Miscellany: Scattered Observations

Education Is the Root of All Roots: Values Are the Soil, Morality the Lubricant of Efficiency, Law the Floor is a root-cause thesis within the account of seeing through the world and society, offered as an answer to the question: where, at bottom, lies the root of all the phenomenal-layer problems in society? The thesis holds that the “three mountains,” the crisis in healthcare, the coldness of teachers, the food served in school canteens — problems that look separate and self-contained — all trace back to one common soil: education and values. Values are the soil; once the soil has gone bad, even the finest gardener and the finest seedlings can do little. And of the two pillars that hold society together, “morality is the efficiency of civilization, law is the floor of society” — law guards the lower limit, while morality decides the running cost of everything above it. Its core statement: “the root of every matter lies in education… once values are set right, these problems at the phenomenal layer will, in the end, resolve themselves.”

The Phenomenal Layer and the Root: Putting Problems Back Where They Belong

The thesis is, first of all, a way of assigning causes: it refuses to patch problems one by one at the phenomenal layer, and instead asks after the root that all phenomena share. The phenomena listed include the “three mountains,” the crisis in healthcare, and the difficulties of education — right down to the food served at a Shanghai primary school and the coldness of its teachers. The judgment is that these are not isolated, unrelated malfunctions but different fruits borne by one and the same soil.

The way I see it, the root of every matter lies in education. The three mountains, the crisis in healthcare, the difficulties of education — once values are set right, these problems at the phenomenal layer will, in the end, resolve themselves. So why aren’t they being solved? When you put something rotten in a critical position, it becomes a tumor.

This line of attribution is structurally the same as the distinction drawn in epistemology in Form and Nature: The Phenomenal Layer Can Never Explain the Being Layer: to circle around at the phenomenal layer is forever to treat only the symptom; one must sink down to the layer that produces the phenomena and look there. For social problems, that layer is education and values. And the line “when you put something rotten in a critical position, it becomes a tumor” pinpoints why a root cause is a root cause: it sits in the critical place that decides the whole.

Why the Root Is Education

In this thesis, education is raised to the height of “the very thing that distinguishes humans from animals.” The remark on Buffett’s final shareholders’ meeting runs:

What you make money on is certainty. Take education: education is the very thing that distinguishes humans from animals.

Education is the root, too, because it sets the cognitive trajectory of an enormous body of people. What mobile platforms released was not a demographic dividend but a “cognition dividend”:

It is because of the “cognition” dividend… When a group with the largest base can browse freely on a mobile device, it gets drawn powerfully toward people on the same wavelength… The root of it all is education.

The group with the largest base is drawn toward content on its own wavelength, and so the stratification of cognition is amplified by technology — this is the obverse and reverse of the same coin as Raising Your Cognition Is the Only Shortcut: You Cannot Earn Money Beyond Your Cognition, and it also explains why a problem like Fleecing the Flock Comes Down to Gaps in Information and Cognition: False Cures, Learning the Wrong Lesson, and How a Lie Can Save While the Truth Kills keeps recurring in soil where cognition has not been raised across the board. Leave education unrepaired and cognition uneven, and all the downstream fractures have their source. The thesis goes further, fixing education as the master switch for the world’s improvement:

The way I see it, the root of a better world is education. Education is like the soil: if the soil is bad, then however good the seedlings and the gardener, it is very hard to get a healthy seedling… History has produced so many tragedies, and they were either a matter of education heading in the wrong direction, or of a good educational system never being made widespread.

Values Are the Soil: The Metaphor of Gardener and Seedling

The thesis’s second pillar shifts the gaze one layer further down, from “education” to “values.” One set of metaphors returns again and again: values are the soil, the teacher is the gardener, the child is the seedling or the seed. The crux of the metaphor lies in the reassignment of responsibility — once the soil has gone bad, what the gardener and the seedling can decide is very little.

Values are the soil. Once the soil has gone bad, what the seedling and the gardener can decide is not much.

The school-canteen problem makes the example: the fire is aimed not at the supplier alone but at the soil that tacitly permitted it all:

With a good system of oversight, with nobody’s tacit consent, how could this have happened? Once a place’s soil has gone bad, what use is the finest gardener, the finest seed? That is why I believe the single most important thing in China is to take education more seriously.

This metaphor guards against pinning a systemic problem cheaply on some individual — it is of one mind with the stance of Stop Blaming Everything on Human Nature: Human Nature Can Be Reshaped, and Emotional Intelligence Is a Wound of the Age: human nature and individual conduct are shaped by the soil, and cursing the gardener does less than changing the soil. The soil thesis therefore marks “taking education more seriously” as the most critical point on which to bring force to bear.

Why the Teachers Lose Their Light: The Quantified Gardener

What soil-gone-bad looks like in a concrete scene is rendered as “the teacher losing their light.” The record of the intuitive feeling in a primary-school classroom:

Sitting in on a primary-school class, I plainly felt that the teachers had grown cold, had lost their vitality… Is it because the children have grown up and are no longer so lovable, or is it because the school has begun to weigh grades, and the teachers now have KPIs?

The answer given is the latter — the gardener has been remade by the soil:

If you hold the word “teacher” to be something sacred, you will suffer a great deal. You will find that most teachers… do not take a child’s growth and guidance to heart at all, and instead quantify the child into their own KPI. So here is the question: is this really the teacher’s fault? Values are the soil. Once the soil has gone bad, what the seedling and the gardener can decide is not much.

Eyes that have gone dark are not a matter of personal attitude but a symptom of the soil’s erosion — the same set of images as in Kindness Is the Light Within: The Eyes Go Dark When Belief Is Gone, extended into the social scene. From this it follows that education should not chase numbers, and that the truly strong, having come to understand human nature deeply, ought to restrain and guide rather than let things take their course:

To understand human nature deeply is not to take human nature as an excuse and let things slide; there should be restraint. This is not something that can be changed overnight, but the moment someone is truly doing these things, is in the act of doing them — that is the light of an age.

Morality Is the Efficiency of Civilization, Law Is the Floor of Society

The thesis’s third pillar names the two pillars on which civilization runs, and the division of labor between them.

Morality is the efficiency of civilization; law is the floor of society.

In this distinction, law guards the lower limit that may not be crossed, while morality decides the running cost of social cooperation — the higher the level of morality, the more effortlessly and efficiently civilization runs; let morality collapse, and everything has to be held up by the expensive apparatus of law and oversight, with efficiency caving in along with it. There is also an inverse law about morality:

When the world begins to run short of morality, we begin to stress morality. When everyone in the world is a scoundrel, being a scoundrel becomes the way to survive.

Stressing morality is precisely the signal of morality’s scarcity; when being a scoundrel becomes the way to survive, the soil has gone bad enough to turn evil into the rational choice. This observation echoes the collapse of the architecture of trust described in Overdrawing Social and National Credit: The Collapse of the Architecture of Trust, and it explains why law as a floor alone cannot revive a civilization — a floor can only prevent the worst; it cannot produce the good. The good depends on morality, that high-efficiency software of cooperation, and morality in turn grows in the soil of values.

The Aim of Education: From Sorting to “All Are Well”

Finally, the thesis names the direction education ought to face. The cold rules of the adult world are granted, yet the thesis chooses not to stop there:

There’s a saying online: the adult world does not educate, it only sorts. I agree — I agree completely. But I feel I want to do a little bit more, because for some people the next second might just be the moment… The world is made up of individuals one by one, and individuals influence one another. One more good person, and the world is one bit more beautiful.

The endpoint of education is located in “all are well,” and “well” requires a standard that has to be guided into being:

The way I see it, this world can only truly be well when all are well. Then what is the standard of “well”? Lacking a commonly acknowledged standard, no one will arrive at true satisfaction… The forming of such cognition and such ways of thinking takes a certain guidance and instruction, and this brings us to education — and education, in turn, is rooted in values.

This orientation of “only when all are well is it truly well” springs from the same source as Love Is the Most Fundamental Energy: Happiness Is Built on Strength, and We Are Only Truly Well When All Are Well. And set against reality, the thesis criticizes the inversion in how educational resources are allocated:

The ones who score ten or twenty on a test are given the best learning tools and the best teachers. And the ones who can score eighty, even ninety and above, are forever being interrogated: why can’t you score a hundred?

Resources stood on their head, children quantified into KPIs, sorting put in place of education — these are all what it looks like once the soil has drifted away from the direction of “all are well.” With this, the thesis closes into a complete causal chain: values (the soil) decide education; education decides the level of cognition and morality; the level of cognition and morality decides all the good and ill at the phenomenal layer. To make the world better, one must work at the deepest root — values and education — rather than fight fire after fire at the phenomenal layer.

Sources

Manuscript — “the cognition dividend,” “the root of it all is education”
Manuscript — “having understood human nature deeply… there should be restraint… this is the light of an age”
Manuscript — “education is the very thing that distinguishes humans from animals”
Manuscript — the question of the teachers turning cold
Manuscript — “values are the soil; once the soil has gone bad, what the seedling and the gardener can decide is not much”
Manuscript — “when the world begins to run short of morality, we begin to stress morality”
Manuscript — “morality is the efficiency of civilization, law is the floor of society”; “the root of every matter lies in education… when you put something rotten in a critical position, it becomes a tumor”
Manuscript — “the root of a better world is education… if the soil is bad, then however good the seedlings and the gardener, it is very hard to get a healthy seedling”
“Complete Personality File, v3” — the adult world only sorts; the standard of “all are well”; the best resources given to the worst students; the school canteen and the soil thesis

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