MosesWrites
Human resources ought to begin and end any conversation about worth, about worthwhile endeavors and whatever ambitions we may have individually or collectively. Maxims, maximization, have no obvious answers, beyond attempted distillations of infinitely complex opportunities. We often crave the singular: called to one profession (false); a true self discovered (an endless process); my true love (yes, an instant and infinite revelation of creation); my “best fit” “dream school” (lolz); death (false finality); conclusion (arbitrary segmentations of time); justice (impositions of power); divinity (“I am who I am”); the list goes on and on.
To take it down a notch: as ROSÉ puts it, “I'd give it all up if you told me that I'd be / The number one girl in your eyes.” Or on the flip side, Taylor Swift, “I forgot that you existed… and it was so nice, so peaceful and quiet, I forgot that you existed, it isn’t love, it isn’t hate, it’s just indifference.”
Just see me for who I am. Recognition. A simple, unique, brilliant and broken and wonderfully awoken and wizened me. Maybe. Just once, forever, I want to hold your hand.
For the past week and in the week ahead I’ve and will engage with a series of panels, forums, conversations, and reflections on education. At the same time, I’ve hired and continue to hire assistants for personal research and special projects as well as for my home institution. I’ve traveled quite a bit within Shanghai and now sit on a plane headed to the US. A number of pressing questions about the near- and medium-term future, personally and globally, undergird with urgency a desire for greater calm and clarity.
We’ve been overtaken by a tech-fueled acceleration and consolidation of time rising slowly from the earliest of the early modern era and intensified by mechanization, the electrical and fossil-fuel revolutions, and finally exploded by silicon-based computing. The present has become past before having been present. Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time. Anxiety reigns supreme. Expectations for instantaneous communication and responses absent any reflection obviate the love we must make to learn anything.
To take it down a notch: in a world of unprecedented abundance, why do so many starve? At one extreme, children in war-torn Sudan or Gaza or in obese America? At the other, anorexic girls and boys in elite schools and queued for modeling scouts or influencing us upon scales on social media, inviting us to wonder when, exactly, skinniness tips from sexy self-control to obsessive frailty and disgust? How much hip bone, shoulder bone, pelvis, kneecap, eye socket ought we to see before we don’t want to see? The gaze, male or female and everything in between, collapsed into a sexless body, a body incapable of reproduction, of the basic biological imperative supposedly underlying our lust?
I’m pained by this every day in my school. I’m pained by this standing in line at the airport, “beauties” strutting and hiding at the same time, boys with thighs nearly the same circumference as my own calves. I’m pained by those with mobility impaired by weight, limited in the basic movements of life. I’m pained by those who train and tone to the point of external perfection while remaining almost entirely hollow within. I’m confounded by whether and why any of this never gets discussed directly, pointedly, despite the chimera of “wellness” and “whole children” and educators as role models and on and on.
We have so many categorical imperatives for labor, from students in classes to employees and their work. Curricula, position descriptions, organizational structures. I take one tiny step back and none of it makes any sense.
To take it down a notch: when I’ve set out to hire teachers or other staff, I’m struck by limitations in talent and skill despite an enormous number of young people seeking jobs (in China and around the world). Yet recently for a research assistant role, I wrote the vaguest possible set of requirements, focused on curiosity and commitment. I’ve had inquiries from a truly astounding array of talented young people—graduate students, recent PhDs—for something part time, for something paid a fair and reasonable wage (c. $35-40hr) but significantly less than what a full-time position would provide.
I’ve realized, especially in China, with an as-always super quick series of structural economic transformations underway, the greatest current crisis lies in management, in inter-generational miscommunication about expectations and the execution of tasks, of processes of innovation and the nature and production of value. Those raised in scarcity still cling to things, to control, to counting, to holding firm. Those raised in abundance seek something more in every moment, something that they can touch, yes, and hold, but not a thing: a self, feelings, love, recognition, creativity, purpose, play, conversation; consummation, not consumption. Ungrateful fuckers who don’t know what we’ve sacrificed: you will be sacrificed. Pick your major! Set your alarm! Practice! Practice! Practice! I want facts!
Can you express yourself with Gucci? Balenciaga? NikePro? Sport and university paraphernalia? Let’s not get lost in some existential consumerist despair: hierarchy and differentiation, the categorical stilling of confusion, impact any species with selective reproduction and increases exponentially with sexualized and then mammalian and finally self-conscious behavior. Not for nothing has Darwin had such quick and lasting if not entirely uncontroversial appeal. Yet most everyone forgets: his greatest insight about natural selection, the survival of the fittest: in the end, circumstance, randomness, entirely arbitrary adaptation prevail—the entirely unorchestrated interplay amongst types and species and both together with environments. Will our stable-state body temperatures rise quickly enough to save us in immanent climate catastrophe? I’m feverishly doubtful. Yet we have no choice in the matter.
To take it down a notch: at a panel exploring a potential balance between learning-by-doing, and the role of tests and more formal assessments, I proposed a solution and a greater problem. Students, I said, already do this, day-in and day-out, at least from late elementary school, as hormones compel them to explore new senses of self, new relationships with their own bodies, and to further explore how all that impacts relationships and interactions with others. How do you know if you like someone? If they like you? Experience, experience and, ultimately, a test: yes or no, from friend to boy-girl friend, patient longing or imposed ultimatum. Can you sense progress? Hints if s/he’s interested? Just a player?
A few good pop songs do more to explain adolescent reality and the nature of learning than most everything produced by adults professing to understand education. Players gone play play play, though really—play at what? Deception, or joyful, honest, uninhibited play, the play of creation? If we could only listen, if we could only cultivate discernment. I’m just gonna shake shake shake.
When I made this comment, and suggested the greater problems arising from the taboo, arising from the simple and essential things we refuse to discuss, things got quite quiet. Silence speaks louder than words.
Supposedly I’m the principal of a school: how should I embody learning, as a model, and as a challenge, for students and faculty alike? What degrees of honesty might sustain optimal growth, individually and institutionally? Find the flow, the ying and the yang, the pragmatic balance between care and competition and hope it all works out?
I’ve never felt more confident.
Recently as I’ve been writing, I’ve also returned to what I wrote in 2009, just a year or so after my mother died, after six or seven years of torturous decline with dementia, after I had served as her legal guardian. I felt a kind of freedom and energy and potential I hadn’t felt since my childhood. Yet I still carried a great deal of debt, literally and figuratively, grief and over-extended finances. I still had to compromise and to conform to structures, again personal and institutional, that didn’t come close to reflecting any true sense of my self. I could see and feel certain truths, but they remained out of reach. I had to hide, and to succumb to others’ expectations.
Luckily now, I’ve a much greater independence.
As the great lyricist Donovan sings, “freedom is a word I rarely use / without thinking, without thinking… / of the time, of the time / when I’ve been loved.”
I feel open to love; I feel the freedom to stretch the potential of my mind and body to the fullest extent possible, and not to worry in the least whether others find it appealing or crazy or a momentary aberration or whatever.
Just be yourself, my Chinese teacher told me.
How can I even for an instant talk about a student’s self-actualization if I can’t push myself toward the very same, come what may? To take risks and truly renege any fear of failure, if I need to sit securely in a position of power, in titular or totemic authority?
I appreciate a recognition of status, a respect for achievement, but I only really care what I can show you, what you can see and hear and feel and touch in the here and now.
Show, don’t tell; judge as we will. Any position ought to be earned anew each day.
I’m flying to the US to present on a panel, “The Economics of Fraud.” I figure I should be as honest as I can, understanding all too well that honesty can cause harm as much as it can heal.
Tell the truth!
As Emily Dickinson puts it:
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
Or as she asks:
After great pain, a formal feeling comes —
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs —
The stiff Heart questions 'was it He, that bore,'
And 'Yesterday, or Centuries before'?
If only we knew, if only we could speak so plainly. Since the late fifteenth century or so, inflected especially by the discovery of a “new” world, at least in the west, as the final certainty of a god gave way to the possibility of plenty, of infinite creation and value beyond those first six days—since then, the best we can do is wager. Wager a bet, hedge, roll the dice, take a chance, guess: that, that, that’s probably the truth. AI hallucinations have been our own hallucinations all along, accumulated over centuries.
If fraud has dealt us the only hand we have, how do we play?
I think we must accept honestly that the answer has to do with matters of degree, and to strive to mitigate the individual and collective harm done to the values and goals we’ve professed.
If I go around telling people I’m a uniquely talented rhetorician, I’m a fraud, but likely a fraud causing rather little harm. We most all try to talk up our talents, or to speak of what we hope the future will hold—even if in humility and self-deprecation. Though if I then try to sell lessons in rhetoric? If I suggest that I can teach you rhetoric in a way that will give you unique and singularly powerful advantages in life, and charge you vast sums of money for that privilege?
To my mind, my fraud has metastasized and ought to be excised by established authorities. If I’m putting myself out there to such an extent, actually I’ve already outed myself, and thus accountability holds.
I’ve come to think of this as the fraud of abundance. We have so much, we have too much, that we’ve been sold false promises that something that might set us apart. In truth, you only need an imagination that’s free. Love, spontaneously, the spontaneity that can only come from love—of yourself, of the world around you, of another person—that’s free too.
Why the proliferation of this fraud of abundance?
To match the fraud of scarcity and, in one particular yet powerful context, the scarcity of opportunity in higher education, in early career opportunities for employment, the scarcity of chance in making a life that matches or exceeds the possibilities of previous generations.
Yet we have more resources, more technology, more productive capacity than at any time in human history!
Thus, the intensification of the fraud of scarcity: we have just too many brilliant, beautiful people and not enough places for them, not enough privilege to go around.
When the fraud of abundance meets the fraud of scarcity, the injustices of exclusion arise, the injustice of resources concentrated inequitably when more than enough exists for all to enjoy at least an equality of opportunity.
In that rarified world of selecting the very best, the best of the very best, the anointed few—whether in athletics or aesthetics or intellect—such power entrusted by whom, to whom?
That we even need to ask such a question: what a poverty of imagination, what a retrenchment of fear and exclusion, what a limitation of the true scope of human possibility. Tell me about prenatal care and paid parental leave and early childhood education and then I will know diversity, equity, and inclusion. Tell me children will no longer have lockdown drills nor will they every so often, but regularly enough to have become normal, tell me that boys and men will no longer mow down children in schools or on the way to or from schools or in hollow shells of what once might have been a school, bombed. Tell me this, and I will know veritas, lux et veritas.
I could care less where or whether you or anyone has studied anything, or your latest PR or score or anything counted, ranked for that matter—especially the accumulation of whatever amount of wealth or power you may have accumulated.
I see what you show, and care little of what you tell; have you acted with greed or gratitude, with envy or grace? I think you know, too, even if you’re afraid: beyond infinite chance, we do know, we truly can tell, when we’ve met the real deal. This amazing present: if you can, let’s play, truly, not a moment to waste not, want not.
14-15-14 September 2025
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