Today on SMTH BBS, I saw an article titled “For Rural Children Going to College, More Important Than Choosing a Major Is Elevating Thinking and Vision.” Though I’m a rural child myself, and a few years ago I might have considered this golden advice, today I can no longer relate to it.
But one question posed in the article does align with my recent thinking:
In modern society, are techniques and skills more advanced than thinking and cognition?
Liberal Education
Many people don’t understand why the Romans called education “liberal education”—education for free citizens. My understanding is that once a person’s intelligence crosses a certain threshold, it means that for you, higher-level conscious self-awareness is far more important than any particular professional skill. Because spiritual self-awakening means the possibility of deeper exploration both inward and outward. The importance of this boundary expansion crushes the significance of any single craft to one’s life. This is why the more elite the university, the more it loves discussing “useless arts.” The lower the tier of the school, the more it resembles a vocational technical college.
Zhihu @Feifeimao
This resonates with my impressions from recent years.
Standing on the Philosophers’ Walk in Heidelberg, I first learned about the concept of liberal education and suddenly felt that the past was wrong and today is right. I felt this was the education more suited to me—the path of self-cultivation leading to personal integrity.
Liberal education might be the only systematic opportunity to learn the big picture after becoming an adult. The reduction of individuals to mere cogs in a machine is a tragedy humanity currently cannot solve, and liberal education is the only means education has had since ancient times to resist such instrumentalization.
Zhihu @Feifeimao
Free Will
For most people, the existence of free will is doubtful.
Everyone has many layers of thinking habits at different depths, which are the parameters at various levels defining their character. Changing surface-level parameters is relatively easy; changing deep-level parameters is very difficult. Human inertia prevents most people from changing their deep-level parameters, manifested in not being open enough—it’s very hard to improve their thinking patterns through communication.
Weibo @Laojiiewangshen
Actually, “inertia” here isn’t quite accurate. I think the more precise word is momentum.
Observing crowds, you can clearly feel that human consciousness is constrained by invisible nets. Many people are completely unaware of the problem, unaware that deeper levels of existence remain. Some people can perceive contradictions in their understanding but have no heart or strength to change. The underlying principle is probably this: if they begin questioning their cognition, they’re pulling out the faith on which they depend. And not everyone is willing or able to endure this pain. Thus they can only run on inertia along predetermined tracks. The manifestation is being trapped in invisible nets.
So I actually agree with Dolores’s words in Westworld:
Free will does exist. It’s just fucking hard.
Westworld, Dolores
It’s truly work requiring both wisdom and courage: Wisdom enough to make you aware of the problem; Courage enough to make you flip the table and start over.
Therefore it belongs only to the few, only to the outliers.