A Drug Named Academia

     Academia is a drug, and I am merely an addict shooting up ideas to get high. That’s all academia is, that’s all academia can be. The only thing more powerful than the high, is the power of society to hide that ecstasy is what really drives academics. Universities are just a place to ingest mental stimulants, far from the reverence we give to the holy production of knowledge. Is it possible that their primary function isn’t to produce meaningful and utilisable truths, but a place where people waste government funds getting high? I sure hope this is an institutional thing, or else I’ve gone really fuckingwrong somewhere.

     Academia is a drug, and I don’t say so merely to shock, for my use of academia is genuinely somewhat analogous to substance use - or at least certain aspects become clear and understandable through the metaphor of substance use. For strong emotions are intertwined (yet often fail to be recognised) with the actions of studying, with the eureka’s ecstasy being the main high which students chase. In fact, none of the substances I’ve (allegedly) tried come even close to the euphoria of getting the perfect idea. I don’t work on issues because of the potential value of to be gained in solving them, but because I want to get high. The arguments I select when writing essays revolve around which make me the most ecstatic. Which makes me question, how many prominent academics are motivated similarly to myself? What are the ramifications of the production of knowledge being motivated by this desire to get high?

     I call myself an addict not solely because I use ideas to become ecstatic, but that in part, I chase that ecstasy to mask life. The real world is fucking boring. Boring, chaotic, and empty. I’ve often thought I should be more engaged with reality, but what’s there to do in reality anyway? Of course the glamorous days-out are stimulating, but what about right now? How could you ‘engage in reality’ if you had to right now? Books, films, video games; we’re all trying to get away from the barren wasteland of ‘life’ aren’t we? It seems the only worthwhile thing which is inherent to the real world is our social relations, but we seem to want to fuck that up as well, with the increasing atomization of society. Birds are quite cool. I like birds. But there’s only so much going outside to ‘look at birds’ I can do before getting bored and needing another hit.

     Why live in life, when I can live in a realm of ideas? Ideas make sense, are graspable, have a sense of completion - are exciting. They have little connection to reality, but this is no problem, for that only means that we have an impossible aim to work towards - that is, figuring out how to make ideas connect to reality. It doesn’t matter if our prepositions make the goal impossible, contradictions only matter if you care about resolving the issue. For someone looking to get high, the impossibility makes it the most tantalising hit one could dream of, and one you can never exhaust. When you are in the detached tower of academia, looking down as the haughty observer that you are, how are you going to care about the real-world consequences when you never have to face them?

     Why focus on your real insufficiencies, when you can mask them with thoughts? I’m not single because of a social ineptness in romantic contexts, fear of making others uncomfortable with my interest, and just all-around not having a fucking clue what I’m doing. It’s actually because something as silly as ‘love’ isn’t important to me, I have much more important things to focus on; like sitting in my room alone and getting high. Why accept the painful and humiliating reality when the academic mindset offers me plenty of rationalisations? Why care about other areas of your life which aren’t going so well; when instead you can use your ‘rationality’ to devalue these errors as ‘irrelevant’ and ‘distractions’. Why face the pain of your insufficiency, when you can convince yourself it’s actually some virtue? Some may call this single-minded degradation of all other areas of your life  as ‘dependency’, which I have some sympathy with, considering I can’t see anything important in my life besides academia. But I prefer terms like ‘dedicated’ and ‘conscientious’, it’s not an addiction if it’s beneficial.

     If academia improves me, where is the issue? All it costs me is a pervasive anxiety about my sense of self. But that is easily solved by throwing away who you are, and becoming an empty vessel defined by your work on ideas. A self-emptying which scrapes out the self into a sticky pile of gunk on the kitchen table, to be promptly chucked in the bin. Why be a person when you can be a vessel for ideas? Someone who picks up and places down ideas as if they were tools; absolutely detached. A sophist who can argue either side of the debate with equal passion. Someone who’s preoccupation is to play with belief; suspending their own to mess around and understand other ideas. Isn’t this the virtue of being ‘open minded’, isn’t this what our education teaches us to do? ‘There are no right or wrong answers’; everything is a toy for us to play with, and we can avoid the reprehensibility of what this implies by detaching the discussion of ideas from actual reality. And yet, now I must act in the world without a sense of the true and false, that I pretended to be an actor of ideas for too long that I’ve forgotten who I am - and no longer believe there can be an ‘I’ that exists.

     This self-denial is deeply institutionalised in academia, and it started in your application to University. A while ago I was reading submitted History cover letters for the laugh, because it’s all flagrant bullshit. I could tell it's bullshit, the student almost certainly knew it’s bullshit, yet even the University probably could tell it’s bullshit. They all repeat the nauseating “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” to justify the importance of history, and describe their deep enthusiasm for the one English Heritage building their parents took them to, and that’s why they’re very, very passionate about history. Isn’t that interesting? An entrance program which literally everyone acknowledges is bullshit, and yet we must feign enthusiasm and the belief of the disciplines’ importance, since failing to do so is a very real jab of irreverence. Maybe what is more dismal than the prospecting student pretending that their subject is valuable, is that articles dedicated to defending the value of subjects in the humanities almost unanimously talk about everything except the subject itself. On all accounts, university is the biggest ponzi scheme ever created. We personally place our faith in university due to the societal reverence of the institution, such reverence being generated by our willingness to pretend it has value, and as a result universities make over £9 billion a year from propping up said value.

     Why would we expect this act of pretending to stop reproducing itself when academics gain higher positions? Do they not have to continue to pretend in order to get a teaching position, who would higher someone who denigrates the value of what they teach? To enter into the position of a student or a professor necessitates (at least at the point of entry) to affirm the importance of the discipline. And to continue being a dedicated student or professor you must genuinely believe the discipline is important, or else be constantly grabbed at by existential guilt. When you're trained in a discipline which revolves around creating reasons to justify things, you’re highly suited to find some ad hoc justification for what you’re doing. So when the spectre of doubt and uncertainty comes knocking, and you search for some reason to sacrifice, what appears to be solid truth is that which eases your conscience - this is the academic drug pacifying fear. But if to be in a discipline you must affirm it, who is going to question the validity of the discipline itself? How could the validity of the discipline be judged?

     Don’t mistake any stated reason for a genuine justification. Of course everyone will justify themselves, they need some way to pacify their personal self-doubts. But it seems rather remarkable that even those supposedly ‘self-critical’ philosophers who condemn philosophy, then continue to do philosophy. Almost every history book opens with some platitudes about how one must be cautious due to a lack of sources, and the inherent uncertainty and biases involved in assessing them. In one moment poking deep holes in the validity of any historical analysis, with empty pieces of advising ‘cautiousness’ scattered like bird-food to establish a facade of taking these issues seriously. and then subsequently doing history the same as everyone else despite their own warning. There is a substantial difference between what academic actors are conditioned to say and do, and the deep internal motives which actually determine how they engage with academia. Never trust a subject to be what they claim to be, for they need to hide who they are even from themselves.

     Given that we are all pretending that University is important, we’re all pretending to be self-critical, can we please all take a second to be honest? I promise we can go back to pretending immediately after. But essentially everyone engages in academia because we gain enjoyment and satisfaction from it; we can all claim some higher-motive of altruism and nobility when talking to other people, but in reality it all comes down to getting high. That isn’t to say we can’t get high off of helping other people, I think Macmurray is onto something significant when he claims all our emotions are directed towards something external in the world. And that isn’t to say selflessness isn’t real or impossible. But we aren’t defining our entire existence around optimising our service to other people, but to get high and avoid flesh-eating existential guilt and angst.

     Truth then, in the sense of that which is created and verified to be socially accepted as truth, is a consequence of us wanting to get high. The most impactful factor which guides the production of knowledge is the desire to ‘get high’. The critical place of intervention therefore seems to be in controlling how we get high in order to make it productive. Attempts to ‘purify’ knowledge away from desire is going to be as effective as any form of self-denial, that is entirely pointless. Control how people get high off of academia, and then you’ll change what knowledge they produce. The self-referential doubt then is how can we deal seriously with directing the key issue of where academia should be developed, when the only people willing to answer that question are those who wish to get high?

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     That’s where I would have wanted to end the piece for the aesthetic, but I also really fucking hate the typical left-leaning post-structuralist ‘le institution is a bad’ so I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t break character for somewhat of a ‘rounded explanation’ at the end. Obviously writing from one perspective is just a technique to bring to the forefront something which is currently hidden, and that trying to frame such a ‘balanced argument’ cannot be productively used as it would merely keep that aspect hidden. But I also have developed a nagging voice that such writing one-factor-as-holistic is somewhat ‘irresponsible’, frustratingly I feel the need to cap it off at the end briefly with an explanation of how I’m handling such dilemmas personally.

     I had been debating doing a PhD in philosophy for a bit, but have become solidified in the decision to pursue a Masters in Psychology. I want a career which involves dealing with people and their problems in the world, so as to be an anchor for the questions I address and the answers I give. I think the worst thing I could do is place myself in a position where ‘being clever’ in impressing fellow professors is the ‘peak value’, because I’m very aware of how detached I am susceptible to being. Not that I want to necessarily chastise this ‘detached knowledge’ yet, the networks through which ideas impact knowledge and reality is so complex it would be hubristic to make any statement on it. But I’m putting myself in positions where the verification of ideas is directly about what helps people, not because of some clever reasoning.