As head teacher working at a private school, I thought that to do the rational thing meant to do what was good for the students. At least this is how I saw things in the privacy of my thoughts. Consequently, when a problem came up, I searched for a solution that would deliver a better service to the students. That is, I tried to improve on the learning environment, the curriculum and the way that the teachers delivered a lesson.
But this was not the best way to do things according to the owner of the school. Instead, he wanted to hear about plans that would beat the competition and strategies that would make our school look good compared to the others. He wanted all of us, teachers and administrators, to dabble with ideas on the adoption of visual attractions such as making the teachers wear a uniform. And he wanted ideas on how to invite students from the other schools to come and visit our school so as to compare them and hopefully switch to our side.
When I probed him as to the possible negative effects that his proposed activities may have on our ability to deliver a good education, he did not show any concern. He did not say it to my face but he acted as if I were irrational for suggesting it was better to beat the competition by improving on the delivery of our service than playing games.
Believing I only met one bad employer, I quit my job and went looking for peace of mind at another school and then another only to discover that the situation was not better at any school. So I started my own school, and to my horror discovered that the ministry of education itself was powered by the same mentality. The bureaucrats at the ministry did not say it to my face but they acted as if I were irrational because I would not do something for myself.
Baffled by this last remark, it took me a long time before I understood what was meant by doing something for myself. It dawned on me one day that the people at the ministry were saying I had it in my hand to become rich if only I abandoned the idea of working to improve the service I was delivering to the students and concentrated on becoming part of the team. The idea was that if I embraced the games they were playing, they would shower me with referrals to come out of my ears and cash subsidies to fall off my wallet.
What the people at the ministry did that appalled me most were two things. First, they manipulated the part of the system under their control not as their turf which it was but as their backyard which it was not. In this regard they established contact with a handful of highly placed employees in each school and played them against each other. They also played one school against another, played the students against their schools and played everyone against the elected Minister of Education and his staff.
Second, they used the power to grant subsidies not to influence the quality of education but to implement a political agenda of their own. For example, the federal government was preparing to privatize the post office which meant that people were going to be laid off. This prompted the provincial bureaucrats, including those at the ministry of education, to work for the expansion of the employment ranks everywhere they could. And so, there came to the private schools the unofficial directive which said that there were subsidies to be had if we hired people even if we had nothing for them to do.
This is when I began to understand the cynicism that made the students behave as oddly as they did. To take one example, I had a student who was hanging around a group of guys even though he did not like their company. After some probing into his thinking, he revealed that he will not sever his relation with the guys because his father did not like them either. Thus, the student stayed with the group just to annoy his father whom he did not really dislike but wanted to see annoyed because it made him feel good to know he can annoy his father.
The word empowerment had not yet been abused by that time and so, the people who wanted to appeal to a segment of society did not run around the media promising to empower this group or that one. But the idea of empowerment was already here and everyone sought to be empowered which meant to have the power to annoy someone just for the sake of being able to do so.
I began to think of the possible implications that this mentality may have on the wider world but discovered that the mentality was already prevalent and that it was reflected everywhere because the culture was swimming in it. One example would be the critics of the Arabs who praise the Zionists even though they hate them more than they hate the Arabs.
A little probing into the thinking of these people reveals that they do the praising because they believe it would annoy the Arabs, an experience that apparently rewards them a great deal. But when these people discover that the Arabs could not care less what they are doing, they feel dejected and thus hate the Arabs a little more than they would have liked to.
But what was it that created this situation in the first place? It was the daily humiliation of having to knuckle under the unreasonable demands of their Jewish bosses. Then as now those dejected people believe that the Arabs possess the means to neutralize the power of the Jews but are not doing it. Consequently they feel justified to hate the Arabs openly which, some will admit, is a disguise to hating the Jews which they do silently anyway.
Somewhere in this muddled maze there is supposed to be a definition of rationalism. True or not, to my mind rationalism depends on the perspective of each individual. And to tie rationalism to the notion of individualism, I see things this way: Individualism means to take the initiative and do something positive for the community. When I was teaching, my community was the student body and that is where I concentrated my effort.
To some other people, however, individualism means to do something for the self even if that comes at the expense of everyone in the community. Thus, what was rational to me was irrational to the owner of the school where I worked because he only cared about his interest. I was also irrational to the bureaucrats at the ministry of education because I did not care enough about my interest to be interested in the bribe they called subsidies.
But this is only a static snapshot of reality when in fact, reality is a moving target therefore a dynamic and complicated thing. This is illustrated by the fact that the folks at the ministry of education wanted me to conform in order to receive more of what the individualists cherish the most which is wealth. Given that conformity is the opposite of individualism, there is here a huge contradiction. How to explain this logic?
Well, if you begin with the notion that being rational means to look after the self, you will do whatever it takes to satisfy your needs including the redefinition of the words. Thus if the word individualism is good and in vogue today, you call yourself individualist. If conformity is the good word then you are a conformist. But if the two words are good and in vogue simultaneously, you attribute them both to yourself even if they contradict each other. But don't worry because there is a way out of this dilemma.
Here is how you do it. Define an individualist as one who chooses to conform because he or she has the free will to do so. Contrast this with the definition of the conformist who lacks the free will to make an individual choice and so, he or she conforms to the norm. More succinctly, you are a good individualist because you are free to conform and he or she is a bad conformist because he or she is not free to make an individual choice.
There it is. I believe I got it airtight now because it seems I have managed to show that hypocrisy is at the root of irrational thought. But did I? Because if I did I should be able to answer this question: Is hypocrisy practiced out of individual choice or out of conformist habit? Never mind; there will be another time to think about that.