In high school one of our teachers played a trick on us, an ‘experiment’ for which we were uninformed and had given no consent.
Half-way through the year he changed the grading scale. It became the new rule that we would have to earn a higher score in order to get the same grade. So, to get an ‘A’ now meant achieving a 95% instead of a 90%, a B required 85% instead of 80%, and so on.
Once the year and the experiment were finished we learned this ‘research’ was part of his dissertation, and that it had ‘worked.’ His purpose was to prove that students would earn the grade they think they are capable of, and not try harder or achieve less. He was working on a PhD in sociology.
I was one of the ones who ‘succeeded’ in proving his point. I would’ve gotten a ‘B’ in his class, instead I got an ‘A,’ thanks to his arbitrary new rules. I was expected to be grateful for this. When I complained, this teacher, in classic narcissistic fashion, couldn’t imagine how his successful experiment would bother anyone, especially someone who ‘benefitted’ from it.
Narcissists don’t look any further than their own noses to justify their actions. Was he concerned what it took for me to earn those extra 5% points? Did he care that my motivation was simply not to get a ‘C’ in his class, because at home we were not allowed to get C’s in school. My mom would’ve been extremely disappointed and my allowance docked. I put myself through months of stress to avoid this fate, including quitting an extra-curricular activity in order to spend more time on his class. My other grades that year suffered, thanks to him, and I was sick more often.
Oh, but it ‘worked!’ He achieved the results he desired by manipulating everyone else. The ends justify the means, according to these types, even though they never bother to ask what those means actually meant to anyone.
When it became clear to me, once a teacher myself, that I was being used as a flying monkey for narcissists and psychopaths, I quit, remembering this moment in particular. I was expected to compromise my students’ autonomy, their privacy, their trust—not to mention my own ethics—in order to comply with the orders streaming down from above, and constantly changing.
This has become the new normal. “Get on board, or get out,” was what I was commanded. I know I chose wisely to get out. Most of my colleagues did not.
This is obviously a societal issue not isolated to the realm of education. Not only are we expected to accept the experimentation done on us in the name of whatever the psychopaths upstairs command—whether that’s with the weather, the vaccines, the 5G, the Frankenfoods, the forever wars, the pathetic political theatre, and the relentless social engineering that is off-the-charts insane, like the rebranding of pedophilia as a ‘preference’—we’re supposed to be grateful for the opportunity to be their guinea pigs in whatever brand of f**ckery they care to shoot down the pipeline next.
At one time I blamed solely the narcissists and psychopaths for this clear social dysfunction they are perpetrating.
But after further research and contemplation I realized this is a dysfunctional relationship, where those flying monkeys and order-followers and social climbers are clearly benefitting from the tyranny inflicted on all of us through their lack of moral fiber and courage, greed, apathy, laziness, fear, and/or whatever other personal character issues they refuse to grow beyond.
Someday the social climbers will lament, probably when they suddenly find themselves under the boot—but, where have all the heroes gone?!
I cherish that day, when I will respond with a condescending shrug and smug grimace and say, “Looks like they don’t work for the tyrants and their minions anymore!”
Kensho Homestead 