On the inherent value of integrity

In honour of the impending Civil War too to the South.

In my final months at UofT, I started insisting—first—to myself, introspectively, and—thereafter—to family, friends, confidants, and colleagues that "my integrity is worth more to me than this degree." During the additional time that I've had to reflect while settling into full-time supply teaching for the Thames Valley District School Board and teaching for my private school on weekends, I found an exciting way to synthesize a bunch of my existing ideas.  Despite currently conducting interviews with past research participants to add to the eventual publication of what would have been my dissertation, in addition to unpacking the nature of that insistence, I felt the need to try to explain the significance of "inherent values" in writing, particularly that of integrity as a virtue.

But first, we need to review "inherence".  Etymologies can be powerful teachers; "inherence" demonstrates this impeccably.  To "inhere" is "to stick in or to".  Therefore, "inherent values" refer to values that stick to or from within or attribute their value from within (i.e., attribute their value inherently).  However, "inherence" has another meaning in metaphysics traceable to Aristotelian and Platonic ideation, that "of essence."  Or, in other words, inherent values also refer to essential values.  And yes, the inherence of some values coincides with the ex-herence of others.  This latter adjective is rarely used outside of philosophical writing circles, but it's an extremely useful term in this discussion.  Basically, exherent values refer to those that "stick to" from "out," from extrinsic sources. 

A lot could be written, here, about the "stickiness" of inherent and exherent valuations, but that's a topic for another space. 

Before we get to the titular fun stuff, we need to ground these broad categorizations of exherent and inherent values.  Exherent values refer to any ascriptions of meaning, worth, (or of value) to objects, subjects, and ideas external to one's being.  They are always a posteriori, after or emergent from experience.  Exherent values stick a posteriori, and their value is derived exherently, or exheres. Thus, they are among the most changeable and ephemeral of values inhabited by an individual.

Inherent values, meanwhile, stick a priori, and their value is inherent, or inheres. I.e., their value could be said to exist a priori, before and/or despite experience.  Note the "and/or", here: inherent values can exist before and without experience, before and with experience, or despite experience and timelessly, (recognizing that some pragmatists may argue that all inherent values exist before and with experience). I've already given one of the many examples of inherent values away; virtues as traditionally understood persist among the bedrock of inherent values.  E.g., honesty could be virtuous (and valuable) regardless of whether you or I existed, and regardless of whether humans existed.  But, integrity is special, both the cornerstone and keystone of all other inherent values.

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I should preface the crux of this post by acknowledging that I am by no means the first person to suggest this; it's been said over a thousand different ways by over a thousand different intellectuals since at least the Ancient Greeks.  And yet, people's actions generally do not reflect this recurrence, so I feel compelled to echo their sentiment.

Much of human history can be reduced to an endless conflict between inherent and exherent values, manifested in and enacted through people.  Objects, subjects, and ideas ascribed meaning by individuals compete for dominance in hierarchies. However, inevitably, cyclically even, individuals find themselves confronted by inherence no matter how committed they may become to exherence (and vice versa for the self-identifying philosophers and virtue ethicists).  But, the eternity and relative ethical and moral superiority of inherent values tend to elevate them, often as fundamental or essential virtues.

Although trust, loyalty, diversity, community, and humility seem to share a similar /elevation/ morally and ethically, integrity holds everything together, etymologically and practically.  Many different definitions persist to denotate integrity as a virtue; I tend to stick to moral and ethical consistency in an attempt to cover as many cases as possible.  Yet, integrity's origins of "wholeness" and "soundness" give it extraneous utility beyond morality and ethics.

Like many of the more nebulous and paradoxical philosophical concepts, integrity tends to be easiest to define and to understand through its absence.  An oversimplification, but practicing integrity can be characterized as a constant evasion of hypocrisy.  At essence, hypocrisy refers to an incongruence among an individual's thoughts, values, and actions. Importantly, integrity could be breached given merely an inconsistency among values themselves (often experienced as cognitive dissonance).  Integrity is both cornerstone and keystone because all other virtues in part derive their values from it; in other words, one could diminish the value of a virtue by violating their integrity.  The cases illustrating this phenomenon are myriad.  It doesn't matter how honest or humble we are (or how committed we are to honesty or humility) if we betray another person's trust unjustifiably or patronize them.  And it doesn't matter how much we value trust if we're dishonest or condescending,  especially if we allege the importance of trust or honesty while betraying someone's trust or lying.  The value of integrity inheres before and despite the inherent value of any other virtue; it is the bedrock of the bedrock—and the keystone, or ideal of the ideal (—or Form of Forms if you're feeling especially Platonic).

And it goes without saying, then, that integrity is not easy.  Anyone who tells you that practicing integrity is easy probably doesn't have much of it, assuming the fallibility of the average person.  At best, we can merely minimize our hypocrisy as much as possible.  More than any other virtue, integral consistency among one's values, ethics, perspective, and actions requires a perpetual vigilance.  But, I can confidently affirm from personal experience that the vigilance is worth it, even if it may not feel like it in the moment.  As I've noted wryly on Facebook over the years, "integrity's not something you practice when it's convenient."

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I'm not here to drag my former thesis committee through the mud, but the final outcome of my PhD program could be attributed to some member's direction to violate what I knew to be right and just.  The stonewalling followed in the wake of departmental intervention, and the more my administration dug into my case, the uglier it became for my committee.  

Indeed, one of the benefits of the academy is that at the professoriate level, people are generally, relatively smart.  But, that does not necessitate that they all hold themselves to the highest standards of ethical and moral conduct.  Not even UofT's Social Justice Education Department is immune to that  inconsistency.

I raise this point to emphasize that the greatest breaches of integrity, greatest hypocrisies, are not perpetrated by the unwise or ignorant but by the leaders of our leaders and, in my case, the teachers of our teachers.  Of all people, they do and should know better.

When confronted with the prospect of breaching my integrity as an intellectual and researcher, I gave a hard "nope."  And I'd do it again.  

/Shameless pitch to show up and vote in the next American presidential election if you hold American citizenship./

P.S. Currently in the process of writing a book about this nonsense.  I'll keep folks posted regarding its progress.

I am dropping out.

Few people know that he was actually defending Bertrand Russell.

I am writing this post mostly for myself as a reference to be used later when I write a much more exhaustive memoir documenting these experiences.

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A vocal minority of people in the academy wax lyrical about the substance and nature of "speaking truth to power" when it's actually relatively banal in practice if university faculty and administrators happen to dismiss or to enable malpractice, corruption, and/or bad faith action.

Just speak the truth. Challenging existing false and dubious authority is concomitant with the communication of unadulterated truth.  But hey, if you really want to speak truth to power, 

rip that doctorate up at the podium, ideally while also reaffirming to the people of the cloth that 

"this is how we speak truth to power."

Cathartic incendiary invective aside, I am dropping out of my PhD program in year 7, after finishing and submitting a full first draft of my dissertation a little over a year ago.  My only regret is that I did not drop out the moment that my thesis committee refused to recognize my data collection in 2021, allegedly because it was unethical for me to collect data without their unanimous approval of a revised proposal, and despite my receiving full ethical approval for the study's Ethics Protocol from my respective Ethics Review Board.  Despite my most recent attempted compromise negotiated with my departmental administration this past summer of 

collecting a second set of data, 
after ratifying a second set of amendments to my Ethics Protocol, 
upon conducting a secondary analysis, 
and despite offering to consolidate two dissertations worth of data and analyses into one oversized manuscript, 

my thesis committee seems to be stonewalling my progress.  Despite paying tuition out of pocket without working full time while living in downtown Toronto, I submitted a revised proposal (about the 6th or 7th version) with highlighted sections for review early November 2023, and no one on my thesis committee has yet gotten back to me as of this writing with feedback or suggestions for revision.  For some of the folks on my thesis committee, this is not a first-time offense.  One might ask, 

"how did you get here?"

I am not interested in flaming my thesis committee and departmental administration, even if I were convinced that such whistleblowing may assist other current and future colleagues experiencing abuse at UofT; there are other fora for that.  Moreover, I am a pacifist who researches and teaches pacifistic pedagogy.  Yet, I think it's still worthwhile to revisit the basic facts of my situation.

I first applied for my program in 2015 from China while teaching math and science just outside Shanghai.  Unfortunately, I was not accepted to OISE's Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning program's fully-funded PhD cohort on the grounds that the department could not find someone to supervise my research.  Upon receiving the decline, I was convinced that the only way to do my research justice was to leave China and to spend at least a year developing contacts and building my application in-person in Toronto.  So, during a year of massive turnover of staff at my school, I elected to pass over an opportunity to serve as vice-principal in order to pursue the PhD program in the Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning department at UofT.

What followed was one of the craziest years of my life; it was essentially fully-funded cohort or bust.  My close friend and confidant in China insisted that I could not accomplish what I set out to accomplish in a single year. He insisted that I could not learn French while securing a teaching job in Toronto while also gaining admission into the fully funded cohort at UofT.  Not only did I nearly achieve B2 level French with Alliance Française in about 8 months (as a backup to teach FSL if I didn't get into the PhD program), but I also landed a job at Olympiads School to build and teach their Advanced Placement US History Course after publishing my Masters thesis research in a journal article to convince my current supervisor to give me a recommendation for the program at OISE.  I know my work ethic.

Yet, I should have paid more attention to the red flags.  After admission into the program, I developed a permanent scar in my eye (from a "peripheral corneal ulcer" in the words of my optometrist) from the additional stress of a two week stint supporting my supervisor in writing a grant proposal for over 300 thousand dollars (which they won).  I needed to support a close friend and colleague who had their work plagiarized by a member of my committee after I had recommended them to this individual.  I imagine my growing reputation as a whistleblower (or, you know, someone who cares about the pursuit of truth in a university) merely exacerbated my thesis committee's willingness to attempt to stonewall my completion and my departmental administration's unwillingness to intervene.

The most common advice I receive is to either escalate to the School of Graduate Studies or to lawyer-up.  Feeding other UofT departments additional ammunition to fire at OISE betrays my own commitments as an educator and as an education researcher.

And, I refuse to earn my degree at gun-point (through coercion via "hired gun").  It betrays not only what I believe, but what I research and teach to my students. If the only thing standing between me and a doctorate is my willingness to retain legal counsel, I'm better off just going straight to law school.

Fundamentally, a doctorate is premised upon the recognition of the value of an original contribution to an existing body of knowledge by the doctoral candidate's moral, ethical, or at least intellectual superiors.  On these grounds alone, the degree has lost most of its meaning to me.  I will likely never redeem my image of my department or of UofT, partly because of the over-idealizing I engaged in prior to and near the beginning of my program.  I pursued this path based on a mythology.

These intuitions allege to support and foster intellectual specialization.  But, if your research is truly speci-al (and thereby essentially original in keeping with the etymological roots of that word), then arguably no one in any of these institutions should be able to support your work directly, and, therefore, there would be a real need for other specialists to trust you to conduct your research rigorously and ethically because you're making a tangible but original contribution beyond existing knowledge, including the existing knowledge of your doctoral committee.

Empathizing with my departmental administrators and thesis committee, it's entirely possible that the University of Toronto's Faculty of Education was never actually equipped to support my work in the first place, despite the relevancy of my teaching and the research study's content to both the work of my colleagues and the interests of student participants.  Hence, I fully plan to finish the research study and to publish my research.  My last goal at UofT is to seek approval of the second set of amendments to my ethics protocol to conduct my second set of data collection.

I will finish this research project, conducting the additional data collection and analysis for a second write-up that honestly could undergird a second PhD dissertation.  I care about this research; I didn't give up vice-principal and leave China for a degree; I returned to Canada to finish the project that I began with my Master's thesis.  I will see this through to the end, with or without UofT, and with or without their increasingly irrelevant institutional recognition.

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When a colleague asked me why I submitted a manuscript for journal publication under pseudonym, I commented on the importance of practicing "a measure of humility in an ocean of unexamined arrogance."  These experiences have not shaken my resolve.  If anything, I'm more certain of my position now than I've ever been before.  From my work as a volunteer domestic violence counselor, to my role in the classroom as a professional high school teacher, to my role as a leader in the UTGSU Resistance, to the work that I continue to conduct as a researcher, we normalize the abuse that we're unwilling to contend.  

Moreover, I keep letting other people set my win conditions.  For me to finish my research project despite the neglect, misdirection, and sacrifices necessary to persist in my program is a greater accomplishment from my perspective than if I jumped into an existing research project and finished my doctorate in under four years. It'd be a far greater loss if I abandoned my research completely and betrayed the promises that I made to students, parents, colleagues, administrators, and to myself. My department may have failed me, but I won't fail them. I know what I promised to do.

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People familiar with this blog likely know about my effusive appreciation for Bertrand Russell.  He's been a tag on here since I launched this blog over a decade ago.  In the early 20th century, he was arguably the closest thing folks had to Socrates in the English-speaking parts of the world.  Yet, as I've insisted elsewhere, he would not have survived in some of the departments currently operating in North American universities.

As I was editing this post, I kept revisiting Einstein's quotation because I kept that same poster in my office, directly above my desk, at OISE; (I bought the poster among a couple others with the $60 my brother handed me when I began undergrad at Western University).  Turns out, my supervisor also kept a copy of this exact same poster, framed, in their office.

I'm too empiricist and agnostic to argue or to believe that everything happens for a reason, but I do believe in generalizable correlations as a researcher and someone committed to the development of knowledge.  If I were smarter, I would have recognized sooner the implications of most of the intellectuals I appreciate subsisting in exile from the academy.

As my close friends and colleagues could confirm, I did not plan to use the honorific even if I "earned it".  My students call me "Mr." from conventional courtesy; "Adam" is still just fine.

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Post script:  I've only just begun writing "thank you" letters to the faculty, staff, and administrators who have supported me throughout this journey.  A lot of great people do a lot of great work at OISE.  I will never forget their support.

State of [Voldemort] (September 13th, 2023)

 

On discriminatory empathy

Look, if you haven't already seen Cloud Atlas, please do yourself a favour: close this webpage, watch the film, and then come back.

When I was young, I was incessantly critiqued for appearing "too serious." My disquietude provoked my adaptation of a relatively bemused Wilde-like persona: a mask I still wear that thinly veils a cold and calculating logician who deeply (and sardonically) loathes anything even resembling pretense.

Even in early elementary school, I remember playing a bit of a game with people.  Ironically (in hindsight), I just started acting.  I became proficient with this performativity to the degree that I was relegated to drama camps almost every summer and performing in the Sear's Festival competitively for three consecutive years for my high school's team.  I even starred in one of my high school musicals. I'll never forget the debrief after we performed a dress rehearsal of 'Tommy' for a couple classes from a local elementary school.  After the show, one of the youngins' asked me whether I planned to pursue acting and performance art professionally.  Even then, I knew that I was going to let them down by telling them the truth: that I had no intention of pursuing art professionally.  That "I can't".

Succinctly and candidly, if the people conditioned as I've been conditioned could elect not to fight for the future, then it might not end well.  Hence, if even one other contemporary demonstrated the same or a greater commitment to the Cause, I would have existentially less justification to embrace the militancy that I now practice religiously; (as noted elsewhere in this blog, this mentality has cost me several prospective romantic partners over the years).  I know that my closest historical relatives were Jesuits, zealots, and monks.  However, unlike their celestial condonations, my rationale is stubbornly grounded in empirically verifiable and reliable knowledge.  I gushed about the potential value of rationalistic morality in undergrad and have unwittingly actualized it myself for almost a decade.  Do I take pride in any of this?  Of course not. Given the human species' relative impacts on the Earth and our relegation on the geologic time scale, we might as well be on the edge of oblivion. My uncompromising commitment to the future of humanity is about as necessary as breathing from my point of view; I have a job to do.  Call it megalomania.  I call it "Monday".

It's an incomparable passion.  Most people whom I've encountered chase incentives; I am not motivated by self-interest, nor have I been since about grade 11.  It's like I'm operating with a mathematical moral justification for everything I do.  When I'm discouraged, all I need to do is remind myself of the existing math problem on the dorm wipe board.  It's changed a bit over the years, but it's still essentially a math problem.

Nonetheless, I have definitely moderated my fervor a bit since early undergrad.  The folks willing to sacrifice as I have, or more, for posterity are running out of places to hide, especially in the digital age—which gives me an ever greater responsibility to answer to the highest justice. 

I'm responsible for teaching kids—which means all of the aforementioned are subject to "school-appropriate" scrutiny and filtering.  Many of my recent students are of Christian denomination; frankly, my morality has a deeply Christian foundation despite my noted agnosticism.  I was raised Christian; I was almost confirmed with the United Church before I pulled out of confirmation in the eleventh hour after securing the same unadulterated skepticism that I practice as I edit this blog post today.  Teaching high school continuously for the last 9 years has grounded me in ways that may be incomparable to the groundedness of any other mechanism, intimate partnership included.  When you've been responsible to as many families and children as I have, your self-scrutiny of the behavior that you're modeling for others can hit thresholds unlike those of any other profession, excepting public office.

—The world I'm fighting for is not a utopia; it could still be realized within most of our lifetimes.  I have always intended for my research to contribute directly to this project by providing and refining curriculum for fostering predispositions toward non-violent conflict resolution—toward peace.  

As always, I am ever critical of my own positionality; I'm no White Savior.  I'm just a guy who cares.

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And that's the closest I'll get to an autobiography.  To dabble in the aforementioned is to play with the fire that prompted me to publish a condemnation of pride in the first Facebook note that initiated this sequence of self-publications back in 2011.  However, empathizing with our selves can be just as important, if not of even greater consequence, than indiscriminately empathizing with others.

In broaching the discussion of "discriminatory empathy", I figured it was important to begin with an attempt to empathize with my self.  I've self-published about empathy several times previously, but I don't think I'll ever do its potential importance and consequence justice.  Since, I tend to attribute it as the deciding variable among the exhaustive scourges of humanity.  Empathic discrimination—that is, electing to empathize with some but not with others—can be attributed as a cause of all violence, depending on how one defines the "empathic" and the "violating".

That's a bold claim, but please hear me out.  How does one justify the violation of an other?  Classically, one often attempts to re-characterize the other as other-than or less-than one's self or one's tribe.  In the associated literature, some scholars categorize this as infrahumanization.  But, at essence, even infrahumanization can be traced to another preferential practice of empathy.  Hence, dehumanization—or the treatment of an other as less-than or other-than human—can also be attributed as an unwillingness to exhaustively and indiscriminately empathize with others.

In every case that I've encountered, the violence enacted by an agent (including cases of absolute psychopathy) involved empathic discrimination: an agent's empathizing with some but not with others.  Importantly, this conceptualization of indiscriminatory empathy includes empathizing with the self—i.e., the witnessing, recognition, and/or expression of one's own perspective and emotions.  Metacognition is a form of empathy if the traditional definitions of cognitive empathy were assumed in this conceptualization.  (If cognitive empathy refers to the re-cognition of the cognitions of others, then cognitively empathizing with oneself becomes what we usually label "metacognition".)  Scholars of clinical psychotherapy had this figured out ages ago: the first step to empathizing with one's self is to recognize and to isolate from one's preconscious internal monologues.

Therefore, to reduce empathic discrimination is to reduce the probability of all violence.  Indiscriminate empathizing is the key to final and sustainable peace.

No one will ever practice empathy perfectly indiscriminately, but some people definitely empathize less discriminately than others.  Most people can't get past Socrates' first step.

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After watching Cloud Atlas the first time, but before reading around its development and production, I was convinced that this was the movie that the Wachowski sisters actually wanted to make when they directed The Matrix.  The Wachowski sisters have played with the themes of existential transformation and the essentially humanizing throughout their careers.  Cloud Atlas's plot(s) and characterizations engaged with these themes directly and exhaustively, which evidently undermined the film's success; it bombed in the box office, and most people I encounter haven't even heard of this epic.  

I won't spoil the film anymore than I already have, but of its literary significances, I think it's valuable as an illustration of the timelessness of this problem: Empathic discrimination will continue to predicate violence unless we elect to cease and desist such discrimination, toward our selves and toward all Others.  So long as people continue to empathize with some but not with others, violence is inevitable, regardless of political, ideological, or even moral allegiances.

That cliché (and its various iterations) of "change yourself in order to change your world" is ever prescient. If "the unexamined life is not worth living," then it's the parts of our beings that we elect not to examine that most define us. We cannot let our empathic discrimination define us.

We will never know ourselves completely, but that doesn't mean that we should stop trying.

Sometimes, people need to hear what they said.

 

On corruption

Probably a misattribution, but in lieu of reading this nonsense, just listen to Tim Minchin.

Preface: I have rewritten most of this post several times over the past couple of months since no matter how I approach revisions, this particular memorandum still seems too much like a rant.  I do not know if it is the topic or my lived experiences but apologies in advance if it still sounds like a tirade.

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One of my past professors whom I still deeply respect once affirmed to an entire undergraduate history classroom that "corruption greases the wheels of governance."  I have hated those words only increasingly since he uttered them.  Since, in my brief stint in student and administrative governance since high school, his claim has only ever been validated by my exposure.  

As someone currently fighting on the front lines of an anti-corruption movement at UofT, I feel relatively confident promising the reader that to contend one agent's corruption is to contend all agents' corruptions.  Corrupt people tend to congregate; the permissibilities of their corruptions are co-dependent.  "An attack against one is an attack against all," except these tribes play a different game with different rules.

In my five years at UofT, I think I may have demystified the potential ceilings of corruption among both student and university administrative governments, and they go far higher than I could have imagined prior to returning to Ontario from China.  During my undergrad, vocally among my friends and classmates, I had already declared university politics "as among the worst politics, because of all stakeholders, these folks should, and usually do, know better."  Yet, my then naïveté now feels total.

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These institutions prioritize classist, nepotistic, and ultimately dynastic considerations above all.  Moreover, the people managing these institutions generally care far more about control than about students' understandings.  Yet, many of the people responsible for preserving these not-for-profit corporations' marketed images would undoubtedly deny or at least attempt to qualify these allegations, but behind closed doors, they're usually playing kingmaker.  Obviously, not everyone elects to play that game or, at least, elects to play that game monolithically.  However, frankly, most faculty and staff will not bite the hand that feeds them, so why should we expect anything more of our elected student leaders?

There's an admittedly Orwellian thread running among the intentions of university stakeholders and administrators.  Generally, the principal benefactors of these institutions want people educated just enough—conscious just enough of what's actually going on day to day behind closed doors.  Not too much.  Just enough—to keep the institution operational.  Faculty included.  Anything beyond that threshold, and your increasing consciousness can become a growing threat, especially if you have the courage to speak and/or to act on it (by virtue of the crisis of conscience to try to do either in the first place).  

One cannot appreciate the exhaustive extent of corruption in our post-secondary institutions until one starts speaking truth to these folks in power.  With empiricism under continued assault, the stakes of any remaining good faith commitment to alethic coherence have never been higher, and I write that with a deep appreciation of the historicized moment.  Somehow, in the era in which people have had among the greatest access to knowledge, the knowledge project itself has endured its greatest proportionate vulnerabilities since the Dark Ages. Bertrand Russell would not have survived in 2022.

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I don't know if I will ever redeem my image of the University of Toronto.  I'm not going to gaslight myself.  I know what some of Canada's "best and brightest" have done and, especially, what they haven't done with the knowledge that they had when they had it.  

It's easy to try to argue that my experience is the exception: that my exposure has been exceptionally unique or unlikely, but I have heard one too many stories from friends and colleagues to ignore the logical implications of their real experiences and feelings.

As such, it's difficult to face my students when they ask me about UofT.  I don't think I'm doing them any favours by misrepresenting my experiences, and especially the experiences of my friends and colleagues who have been harmed and could be harmed again with the same impunity, but misrepresent I do.  As implied, we at UofT are generally engaged in a great project of misrepresentation.

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I will finish my PhD, but not with the pride that I would have had five years ago.  Universities are not immutable or indispensable; in Canada, our larger institutions' undergraduate programs continue to be integrated as public-private extensions of public high schools.

Prophetically, that same professor also once noted that "if you want to learn, just get a library card."  A small part of me regrets that I did not follow that advice.

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To conclude, I find myself returning to Camus's alleged words almost weekly.  Despite my own bias toward the fundamentality of epistemology, I believe that rebellion is more ontic than epistemic: One exists in a state of rebellion if they are truly "rebelling".  Mere thoughts of dissent or of rebellion do not constitute or predicate ontic rebellion unless one were living under (e.g.) a totalitarian dictatorship, categorically.

If nothing else, my program has taught me that it's far easier to join (or more often to submit to) those inhabiting corruption than to fight for any other alternative.  But, the same were true throughout most of recorded human history; I can think of no exception where electing for corruption within a corrupt system presented the more difficult or higher justice, regardless of what people perceived as that which they had to lose at the time through resistance.

I told my mother something off-the-cuff over Thanksgiving that still resonates with me as I finish writing this post: "Power does not give one the right to abuse it."  Upon critical reflection of my own words as part of my endless attempts to falsify of my own positions and morality, I realized that this is still artifice, still baseless: nothing gives anyone rights.  We give each other rights, since time immemorial, regardless whether we philosophize or categorize them as inalienable and/or a priori.  Since—We can also take them away, as we have done so and will continue to do so, unless We stop them from rescinding or disrespecting what We have established as Our rights.

Only would-be tyrants fear a free and honest will.

"The protagony of vice villainizes virtue."

Excerpted from a cease and desist letter.

I presented my dissertation research at a national academic conference in May.  I had anticipated that injection into the marketplace of ideas since I started (obsessively) reading Nietzsche and the surviving Socratic dialogues in high school.  It's likely that those texts were the only reason that I reached university; as my mother could still probably attest, I almost dropped out in grade 11.  As I remarked to my current class of Writing 11-12 students the other day, my grade 11 and 12 Law teacher typically conducted all class time and assessments, including the exams, through fill-in-the-blank exercises that reiterated the courses' textbooks verbatim (every. single. class.).  My classmates and I were keen enough to know that this was dubious even as teenagers.  This teacher continued to teach at my public high school for years after I left, protected by the OSSTF no less.

Clichéd clichés, I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth.  As a lower-middle class White male growing up with a single-parent mother in South-Western Ontario (with a genealogy of significant mental illness), I experienced oppression, but orders of magnitudes less than those of many of my current colleagues and friends.  This origin seems to have nurtured my empathy with those who have experienced or especially continue to experience absolute poverty—true desperation.  More than most of the people whom I've encountered in the academy, especially in its upper echelons, we often had to choose, deliberately and consistently from relatively young ages, to become the ways that we are now.  We didn't have the external pressures from our immediate communities (let alone families) to search for better lots in life; if anything, we faced opposite pressures.

However, I don't write this from self-pity.  This context is necessary to situate the subject of this post.

Why I—like those others—often confront the problem of protagony.  

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Sidebar.  I'm an English teacher.  Narrativization is an essential composite of both the learning and teaching processes of disciplinary English.  In some ways, we've never finished or transcended the Ancient Greeks' "agon".  The great contest continues unabated—among tragedians in fifth century BC Greece and among players of roles of all recreational, intellectual, and political stripes today.  However, arguably the self-consciousness of this role play and of the impulses to interpret, to retell, and to witness lived experiences through narrative has a history and developmental arc traceable to prehistory.  In other words, in some ways, the narrativization of these impulses to story can be traced to and reaffirming of the essentially human and therefore humanizing—ascriptions of prot-agon-y and antagony offering signs and signifiers of people attempting to interpret meaning from the human experience.  I don't know that we need Thomas King to confirm this, but he's still an awesome read.

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During a seminar at that academic conference, one of my department's professors contributed an interesting point regarding the liberation of inter-generationally oppressed peoples in systemically violent conflict zones.  The professor noted the importance of nurturing progatony among the oppressed.  On the surface, this object may seem rather benign and even benevolent.  However, like so many other tools of the human experience—empathy, charisma, sophistry, etc.—protagony is only as Good as the agent (self-)actualizing it.

I don't think I need to belabour societal obsession with heroes and heroism.  It's popcorn fare for the looking-glass self's validation.  These heroic narratives and narrativizations present elevated forms of protagony, appealing to their audiences' ideals.  As a gamer since toddlerhood, I grew up immersed in the protagonies of Japanese role-playing games.  It's terribly easy to inhabit these stories, since generally, people tend to find solace in the un(der)examined assumption that they may inhabit their own RPG.

But take two seconds to stare into the stars, and our collective cosmic insignificance is once again rendered obvious.  The universe probably doesn't care about us, falsifiably, and even if it did, we don't yet have the (observable) evidence necessary to validate thus.

Needless to say, we're probably not the heroes of our narratives; we might not even be Fifth Business.

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And yet, it's 2022, and people continue to heroize their choices and actions. But who among us are most predisposed to protagonization?  Our political leaders?  Sure.  Celebrities?  —I'm sure at least one or two people come to mind.  What do these folks have in common?  

Let me guess.  Do the germane characteristics validating their protagonistic candidacies involve (under-)philosophizing, a (lack of) truthfulness to their lived experiences, or a (repudiation of) the "conscientization" that this blog has alluded to since its inception?  Right.  As a virtue-ethicist, I make a point to avoid the skulljacking of virtue ethics, but the omnipresence of vice seeking validation (and most often exoneration) through protagonization has become comically conspicuous.  

Implicitly, an agent's protagonization of their actions requires an under-examination or self-deception.  Today, we endure the great irony that the people most inclined to narrativize themselves as protagonists tend to be the last to self-examine, if they ever bother to do so.  It's "those who won't take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness," as Sophie Scholl would say, who seem to be most predisposed to protagonize their actions and existences, if only as a last resort.

Crucially, this trend becomes especially worrisome among our intellectuals. After all, our "Doctors of Philosophy" have (allegedly) exhibited a threshold of love of wisdom, communicated a threshold of trustworthy truth value, and have (allegedly) habituated a threshold of consciousness and of conscientiousness critical of the former.  Intellectuals tend to be the most vulnerable to protagonizing their triumphs over adversity—as those among the most self-conscious of the gravity and magnitudes of their struggles and positionalities.

Make no mistake: A commitment to virtue can threaten the very existence of anyone protagonizing vice.  Those protagonizing vice will almost certainly experience harm in your presence, although necessarily self-inflicted. Virtue is the villainy of vice.  Moreover, the people aspiring to virtue tend to be the last people to self-identify as the protagonists of their own narratives.  Unadulterated self-examination tends to bar said individuals from the necessary myopia.

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When V for Vendetta reached theatrical release in Ontario, I paid to see it in theatres four times in just over a week (a substantial feat for a teenager pumping gas on weekends).  I knew nothing of the graphic novel at that time; I knew only that the Wachowski sisters had a hand in its production, and after ruminating over The Matrix for years, I knew that I needed to see this film—to attempt to understand it. After my first viewing, I would have rewatched it in its entirety on the spot.  The film's cultural legacy and co-opting aside, it still communicates the importance of fearlessness and of determination in the face of oppressors, of authoritarians, and of their contemporary iterations.

With few exceptions, we have almost no Disney-villain level antagonists today.  Most of the people who have been villainized have been ascribed such villainy for political purposes, usually through some collaborative gaslighting.  But this follows logically; if one has already protagonized vice, (let's call it an "hamartia" to keep my English colleagues satiated), the various varieties of prevarications tend to be one concentric circle deeper.

To conclude, the vile yet vociferous villains to virtue violate with vengeance the vocations of valor and veracity; yet, the virtuous vicars of vigorous vantage vacillate voicelessly, vetting varieties of ventures to venerably vanquish the vacuous villainy.  Voilà! The vanishing vanguard vie the vogue vignette: that the protagony of vice villainizes virtue.

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