How to Be a Human Animal: Chapter 6: Your Job is to Play and that Should Never Stop Being Your Job

Chapter 6: Your Job is to Play and it Should Never Stop Being Your Job

Because you were just born yesterday, you probably have some questions about what to DO here on Planet Earth. First of all, eat, pee and poop. Over and over. Nonstop. This will allow you to grow up so that you can feed and change the diapers of other babies.

Another job is that you’ll need to be cute so that others will bring you food and clean up your scatological messes. You’ll quickly figure this out.

Here’s another job for you and it’s rather hysterical. You’ll quickly learn how to train adults to talk in “baby talk.” Truly hilarious. Fully adult tax-payer citizens who talk in somber and earnest voices most of the day. You—little you--will have the power, using sheer cuteness, to cause them to talk in little high pitched voices, saying things like “poopie” and claiming that they “wuv” you. Enjoy it while it lasts. You will have zero responsibilities for only a couple years and then you’ll need to start fending for yourself by coming up with a more clever schtick.

In addition to being cute, your job is to play. Play is your best way to creatively explore your world. Essentially, you’ll be doing lots and lots of experiments, including physics experiments (What if I drop this apple sauce on the floor?) and social psychology experiments (What will happen if I poop on this white living room carpet?). This will be your main job. Try hundreds and thousands of things and see what happens. Figure out the patterns. When something interesting happens, use your hippocampus to pack it away for future reference. For a couple years no one will blame you for anything you do, so play to your heart’s content. Have lots and lots of fun.

Beware that your parents might soon try to groom you to be a super-child so that they can claim to their friends that they are extremely good parents. This comes with the territory and there’s no way to get around some of some of these performance obligations. I would urge you, though, to keep playing as often as possible and for as long as possible. Some parents try to turn you into an academic superstar even when you are 2 or 3. Resist this! Lots of research shows that you are much better off playing on your own terms, including this article, which contains this quote:

"If this study doesn't put the nail in the coffin of academic training to little children, it's hard to imagine what will," says psychologist Peter Gray.

Here’s a longer excerpt:

Gray believes these outcomes were predictable. When kids are pushed into academics before they are ready, he says, it disrupts the natural unfolding of curiosity, mastery, and joy. It's like being forced to take poker lessons before mastering Go Fish. Kids feel lost, bored, and dumb. They may decide they hate school, or that the only way to escape is by acting out.

Compare that to plain old playing, where kids discover how to make things happen, try out new ideas, and make friends. This requires learning "self-management," i.e., the ability to hold yourself together enough that other kids want to play with you. Those are real lessons—some of life's biggest, in fact. There's time for academics later.

But that’s just the beginning of the struggle. As you get to be a teenager and then an adult, please please please keep playing. Don’t let your inner child whither and die! I’ve seen countless adults who have forgotten how to play. They forget how to make believe. They don’t know how to creatively pretend. They’ve long ago forgot how to giggle. They are uncomfortable making their own music and art. They start calling these things “wastes of time.”

Beware of those serious adults. They think that their job is to look proper, but here’s the sad truth: To the extent that adults no longer engage in play, they die. You can see it in their dull eyes, eyes that formerly sparkled. It is well established that adults need to play in order to maintain their mental health. That is the conclusion of psychologist Barrett Brown. Brown encourages the audience that they should not set aside time to play. Rather, they (including adults) should infuse every moment of their lives with play. He argues that play is just important for humans as is asleep and dreaming.

Over time, adults who don't play ossify into hard lumps of properness. They worry about the craziest things instead of playing. Mostly, they worry about having money to buy things to impress their friends. Some of them will never have enough, so there will never be a time to pause this bizarro form of hunting and gathering.

So here’s my advice. 1. Start playing. 2. The entire world is your playroom. 3. Never stop playing.

Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal: Chapter 6: Your Job is to Play and that Should Never Stop Being Your Job

Why Some Colleges Have Increasingly Become Cults

Here is an excerpt from an article Dr. Lyell Asher, posting on Peter Boghossian's Beyond Woke Website. Title of the article: "Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults."

[I]n the last twenty years, and in the last decade especially, higher education has gone from listing to the political left, to a full-on capsize into something that, at many institutions, more closely resembles a cult. Different institutions hit this tipping point at different times. But it was back in 2010, when I began hearing adults in positions of authority say “intentions don’t matter,” that I realized that something very different—and very stupid—was afoot. This mantra wasn’t shorthand for intellectually respectable arguments about the limits of authorial intention in literature, or about “intentionality” in philosophy. Rather, it was a dismissal of the “I-didn’t-mean-to-break-the-lamp” kind of intention—that basic component of moral evaluation understood by people everywhere, usually by the time they’re potty-trained.

This wasn’t coming from faculty either, at least not back then. It was coming from student-facing administrators whose increasing numbers and expanding roles on college campuses had been accompanied by—and accomplished by means of—subtle shifts in language. Students were no longer in a college; they were in a “community.” One began to hear in official pronouncements that “we’re all educators.” The word “collegial” began to mean little more than “compliant.” Something was “inclusive” if it coincided with that week’s political positions of the (mostly white) urban elite sporting advanced degrees. In a little over a decade this administrative class helped turbocharge a process that had been underway for several decades: transforming four-year colleges and universities from being among the best places to critically evaluate ideas, into being among the worst.

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How to Be a Human Animal. Chapter 3: The Most Important Fork in the Road: Approach versus Avoidance

Chapter 3: The Most Important Fork in the Road: Approach versus Avoidance

Is the world something to be feared or something to be enjoyed? That is the most important decision you will need to make, day after day. Does the world seem like a scary haunted house or like a big playroom? The stance you take, avoidance versus approach, will have a profound effect, not only on what you accomplish, but on who you turn out to be.

I'll admit that Planet Earth is filled with many dangers, including spiders and snakes, but also automobiles and addictions to dangerous drugs. There are innumerable ways to ruin or lose a life and we are wired to see many of these dangers much more saliently than we see the safe and happy things. Daniel Kahneman teased out this deep instinct with his Prospect Theory. We see risks twice as big as we see benefits.

We have been wired to assume the worst. A snapped twig in the darkness of the forest might be a puppy, but the body’s operating assumption is to run because the joy of finding a puppy whereas the danger of a grizzly bear can kill you. We are wired to run at all of Life’s snapped twigs and metaphorical snapped twigs. Those twigs are everywhere, leading many people to curl up in a fetal position, afraid to leave their houses.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt characterizes this choice of Approach versus Avoidance as “the fundamental question of life.” This attitude affects almost everything we do, including how we approach education.

As soon as life began moving, as soon as you get little tails on bacteria, you have to have some mechanism for deciding this way or that? Approach or avoid? And all of the rest of the billion years of brain evolution is just commentary on that question.And so the human brain has these gigantic tracts of neurons on the front left cortex, specialized for approach. And then a frontal cortex specialized for avoid. And so all sorts of things go with this. So when we’re in explorer mode, some features of it are, we’re more, we’re curious. We take risks. You might feel like a kid in a candy shop with all these different things to explore. You think for yourself. And the model of a student in this mindset would be whoever grows the most by graduation, or whoever learns the most by graduation wins. If that’s your attitude, boy, are you going to profit from being in college for four years.

Conversely, if you spent most of your college years with your front, right cortex activated, because you’re told everyone’s against you, everyone hates you, you’ll never get ahead. It’s always been this way. Then it always will be this way. If that’s what you believe, you’re in defend mode, threat mode, and then you don’t trust people. Your goal is not to be curious. It’s to be safe. You’re afraid of things. And you think about books in terms of certain speakers in terms of danger versus safety. You see threats everywhere and you will cling to your team. And your motto is: If we defeat them, then we win. And that’s the incoherence that has been with us since 2015. We had an influx of students who were playing a very different game where everything was danger and conflict. And no, that’s not what a university [is]. You’ve misunderstood what we’re about and why you’re here. And so it’s been a tragic waste.

So what is your decision this moment and every other moment yet to come? Are you going to be an explorer, seeking out new worlds with uncertainty and risk? Or are you going to obsessively try to be “safe,” meaning that you will hide away and tremble as life passes you by?

Explorers often fail, they know it and they still explore. They know that failure usually doesn’t hurt you or kill you. They know that failure is a teaching tool and a way to build strong character. Long before Carol Dweck wrote about “growth mindsets,” the famous explorers felt it in their bones. They knew that human animals are antifragile, even though they didn’t know that word: they knew that they would thrive in the world because it is filled with stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. They understood Nietzsche’s point that “what doesn’t destroy you often makes you stronger.” They fe;t the wisdom of the Stoics in their bones: “The Obstacle is the way.” They would agree with Woody Allen’s observation that showing up is 80 percent of life.

There is one thing that does makes Explorers tremble: The thought that after they die, someone would carve this epitaph on their tombstone: “Here lies _____ ______ , who was afraid to leave the house.”

But what if you are afraid? What if you worry that you will get laughed at or humiliated, or criticized or called a name, much less that you might get hurt or even die? Heroes feel all of these things. There is nothing incompatible about being afraid and simultaneously being a hero. Heroes and explorers make themselves move forward even when they are scared. One of my favorite illustrations of this was noted by Nietzsche:

Sometimes during a battle he could not help trembling. Then he talked to his body as one talks to a servant. He said to it: “You tremble, carcass; but if you knew where I am taking you right now, you would tremble a lot more.”
Nietzsche cited (in The Gay Science, Intro Book V) this quote as an illustration of his own conception of fearlessness (attributed to Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne (1611-75) a great French general).

So go hither and explore the world! Try new things. Plan to get knocked down, criticized and ridiculed. And then get up again and again. Channel Cool Hand Luke. Never ever give up.

Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal. Chapter 3: The Most Important Fork in the Road: Approach versus Avoidance

Peter Boghossian Diagnoses the Problem with Modern College Administrators

Peter Boghossian writes:

To understand the intolerant, anti-intellectual attitudes held by many college administrators, it helps to know that most of the ones who worked directly with students got their graduate training from education schools, or “ed schools” as they're called. These are the schools that have been training and licensing teachers and administrators in the K through 12 school system for the better part of a century.

Unfortunately, ed schools are notorious for their low academic standards and woke politics. Among their many dysfunctional programs, the ones that train school administrators are the very worst. They're so bad that in 1987, a report by the National Commission on Excellent and Educational Administration recommended that out of the 500 programs in administration 300 of them should be closed—not reformed, but closed . . .

It's an understatement to say that ed schools ignored this recommendation. Instead of closing programs during the next 20 years, they opened over 100 more and they did absolutely nothing to fix their low quality. Why not? Low-quality programs bring in tuition dollars and they don't require much in the way of investment.

Here is the mission statement of Boghossian's Substack, Beyond Woke:

This Substack gives you a front row seat in the culture war. I’m executing a blueprint to push back illiberalism and I'd like you to be directly involved. The blueprint has a two-fold aim: first, reveal the implications of far-left ideological takeover; and second, restore free speech and open inquiry as non-partisan values.

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FIRE’s 2022 List of Worst Colleges for Free Speech

You would think colleges and universities would "get" the importance of free speech, especially given that they are so top-heavy with administrators who could study these sorts of things (Yale has 6,000 undergrads but more than 6,000 administrators). Further, many of these universities have law programs. Couldn't the administrators walk across campus and make sure they aren't acting unconstitutionally?

This excerpt is from FIRE's annual list of failing colleges. FIRE is a non-partisan organization dedicated to defending free speech at colleges and universities:

"There’s no shortage of colleges and universities that will go to great lengths to stifle free speech. Some institutions are worse than others, which is why each year for over a decade, FIRE compiles a list of the worst-of-the-worst.

Since our first list in 2011, FIRE has named and shamed 80 institutions in 33 states for actively working to shut down student and faculty speech rights."

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