Here is a space where we attempt not to be straightjacketed by some version of sophistry .. establishment or antiestablishmentarian..
one cultivates philosophy as a guide. Or one doesn’t have it at all.
Economics is a branch of philosophy.
***
After a rainy day yesterday, the sky cleared so sunday evening I went for a walk down to the park. To get there I pass by the campus of sydney university. I guess that that ‘s what set me off..
I was reminded of what prof. Noam Chomsky said of tertiary education in one of his more recent books.. that 'universities' are instrumental in maintaining the status quo of thought : by simply failing anyone who disagrees with the current power structure or even questions it.
His observation corroborates my experience. Definitely.
What one is force fed at institutes of learning is simply the current illusion that maintains the establishment’s power. perhaps that isn't a bald enough statement.. i think that this is why economics departments have become so important in the past generation..
Well I completed my degree coz I refused to quit .. to tell the truth…….I just wrote the crap that would impress the examiners in order to be done with the 'faculty of economics' once and for all.… what I did quit was any illusion that the modern university is an academy. That is a lie… it should not be called an academy.
Needless to say, I seldom walk that way.
Plato is remembered as the one who established the academy in Athens in the heyday of its classical age.
He stood in the tradition of Pythagoras and the ancient philosophers of (ionian) Greece and Egypt.
The academy was the space devoted to the search for truth and the love of wisdom. It was a sacred task. Plato's epithet is/was ‘the divine’. (that is no mean appelation to have stuck.)
I wonder what they would make of him in sydney uni.. if he came down on campus.. or what he would make of it..?? it doesn’t really bear thinking about. Search for truth? Poppy cock.
Security would have him out of there in under 30 minutes.
Academy? utter nonsence.
Midway through the last century, in a country which shall remain nameless, where refugees had fled from a certain hindu majority country during partition, they had put their refugee camp in the river bed.. i didn’t ask why but the only reason why anyone would make camp in a river bed is because someone must have pointed a gun at them when they tried to put it some place else… well, they were still there in 1991 when I passed by. The power elite lived in fantastic mansions about the capital. It was so starkly obvious. I haven’t heard anything that might have changed the situation for either party till now. Au contraire.
(This incidentally is a country that has had gigabillions of ‘aid’ poured into it. There is no prize for guessing where it has ended up.)
even the mainstream media talk about foreign policy mistakes in this country. :snort:
no one can stay tuned in to this kind of thought wave and remain sane for long. Their reason will shatter and fall in shards on the carpet in front of the plasma screen.
My experience however is that the people who suffer most in this unnamed country are the refugees.. both those who came during partition. and the more recent ones who fled from factional differences in the northwest. So please spare a moment to pity those humble peace-loving humans who were caught up in the power manipulations of criminal establishmentarians and half a century later are still patching up the kerosene tins and sugar bags in the hope it doesn’t rain too much.
But heck! it isn’t a lot different anywhere else. Just more or less subtle. the sitdown money is just more or less better. The ‘academies’ are just more or less expensive. the lies just bigger or smaller.
I think professor Chomsky is spot on.
tejas fu
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