“There is this spell and we have to break it.” – Daniel Dennett

The fact that human beings are susceptible to indoctrination, demands that young people are protected from false beliefs.

Because just as soon as they are tricked into believing falsehoods, they will act them out, and sometimes cut themselves off from their own future.

The word indoctrination is frequently associated with cults which is to say religions, but it is actually about entering any type of belief system.

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For example, teaching children that memorization is a mystical form of education, so that they should waste their time on memorizing things they can look up.

Until there is no time left in school, to pursue curiosities, until they build up a powerful body of knowledge, is also a false belief.

Punishing your children for having bad grades, in ineffective schools that manipulate grades, as not to stick out.

Or letting a sick teacher pill your kid with stimulants, until their mind sticks to useless components of ineffective education.

Is part of the belief system, that you just send them out to college, and they’ll take it from there.

But they can’t, because they just go to a school to get a job, to pay off the school, and they still end up with fake education.

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This is not our culture, this is not what we do, this is TV commercials, and stupid movies.

This, is, indoctrination, entering into a system of belief.

The opposite of indoctrination, is real education.

Real education begins with a curiosity, a single interesting dot, that moves a person.

It can be setting up an account in an online marketplace, to sell art generated with artificial intelligence, just to make a few dollars a month.

This dot once poked, is a universe of connected, and related curiosities, that are invisible until a person is pulled in.

It seems trivial at first, and many people don’t even notice it, but with in this tiny idea is a call to programming, a call to painting.

Even composing music, recording audio-books, and adventure videos.

Every curiosity-dot is a start of real education, and the same dot will take most people, in different places, as they develop unique curiosities along the way.

Sticking a child into a classroom, where everything is a meaningless grid, from teacher’s grades, to rows of seats, and class arrangements and predefined duration.

Is the worst thing you can do, here they get indoctrinated into pretending to learn.

Real education is a self directed process, school is not a magical wand that will enable your child to walk the path most worthy of them.

Even narrated books, which are our best tool, can’t be arranged in any way, they have to be chosen and re-listened many times in a complex sequence.

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Our culture, the Human Culture, exists as veins of literary gold, that run through our first couple of thousand books written by great beings held in high regard by all the world's intellectuals.

The story telling and story listening that takes place here, expands understanding of human condition, of the culture of compassion and wisdom.

Every person, will find a differently shaped golden vein, running through their unique selection of books.

To dare to fail to instill the culture of Love of Wisdom, and poison natural curiosities that lead to real education with stressful and threating cookie cutter ineffective education.

Is to indoctrinate a human being, into a system of false beliefs…

That will crush them in their middle age with a crisis, where they are likely to blindly act out again their best self interests.

And leave them still searching for their gold veins, in their golden age.

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Indoctrination is everywhere and at every scale, and once it grabs the mind of a person, it won’t ever fully let go, not without extraordinary effort.

There are entire nations who have been purposefully poisoned by it, to create a population who will be indifferent to the use of nuclear weapons.

Entire governments, entry into which demands indoctrination, under the threat of never making connections, or getting paid-off with a cozy position at some giant company.

“Listen here kid, forget everything you know, and above all do as lite as you can, but here is how it all really works…”

It takes a strong moral principle (to borrow from Melville), to avoid false beliefs, and find dignity in being an unbreakable cast away.

And that perhaps should be the first and foremost, even before children reach out for their first narrated life changing book.

That with the power of storytelling, mainlines their first large inheritance of wisdom.

They have to become mindful of Authenticity, that the road to building content of character demands that every step is authentic and honest.

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To hope to undo indoctrination takes a lifetime of work, and must be left up to professionals, rewiring a persons brain requires professional competence.

To prevent indoctrination, takes almost no effort at all, and it may be, that it isn’t even a question of effort but pleasure.

The pleasure, of pursuits of ones own curiosities, the dots that eventually form to create a web of knowledge, a foundation for fine synthesis of wisdom.

There are traps along the way, treating depression with doom scrolling, or playing games to numb out life.

Where games should really serve as an invitation to programming, and it is never too late to start learning to code.

Getting stuck deep in debt with half finished ineffective education, and not knowing what to do, by being cut off from wisdom is another.

The pitfalls exist, because human beings have two unique properties, we don’t yet live forever, and we are social creatures.

This does not mean going out to a random coffee shop and talking to brainless strangers, or worse yet a bar.

It may come as surprise, but It means self education, so that you become a beacon to people who are worthy of you.

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I am happy, and sad to say, that your first real lifelong friendships, will be forged with the spirits of philosophers that so hoped you would read them some day.

The thinkers from your narrated books, are not just going to give you wisdom, they are going to pull you up into their hard won culture.

Not a system of thought crafted, evolved, or emerged, to turn you int a cog of some meaningless machine, often of the night or darkness.

But rather, the culture of Knowledge, Wisdom, and Greatness, of Restraint, of Dignity, Nobility, Unbreakability, Fortitude, Courage, Honor, Love; and Insight; and Foresight; and Understanding; and Authenticity; and Heroism; and True Human Beauty.