Drakengard 3 and the American Education System
Abandonment, abuse, and absolution
Dragonsphere Report
I launched a poll to determine what I would write about this evening and there was a tie. Well, there are worse outcomes, and I appreciate the challenge, as well as any occasion to demonstrate eccentricity. A merging of topics it is.
Let’s start by explaining Drakengard 3. As Yoko Taro’s best game, and the game that currently follows closest to his most inspirational source text (Hybrid Child), Drakengard 3 is best summarized as an unconventional story about a mother who is willing to do anything to save her child. What is she saving her child from? In a sense, from herself. But also from demon summoning sorceresses, some wizards, various monsters, soldiers, and an evil flower. In the end, she sacrifices herself and destroys most of the world to achieve this goal, which is unambiguously good, because the world of Drakengard 3 is terrible.
So, let’s connect this basic formula and story to education, perhaps by way of another tweet:
The American education system is pointless and absurd in the same essential way that life is: it’s a combination of different conflicting narratives, acted on with various degrees of incompetence, and equally many natural and hence meaningless processes. It is a tale told by many idiots full of sound and fury at the same time, with the biggest idiot being the blind forces of the universe itself. And due to the centralization of education, the assorted interests involved end up competing in a largely zero sum ecosystem. Everyone is indeed trying to escape some local maxima, though usually that maxima is a function of their own nature rather than the nature of the system; the system just makes escape harder, less consistently achievable, more arbitrary.
Among the alleged functions of education are:
Promotion of racial equality
Promotion of gender equality
Promotion of income equality
Development of social skills
Development of civic identity
Promotion of cultural unity
and so on and so forth. Notably, all of these goals are about murdering distinction and difference. Everyone in education believes, or at least pretends to believe, that possibilities are divorced from natures: often they believe that natures don’t exist. This leaves only supernatural explanations of outcome. Grit, free will, even “social skills” themselves are all ex post facto and illusory rationalizations at best. A bad thing happens to a person therefore that person is bad. A good thing happens to a person therefore that person is good. Sometimes these notions become magick formulas, attempts to imbue character into people based on a confusion of cause and effect. Post hoc ergo propter hoc as a national level imperative.
Essentialism is an overreach. It is better to think in terms of Yudkowskian thing-space. Objects with plots of properties that cluster but don’t have clean divisions. Creating opportunity is not a meaningless concept or a bad aspiration, not even in any of the terms listed above (race, gender, etc), but the current education system doesn’t understand what this means mechanically. A functional education system would still just be an elaborate social sorting mechanism. A functional education system would not try to achieve outcomes that are materially impossible. If you roll a six sided die infinitely many times, you will never roll a seven (but a 20 sided die will roll at least a seven 70% of the time if it’s fair).
In this context, the global, let alone local maxima for a six sided die is a six. The global maxima for a 20 sided die is 20. Nothing will change this, ever. It is not even a matter of physics, which might have theoretical alternatives. It is a matter of math. It is baked into the platonic nature of reality. Notice that we don’t even have to stipulate that the die are fair: if they are loaded and land on their highest value every time, that is still their highest value. God plays dice. Everything is dice. Even human beings are dice. If you are not engineer-brained enough to accept this you will only design a sub-optimally efficient system of education and hurt people.
For the past who knows how many years, the American education system has been attempting to disprove materialism. It has been attempting to engineer or discover external conditions under which die can behave as if they have landed on a higher value than they are materially capable of. Equivalently, it has been attempting to engineer or discover circumstances under which the additive sum of a collection of rolled dice is more than the sum of the individual values of the dice. Bluntly, the American education system has been looking for the hand of God, the logic that assigns reward and punishment from outside the boundaries of the material world based on fair moral principle. Well it doesn’t fucking exist.
In Drakengard 3, the main enemies are personifications of corrupted visions of the good: Reason, Agape, Curiosity, Discipline, and Eros. These corruptions masquerade as benefactors while setting up the world for annihilation, and the only thing that can destroy them is the main character, who represents nothing so much as pure will: the will to save a single child. The American education system is similarly beset by false prophets: studies that don’t replicate, love that looks before it leaps, experimentalism that violates ethical principle, fetishism of order for order’s sake, and projection of adult sexuality onto children (mostly, in practice, done by cishets to LGBT youth, but with the onset of wokism now sometimes done oppositely to the equal detriment of children).
The American education system must be destroyed at least as ruthlessly as Zero destroys her sisters in Drakengard 3. Metaphysical salvation is not even the point. In Drakengard 3, Mikhael (the “child”) lives a long and healthy life but ultimately dies without escaping the world of his birth. In Hybrid Child, the universe runs its course and all life is extracted into a better, higher reality. There is no God coming to save us: whether we make this world better, or whether we find our own escape to a higher world, we are still facing a choke point: a great filter. We have a species-wide local maxima to escape, and absolutely any system or tendency holding us back from escaping it has to be dismantled, ruthlessly and without hesitation. Even when it is called by noble names like anti-racism, anti-sexism, or equality. This doesn’t mean that a different (ideally free market) education system would be worse for specific people, but even if it is we have to bite that bullet. The only path to the future is through the concrete achievements of specific people capable of them, and the current education system is constraining and destroying such people.
Thus ends another Dragonsphere Report