Chapter 2

Chapter Two – Undermining the Tools of Disconnection (Part 1)

I have been trying to think of a decent analogy for the Tools of Disconnection but it’s hard to find something most people can relate to, even though they fundamentally affect everyone in the civilized world. Taking a reference from popular culture seems like a good start. The Peter Jackson produced movie District 9 provides a useful glimpse at something like these Tools. In the South African set movie the main protagonist, Wikus van der Merwe, through exposure to a cocktail of chemicals becomes infected with alien DNA and begins to develop some of the capabilities of the abhorred immigrants, who also happen to have access to a remarkable array of weapons. Wikus’ genetic aberration is discovered and seized upon by the ruling corporate-military elite as an opportunity to make violent capital against the aliens (and, by implication, anyone else who challenges the dominant culture), for only those in possession of “Prawn” DNA are able to use alien weapons…

Chapter Two – Undermining the Tools of Disconnection (Part 2)

School is a device to disconnect children from reality. The role of the public “education” system in the civilized world is to prepare children for their future as workers. Within the walls (and rarely outside of them) of schools and colleges our precious progeny are made to ingest slice after slice of appropriate information, carefully selected so eventually the graduates of these institutions will be qualified to perform a money-earning function within society. In these terms, it’s fair to consider just whose side the school system is on.

Was it possible that I had been hired [as a teacher] not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realise that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.…