It's not a refutation, but a question. How do we know that learning is
valuable? Does it have a survival value?
Studies show (Prof. Csikszentmihalyi at U of Chicago) that conquering
reality is pleasurable. It is a built in mechanism of "flow". We like
learning and understanding new things. We like doing challenging things and
conquering the unknown.
A society does not need everybody to understand reality. If many people
spend time thinking rather than hunting, the group may not survive. It's
better for the group if only a few will "do the thinking" and the rest will
"work". A social mechanism has developed: keep the majority in the dark and
allow only a few to think for the group. Learning may be not "valuable" for
the group if too many get involved in it (in that sense learning is *not*
valuable).
There are many memes designed to stop the majority from independent
learning. They were "designed" by evolution, but now experts in memetical
engineering are trying human-designed memes. One of them is to spread a
belief that objective reality does not exist. If one believes the reality
does not exist, the truth is not worth pursuing, and what's the point of
learning reality? The whole inborn potential for
learning-as-discovering-reality is used to learn the "revealed truth" which
is used to better control "them" ("the people").
There is a set of beliefs which stimulates independent learning. The
intellectual elite -- who knows the set -- is divided into two groups: (1)
those who want to make the set of beliefs public (causing more people to
loose interest in "hunting" and other hard work needed for the survival of
the group), (2) those who want to keep the set secret. Of course the first
group is spreading the set of beliefs, so what does the second group do?
Ridicules this particular set of beliefs. This way more people can be kept
in the dark and serve as mental slaves to the society. Who is doing a
better job for the society?
The game is much more complicated, as people from outside of the elite are
also playing it, there are many other ways of keeping in the dark, etc. I
refrain from specific examples, although there are plenty of excellent ones
in CoV.
Regards, Tadeusz (Tad) Niwinski from planet TeTa
tad@teta.ai http://www.teta.ai (604) 985-4159