Another Perspective

What I Really Learned in College

In one fell two-page swoop the over- educated Bryan Roberts exposes the very pointlessness of that over-education.

This is it: classes are ending; people are marching away from the world of used books and smelly bars and into the world of paychecks and financed cars. I feel very much a part of this progression, being a senior and knowing a lot of people who are graduating. I also feel excluded from it, being that I still have leftover incompletes from fall term and a needed class I cannot get into this summer, my supposedly last term, because of that deficiency. I am in self-imposed limbo. I don't know what happened. I had it all together when I arrived in this enigmatic burg a few years ago. Really, very together. Then at some point I decided, without deciding, to become a wordsmith at the expense of all other pursuits. I decided without deciding that the agony in this world is more interesting than the satisfaction. So I have no degree to show you. You will fax your resumes all over the country and settle for a flavorless but well-paying job and put a down payment on a house; I will wallow around and possibly finish my degree and wind up a hypocritical advice columnist for some publication I haven't heard of yet. I am tempted to suggest that to make a value judgment would be to miss the point - but such assumes that I know what the point is, which I most certainly do not. All that I do know may be distilled into a collection of anemic observations, most of which owe their existence to my search for the everlasting hangover. Here's what I really learned in college:

-People have little taste for sincerity. People revel in being duped, which they call entertainment, and it satisfies their urge to escape all the other ways in which they can't help being duped, and it makes them feel victorious. "Look at that over-sincere jackass," people say. "By laughing at him I am better than him. I believe that he is a dupe." Somewhere a pathetic pantheon of gods convenes to howl with ridicule at humanity.

-As humans, the act of being born constitutes a swindling of the world. While here we tend to take more than we give.

-You are quick to point out that (as far as we know) we do not choose to be born. In a sense it is an act of violence that the world perpetrates against us. It creates us, then commands us to apologize. In response we conquer it for no apparent purpose.

-The only way to validate the experience of being alive is to press our love upon the world with all our strength, in every instance. The trouble is that such an approach is suicidal. The world has no sympathy for vulnerability, however brave or ethical. We are forced to love with economy.

-Drunken one-night stands simply do not lead to fulfilling romantic relationships. They may, however, sometimes complement some very interesting friendships.

-If you desire moderate and stable success in a life of crime, go into law enforcement. On top of all the free drugs you'll score in your "busts," you'll also receive unprecedented opportunities to unleash your demoniac tensions upon society's castaways. The state will sanction this activity and sponsor a respectable home life for you and your family, conspicuously free of any hassle from your neighbors, who will be dreadfully afraid of you. Or you could join the mob. Same thing, really, but the law enforcement gig is far more stable. Eventually it may become monotonous. If you really want to make a killing at the expense of your more honest fellow humans, your best bet is to run for public office.

-Segregation is a time-honored tool invented by evolutionary forces, implemented voluntarily and without ceremony by humans far more often than by states, which preserves the integrity of evolutionary phenomena - ideologies and preferences just as often as races or classes - and allows them to flourish. Find a black-clad anarchist, a door-to-door evangelist, and a sports fan on his way home from Hooters all engaged in friendly, respectful, and agenda-less interaction, and you shall witness not only the elusive answer to humankind's desperate search for peace but also a retirement of those evolutionary forces, an encroachment upon the integrity of those disparate groups which will meet vehement resistance from the groups themselves. For me to admit that I am no different from you is to alienate myself from all groups to which I already belong, and to be different from them.

-In 1668 Thomas Hobbes undertook the impossible task of rendering a century-long war between two Christian empires compatible with the obvious pacifism of the Gospel by declaring that all men are naturally at war and that it is only by submitting to a social contract, an explicit agreement, that men may be at peace. This social contract he equated with Jesus' Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Whether or not Hobbes was correct is not nearly so pertinent a question as these: Why did the whole of Europe, even and especially those who never read this philosophy, take Hobbes' conclusion as fact and proceed to wage war against the whole of the unprepared world in the interest of forcing it to sign the contract? And why have the aggressors refused to sign the damn thing in the wake of their victory?

-Philosophy is at best an interesting way of reiterating that we don't know anything. Since most people find this unpalatable, philosophy becomes a sophisticated way of talking in circles to produce the illusion that we know everything.

-Any attempt to save face in an embarrassing situation is a proclamation of your acceptance of the ignominy. To rage against it is to flail your arms in feeble resistance to your consumption by a malevolent beast.

-To expect a social movement of any sort to stand up to the trial of logic is to demand that a non-entity exist as an entity. Social movements never exist as unified ideas; they are bundles of various and sometimes disparate passions. To agree with the movement is to identify with one or more of these strains of passion, possibly because your mind, which you might think of as logical, can grasp it and tell you a story about it. Or your agreement might simply mean your failure to stand defiant in this passion's path.

-Nothing that is written on this page is truth. Everything is an approximation of subjective observations. Truth really is a chimera, no matter what these sophists try to tell you. A very unfunny kind of irony lies in the impossibility of relating the verity of such an idea from one party to another, from me to you.

There you have it: a shining monument to a college education. I'll see you in the unemployment office; or perhaps you'll run across me near your horoscope.

Bryan Roberts, a senior majoring in English, is a featured columnist for the Oregon Commentator