Advice for youth
Tommi:
High school intellectuals
Many years ago when I was myself a high school intellectual (a pitiful one, like all of them are), university student intellectuals confused me. They never read books, since they seemed to be in such a hurry to collect course credits. When I tried to discuss some topic with them, they always switched to some other topic and raised my bet with something that I had never even heard of. As I grew older I learned that my most cynical hypothesis of their motives turned out to be true. Teens, hear this: most of the people who study in universities don't really know even the basics of their own field. They merely study for exams and use their short-term memory efficiently.
The lip piercings and vegetarian diets of freshman students ceased to puzzle me last Spring, when I visited my mother who lives in Kangasala, and grabbed my little sister's religious studies textbook for bedtime reading. When I was young myself, I had gone to a Steiner school, in which religious studies classes are pure satanism and blasphemy.
This particular book was written by a team that included e.g. the famous Ruokanen brothers. The book is perhaps best described with the pair of pictures shown on one page. The first one had some hippie anti-fur teenage girls participating in a street demonstration, and the second one had some trade school guys sucking on ciggies in the corner of a garage. The picture of girls had a caption of something like "smart and wise teens" and the picture of boys had a caption of something like "bad and dumb teens". The ethics section of the textbook actually was better illustrated than that of philosophy textbooks, but according to the official answers of the Lutheran church, the worldview of this textbook was identical to that of some activism guide of a young squatter vegan. Who would have thought that the little rastafarians who terrorize the fur industry are given their marching orders from our very state church?
A strange form of altruism forces me to now advice our youth. The first and the most important advice is probably to note that the intellectual profile of a person is permanently formed around the age of 16 or so. No matter how you try, you won't really change much after that. You should just accept who you are and not waste your energy in futile efforts to change yourself. There seems to be an endless number of options available, but long before the end of high school and your career choices you have recognized what interests you really have. "Really" here means the interests that came to you naturally instead of from the desire to look good or to have some variety. After a few years you will understand what I mean.
Another advice is to get yourself some good company. That's right, none you of you is a unique genius that nobody really understands. Even the most ardent individualist among us is merely an example of a type of people that there are hundreds of in this country, more typically thousands or hundreds of thousands. Hang around with people who challenge you intellectually. School tries to motivate its smartest students with narcissism and fantasies of omnipotence, but in the end these turn out be only harmful. Self-deception will always come back in the end to bite you in the ass, and the time you spend on admiring your excellence is time not spent in actual learning and improvement.
Toss away all fantasies of being a genius for the simple reason that geniuses don't exist any more. Modern science and culture advance in a nice bourgeois and rational fashion. Suffering geniuses used to exist for the reason that so few people had any intellectual interests, so loneliness made these men nervous and eccentric. Since most people were stuck with hard work and various superstitions, thinking was socially inconvenient. These days all fields advance in such wide frontiers that the results of even the most industrious paradigm smasher really aren't that much next to the fact that the same topic is studied by a massive number of very intelligent people.
Being an eccentric and a suffering genius is bullshit similar to the idea that ancient witch doctors dressed up in animal skins and somehow gained relevant knowledge by eating poisonous mushrooms. The idea that some artist or scientist is a visionary whose subjective knowledge is somehow better than factual statements that can be examined and analysed collectively is identical crap that seeps bubbling out from the well of nonsense of shamanism.
In other words: live your life in a comfortable and bourgeois fashion. Don't be so stupid that you would waste your resources in constructing a personality or engaging in other fantasies of individualism. Drink beer to have fun, not because you want to be rebellious. Your parents are probably right in their views about your future and your environment is right in its views what social activities a modern young person should spend his time in. Do your homework, because your knowledge of the objective reality is still somewhere between miniscule and nonexistent.
Such a high-flown sermon I am now preaching during the second half of my life. I hope that it will help somebody.
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