Through ascending and descending the stairs, picking up facts from the natural world through experiences and observation, we construct our objective theories of truth. Just like the game of Mastermind we try to mimic reality, placing pins on our side of the board, the inside walls of our ivory tower, trying to make it match exactly with the other side of the board, the world. And once we’ve decided one pin to be in the right position, we write, we publish, and we send this knowledge down, via the cloud or the cable, on its way to society.
But before being submitted to society, this knowledge will be checked for being ‘true’ and ‘objective’, since, that is what we do at university, construct the objective truth. Hence, our newly written knowledge, will be forced down through the objective truth funnel, the final test, where it will be stripped of all qualitative and subjective aspects, and norms and values. Until only impartial, objective numbers remain: facts, proven to be exactly what they are. Next, through the ducts, those numbers are led to the binary press, where they will be cut into zero’s and ones, ready to enter the computers of the programmers. Through algorithms and optimizations, the programmers turn the zero’s and ones into efficiency, speed and growth.
After this process of rationalization, the remains of the knowledge are provided to the economists, steering society with their robotic arms - all dressed up like a political party. Positioning everyone somewhere in the factory of our society. In blind procession, trying to keep the machine running and do what is expected of them, we have all become creatures of habit and convention, imprisoned within the eternity of our daily routines, moving from one box to the next. All the while, the food industry supplies us with cheap garbage loaded with sugar to keep the endorphins flowing; fat to keep our organs warm; caffeine to keep us up and running; and alcohol to keep us pleased, putting us on the fast track to the doctor and dietitian. And finally, the ad industry encourages us to spend money we don’t have on junk we don’t need in order to impress people we can’t stand.
On the other side of bridge, we see all those who dared to take the other road, we see the artists, the musicians, the poets, the philosophers, the utopians, or those who just seem to be fishing for something. Resonating on beauty, values, morals and ethics, or how to harmonize our intellectual, social and cultural life. But for them it is too dangerous to cross, they are not needed here, and their questions cannot have a place inside this rational society of numbers.
The 21t-century university resembles nothing so much as a factory, an objective truth factory we might call it, where everyone is too busy writing to read, too busy publishing to debate. And all the while, education is constantly made more efficient, faster, quantifiable and worst of all, turning it into a linear process, again the most important part becomes the number, leaving the teachers with a checklists of products adding up to a grade, making the projects comparable to each other. Equality, but an empty one.
Gazing into the horizon of time and cultures, I start to realize: Our version of truth is only one of late, there were and there are still many other interpretations of what knowledge is and how we should obtain it: Perspectivism, rationalism, positivism, just to name a few. We do not have to believe in our current ivory tower, like some religious sect. There is a plural horizon of truth and reality is much more complex and delicate to be mimicked and rationalized like we do today.
Knowledge is not absolute, nor can it be objective, and the process of obtaining knowledge should be all but linear. If we want to perceive knowledge in a non-linear, subjective way, we have to get a better grip on a new metaphor, this apparent chaos, this non-hierarchal, decentralized, and constantly evolving principle, the principle of the network.