Cognitive Castration
- A maimed and miserable condition of mind, in which the subject can no longer learn.
- The process, widely practiced in school, by which individuals' minds are maimed in this way.
A frequent complaint is that schools today teach students not how to think, but what to think.
The reality is worse. What schools teach today is how to never learn. And in the process they make their students very sick.
Schools systematically train students, from a very young age, to feel shame and fear of punishment for their own natural and human experience of life. For instance, young boys need nearly-continuous play and physical motion in order to achieve normal mental development. The school forces boys to sit still for hours at a stretch, and shames and punishes those who fail to sit still or who, when allowed to play, play like boys.
In school, the harshly-enforced doctrine of equalism serves to cognitively castrate students. Consider the following statements:
- "Men and women don't like all the same things."
- "I am not ashamed to be a white person."
- "My culture is preferable to the culture of Saudi Arabia."
These are reasonable opinions, but in school they are forbidden under considerable social and scholastic penalty. The student knows perfectly well that boys and girls aren't alike; the student can't help being white; Saudi Arabian culture is not preferred here in the land of alcohol, hot women, and fast cars that don't crash every time. But the student must publicly and loudly pretend that men and women are alike, that he is ashamed to be white, and that all cultures are equal. The student becomes ill with cognitive dissonance which is easily triggered by pointing out what is obvious.
The result is a complex where reasonable propositions are greeted not with reasoned discourse, introspection and correction, but with shame, rage, and incoherence.
It is not possible to reason a person out of cognitive castration, because they were not reasoned into it in the first place*.
However, cognitive castration may be curable on something like the same scale it has been inflicted. Put briefly: the smarter ones know they're faking, and are looking for an excuse to bolt. The middle part will convert when they find the mockery and shame from our side is more galling than anything their own weak side can inflict.
- (Credit to ace.mu.nu) First saw the saying "you can't reason someone out of what they were never reasoned into in the first place" in a post by Ace. I've seen it since, in various forms, on other sites. Don't know whether Ace coined it, but as a person who tried Reason to the end, I can testify this is a damn good insight, practically an Iron Law.
