​I’ve been trying to get my head around some of the foundational structures of thinking that motivate our political thought and put together this chart.
I'm open to this being a straw man of the right.
However, I'm convinced moderate conservatives are only so to the degree they've accepted tenets of liberalism. The degree to which they identify as conservative is their rejection of core liberal values. "Smaller government and deregulation" they would argue are about freedom - ostensibly a liberal value.
However, in practice it is anything but, as it is an oligarchic freedom, as historical and sociological evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that while something like "free market entrepreneurship" has focused investment in growth areas of the economy and contributed to human flourishing in health and comfort, this has also come at a terrible cost in terms of generational poverty which by definition is the opposite of freedom.
If, in aggregate, even more have been brought out of poverty by this "rising tide", this is a moral proposition in which millions are essentially being sacrificed to live in chains for the benefit of some future wealth created elsewhere - hardly a burden any individual ought to be asked to bear.
Furthermore, the bargain rests upon the premise that this "law of the jungle" type scenario is the only choice. It is one in which, let's face it, an upper class will continue to ride out comfortably (born out rather garishly in the proponents of this philosophy having always been the owners of capital who themselves bear the fruit in their lifetimes while the poor suffer for some future generation. "Yes, I know you live stressed out in a dangerous neighborhood next to the toxic plant we just deregulated but we really can't raise your wages because that would impede the growth that will lift your great grand-daughter out of poverty.").
They enjoy reminding us that the only alternative is totalitarian communism and look how that turned out, ignoring of course the entire concept of a mixed economy and the myriad ways in which economies might be designed in which everything is on the table from socialized healthcare to daycare, to groceries to sectoral bargaining, to free college education to extremely high marginal taxes on wealth, etc., etc.
So what then is this position if not a fig leaf over the deeper motivation which is basically self-interested comfort with the status quo, invariably involving personal privilege and acceptance of all manner of bigotries that serve to lubricate the gears of oppression and order amongst the hierarchies propping up the powerful. Of course, the dismal science of economics allows all sorts of bunk to creep in, padding the walls of the tunnels through which the charlatans bore, coming in not with liberal intent but with greedy, unwittingly motivated self-interest.
 
 

​Something interesting about hate is how much it relies on dishonesty, both internally and externally.  I think we naturally recoil at it – we have to learn to overcome our revulsion to its wrongness, to its irrationality and illogic, to the obvious pain it causes.  We face a choice and must either fight or embrace it, or ignore it (which is maybe another way of embracing it).

Today we see so clearly the many paths it travels, the murky ways it winds around the minds of our fellows and warps their thinking.  We see the phantasms is creates for them and which they try – often seemingly earnestly – to pass off upon others.  When I was young, I remember hearing a conservative critique about Black Entertainment Television (BET).  Why is it OK for there to be a BET but not a WET, a White Entertainment Television channel? 

Now, this was 30 years ago, and even then, as a teenager I knew enough of black history and the civil rights movement to know the obvious answer (which I won’t bother with here because it’s not even worth it).  This was not coming from an explicit white nationalist.  This was standard, basically mainstream – if a tad provocative – conservative thought.  You can still find this critique, and many worse examples on the mainstream right today.   The theme is always the same: to diminish, to deny, to denigrate the black experience of racism in America. 

The corkscrew turns of excuse-making and misdirection, of blame-shifting and all manner of fallacy spill out in a toxic mess of something called conservative ideology.  But it’s really just hate at its core.  Economics, psychology, criminal justice, genetics, evolution, education, religion and any other popular political subject gets bent into service.   

There is no science or research to back up any of it.  No lived experience.  No data.  Nothing expressed in art or poetry.  It is hate that is too ugly to be named outright.  And so it must be dressed up.  It must be hidden behind euphemism and implication, pseudoscientific hand-waving and misapplied academic imprimatur.   Over the years many tactics have been tried, and many have succeeded in subtly shifting the discourse. 

Something obvious to black Americans and minorities who experienced racism first hand didn’t need to learn to see it.  Those on the radical left who studied racism and bigotries could learn to see the connections.  But the assault was so broad and cacophonous, so subtle and hard to pin down.  Did they really mean that?  How could you know what is in a man’s heart?  It was hard to prove. 
 
Liberal tradition encourages pluralism and open-minded thought.  Bad ideas ought to be discussed.  Hold them in the light of truth so as to expose their flaws!  But there is a weakness to this tolerance.  Once an idea is shown to be clearly wrong, it is time to move on.  What hate is, what causes it and what perpetuates it has been clear enough for quite some time.  It is a hierarchy in which an arbitrary marker of some group is determined to be superior to another and thus deserving of more rights.  This has been, and remains one of humanity’s great evils.  We have codified it in law with the concept of Protected Classes: groups historical discriminated against on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, or other characteristics. 

And although, sadly, too many of us are denying even this truth, most still agree that this is wrong, that this is hate.  But hate isn’t honest.  Hate wears masks.  Hate deceives the wearer into believing the unthinkable: that they don’t hate.  “I am not a racist”, are words not uncommonly found coming from people who are indeed quite comfortable with racism.

So, as we see the modern conservative movement awash in open displays of brutal hatreds towards all manner of protected classes – President Trump seems to have a go at each one on an almost daily basis.  (As he has himself stated “I am the least racist person in the world”.)

It is my contention that the right wing has always given safe harbor to hate.  Even in its most charitable description, an ideology of free markets and limited government, it is essentially an ideology of protecting a system in which property owners can consolidate their wealth free from government interference.  History is clear that this leads directly to more and more accumulation of capital in the hands of fewer and fewer hands.  Capital, no more so than in the absence of government regulation, equates to power.  And given our country’s peculiar history of slavery and settler colonialism, Christianity and Jim Crow, we are literally talking about the consolidation of White Christian Power. 

There are stories you can tell about competition and free will and trickle-down theory and any number of other fantasies about “opportunity” and the “land of dreams”, and I’ll grant you that while some of it is debatable, much of it is complete bunk from a scientific perspective.  Conservatism has always been about telling a story to justify why those on top should feel OK being on top because those on the bottom deserve being there.
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But we’re all seeing more clearly than ever how much this was just a part of the lie.  The only difference now is that the movement felt the need to come out and say it out loud.  They want their White Entertainment Television and they don’t want to be ashamed about it.
Oh, and don’t complain.  They might just send you away.

​I just emailed this to The Free Press:
 
Dear The Free Press,
I am writing to you because of your reputation as champions of bold, heterodox thinking.  You are known to take brave stances that the stodgy, mainstream press has long been afraid to publish.  While universities across the countries bow their heads to communist and antifa-sympathizing student radicals, you firmly plant your flag in the firmament and say, “No, more.  This ends here.”

So, I would like to propose that you allow me to - free of charge – provide a one hour lecture to your staff at a day and time of your choosing.  My topic will be as follows: your absolute ass-pilfered, morally constipated garbage-brained gum-fuckery.  The contents of your intestines have somehow replaced your brains.  Where your bunghole once was, your eyeballs must now be, because you couldn’t see your way out of a shit-filled diaper.  Your cultural references lack the sophistication of a greasy little cockroach condom.  Your pedantry is barely risible due to the simple fact that its inarticulate blather is hardly more coherent than the pus exploding from a dead skunk’s rotting corpse.  The most horrific farts I have ever smelled have had more jeua de vivre than your nihilistic grifting confidences.    The way your pseudo-intellectual fumblings scour the American neo-fascist underbelly, searching tentacle-like for erogenous positions has no doubt earned you legitimate financial and institutional scalps.  And I imagine they will fit well onto your scabrous pate, soiled as it is after being plucked not only of every moral fiber but so too of anything resembling human skin.  And in the end maybe this is what your ultimate form will reveal: a cacophonous simulacrum of the angry man, a blistered plastique in the form of human hate, nothing but inorganic, toxic oozes, more manure than man.

Please Be In Touch,
 
If anyone there reads it, no doubt they will miss the point.  Which is that their shrill outrage over college students shouting down or refusing to platform speakers and calling it illiberal is hypocritical when I propose they invite me to give them a lecture in which I spew vile hate at them.

To put a finer point on it, to have a CK or any of countless other RW ghouls speak at your college means having them say either explicitly or imply the racial or cultural inferiority of minorities, of women, of other religions, of sexual identities being psychologically damaged, or dangerous.
Nothing I wrote in that letter touched on anyone's identity at The Free Press.  There was no broad claim that transcended and trapped the individual into membership of a broader, delegitimized class based on some arbitrary feature.

Every insult I lobbed essentially came down to personal failure.  There is at least in insults of this nature an acknowledgement of the person - that they may have failed, but they themselves *could have done better*.

​Bigotries on the other hand (which the FP loves to rescue) make no such allowance.  There is simply no escape.  This is why their logic is ultimately at best caste-based and at worst genocidal.
So any umbrage one might take at the absurdity of sitting through a lecture such as I proposed, imagine how much darker and infuriating one must be in which the words are not mere insults but directed at one's entire social class.
 
And then, adding to this insult, we have civic institutions asking everyone to politely go along for the ride.  Sit down, shut up and be good boys and girls.

Of the many indignities faced by being a 21st century human, having to place one's faith in expert consensus ranks pretty high.  The cold logic says that modern distributions of complex knowledge require a shared burden across society as no one can know all things.

Thus, the best laypeople have access to is a consensus formed within systems of knowledge, paying particular attention to the quality and accuracy of the consensus calculation.

In practical terms, this means outside our individual areas of expertise (which is 99.9% of things) we are forced to say "I don't know" and to rely on X or Y reference to established consensus view.
To argue against this logic is difficult.  Sure, many issues do not enjoy consensus.  In these cases, the best one could do is to be familiar with the strongest positions.
 
But putting that aside, it is too often the case that consensus views are challenged by non-experts.
This is modeling in popular discourse, and non-consensus views are routinely promoted, often for "clicks", as there is something titillating about presenting a narrative between two opponents, a David vs. Goliath, even. 

And when the two sides represent values laded with cultural significance, the event becomes a passion play.
 
I don't think it's new to say we've been witnessing an erosion in trust in expertise.  And maybe we can add mythmaking -  and identity reifying and taking up space within the void.

It's not hard to see how illiberalism thrives in this environment.  I've elaborated before on my understanding of the RW twin pillars of epistemic authority being traditional religious and secular cultural dogma, and the LW pillars being the diffuse tools of liberal enlightenment, such as reason, humanism, pluralism, empiricism, skepticism, etc. 
 
Maybe RW thought is basically ideations of a basic human inclination to caution & pragmatism at its best, and to domination and retribution at its worst.

If you are experiencing these impulses, what better narrative for them than a fundamentalist narrative about a harsh God that you must obey a strict interpretation of, or strict social traditions you must follow?

The problem is these narratives are incompatible with modern society.  Sure, if you want to carve out your sect, they can be tolerated within a larger pluralistic framework, but they cannot *be* the framework.
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As humans develop and technology advances, as we learn more and more about ourselves, the more and more obvious this becomes. 
 
I think the RW realized this at some point and had a decision to make.  What was that famous "split" a few years back - between the Catholic guy who wanted to retreat to a sect, and the guy who wanted to start a war to dominate the world?
 
The truth in these two paths is this: they cannot play the game.  They either destroy the game, or play by themselves alone. 

In practical terms, the religious among them don't want to work next to a lesbian and not be able to tell her she's going to hell.  The secular among them want to - I guess - be able to say retard and not pay so much in taxes.

And I get it.  They are constantly angry.  The cognitive dissonance of modern life drives them crazy.  Everything reminds them of how wrong everyone else is.  They are always scared, confused, angry, and sad about "the way things used to be".

So, if we get through this, we don't include them in the constitution.  It's better this way.  Better for them because they don't have to worry any longer. 

​They can maybe find a state somewhere.  Call it Gulchnesia or something.  They can't do a colonialism thought - even though, man would that be up their alley!
 
What about Antarctica.  It would be perfect.  They could be tough and rough.  Survive off fish and seaweed. Build houses out of stone.
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Meanwhile out constitution would have a global wealth cap.  Guaranteed equality for protected classes.  Guaranteed education, healthcare, daycare.  I don't know what else.  Some kind of socialist shit. I'm no expert.  

​One of the almost defining features of conservatism is a personality trait of toughness or indifference to the suffering of others.  We all fall somewhere on this spectrum of concern.  I might show my daughter “tough love” by not giving in when she cries for a cookie.  I might support giving the government money to provide aid to a foreign country.  There are complex reasons for any given attitude in a specific situation.  But overall, conservatives have a more callous sensibility about what is necessary to do for others. There are many caveats, one being how close they feel towards the person.  If they are kin, or of an affiliate class (culture, religion, etc.), they are more willing to extend grace. But in general, much in what they do and say (or do not say), and especially in contrast with more liberal responses.
There are many cliches, nicknames and stereotypes about this.  Conservatives literally made a push to brand something called “compassionate conservatism” in the early oughts.  When they sometimes refer to liberals as “bleeding hearts”, “pinkos”, or supporters of a “nanny state”, they are speaking to a general tendency on the left to want to do things for other people, and a tendency of those on the right to leave people to fend for themselves.  Of course, there could be very thoughtful arguments given the context.  There is a vague sense of behavioral conditioning often underlying attitudes about action in which a theory of learning is being applied.  If I give my daughter a cookie when she cries, it will reward her crying behavior.  If we give people food stamps, it will reward their behavior.  However, it is often used imprecisely (certainly from a behaviorist point of view, which I won’t go into here), showing a lack of understanding about how operant conditioning actually works.
It's difficult to tease out whether these attitudes are based on assumptions and ideas, or from some deeper, genetically programmed disposition.  Researchers have studied this and found general tendencies that appear detached from political leaning.  The classic example is the finding that conservatives seem to generally register disgust with more speed and intensity, while liberals tend to be more open minded and tolerant, when provided a variety of stimuli.  However, other research argues that while true for certain elicitors, political orientation is not biased toward elicitors in general.

​
But regardless of where it is coming from, it’s pretty clear that merely from what they say and do, conservatism is not known for its empathy and kindness towards others, and liberalism is not known for its hard-nosed emotional toughness. 
 
We might note here that gendering seems to be going on.  The traditional view of gender norms is of women, especially as mothers, being extra sensitive, empathetic, and nurturing, while men, especially as fathers, being less sensitive, empathetic and nurturing.  Mom holds you and kisses you while you cry.  Dad tells you to get up and try again.  Conservatives – obviously long supporting more patriarchal social systems – will explicitly argue for limited participation by woman in consequential roles because of assuming in them a femininity that is not “tough enough” to take charge of important matters.  Liberals do not argue for discrimination against men based on inherent characteristics. However, they will argue that specific traits of traditional masculinity are “toxic”, in the sense that they are ineffective and harmful for pro-social outcomes.  Conservatives may indeed see this as discrimination to the extent that they not only view these supposedly toxic traits as pro-social, but also as inherent traits.  For example, if speaking over others in a conversation, or otherwise engaging in behaviors that establish or seek to establish dominance, a liberal might argue this is learned behavior that reifies a patriarchy based not on inherent merit, but on arbitrary social control, and that it stifles productive participation from other members who would otherwise add to the conversation.  A conservative, on the other hand, might argue that men are inherently stronger, or more intelligent or wise, and that to ask a man to not talk over others is discriminating against him based on his sex.  They might also argue that talking over and dominating others is good because it benefits his group more, as well as a sort of sense that the behavior is justified because might makes right.
Now, zooming out a bit from the example of a conversation, you see how the basic shapes of conservatism and liberalism are coming into view.  On most issues, the conservative/right side is ultimately arguing in some way for traditional cultural hierarchies, while the liberal/left side is arguing against them.  This is a fundamental element of cultural propagation; as people interact, we develop behaviors and traditions that at any time are becoming more or less salient.  The right and left can in some sense be defined by nothing more than how much they want things to change and how much they want things to remain the same.
 
This can be difficult though, because depending on where cultural and social power lies at any given moment in history, current norms and traditions will be valued differently according to the right and left.  For instance, in 2025, the current mainstream tradition is that women and men, and people of any skin color, ought to be allowed to participate fully in society.  But some on the right explicitly want to take away the vote from women and limit minority immigration to the US, which would mark an extreme social change.  One could argue then that they are opposed to cultural tradition.  However, when you examine their own stated rationale, it is deeply rooted in a concept of a culture that is hyper-traditional, that of decades or centuries in the past.  Studies of fascism will point out that a “longing for ancient traditions” is one of its hallmarks.
It may be interesting here to examine the competing epistemologies of conservatism and liberalism.  When one seeks to make a case for their ideas, they must show that they are true, or real.  There is an evidentiary standard that must be met in order to convince others.  When a fact is not self-evident, it needs to be supported by some authority.  This could be the lived experience of a relevant subject, or trust in an expert opinion based in research or study, or the truth of a religious dogma taken on faith.  Or, it could simply be a sort of dogmatic righteousness based on an appeal to tradition.
 
The right, invested in “traditional” (I’m adding quotes now per our note about the contextual nature of tradition) culture, tends to rely on either the argument from religious text or from tradition.  One should do X “because the bible says so” or “ because we have always done it that way”.  Neither of these arguments are logical because they are not based in any truth deeper than what one might feel in their gut, and cannot be proved or disproved.  The authority provides no evidence or reasoning, and cannot change by new information.  It is tautologically in that the premise is proved by acceptance of the premise.  If the bible says homosexuality is wrong, than it is true because the bible is true, and the bible is true because it says it is true.  If tradition holds heliocentrism, then it is true because tradition is true, and tradition is true because it says it is true.  And so on.
 
Liberalism, invested in reforming or changing culture, uses neither religious dogma or tradition to make its arguments.  Instead, it relies on what came to be known centuries ago as enlightenment ideals: reason, logic, empiricism and above all else inquiry.  Religion and tradition are not sufficient authorities, and must be at least tempered, if not subsumed by deeper critical analysis. 
 
The right will of course often engage in critical analysis, but it is weak and underdeveloped.  It may use evidence, but be cherry-picked.  It may use expert authority, but only that of those who are not representative of the consensus in their field.  It may engage in rhetorical techniques designed not to edify but to obfuscate or distract.  It is no wonder that the great institutions of fact finding – academia and journalism – have always tilted left.  This is because a competitive rigor exists in which arguments and evidence are currency.  One cannot do research, write a theoretical paper or journalism that is serious and truthful by quoting scripture or producing pictures and quotes only from proponents of traditional culture.  This explains why right wing universities or news outlets tend to be unserious and lack sophistication, lacking any real purpose other than to reify what its students and consumers already believe.
 
This epistemological schism can be tied directly to the gendered nature of the right and left paradigm.  For one to show the “feminine” trait of empathy, reflection, listening, etc., they must rely on a “slow” developing epistemology that embraces some degree of authority beyond religion or tradition.  It is an epistemology of practical objectivity that allows for an openness and trust that one does not have all the answers, that the answers aren’t always easy, and that perspective is always subjective.  This is a picture in which the ego is subservient to the environment, where new information is welcomed, and an egalitarian trust exists in which one must rely on and support others, even if the immediate benefit to the self is unclear and there are shades of gray.  It is about solidarity, community, and fellow man.
 
Alternatively, for one to show the “masculine” trait of stoicism, strength, individualism, toughness, etc., they must rely on a “fast” epistemology in which authority is immediately designated by religion or tradition.  It is an epistemology of hyper-subjectivity that is closed and distrusting in the answers of others that may conflict with one’s own understanding, that understanding is simple, and that subjectivity is irrelevant because one is already correct.  In contrast to the left/”feminine” epistemology, the environment is subservient to one’s ego, where new information is unnecessary, where one should not need to rely on others, especially when there is no benefit to the self and the truth is usually black and white.  It is about rugged individualism, establishing dominance, holding the line, defending the ego’s honor.
 
In a folding back on itself, our assumptions about gender and what associated traits we value in it can reinforce the very epistemological process by which we attempt to access truth. If we value traditional masculine traits as superior to feminine traits, we end up valuing a process that leads to a specific way of learning about truth in the world that reifies the very act of valuing those traits. Likewise, if we value a sort of gender-egalitarianism, we end up reifying those preferences.
 
There are many institutions and ideologies devoted to shoring up the ideologies of the right and left.  There may be some kernel of innate disposition to being on the right or left, however this is clearly overpowered by environmental learning, as demographic patterns of political belief show that one’s environment is far more determinative.  But it is important to understand how and why we come to the assumptions we do, and that move us either left or right politically.  

​To what degree is time actually consciousness?  The experience of the “passage of time”, that is.  I was watching my cat eyeballing a ledge and then launching himself there with precision.
He used his brain to process various visual the stimuli from the world and predict where he would be in the future with the coordinated exertion of specific muscles.
 
This is how all behaviors work, whether we are conscious of them or not.  My cat likely didn’t think about the jump at all – maybe the advantages of the new spot, maybe auditory stimuli of possible threats in the distance, etc.  But he had a learning history, both since birth and in conjunction with his feline DNA.
 
In fact, we are conscious of only a tiny portion of our behaviors, from breathing, to balance, to absent-mindedly tapping our toes.  What is the difference between consciousness and sentience?  The latter means to feel and experience.  All animals do this, to a degree.
 
We usually refer to consciousness as “awareness”.  That is, “I am doing this”, “I did that”, “I could do that”, etc.  It’s impossible to know whether my cat is experiencing these thoughts, as he has no verbal behavior to communicate them to me or anyone else.  But he is obviously experiencing the world, and communicates in many other ways his emotions and even wishes.  When his eye and paws twitch when he sleeps, I know he is dreaming.  
 
But humans can describe ways in which we are thinking. Part of it is verbal, that is, specific stimuli arranged in a grammar that contains information about relationships in the world that takes place in a shared verbal community.  It’s really hard to self-analyze, but I’d venture a guess that most of our thinking is sort of sub-verbal, that is influenced by verbal behavior but takes place without much if any verbal stimuli.
 
When I suddenly remember to take the cookies out of the oven, I likely think, “Oh, shit, the cookies!”, but most of the information suddenly flooding into my awareness, the stimuli coming into my attention - the kitchen, the oven, the rack, maybe the smell of smoke, etc.  – I just experience without any language.
 
In behaviorism we call this a Tact, or labeling stimuli.  The stimuli evokes labeling behavior.  “Look at that”. “There it is. I’m thirsty. The cookies have been in the oven for too long.”  This allows us to chain complex logics together to create “worldviews” which link to abstract stimuli in the past and future and allow us to analyze and make plans.
 
In this complexity, we see time emerge.  My cat experiences it, through memories and stimuli relations (e.g. feeling anticipation before the bowl of food is provided). He has no verbal behavior from which to create advanced and abstract logic systems.  But he does experience relationships.  If the can is different than usual, he may become skeptical and adjust his expectations.
 
 If the can isn’t a can but say, a banana, his behavior of swishing his tail and meowing, glancing at his bowl, won’t be evoked.  There was no history of reinforcement with bananas, so no “association” between it and food.  I could hold a banana every time I feed him,  so it will soon become a “discriminative stimuli” for reinforcement (cat food).  Taking out a banana will signal the impending presence of cat food.
 
To what extent then does consciousness exist without verbal behavior?  For my cat and I, most of our experiences are not noticed by us at any given moment.  Stimuli in our bodies and in our environments around us are evoking behaviors in us but often “our mind is elsewhere”.    Maybe daydreaming.
 
To the extent that we are experiencing stimuli, attending to it, and are placing it in a context of past and present, are we creating time?  Are we merely predicting past and future events, based on logical relationships were have developed in our learning history?
 
Of course, we only have access to the past.  Or rather, stimuli in the present a relationship to which past stimuli has been reinforced.  The experience of “This is can is cat food” is related to “last time this can was cat food”, referencing a memory of the can stimuli we experienced previously.
 
Before my cat jumped on the table, I don’t know what stimuli he was attending to; it could have been a very rote, absent-minded behavior.  Yet it required both a learning history of past stimuli (similar tables, counters, ledges, etc.) and his body’s ability to jump, as well as a projection of the geometry involved that would require specific muscle movements.  He essentially planned a future scenario based on past experiences. 
 
Yet time – the passage of time – requires attention.  The phrase “time flies” appeals to subjective experience of a passage of time which one has not been attending to.  The fact that this happens when one’s attention is occupied elsewhere makes sense; you literally have not been attending to a changing series of stimuli.
I suppose one could define time as just that – a series of changing stimuli.  But the *passage of time* requires noticing these changes.  “Passage” denotes an experiential process whereby changes in stimuli are noticed and tracked.  So, you could say experiencing the passage of time requires consciousness.
 
Without consciousness, there would be no experience of a passage of time.  Changes in stimuli would occur, and they would evoke responses in an organism. But without attending to these changes, no “passage” would be recorded or responded to.  Just the moment, one to the next, in a constant state of reaction to the extent the organism is capable of response, learned or otherwise.
 
Time, unlike any other stimuli, is a dimension that requires a change to have occurred.  Up, down, left and right can exist despite change.  A location can just be.  However, time cannot just be – it *requires* two or more other dimensions to transition.
 
Consciousness likewise requires time, as it is the process of attending to changing stimuli.  But it also requires a sort of geometry in which the relationships between stimuli are analyzed and predicted, not just experienced.  An organism experiences time as stimuli change and it responds according to it learning history.  But to experience that passage of time, it must make relationships – up down, forwards, backwards, warmer, colder, more colorful, wetter, stinkier, closer, farther, etc.
 
 
What we call “attending” is responding to specific stimuli, which can be in the external environment or internal to our body (our thoughts).  We can “notice” things outside like cars or tress, as well as inside like feelings or memories.  When we are attending to time, we are attending to changes in stimuli.
 
But we can only ever attend to a glimpse of this passage, owing to our limited cognitive faculties.  Some people have been found to have the ability to recall stimuli relations far greater than average.  They can recall stimuli changes that occurred far into the past.  What they wore or ate in certain locations years ago.  I’m afraid these days I’ve become more and more goldfish-like, unable to recall relationships even hours ago!
But for the most part, the experiential passage of time is similarly limited to a sort of hour by hour, maybe day by day window in which our ability to recall changes in stimuli is acute.  This is what we call “passage” – not so much the thing itself but the intensity with which we are responding to it.  Things happening to us right now are always a “big deal”, but which fade over time.  “Time heals all wounds”, etc.
 
Our cognitive limitations require us to budget our attention.  We learn to “focus” on what is important, that is, what stimuli provides the most reinforcement at any given moment.  The passage of time, as a period of acute responding to changes in stimuli, can be considered a “behavioral repertoire”; it requires the evocation of a series of learned behaviors that create connections between past changes in stimuli.  The food was there.  Now it is gone.  I was on the floor.  Now I am on the table.  Noticing this requires attending to numerous stimuli both in the environment and in our bodies.
 
But (often mercifully), we forget and move on to allow space for processing new stimuli and relationships.  The more powerful stimuli, however, remain to varying degrees as memory. This ability to capture time – to attend to it and then remember it – seems fundamental to consciousness.  I worked with people with brain injuries once and individuals with short-term memory loss were perfectly conscious for a given period of time, but would then lose it hours or days later.
 For them, the passage of time must have felt quite different.  Only limited changes in time could be attended to.  I once sat at a table drinking coffee with a man who had no idea how long we had been sitting there.  When the waitress began to refill our coffees less frequently, he complained about the service, not realizing that a $2 unlimited refill would only last so long.   He did not realize the length of time because the memories of changes in stimuli were not being created.  Or at least, were fading too fast to be of use.

Any day when I can avoid scurrilous nonsense about ABA is a good day. But I am motivated to write in the context of the general social view of behaviorism essentially having been reluctant at best, and hostile at worst basically from its post S-R developments, which went much further
taking operant conditioning into verbal behavior, emotions and thought, and essentially putting a nail in any cartesian myths left standing.
But as a hard science, relying heavily on the scientific method, empiricism, determinism, parsimony, philosophic doubt, etc., it required measuring & manipulating dependent and independent variables. These contingencies are hard to arrange due to the complexity of an adult human life.
Generally coming out of the field of psychology, it was at a disadvantage toward other approaches - we would say "mentalistic", which rely on theoretical models of psychological functioning that are difficult to analyze experimentally, but broadly descriptive and general enough to be of use.
Behaviorists had limited access to the vast data in one's learning history that would be required to identify relevant variables. And as a relatively young field, had not yet built up larger tested theories to allow for explanations of complex events such as language, thought and emotion.
But within decades, the data was pointing towards a startlingly powerful insight into human behavior - everything we do or think - is ruled by the interaction between our phylogeny and our ontogeny, our genetics and learning history.
All of our thoughts and actions that could be measured were found to be under the control of environmental contingencies. A strict relationship was found between environmental stimuli, the organism's previous interactions with it, and future stimuli.
The frequency, intensity, and duration of a behavior (bx) is under the control of these elements.
Let me give an example:
If John has engaged in eating an apple in the past, we know his body "enjoys" apples (the presence of apples has produced eating, we call this "reinforcement").
If he sees an apple (stimuli), he will be likely to eat one if he has not had one in a while (we call this the "establishing operation", the condition in which one is either deprived or satiated on a stimulus).
Here's the mind-blowing part: any bx John engages in just before receiving the apple with be strengthened (more likely to occur in the future). This could be walking, talking or thinking.
It could be morally good or bad bx, but it will be strengthened. Washes the dishes + apple = strengthened. Plays on his phone instead + apple = strengthened.
But the opposite is true. Dishes + no apple = weakened. Dishes plus no phone = weakened.
And further, if John doesn't "enjoy" something after the bx (we call this "punishment", it will also weaken. Dishes + grating music = weakened.
This is much more advanced than the classical conditioning in which only the stimuli *before the bx* is analyzed.
e.g. Pavlov's bell rang before he got the meat powder (which always induced salivation), so the bell came to produce salivation. In operant conditioning, we look at the stimuli provided both before (the antecedent) and after (the consequence) the bx.
But it goes further and looks at behaviors that need to be learned. Unlike automatic bx such as salivation, sneeze, etc. , the bx of talking, riding a bike, waiting, etc. need to be learned. From here we get to the relations of verbal operants which identifies how different types of language get reinforced.
Skinner broke them down into categories, each consisting of a verbal stimulus (a bird), the verbal bx (saying bird) and consequent stimuli (reinforcers or punishers). The mand is requesting: verbal bx reinforced by receiving reinforcement from the thing requested, or removal of an aversive.
The tact is labeling: verbal bx reinforced by occurring in the presence of something. (look at the bird!)
The intraverbal is abstract thought: verbal bx reinforced in the absence of a thing. (birds come from eggs)
There are more, but you get the idea. The nice thing about seeing these relationships is they provide a window into how, why and when we say different things. They identify a learning history between stimuli and bx.
It turns out that any bx you can measure will be constrained by what we call the 4-term contingency: the establishing operation (EO), the stimuli, the bx, and the consequence (R or P). Bx more difficult to measure (Skinner calls them "within the skin", which I always found macabrely funny).
I forgot to mention stimulus and response generalization. These are key to how our bx repertoire grows. A learning history with stimuli x will generalize to stimuli Y according to its degree of feature similarity: color, shape, texture, etc.
Response generalization is a variation in response that produces the same effect: response X and Y both produce effect Z.
Stimulus equivalence is a crucial to understand more complex and abstract behavior, as it provides a framework to analyze environmental contingencies of the organism*.
* btw, behaviorism appears to be at work in any animal that behaves. Early models used rats and pigeons as their environmental variables were most easy to control.
A more recent branch of behaviorism has been relational frame theory (RFT), which may be most popularly known clinically as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and developed in large part by the work of Stephen Hayes.
It takes the notion of stimulus equivalence and expands verbal operants into much more complex relational areas (frames), such as size, value, categorization, etc. Each of these operants identifies additional relationships between stimuli and bx that can be measured and manipulated.
All of this within the hard science philosophy of empiricism, determinism, parsimony, etc.
Due to the complexity of relations in our learning history between the stimuli in our environment and our responses, a predictive analysis of human behavior will always be incredibly difficult.
A phrase I've liked is "we are swimming in a sea of reinforcement", referring to the overwhelming number of relations going on in our lives, each involving all of our senses: the temperature of the air, the feel of our clothes, our interactions with others, etc.
How both the preferences our DNA builds for us, as well as how environmental stimuli has interacted previously and is currently, with those preferences to shape our future bx, is crucial to understanding about why we all do what we do.

​A 2018 Pew research poll showed 73% of Republicans feel colleges are moving in the wrong direction, and 79% say professors bringing their political views into the classroom are a major reason for this[1].   This is nothing new; the political right has long disdained college education as being too liberal.  In the 1950’s Joseph McCarthy targeted liberal faculty members for supposed ties to communism[2], and The California Board of Regents began threatening to fire professors who didn’t sign loyalty oaths.[3]
 
It is true that today colleges are overwhelmingly liberal.  A 2016 study showed Democrats were represented in college faculty 11:1 over Republicans.[4]  A study in 2010 concluded that greater numbers of liberal than conservative professors was accounted for by career-path selection.[5]  However, while the right believes universities are indoctrinating students, a 2008 study, showed there was no evidence faculty ideology was associated with changed is student ideological orientation.[6]
 
But do conservatives value university education at all?  As long as it aligns with their worldview, yes.  Literature and the arts are acceptable as long as they privilege the Western Canon.  “Multiculturalism” – perspectives from non-European or non-white sources – has been derided for decades.  Art movements that do not express traditional realism are discounted.  History that strays into questioning narratives of western and US exceptionalism is deemed subversive.  The notion that traditionally dominant and powerful groups or ideas ought to be critically examined and not assumed as correct are to be avoided.  Sociology must not examine social hierarchies and systems that perpetuate inequality.  Entire fields of study such as ethnic or gender studies are dismissed as “activist” and illegitimate.  Economics, long a bastion of conservative thought, must assume that capitalism is the superior model and inquiries into its flaws or the exploration of alternative systems are inappropriate. 
 
Since its inception in the second half of the 20th century, one of the conservative movement’s founding causes has been to critique the leftward slant of the university.  Books like Buckley’s God and Man at Yale and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind have been popularizing, catalyzing forces in this line of thought.  Leo Strauss, a far right “founding father” of American conservatism, in his 1941 lecture on German Nihilism, argued that the rise of Nazism was due in no large part to the failures of a professoriate, caught up in liberal thought and attitudes, to teach the classics and thus provide disillusioned young German men a social vision that would inspire faith in social institutions so that they might have avoided the nihilism of Nazi rhetoric.
 
However, while Strauss explicitly rejected much of Nazi ideology, he was obviously sympathetic to many of its grievances about modern, progressive Germany.  He too, wanted to Make Germany Great Again, just not through war and racial cleansing so much as the privileging of traditional social hierarchies.
 
It is in conservative DNA to oppose what it views as the excesses of progress.  In its own telling, this doesn’t mean inquiry and reason per say, but rather the “right kind of” inquiry and reason.  As Buckley famously spoke of standing before history and yelling stop, shades of conservative thought range from complete rejection of modernity (a populist Retvrn to blood and soil, homogenous nationalism, with the salt-of-the earth farmer making everything by hand), to selective rejection of modernity with its “big government” social engineering programs and emphasis on the marginalized and oppressed.  Echoes of this instinct take us back at least as far as the French Revolution and its violent and messy guillotining of the monarchy.  (Modern far right figures such as Curtis Yarvin explicitly call for a return to Monarchy, albeit in a modern form with corporate boards and CEOs overseeing society through technocratic investments instead of an actual king, queen and their lords).  The French went too far, and wrought the unintended consequences of progressivism – a dismantling of traditional hierarchies that were central to the proper functioning of society. 
 
Post WWII, with the rise of the Soviet Union and its communist satellites around the globe, conservatism had a large and obvious foe in totalitarianism.  But while gulags, secret police and central planning were ripe targets for opposition, the underlying premise of communism - a Marxist critique of capitalism’s exploitative and oppressive nature - was more complex and nuanced, and likely a more difficult case to argue against.  Yet while Marxist or not (more often not), what was going on in universities was a project of deconstructing the very systems of power that communism had originally been designed to address.  By lashing the obvious critiques of 20th century communist totalitarianism to the critical analysis of traditional hierarchies and social structures going on in universities, conservatives were able to build a popular case against progressivism in all its forms. 
 
In the 21st century, with the ascendance of the far right in the US, it is not uncommon to hear the terms progressivism and even liberalism used interchangeably with communist or Marxist, despite multiple decades having passed since the fall of the Soviet Union.  However, even as old references are made to the realities of any communist state, only a dwindling percentage of the population will have any clear association with, the modern far right has been able to whip up new and generally fanciful fears and anxieties in the public. Cosmopolitan crime, border invasions, gay menaces and dark Democratic plots to take away American guns have become fruitful substitutions.
 
Yet beneath each of these political and social phantasms lies the same core impulse, that of weakening traditional hegemony.  The supremacy of the patriarchal, Christian, heterosexual and white ethnicity is under threat.  In this, conservatism is correct.  For more than two centuries, since at least the enlightenment, a vision of human rights has generally been ascendant.  From the overthrow of monarchism, to the abolition of slavery, to female suffrage, up through the civil rights era and gay liberation, traditional hierarchies have been under assault, and in the popular imagination, with generally favorable results.  The idea that an individual should have the right to an equal footing not determined by birth or body makes moral sense in a way that is hard to argue against when presented clearly and free from distractions and mendacious associations.
 
While tireless organizing and individual and community action have been instrumental in the success of this progress, academia has played a crucial role not only in providing the research, data and theory giving empirical support to moral consideration.  However, in a more abstracted yet maybe just as important way, the notion of academic inquiry itself has given us a posture in which we are able to objectively understand and communicate what it is we value in society.  Through countless hours of painstaking observation and analysis, universities have been the place where hundreds of thousands of humans have performed the work of holding up a mirror to society, allowing us to see more clearly not only what we do, but why we do it.  By rigorous examination, our systems of social organization are deconstructed, reconstructed and deconstructed again and again. 
 
And yet this process is the antithesis of the central conservative impulse to maintain tradition because it elevates authority to that which can be proven, not merely that which has existed.  In other words, there is no idea that is beyond critique, nothing is sacred but knowledge and truth.  This process is not linear, clean or obvious.  It requires patient debate and humility.  It requires an openness to having old ideas overturned.  It requires the courage to face the possibility that the truths we uncover may be ugly or uncomfortable, or require new moral obligations.  It is nothing so simple as opening a book and having the answers laid out in black and white.  It is fundamentally liberal and progressive, and while often conservative in practice, it is its opposite in spirit.


[1] The Growing Partisan Divide in Views of Higher Education, Pew, 8/19/2019

[2] "Sarah Lawrence Under Fire: The Attacks on Academic Freedom During the McCarthy Era". Sarah Lawrence College Archives

[3] Radin, Max. (1950). Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors (1915–1955)

[4] Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology, 2019, Econ Journal Watch

[5] "Five myths about liberal academia", Matthew Woessner, April Kelly-Woessner and Stanley Rothman Friday, February 25, 2011 Washington Post

[6] Yancey, George. "Recalibrating Academic Bias." Academic Questions 25, no. 2 (2012): 267–78.

                                        
            I zipped up my backpack and slung it over the back of my chair.  On the desk in front of me was a manila folder with the words, "DO NOT OPEN" emblazoned on the front.  When the TAs finished passing them out, our professor stepped slowly to the podium.  He appeared to be at least eighty.
 
"Welcome, and congratulations.  Each of you has passed basic calculus.  Not an easy feat!  Basic Arithmetic, then Algebra and Geometry.  Finally, Trigonometry and Calculus.  From the Lebombo Bone to Peano's axioms.  From to Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi's Ilm al-jabr, to Fibonacci's cubes.  Plimpton 322 to Euclid's three dimensions.  Archimedes' parabolas and Newton's infinitesimals... you've learned it, you've used it, you've proved it.   And then we told you a little something about parabolic disorder.  Now, I know..."
 
A woman with dark hair and cat shaped backpack in the front row raised her hand, "Excuse me, sir?"  The professor cleared his throat.  I could not determine if this was due to nervousness or irritation.
 
"Uh, yes, young lady?"
 
"It's just that, uh, you said parabolic disorder.  I'm not sure what you mean."
 
"Oh, my apologies."  He looked over to a short, fat man with a thick head of hair sitting in the corner with a clipboard.
 
The man stood up and walked hurriedly to the front, hunched in deference to the professor.  "Yes, she is right," he intoned, " We didn't get into parabolic disorder.  I thought we were going to wait on that until the presentation."
 
Now I could tell the professor was clearly irritated.  He looked back at the half-full classroom, our eager eyes so full of anticipation.  He forced a smile.  "Right.  I'm used to getting groups who've already got a sense of where I'm about to go.  But OK."
 
He stepped back from the podium and began to pace.  "As I said, 40,000 years ago with Lebombo we have the first evidence that humans began to mark their counts.  Peano described the basic axioms for arithmetic, which billions of school children have been taught all over the world.  It's what most of us use at the grocery store or when baking cookies.  Some of us have need for more demanding calculations, and we have Ilm al-jabr to thank for that.  Building houses, planes and writing software code all relies on what it originally laid out.   When they first found Plimpton 322, they saw where Euclid was coming from and Newton knew where the apples fell.
 
He stopped pacing and looked out at us with intensity.  "But see, what was just mentioned here with regard to parabolics."  He pointed in the general direction of the woman in the front row.  "Well, that was it.  We had reached what appears to be the limits of mathematics."
 
"You might say we followed the fifth postulate as far as it would go."  The professor smiled and let out a small chuckle.  He adjusted his glasses, obviously proud of his little witticism.
 
The students rustled in their seats, uncomfortable as to where this was all heading.
 
"The best mathematicians pushed and pushed.  We lost many good men.  Gauss was the first to fall.  He famously went mad, and they found his body in the Oker.  Lobachevsky and Bolyai ended up in a duel and shot each other fatally.  Families were torn apart after seeing their young going to college and destroying their careers.  So, something had to be done.
 
"A group of mathematicians, calling themselves the International Convention of Concerned Mathematicians (ICCM), came together to address the problem.  They met in secret, in Geneva so as not to worry the public.
 
From somewhere behind me another student asked in confusion, "But why?"
 
"Right, well.  Sure, just let everyone know that that was it - the end of mathematical discovery forever.  Do you realize what that would have meant, how demoralizing it would have been for humanity?  All this war and famine and sickness and the constant, just awful dreariness of existence?  Math was something we could believe in.  Sure, there is God but who believes in him anymore?
 
A muscular young man in my row snorted.  I had been standing near Rick before class began and he was on his phone talking to someone about corn futures in Iowa.  "Whatcheer isn't more than a half an hour.  Tell him he could be in Oskaloosa before Chicago even opens.  Dad's position is good.  Tell them I'll be back in a few weeks but to not doing anything before I get there."
 
He raised his hand and responded, "Uh, I think I know quite a few people in Iowa who would fit the bill."  The class tittered.
 
"OK, sure," the professor continued.  "But Math is such a part of everything we do."  Most people don't do much more than simple addition and subtraction on the first of the month.  But they know we mathematicians have it all under control.  We make the things work that make their lives comfortable.  Their cars, their TVs, their internet, their satellites and airplane systems.  We make things WORK.
 
"Could you imagine humanity suddenly being faced with the reality that this is it, that we aren't going any further?  I don't know.  I just think it would be a shock we wouldn't recover from.
 
Well, at any rate that was the conclusion of the ICCM.  Each of you has a folder in front of you.  Go ahead and open it."
 
The room was silent for a moment as the class seemed to be calculating what was about to happen, processing the words of the professor.
 
I peeled back the adhesive, reached in and pulled out a small packet of legal paper.  On it, just as was written on the outside of the manila folder, were the words DO NOT OPEN.  One student protested that we should heed them.
 
"No, go on ahead.  That's just there as a reminder of how serious this information is."
 
Multiple gasps erupted in the room. 
 
I lifted the first page and read words I'll never forget:
 
The math is not real.
 
I looked around and the entire class was staring towards the old professor in disbelief, rows of brows furrowed.
 
"I know.  It's a lot to take in all at once.  This is why I always thought we should finish the final unit on parabolics with at least a preview of what would come next.  Might be a bit less shocking."
 
The lady with the cat backpack snorted and said exasperatedly, "You can't be serious with this?" She looked around at the rest of us with an awkward smile and asked the class, "This is a joke, right?  He's joking."
 
She was met with a prevaricating silence.  She turned back to the professor.  "Right?"
 
"I'm afraid not, miss.  The greatest minds tried and failed.  We have basic integers, coefficients, polynomials, graphs and such.  But that's I'm afraid all we're ever going to have."
 
The Iowan leaned back deeply, using his broad biceps to push the edge of his desk back with the heel of his palms.  "There's no way this is real.  I know mathematicians, they do all kinds of crazy stuff.  Our course catalogue is filled with higher math.  Calculus II and III, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations.  What are they all doing!!?"
 
The professor stood silently; lips pursed in a slightly wry smile.  He looked like a man for whom things were going exactly as he expected they would.
 
"Um, sir, what about the movies?"  I turned around and saw a middle-aged woman with a simple hair style that fell down over a faded white t-shirt.  "Or on TV.  All those chalkboards with lots of equations all over the place.  I mean, I know it's just fiction.  Or, but on the news, I've seen stories on science where labs have some pretty advanced looking math on the whiteboard.  I usually can't understand it.  What's all of that then?"  The Iowan nodded along.  They looked to the professor, who was now looking down and had resumed his pacing.
 
Without looking up, he continued to pace, allowing a silence to drag over the class. 
 
"It's all made up.  Turn to the third page in your packets."  The class obliged.
 
On page three was a list in three bullets:
 
Rules for Higher-Mathematicians

1. The math does not exist.
2. Tell no one.
3. Use only Provideo.

 
"When you stepped into class today, you were stepping in to a very special, very exclusive group.  You were selected through your proficiency, and we are grateful for your dedication.  But the sad truth is that you have reached the end of the road.  There is no math to learn beyond what you already know.  As future mathematicians, you will be the inheritors of a sacred duty: to keep the story of math alive in the public imagination.  This has not been easy, as you can probably imagine.  But aside from the unavoidable slip-up here and there, I think we have done a pretty good job so far."
 
The professor looked up and his tone became more serious.
 
"One of the first tasks of the ICCM was to develop a system of structures that would be our guideposts in this new reality.  Protocols were developed, networks activated that ensured only the proper channels of communication were used.  Briefings were devised to inform heads of state and captains of industry.  Special departments were tasked to develop materials that would be given to media sources such as journalists and film producers.  They had to have the appearance of complexity.  A sort of arbitrary language was developed.  You know, like Klingon."
 
The class appeared oblivious to this reference.  "From Star Trek?  Their whole language - they made a whole language up.  It was internally consistent, and they used it in the series and films.  I think some fans even learned it.  Imagine that!"
 
The class remained silent.  The professor waved his hand, "OK, before your time.  Whatever.  The point is that they made it up, but it seemed real.  So, the ICCM went to great lengths to do the same thing but for math.  It was sent out globally to every college and university.  Students just like you were given the same packet you know have on your desks.  Turn the page."
 
On the next page, a hyperlink and an email address: my first and last name@provideo.
 
I was about to ask the professor a question myself but before I could get the words out, he went on, providing the answer soon thereafter.
 
"These are the two most important things you will need for the rest of your career.  That link is your access portal to the ICCM's database.  This will be your personal email throughout your career in mathematics."
 
From somewhere behind me the sound of a cup spilling and a student calling out "oh shit."
 
The Iowan, still in a state of shock, "I don't believe it.  This makes no sense.  You said it before - cars, planes, satellites.  The Hubble, the Mars rover.  Carl friggin' Sagan! You're telling me none of that is real?!!"  He stared back at the professor, as if expecting him to reveal at last that this was all some silly first-day-of-the-semester charade.
 
The professor was deadly serious.  "Well, it's complicated."  He then explained that while yes, we did have advanced electronics, the notion that these were based on any higher math than simple calculus was a myth.  Sagan had actually been a high-ranking member of the ICCM.  That wistful, almost sad quality about him was less about the wonder of the universe than the sadness in seeing its mysteries ever-unreachable, locked away behind an impenetrable wall of ignorance.  We were able to land on the moon, to sample the rocks on Mars, but these were simple feats of basic math it turned out.  More fantastic theories such as the distance to stars, the gravity of galaxies and cosmic inflation - all little more than hunches, with little math behind them.  In reality we had no idea what was really beyond our solar system. 
 
And what about atoms and particles, someone asked, dejectedly.  We knew some basic chemistry, but we didn't really know much about the interactions of electrons, much less quantum dynamics, one of the better "fields of study" conjured up by the ICCM. 
 
The cat backpack lady seemed almost ready to cry as the professor spoke, each of his words like the teeth of a chainsaw to her soul.  "What... do we all do, then?"
 
The professor leaned on the podium and took out a small green piece of cloth, with which he then used to clean his glasses. 
 
"You work.  If you want to continue.  You may decide of course to turn around and walk right out that door."  The professor pointed limply.  "You just need to sign the next page, agreeing to the rules.  But for those of you who want to remain, and continue on in a career of mathematics, you will become an employee of the ICCM.  Each quarter you will receive a new packet of materials.  We call it the Provideo.  It is designed by the art department of the ICCM.  Unlike Klingon there is no real logic to it.  It's just a bunch of squiggles and dashes.  Meaningless really.  But you need to memorize it.  It is the most important thing you will do.  You will meet together in your departments at your assigned university or private lab.  There your days will be spent in review, going over each new piece of Provideo until you know it like the back of your hand.  You will put it up on the whiteboards in your workspace, print it out and tape it to checklists, you know, all the kind of busywork stuff the public would expect.  Should you take an interview with a PR team or news anchor or whatever you'll be well equipped to make it all seem quite serious and above board."
 
The student behind me had finished wiping up their spilled drink, had now gathered their things and was heading down the aisle towards the podium.  He looked flustered, and handed his packet to the professor, who looked it over.  "I signed it.  I'm not sure what to think right now.  But... this is a lot.  Thank you."  The door slowly closed on its pneumatic hinge after he left the room.
 
"It's not for everyone.  I know.  It is sad.  I won't lie.  But I hope you'll understand the position of the ICCM.  It's really best for everyone."
 
---
I sat on a park bench outside.  The late morning sun was still working to evaporate the morning's dew.  Passing students laughed and continued on to whatever interesting new studies lay ahead.  Still wearing my backpack, I gripped its straps in my thumbs and pulled it close.  It was heavy with textbooks from the Spanish, Women's Studies and Criminal Justice classes I planned on attending later today.  But no math.
 
There would not be any more math.  I suddenly took note of the geometry in the buildings around me.  A bird swooped by overhead and I thought of how one might calculate its flight path.  How many cubic liters of water in the fountain?  How much plastic feeder line was predicted to be needed in the landscaper's gas-powered trimmer?  All basic math.
 
I looked into the sky, the white whisps of clouds smeared across the nitrogen blue.  Beyond which there were stars.  Or were there?  What was it the professor had said about the solar system and galaxies?  I think we still know they are there, some things, somewhere out there.  But I suppose we'll never know.  I suddenly realized the word for what I was feeling: small.  Everything usually seemed to have a grandeur to it - a bigness.  There was a sort of infinity that transcended reality and we were always searching to discover more of it.  But this was all shattered.  Or not even that.  It wasn't explosive it was implosive.  As if in an instant an eternal outward energy had reversed course and was now turning in on itself.  What was shining, giving off light, was now absorbing it into a deadened kind of gloom.
 
And yet the sun still shone above.  I stood up and began to walk.  My next class, Freud's Old Maid: Sexual Repression in Victorian New York, didn't start until 12:30pm.  I had time to grab lunch.  I was suddenly really hungry all.  I thought about my friend, Barry, and felt a strong urge to call and tell about what had just happened.  I quickly remembered the rules, and the paper I had signed.  I couldn't tell Barry, or anyone else.  I was now part of a worldwide secret society, in possession of a secret knowledge that only a handful of humans would ever know.  That felt kind of good.