Nurturing the Cat: An Additional Methodological Note

The Degeneration of the Nation - Part 4 But Who's Counting: Why Is Everything Deteriorating?

A well-groomed cat is a developed cat  (Source)

Why is the world deteriorating? Sometimes the answer is the most obvious and simplest one: due to the absence of learning. After all, why wouldn't the world deteriorate? What actually causes the world to elevate? Learning - and we're talking about learning in its simplest form. The main reason for the deterioration of Western culture is the disappearance of personal, private, and long-term instruction from teacher to student, and the transition to mass learning in mass production - in the classroom. The shift from apprenticeship to education is our cultural disaster.

At the center of the disaster zone are the institutions of schools and academic studies, which have replaced the personal apprenticeship between an artist and an apprentice who is a future artist, or between an accomplished literary figure and a talented novice writer, or between a senior researcher and scientist and a gifted student, or between any teacher of any significant cultural school of thought in history - and their students. There is no nurturing. Therefore, there is also no identification of talents, and consequently, there is a flood of lack of talent, where the ability to elbow one's way through is the critical variable for success (without correlation to true talent).

When their critical importance is not recognized, even the nurturers themselves become an endangered species - and a long-term relationship between teacher and student is rare. The healthy and very natural need for an adult to teach and be a mentor is suppressed under anti-learning individualism (Did I learn from someone else? Do I need someone to teach me? And conversely: Why should you dedicate your time to nurturing someone else?). No one recognizes the contribution of the nurturers and does not attribute the student's success to the teacher, because talent is individual, isn't it? My success stems from within me. The star is born - not taught. Therefore, any attempt at nurturing is immediately suspected of power relations, castration, and exploitation, because sexual and power relationships are perceived as basic instincts, unlike the learning relationship.

The result is that the central mechanism of development within the cultural system - patronage under an established nurturer who develops and promotes you - has been replaced by a competitive individualistic jungle, where talent is secondary to the ability to maneuver and drive without inhibitions. Even in the political system, for example, we no longer see apprenticeship and the grooming of heirs and nurturing of talents, and even parents nowadays don't understand that their main role is to be the teachers of their children: parent [in Hebrew: "horeh"] is derived from instruction ["hora'ah"], not pregnancy ["herayon"] - the home is a school, not a breeding ground. Thus, we have lost the institution of learning that is the secret of learning that turned Greek culture and Jewish culture into the great learning cultures of the ancient world: mentorship (pederasty relationships, and rabbi-student relationships). Without the Netanyahuite philosopher, would there have been "The Degeneration of the Nation," or would we have remained in cat grooming?

Let us ask: What is the fundamental difference between these two types of learning - the long-term private learning and the learning of details on an assembly line? The industrial learning that has taken over the idea of teaching is learning from the outside: the many individual learners receive knowledge from an external source and are tested on it externally, and then compete for external evaluation (standards, money, popularity, exposure, citations, recognition, likes). In contrast, apprenticeship learning is learning from within: it nurtures the specific talent and internal development of the individual learner. This is learning within the context of the teacher-student relationship, and the evaluation in it is personal. In other words, it is much more similar to parenting, and is suitable for nurturing creative and even artistic talent (without an external goal), unlike industrial learning which is more similar to work, and therefore not enjoyable. Who doesn't hate going to school?

All this is in accordance with the difference between a dating site and couple learning within a committed relationship, or between Facebook and a book, or between investing in the stock market and investing in a startup (where they still recognize the importance of "mentors"). Competition in the market works according to a learning algorithm of the evolutionary type, built on a huge number of individuals competing for an external evaluation function, while learning in the brain is learning within the system, which requires concentration and focus and is built on gradual internal construction.

Of course, learning also requires external competition at the macro level (according to the fourth postulate of learning), otherwise we will end up with a nepotistic and corrupt system. But at the micro level, there is a need for nurturing, and therefore higher evolution is indeed built on a combination of two different, and even opposing, learning algorithms: competition between individuals who have undergone parenting. Even capitalism is built as competition between limited liability companies, which have undergone nurturing and gradual building. Today, our cultural, intellectual, and social environment resembles the evolution of reptiles, meaning competition without parenting, and therefore everything is subjected to external, vulgar, and simplistic metrics. Just as an optimization algorithm according to an external metric needs to provide an internal experimentation space of exploration and mutation that do not necessarily improve the metric - if it wants to find hidden, interesting, and non-trivial solutions. The competitive externalization is the main reason for the disappearance of the world of secrets in our time - but we will continue to nurture our gardens, our site, and even our cat.