption of a “moderate student lifestyle”) and other bloated MBA tuition fees for better educational pathways of far greater utility and applied knowledge.
For fifteen years, I have worked on a solution for how to fix the broken global business education system. If you have ever spent considerable time in academic classrooms and on social media platforms, then in all likelihood, your brain is in need of serious rewiring to (1) reconnect essential neuronal pathways that have been destroyed; and to (2) disconnect other established pathways that create uncritical acceptance of information and blind obedience to authority that suppresses our potential and causes us to timidly accept life inside a neat little box that leaves our enormous potential untapped. Today’s “modern” educational institutions, even the most prestigious universities in the world, remain deeply rooted in behavioral conditioning and boring, repetitive rote memorization tasks that instantly kill individual creativity and critical thought.
Consequently, we have been conditioned in classrooms to think robotically and convergently, instead of intellectually, creatively and divergently. In life, being able to think critically and divergently is paramount to success, regardless of our goals, and in the most extreme cases, like the 1995 Sampoong mall collapse in Seoul or the 2014 South Korean Sewol ferry disaster, may decide life and death itself. Unfortunately, by the time we graduate from high school, the academic system has stripped most of us of our creativity and our critical thinking skills, a process that is expedited with social media use and furthered with the length of time we spend inside the traditional academic system.
Upon graduation, most of us unfortunately apply this close-minded way of thinking to our careers, and more tragically, to other aspects of our lives as well. In fact, this process occurs in such an insidious manner that most of us are oblivious to the highly negative and suppressive end result. We must reverse the insidious process of the institutional academic system that is currently producing sinister outcomes among hundreds of millions of young adults, or enter an intellectual dark age in which feelings, not the genetic makeup of the 23rd pair of chromosomes, determines the sex of a child.
The roots of true education have been completely stripped from most academic institutions today, a facet of academia that has led to the production of young, behaviorally conditioned adults that share more in common with obedient Pavlovian dogs than free-thinking human beings. Sadly, even during global lockdowns that lasted three years from 2020 to the end of 2022, the majority of adults all around the world subjugated themselves with little resistance to non-scientific mandates handed down by authoritarian oligarchs that literally understood almost zero about virology and immunology.
Unfortunately, due to the fact that “educators” have stripped critical thinking skill development out of the curriculum of almost every university and college in the world, even among universities perceived to be the most prestigious in the world, including the University of Tokyo, Cambridge, and Harvard, the institutional academic machine continues to graduate young adults that are blindly compliant to even blatantly self-evident lies. For years now, top scientists around the world have been appalled by the near uniform appeasement of the masses to suspect authoritarian mandates that strip the entire realm of science of a central immutable principle in the journey towards scientific revelation and truth – the relentless questioning of all scientific declarations that lack indisputable proof and evidence.
However, due to the lack of knowledge about the history of academia, most believe this insidious process to have started during lockdown periods of 2020 to 2023, when in fact, it can easily be traced back to far earlier times more than a hundred years ago, when the architects of the Ivy League system of universities in America held meetings to discuss how they could start stripping real sciences out of the sciences in their curricula so they could produce ignorant students with science based degrees that understand little about the scientific knowledge their degrees were supposed to bestow upon the. The political and economic Ruling Class’s forwarded notion that their interpretation of science can never be challenged and is the only right one, and that all that dare challenge them ought to be censored, silenced, and even imprisoned, during the lockdowns, is a truly appalling insult to anyone that values freedom today. Furthermore, given the billions that did exactly as they were told by an uneducated and authoritarian Ruling Class in 2024 confirmed the appalling, near worthless utility of the modern institutional education system today.
Despite a mountain of evidence that proved scientists and politicians (appointed to the top of national health agencies) were comically wrong about the “science” they spouted to justify their lockdowns from 2020 to 2022, only a handful of scientists and academics around the world pushed back against their nonsense. The silence that predominated among their colleagues was due to fear of those that spoke truth, who unfortunately in their commitment to voicing truth, sometimes lost their Board licenses to practice or their employment at universities. And this outcome also is a direct consequence of the secularism and anti-religious crusade of the Ruling Class that has stripped all objective morality from the developed world and revealed an epidemic of cowardice among billions. All hope to reverse the rise of cowardice, the feminization of men, and the purposeful gravitation of billions around the world to the seven deadly sins of gluttony, lust, envy, pride, greed, wrath, and sloth over discipline, virtue, morality, work ethic and honor, and the need to reverse this trend as firmly as possible in 2024, all depends upon a complete reversal of current trends in institutional academia and education.
My fifteen year study of this problem led to nine crucial changes that are needed in the global education system today:
- Return Education to Learning, Not Rote Memorization
- Stress Real-Life Application of Knowledge, Not Useless Exam Scores
- Acknowledge the Need to Pursue Education Outside of Traditional Academic Classrooms
- Redefine Success and Wealth to Include Life Purpose and a Balance of Physical, Mental and Spiritual Wealth
- Expose Lies About Money and Wealth Taught in Schools Today
- Reprogram Our Brains to Think Critically, Not to Blindly Obey “Authority” Figures that Often Lie to Us
- Provide an Educational Curriculum Applicable for All Ages
- Stress Personal Responsibility in the Pursuit of Our Life Goals; De-emphasize the Blame Game
- Utilize Peer to Peer Learning to Foster Cooperation and Critical Thinking Skill Development
Far too many among us accept, without challenge, articles, ideas and information presented to us by a very rigidly controlled and mainstream media narrowly funded by a few extremely wealthy people. For this precise reason, most of us need to deconstruct our present belief system before we can start the process of arriving at the truth. We need to empty our mental trash bins that currently command our minds to comply and obey, before we even can find the space to welcome new information and truth into our brains. Unfortunately, many of us fiercely cling to a very rigid belief system, whose origins are deeply rooted in institutions of politics, finance, academics, religion (fanaticism), nationalism and culture, and in a diametrically opposed manner to a sound intellectual and introspective foundation. I’d like to make it clear that I am not opposed to any of the above constructs, but only to the institutions that rule over these constructs and have deceived the entire world about them.
The most intellectually honest among us, after deep introspection and critical reflection, would acknowledge that our most deeply held beliefs about life have not resulted from any analytical or empirical research, reflection and critical thought. Instead, most of our deepest held beliefs simply have as their origins the blind embraced of cultural norms, traditions, and endorsements by people in positions of authority. In fact, during the course of my lifetime, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been engaged in debate with someone whose entire argument of an opposition viewpoint consists not of fact-based, intellectual refutations of my viewpoint, but simple, vomited claims made by demagogues, like “that’s been debunked by a fact-checker” without the provision of any actual evidence. The reason such a push back has zero intellectual gravity is because such a claim never provides the basis for why a position has been debunked. “Fact-checking” websites are continually exposed as billionaire-funded websites that declare anything that opposes their narrative as a “fact-checked” lie. Critical to the survival of intellect in our society is the understanding of the difference between a completely invalid argument and a valid one.
Once we begin to root all education in relentless questioning of all teachings that have no valid evidence to back these teachings, we can then proceed with returning real education to academia. While it is unnecessary to have indisputable evidence of everything we believe, we should, at a minimum, be well-versed in the existing evidence that supports our views, with the existing evidence overwhelmingly in support, and not in opposition, to our views.
Stay tuned for the next article in this series, to be published on this blog, titled, “How Being Programmed “What to Think” v. “How to Think” Has Ruined All Meaning in Life”.