love's not only blind, but deaf

I'm a bit angry at academia as a whole and its respect for titles and knowledge. I took an IQ test a couple years ago and scored well on it, but it hasn't changed my self-concept and I don't feel superior about it, because "intelligence" cannot, in my opinion, be measured by others. Intelligence, IMO, is not empirically quantitative.

I could meet a bum on the street tomorrow who knows more about life than I do. the fact that he can't do advanced calculus doesn't make him dumb. Does it make him ignorant of advanced calculus? Certainly. But so what? Is ignorance of knowledge a vice? Is it to be frowned upon?


Learning may be a virtue, but ignorance of knowledge should not, be a vice. One could certainly dedicate one's life to the accumulation of knowledge, and many in academia do, isolated from the rest of society in their white ivory towers. But will all of this accumulation of knowledge fulfill that person? Or, if it DOES fulfill that person, could a simpler, less time-consuming path have been chosen wherein that person had more time to really LIVE and ENJOY life instead of constantly OBSERVING IT and learning about it second-hand through books and lecturers?




I suppose where I'm going with this is that I'm fed up with academia standing in front of me, flaunting their titles and degrees and scholarly journals and attempting to design my reality with their precepts. I see students on a daily basis doing their best to keep up in class and participate, and I feel badly for them when I can glaze briefly over a 50 page essay and bring up points and ideas that make the professors cum in their pants/panties then said students could have painstakingly read every one of those 50 pages twice over and churned out mediocrity.

If you have ever seen the movie Donnie Darko, I feel a lot like Donnie Darko in the scene where he doesn't want to participate in some stupid exercise the teacher wants him to do.

And I see all these people around me, ears stuck to cell-phones when out of class, and they really think they are going somewhere. They really think they're doing something of importance. They have ambitions. They are trying to MAKE IT, to accumulate some status so that their parents will approve of them. To make a splash in some field to confirm their sense of identity. To confirm that the mindless ingesting and regurgitation of soulless academics really meant something in the end.

How will most of these people's lives unfold? Briefly after college, they will get a job. They will then find a mate. They will then have children. They will then send those kids to school and fade quietly into the realm of responsible, bill -paying Australians.