8 April 2004: Nature, Joy, & Constructive Chaos

Yet another entry recycling my writing from elsewhere - in this case, from a conversation on the Moot email list yesterday, in which I ended up writing quite a bit.

It started with Wonderboy posting a message saying that he was thinking of a career change:

I realized that one of the things I'd really like to do is teach children.

Nick, I know you had a job as a reading teacher for a while. How did you get that job and what did you think of it?

The full answer to the second part of Wonderboy's question is fairly long, and is also an important part of the answer to the question of why I'm spending the coming decade in school. Wonderboy is one of those rare people who, when he asks a question, actually wants the full answer, so I gave it to him:

I loved working with the kids. I hated working with the adults.

Learning, for children, is a natural, chaotic, and joyous process. The people who should work with children are the people like you and me, for whom learning is still a natural, chaotic, and joyous process.

Nature, chaos, and joy are anathema to the forces of Evil, who do everything they can to crush and stifle these things. The spirit of every child is under constant attack by adult control freaks ("control freak" being, in my view, synonymous with "agent of Evil"). Many of the people who work with children are control freaks, on a mission from Satan to crush the spirits of children. To be a good person working with children is like being a compassionate physician working in a concentration camp.

Agents of Evil prefer positions of maximum authority. In the educational hierarchy, children are at the bottom. Teachers are just one small step above children. Teachers and children alike are far outranked by both bureaucrats and parents. So, while many agents of Evil become teachers, even more of them become bureaucrats and parents. About two-thirds of the teachers I met were good people; about a third were agents of Evil. About three-quarters of the people in supervisory/managerial positions over the teachers were agents of Evil. About three-quarters of the parents I encountered were agents of Evil.

It's agonizing to have the mother of a nine-year-old girl say to one, right in front of the girl, "She's just not very bright, and I hope you can improve her grades, because it's very embarrassing to us," and to know that if one makes any of the responses that one wants to make, the mother will simply continue shopping for teachers until she finds a suitably complicit one.

So my advice is to seek teaching situations in which you and the kids have as much creative control as possible, and as little interference from other adults as possible.

Oh, and the pay sucks.

It's all worth it. Because of me, there are some kids who couldn't read, and who thought they were stupid and had lost the joy of learning, who can read now, and who feel good about themselves and love learning again. Even if I do nothing else worthwhile in my life, even if I'm crushed by a falling piano when I walk into my kitchen a few minutes from now, I've done some real good that's going to carry on into the next generation.

I got my teaching job because I had just got myself out of the biggest (and last) period of depression in my life, and I decided I wanted to work somewhere lively. I went to interview for an admin job at this private tutoring center. The eccentric hyperactive educational genius who had founded the company (and who was soon to have most of her authority in the company taken away by evil and incompetent managers forced on her by her investors) was visiting that day, and spontaneously decided to sit in on my interview with the center's director (who was a great admirer of hers). When she heard that I taught aikido, she exclaimed, "Then you should be teaching here! Don't hire him as an administrator, hire him as a teacher! We can squeeze him into the next teacher training!" And so it came to pass. It was one of those Act of God things.

The big problem, for me, was that without a college degree, I couldn't get hired by any other educational institution, which meant that the only way to stay in that line of work was to stay with the same company - a company which, over time, came to suck more and more.

So eventually, I left to become a full-time college student. In ten to twelve years, I'll have an impressive set of letters after my name, and then I'll be going back into teaching - probably by founding a school of my own, along with whatever friends of mine are up for the project.

A good day's essay-writing. But not the end of it, as it turned out. Because the Saint, a superb critical thinker who’s one of my favorite people in the world to have a conversation with, chimed in with this sublime clarification of my assertion that “Nature, chaos, and joy are anathema to the forces of Evil, who do everything they can to crush and stifle these things.”:

Well, not exactly. Yes on Nature and joy, but chaos is more subtle.

Evil (to adopt your term) benefits at the extreme ends of the spectrum: rigid structure and random (destructive) chaos. The latter naturally results from imposition of the former. When that happens, Evil labels its own byproduct chaos as "evil" and "solves the problem" by imposing more rigid structure, etc. Its agents strip-mine the chaos while they perpetuate this cycle.

Life works in between these extremes. Life flourishes amid flexible structure and constructive chaos.

I admit it's sketchy, but I'm working it out as I go along. Take it from there?

“Take it from there?” Heck, yes! How could I turn down an invitation like that? So take it I did:

I quite agree.

Nature, joy, and constructive chaos are anathema to the forces of Evil. I was thinking of chaos as it manifested in the spontaneous explorations and creative impulses of children, and forgot that it was necessary to distinguish that sort of chaos from the destructive chaos of the "imposition of order equals escalation of chaos" equation.

The agents of Evil, of course, do not distinguish between constructive and destructive chaos: they hate and fear anything they can't control.

Further thoughts:

I misspoke (or miswrote) when I used the phrase "the forces of Evil." It's a blanket term that fails to make a distinction between Evil and the human agents of Evil, which is a distinction worth making.

Evil tends to work by selling people on artificial dualities and the artificial conflicts between them - getting people to limit their options to one side of the duality or another, when both sides suck and each one perpetuates the other. The order/chaos duality is one of the biggest; it works exactly as you've described.

People act as agents of Evil whenever they perpetuate one of these artificial conflicts by buying into it and becoming a soldier for one side or the other, or when they sell the artificial dualistic perspective to other people.

This distinction generates two statements, both more accurate than my original one:

1. Nature, joy, and constructive chaos are anathema to Evil.

2. Evil recruits many people as agents by exploiting their fear of destructive chaos, using it to suck them into the artificial order/chaos conflict. The more deeply a person is ensnared by this trap, the less that person is able to distinguish Nature, joy, and constructive chaos from destructive chaos - and thus the more they end up serving Evil by suppressing Nature, joy, and constructive chaos through the imposition of rigid order that ends up creating destructive chaos.

This, in turn, leads us to two more interesting ideas:

1. The imposition of rigid order is a process by which Evil converts constructive chaos to destructive chaos (as seen in the unpleasant behavior of children who have had their joyous creativity forcibly stifled).

2. One good way to serve Good is to teach people to how to channel their destructive chaotic impulses back into joyous and constructively chaotic ends - for instance, by getting teenage gang members to participate in cathartic group art and theatre projects (this is a big part of what I'm planning to do when I grow up).

While thinking in terms of a Good/Evil duality doesn't automatically turn one into an agent of Evil, it does easily lead people into attempting to wage war on Evil. Attempting to wage such a war through coercion and the imposition of rigid order does turn one into an agent of Evil. I'm trying to remind myself of this, lately, by thinking in terms of "serving Good," rather than in terms of "fighting Evil."

A final thought on Evil: In the movie The Usual Suspects, Kevin Spacey says, "The best trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing people he didn't exist." I don't agree. I think that this was the second-best trick the Devil ever pulled. The best trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing people that he does exist, and that it's necessary to hate, fear, hunt, and destroy him.

 

Hey, Geminica – since you’ll be here for it (yay!) remind me at my birthday dinner that we must drink a toast to Nature, Joy, and Constructive Chaos.