Struggle Sessions?

 Almost a hundred years ago....in the newly proclaimed Soviet Union....the communist folks came up with this idea to introduce their method of running things, and it meant arriving in towns, village and cities....convincing people that they needed to confess to certain thing (self-humiliation really)....to rise out of the ashes.

As the years passed, and Mao arrived to remake the Chinese government....this idea of self-humiliation came up and they redesigned it....calling it 'struggle sessions'.

The basic idea?  You'd take general public opinion and just destroy the hell out of it....getting people humiliate themselves, their relatives, friends, and co-workers. Everywhere....there would be enemies of the public.

The idea here?  Everyone was a victim as they exited the struggle session.  And they stayed victims....in order to appear 'in-tune' with the game being played out.

Struggle sessions were held at work, in the local neighborhood, and even at large arenas/stadiums.  

If you stand back today.....wokeness is basically the struggle sessions in a modern day society.  

Funny how history repeats itself.  But if you asked college professors about the struggle sessions....I doubt if you'd find more than a thousand in the entire US who know of the Chinese history, and how it changed society.

Usefulness of Useless Knowledge

 I was sitting and reading a piece yesterday, which led to the idea that there is value or useful purpose....if you were going out to gain useless knowledge.

This actually came out of a book from late 1930s, and it was an open discussion that maybe some experiment or project led to a simple report of zero value today, but sat around for an era and is picked up....to  advance some highly valued project in decades to come.  

It'd be like you doing a garage experiment to find some other type of air conditioning 'element' that was workable but less toxic.  You wrapped this up successfully but found that this was ten times more expensive....so you published the idea but it just sat there.  Years later, the cost factor drops by 90-percent and it suddenly has value.

Out there in the bold world we live in....there's probably tens of millions of people across the globe....working to gather useless knowledge.  To be honest....some of what they work up....WILL NEVER have value and be terribly wasted efforts.  Some will have marginal value, and some will have tremendous value (coming maybe years after the guy's death).

So it is in our best interest to be 'kind' to these individuals and urge them on....even if we see the value of this today as totally wasted.  

I know it goes against our very nature....to discourage stupid work, or work without value.  But you just can't tell....that crazy cousin of yours might come up with some idea that might make Pepsi an actual healthy drink to consume, or get the magic formula to eat 10,000 calories per day but get the body to burn that intake as quickly as it comes in.