Cognitive Castration
- A maimed and miserable condition of mind, in which the subject cannot be persuaded by any argument, however cogent.
- 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, they can't help being white, and yes, Saudi Arabian culture is not really desired here in the land of alcohol. But he has to publicly and loudly pretend then men and women are alike, the he is ashamed to be white, and that all cultures are equal.
The Process: The traditional school setting, a classroom with a group of students and a teacher, might as well have been invented for the purpose of cognitively castrating the students.
The subject is invited to offer personal opinions in a free intellectual environment. Those opinions which do not meet with rapidly-evolving standards in what it is considered decent to think or believe, are punished with the emotion of shame, usually inflicted by an authority figure with at least tacit approval of all the subject's peers on the scene.
The Effect: A person who reacts to the inevitable cognitive dissonance with displays of emotion (to avoid being shamed again, castrati will compete in terms of shrillness, volume, and extremism), not with introspection and reason.
It is generally not possible to reason a person out of cognitive castration. They were never reasoned into it in the first place (ace.mu.nu).
It may be possible to shame them out of it.
