Maybe it's not you. Maybe it's the System...

dr_warlock · 2015-03-22T10:30:40+00:00

The Rest of It (Part 2 of 3):

Why is the real world more hospitable to nerds? It might seem that the answer is simply that it's populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on one another. But I don't think this is true. Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high school, with all the same petty intrigues.

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, at least as measured in revenue.

The other thing that's different about the real world is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together. Out in the real world, nerds collect in certain places and form their own societies where intelligence is the most important thing. Sometimes the current even starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularly in university math and science departments, nerds deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter. John Nash so admired Norbert Wiener that he adopted his habit of touching the wall as he walked down a corridor.

As a thirteen-year-old kid, I didn't have much more experience of the world than what I saw immediately around me. The warped little world we lived in was, I thought, the world. The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse.

Because I didn't fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn't realize that the reason we nerds didn't fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.

We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle school. He wouldn't know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like, the right slang to use. He'd seem to the kids a complete alien. The thing is, he'd know enough not to care what they thought. We had no such confidence.

A lot of people seem to think it's good for smart kids to be thrown together with "normal" kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don't fit in really is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a "pep rally" at my high school, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.

If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.

Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits.

Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the nerds. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.

Adults can't avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don't they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their bloodstream and messing up everything. There's nothing wrong with the system; it's just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age.

This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it, which probably doesn't help. Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes.

I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I've read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren't crazy.

As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.

When I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, and some may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic. But partly it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable.

Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.

At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future, so far that we didn't even know at the time what we were practicing for. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability. (The three main causes of the Civil War were.... Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)

And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it.

Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren't left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.

Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do in their distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there is precious little) between schoolwork and the work they'll do as adults.

And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for teenagers. After a couple years' training, an apprentice could be a real help. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop.

Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.

What happened? We're up against a hard one here. The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of so many present ills: specialization. As jobs become more specialized, we have to train longer for them. Kids in pre-industrial times started working at about 14 at the latest; kids on farms, where most people lived, began far earlier. Now kids who go to college don't start working full-time till 21 or 22. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may not finish your training till 30.

Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them.

alreadyredschool · 2015-03-22T11:19:27+00:00

Maybe it's not you, maybe it's the system! You are perfect, you can and should feel good about yourself!

Nah man, it's you! The system won't change. Survival of the fittest, not strongest, not smartest but fittest. You have no control over the system, so accept it. You have control over you, so stop worrying about the system and focus on what you can do.

But it was a nice read.

DRMMR76 · 2015-03-22T11:08:20+00:00

You really need a tl;dr if you're going to entice people into reading that book you just wrote. You might have the prose of Cicero but no one is going to spend 45 minutes reading what some guy wrote in an online forum if they don't know what it's about, his summation, key points, etc.

Code_Bordeauxx · 2015-03-22T12:48:55+00:00

I logged in on reddit -something I almost never do- to make sure this gets upvoted. To people complaining about it being too long: learn to do some reading. Not everything can be caught in a tl:dr. I have no sympathy for your whining.

It may not allign with everyone's personal experiences (my case wasn't this bad either), but it is very insightful for determining what's exactly wrong with the education system, and many things are wrong indeed.

You cannot deny that schools fail miserably to create an environment that encourages students to learn. It is in many ways indeed a prison and a warped artificial society. If you purposefuly throw kids in such a system you need to be able to guarantee their well being and this isn't happening. Toughen up and work to be popular? This might be good advice for adult redpillers, but not for young kids who should be able to focus on learning without being punished for it.

Johnny10toes · 2015-03-22T12:56:11+00:00

This lines up with some of the same things that I've been thinking about lately. Mostly "What is intelligence?" and the types of intelligence. I believe that we do have some sort of "thing" that sets our self on a path. Mine was drawing. I enjoyed the process and the praise. After adulthood I realized I wasn't that great at it but that's not the point. Anyway I have a good spatial awareness from this. I believe anyone can do it though. With the right kind of practice of course.

Another one that I can relate to is the sense of direction. One of those things that people say "You have it or you don't." Well I didn't. I made it a mission to get it and now I have it. I read books, focused a lot of my attention on it until I didn't have to think about it.

Simarly kids discover popularity and they practice it and it becomes something they just do.

NeoreactionSafe · 2015-03-22T13:56:06+00:00

High IQ males can develop into nerds if they get addicted to scientific topics.

Red Pill is (in part) about introducing those high IQ males to Game.

Game is understanding Heirarchy.

Understand Heirarchy, learn Game, and now the nerd becomes a Man.

Simple...

foldpak111 · 2015-03-22T12:40:08+00:00

Some of the most popular kids in my school were very intelligent. Heres the difference; they acted cool. They didn't talk, act, or dress nerdy. It is all about your frame.

fentrix2 · 2015-03-22T12:09:32+00:00

Your experiences don't really line up with mine.

Title	Maybe it's not you. Maybe it's the System...
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	7
Comments	22
Date	March 22, 2015 8:09 AM UTC (11 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/TheRedPill
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/2zvz71/maybe_its_not_you_maybe_its_the_system/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/TheRedPill/maybe-its-not-you-maybe-its-the-system.30505 https://theredarchive.com/post/30505

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