Educational Isolation

Far from the original purpose of higher education (the reinforcement of social class by spending ones formative years in a cloistered institutions studying an official canon, such as the Greco-Romans or the Four Arts), the democratizers have taken it upon themselves to make this institution open to the public. With the ridiculous idea in mind that the majority of students (of any social class) give even a fraction of interest towards what they study, they believe the purpose of higher education to be its content and not its form. An entire apparatus has emerged for the purpose of their aims, achieving “higher education” by any means. Those means are, in almost all cases, turning college into an extension of high school, allowing the consumptive dregs of the American middle class to coast through a prolonged childhood. In dark mirror of these “benefactors”, another industry has emerged which exists to drag out and profit from the slow torment of its captives. Those students falling out of the script are strapped down upon “special education” and “financial aid”, propped alive even at their own detriment, leaving high school with artificially lowered IQ, doped up on SSRIs, leaving college in debt to pay bills they were never intended to be able to afford.

The backlash against this has been neatly demonstrated in Kantbot’s article, “Guns Don’t Kill People, School Psychologists Do”, the content of which goes without summarizing. In higher education, the backlash is slower, steadier, but with the same purpose and intent. Here the propellant isn’t psychiatric policing inspiring retaliatory violence, but the financial strain on those unable to pay out of pocket for their higher education. Both left and right step in now, to accept their acolytes in railing against the decrepit institution which they were suckered into attending.

As the apex form of rising-against any system, the modern iteration of violence against the Crowd emerges from the school from this pressure. A glance over the faces and facts of the perpetrators of these massacres reveals a single psychosis at the core of it all. In the mind of the massacring killer, all of humanity is imagined as the mysterious, seductive, judging woman, with fully opaque mind. In desperation to seize back control, against the womanly wiles of the world, in revolutionary anger against some vague idea of their particular oppression, the killer works themselves into eschatological overheating until they strike out against the crowd, the sublimated rage through an individual echoing the anarchic cell-attacks during Anni di piombo.

Just as the educational environment has lost its Symbolic value, so are the locations which are chosen in non-school mass shootings. The public, empty, commercial places where the gunman takes aim are chosen for being the same as the school, having suffered the same fate. As any character writer knows, the school is the ideal location of character drama, with every individual being trapped in an isolated box to do alien objectives, together. The shopping mall is the same form of liminal space, humans bouncing around its echoing walls like particles in a void, mindlessly moving. Without purpose, the subject has nothing to plug into, no reason to exist. When combined with the particular individualist psychosis afflicting the corpulent middle of America’s white society, all that’s left is the individual’s masculinity to prove against the woman, the world.

The nihilistic defenders of the fluorescent halls where they earned their four year degrees in “communications finance” and similar nonsensical non-topics point to what they see as the obvious: engaging the police state to take away the citizen’s weaponry. So blinded are they by the ideology of loneliness they defend, they cannot see even the purpose behind these attacks. The opening of the university’s doors, to pretend as something it isn’t, a job training program for the masses, has immediately, destroyed the reality within. Funding cuts for these democratic pushes are destroying STEM and Humanities in favor of, at best, pseudo-scientific pursuits such as psychiatry and sociology, at worst, in favor of the twin pillars of the modern school, sports and MBAs. Subtly, another brick in the once stable wall is taken down. The subject is left standing in rubble, another little hierarchy, another stable institution, another form of authority, of meaning, of symbolic truth torn away, as all that is solid melts into an amorphous, institutional air, a poison without source or substance but no less present.