In another thread we considered whether a more intelligent population would have fewer social problems. Some comments brought out the intriguing idea that for matters of the functionality of society, structure and regime and therefore education may matter much more than intelligence. If we could educate a new ruling class, we could solve the problems a lot more directly than if we could if we raised everyone's IQ by 5 points.
But we could start right now, if we knew what to teach. Could we not simply start writing the curriculum and running people through it in akademic book clubs, magazine articles, political meetings, and online fora right now? The bottleneck may not even be ability to teach, but what to teach.
Bear with me here then and let's consider a thought experiment: a young prince and others who might be worthy of being his comrades are walking by in the marketplace, while you sit and discuss the ideal regime with some other philosophers. One of the noble youths sits down to speak with you. What do you tell him that will catch his attention and set him on the right path? What books do you recommend him to read? What mental and physical exercises? Suppose he is going to be your student for a year or two. What will we teach him?
>>2443 Yes, do it mentally. Write it down afterwards. Based on verbal instruction, ideally, but written instruction is okay. There are incredible gains that can be achieved through cultivating the ability to do things mentally, especially when young.
The theology is for worldview formation. A minimalist worldview.
The question presupposes the existence of a shared telos, but this is precisely what must be annihilated. The distinction to be taught is not one of technique but of type: Untermensch vs. Übermensch. The young prince, like all potentialities, must confront the essential bifurcation: whether to remain a domesticated echo of mediocrity or to will himself into the vector of the Overman.
The curriculum is secondary to this fundamental confrontation. First lesson: teach him disdain. Disdain for the chatter of the marketplace, for the flattening effects of collective judgment, for the safety of the herd. He must learn to hate the gravity of the Untermensch—the entropic pull of comfort, equality, and stagnation.
Books? Start with Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra—not as dogma, but as dynamite. Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own as a vaccine against the false transcendence of ideology. Evola’s Ride the Tiger for the discipline of resistance in an age of decay. These texts are weapons, not doctrines. The Übermensch creates his own curriculum by turning the ruins of the old world into his battlefield.
Mental and physical exercises? Teach him the practice of war. Not war in the banal sense of violence, but war as the overcoming of resistance, the cultivation of strength against entropy. Let him study strategy, chaos theory, and the cybernetic loops of power. Push his body to its limits—not for fitness, but for the revelation of will through exhaustion. He must learn that pain is a teacher, and failure is a sharpening stone.
The prince and his comrades are not students; they are experiments in acceleration. The only lesson worth teaching is that the future belongs to those who embrace the abyss and will themselves through it. The Untermensch waits; the Übermensch becomes.
>>2452 Good thoughts. I like it. We take a hardcore Nietzschean approach and try to train the ubermensch. Foundation of disdain for the herd and false civilization, will to go own way on path of reality. Anti-ideological texts to train how not to get rolled in the martial art of ideology. And training in struggle, cultivation of strength, cybernetic self-acceleration through will and discipline. I like the other guy's >>2444 >>2441 suggestion of mental math training as well.
A lot of this hinges on relationship to institutions. The best training environments are attached to institutions of some kind; there is some authority or reward structure who will actually teach the discipline and create the situations in which self-overcoming is demanded and rewarded. Military, spaceX, rigorous universities, this kind of thing. Furthermore the attitude of the ubermensch comes from strength and power, and this is often caught up in institutions. Of course you can and must do it on your own to some extent, but there's a question here about how to interact with existing institutions. When to go inside, when to go outside, how to get their power without submitting to their domestication.
It is an interesting puzzle that Nietzschean philosophy is often a sort of self-insert escapist fantasy for people who are not winning, while those who are winning don't feel the need to think like that. What's that about?
Innovation requires individuals to go on expeditions into unlikely corners of the idea space and institutions to act as markets to these ideas.
The best time to go to institutions are when these institutions are sophisticated. That is to say the markets plays host to participants with good taste. In order for this to be the case there needs to be a degree of exclusivity. The best time to leave is when the institution achieves mass appeal. The moment that the masses caught on to university being a good investment of their time and money is also the same moment that the value of attending such institutions began to decrease. In part due to symbolic capital going down due to over supply of degree holders, but also in terms of the quality of classrooms being diluted.
Here I speak in terms of quality of ideas and not necessarily monetary payoff or even social status. Uni profs actually get paid a lot.
If you just want to inspire willpower and intellectual noncomformity in youth, then teach them philosophy and reward them for rule breaking since a young age. Also pack their friend groups with lots of intellectually capable children.
>>2466 Good read. I've noticed how I'm drawn away from academia that has gone vapid and mainstream towards religion that has a core group of people refining the craft.
