From Marcus This is an audio interview with Ray Peat from 2020. It's part of my effort to archive and augment Ray's complete works within this website, Ray Peat Rodeo. You can donate to the project on GitHub sponsors, cheers🥰.
Very well.
Great, well I feel just thrilled to be speaking with you today. I love that you expressed interest in this topic of education. I’m really excited about this, I think it’ll be a great one. The topic is education. In other words, how can we grow a rich, dynamic, and just, quality education. In the year 2020 and beyond what does this look like? How can it be cultivated? I think you’re a great person to talk to when it comes to this.
00:40 Would you mind, I think for our listeners, people who might listen to this and enjoy this, would you mind going into your background? Why are you such a good person to listen to when it comes to education?
Oh I actually started thinking about education when I was about eight years old. We moved to Oregon from San Diego and I had a couple of years at a very tiny school. I think there were a dozen students in eighth grade, and so as a third grader I got to listen to the lessons for all of the grades. And when I got to the junior high I realized I had already heard the lessons for a couple years previously.
We had a little encyclopedia, published about 1930, and it had an article about experimental schools, and I heard about Bertrand Russell's private school he started with his wife, and that really got me thinking how good the experience was in that tiny country school, and then when I got to the the city schools, how regimented and deadening it was.
So all the way through high school I experienced that stifling effect of most of the classes. For example the biology teacher at tenth grade biology refused to talk about evolution. Most of the teachers were similarly backward. There were two or three very good people and I realized that getting to know enlightened people was the thing, not taking their courses.
03:18 When I went to college, a little State College, I sampled all of the required courses, and similarly most of them were taught by people who basically just surveyed what was in the textbook. Some of them literally wrote everything out on the blackboard laboriously. I had a couple of good introductory science courses: the people actually took teaching seriously and wanted to get the main ideas across.
But I accidentally I heard about a literature professor who had a reputation for being a hard-grader. The literature instructor I had first was just impossibly tedious and so I switched over to the one with the reputation of being a hard-grader and found that he was actually just talking to his students and explaining how he saw each of the periods of literature and revealing that he had a big picture of what’s going on in the world and that each phase of literature was a way of seeing the world from different perspectives.
05:04 So I had the expectation that graduate school might have other people like that and found that they were even scarcer in graduate school than in that little State College. So first I got a General Studies Master’s Degree in which I was able to pick out professors that I thought were sane and then do a one-to-one reading and conference, sort of, tutorial with them and went on to specialize in linguistics and found a couple of professors for similar one-to-one tutorials.
But that was in 1959 and 1960. The Masters was 1956, 1957. And at that time the best of the professors had to be extremely cautious. For example the atmospheric bomb tests were going on and if anyone criticized militarism, or the dangers of dumping radioactive fallout onto populations, they were fired from their government jobs and cut off from all sorts of communication. If a professor signed a petition opposing war, or bomb testing, they lost their tenure or got fired. The atmosphere was probably just about as bad as the 1930’s under Hitler but no one really talked about it in the US because it was defined as “how democracy works.”
07:30 So it sounds like it’s not just that these teachers, so many of your teachers, so many of the teachers that we probably have all had, were just doing their job and doing what they had learned to do, collecting a paycheck, but it was also that they were afraid in some ways. It took a lot of guts to teach differently, perhaps?
Yeah. Lots of the famous 18th century literary figures were members of the ruling class and I mentioned something [in one of my literature seminars] about the present effect of “class” on literature and viewpoints, and the professor interrupted me and said “there are no classes in in United States.”
08:31 Unbelievable. Wow. Geez. So no one was encouraged then to think for themselves. How did anyone make it out thinking differently?
I got a job of teaching college that year and was assigned to teach “Introduction to Physics for Biology Majors” as one of my courses. And the president of the college said what he wanted was for the students to be able to understand what they read in the newspapers as well as have the information they should know as a Biology freshman. Since the issues in the newspapers related to a lot of discussion of atom bombs and nuclear energy and quite a bit of discussion about computers, I decided that those would be good themes to talk about. So I discussed what energy means to an organism, and what ionizing radiation does to a cell.
And it happened that in the spring term a visitor from The University of Illinois came to give a lecture. He was invited without assigning a topic. And when he got there he lectured on the Biological effects of radioactive isotopes. Just what I had been talking my students about. And he was, that week, fired from his job at The University of Illinois without mentioning his anti-war, anti-bomb test position, but accusing him of supporting sexual freedom among college students.
But the effect of his lecture on radiation was disturbing to the administrators at my college, and it ended up with me getting fired, and that immediately led me to think about the general issue of College education, modelling it, for example, on Bertrand Russell's school and the other experimental schools I had read about in the early part of the century.
So I decided to start my own college. The professor from Illinois was going on a lecture tour about academic freedom. He was in the news about suing The University of Illinois, and in his lectures he mentioned that we were starting a college that would be free from intervention by trustees.
And so we gathered up some students, and I found that the Boards of Education in the United States wouldn’t let you give a transcript if you didn’t have a certain amount of money behind you. If you had an endowment of some sort—buildings or property—then you could in effect sell your degrees and transcripts. It was legal to have a degree-mill but not to give, even a letter, saying that the student had been there if you didn’t have money that you had at risk, so if you said the wrong thing the state could shut you down and take your money.
13:18 My gosh, so just like all these other institutions it’s just been a business.
Yeah. That was in California. I went to Oregon thinking they might have a different attitude but the Assistant Secretary of Education or Public Instruction ended our conversation saying “education isn’t about what students know!”
I’m not surprised because I’ve been reading a lot of various viewpoints, and listening to some of the things you said, but it really troubles me. It’s deeply disconcerting.
14:15 Back to Blake College. You said Bertrand Russell was an early influence of yours, and you talked about the experimental school that he and his wife had built. What were some of the educational practices or some of the educational philosophy that they had going that worked its way into what you did with Blake College?
Just to recognize that each student was an individual. Pretty much the same thing that A.S. Neill did at Summerhill. Just to recognize that everyone is in the world wanting to understand it. They dealt with that: whatever the individual wanted to know or needed to know.
15:09 What did you do at Blake with with students that allows them to get to know themselves better and to get to form opinions without outside influence?
For example at one point we had an old hotel and several instructors and students had rooms in the same building. So a professor could say “at home I teach courses in so-and-so”, and the students, if they thought that was interesting, one of them would say “well we’d like to hear you talk about that.” And so all of the other students who were interested would get together and spend maybe five or six hours continuously in conversation. And typically they would cover at least a semesters course work at home in one sitting.
16:25 Wow. It really just sounds so good to me that someone gets to decide what they want to do. That everything’s optional. And then if they wanted to do top national exams that showed they were ready for grad school, that this was something they could do also right?
Yeah. They took the Graduate Record exam, General Studies— they were called Area Tests. They had the departmental tests: History, Math, Biology and so on. But they had the area tests that were given at that time to graduating seniors across the U.S.. If you scored 50th percentile on the three Area Tests that was typical of a graduate of a four-year college in the U.S.. It was Humanities, General Social Studies, and Science were the three areas. We just set, arbitrarily, the idea that we wanted the students to have the experience of what it was to be there. We said you had to be here six months—two quarters—participating and then you can take the test. And they averaged, after only six months, the students who took the tests, I think their average was 92nd percentile.
Wow. Ray, I love how you’re talking about the relationship aspect and the one-to-one opportunity and just that, you mentioned earlier, that if you want to learn it’s the relationship, it’s not the classes, it’s not the the things that you’re setting, it’s the relationships, it’s interpersonal communication and being with people.
18:45 Do you think that the people who attended Blake College were generally feeling the same way? Did they love it? Were they happy?
One guy said that he was considered, sort of, retarted. He had scored something like the 4th percentile on some tests that he had taken in high school. He was only there for 10 weeks but we let him take the test just because he was a special problem that believed he was not up to the standard. After just 10 weeks he scored at the 50th percentile ranking equal to the average United States College graduate.
19:50 So was it that he was accepted and allowed to find his personhood and explore— I mean cos that’s got to be a part of this right: the confidence that goes with being able to do what you want grows—
One of our people, he had been a TV whizz-kid on one of the TV shows, where he was a straight-A student. They had a panel of supposedly very bright, well-educated kids. But he said he didn’t know how to think, and what he wanted to do was just put himself together so that he could think with his knowledge.Because he said it was completely useless to him.
That’s awesome that you’re giving opportunities to people like that, who maybe were labelled as smart. Labelled as people who received the information out of a book well and they can spit it out, they can regurgitate information, but that had nothing to do with thinking. It’s cool that even the individual recognized the importance of that.
20:11 One of the things you said reminded me of A.S. Neill. He said once that a good teacher does not “draw out” he “gives out” and what he gives out is love. And by love I mean approval or, if you like, friendliness, good nature. The good teacher not only understands the child he approves of the child. Did you care to add anything to that?
I’ve read a little bit of his stuff now, yeah.
Yeah. While I was a Psychology major in graduate school for a while, I had a professor that introduced me to people like Carl Rogers. And his thing was unconditional positive regard was therapeutic in the treatment situation, but it’s also educational. It’s essential for learning and teaching just as much as for Psychotherapy.
22:21 I love that. It reminded me of, and I don’t know how familiar you are with Nietzsche or what you think of Nietzsche, but he, apparently, from my understanding there’s this thing called “Amor Fati” and in one of his translations I thought that he said “my formula for greatness in a human being is Amor Fati, that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity, not merely bearing what is necessary, and still less concealing it, but rather loving it.” And, I don’t know, to me that speaks a little bit to that in order to change something, or to see challenges and come up with new solutions, you kinda got to start where you areDB: Do you have anything to add to that?
Yeah, you know John Dewey's famous phrase that “education isn’t preparation for life, it is life itself.”
23:23 Oh I like that, I like that.
Another philosopher-psychologist that I think was very insightful and useful was Eric Schachtel who wrote the book Metamorphosis and in that he has the ideas of “Allocentric Perception” starting in infancy in which you learn to see—empathy basically—to see that there are other beings and to learn to let your involvement go out, and have them participate in a personal way. But the way things are set up people start, what he called, “Secondary Autocentric Perception” in which things are understood and valued only as they are useful in your little, self-contained world: you don’t go out of yourself, you bring everything useful in to your control.
24:52 Why do you think it is that we learn to do that?
The attitude towards language of the parents and the schools. It usually gets built in by the time a kid starts school with the parents telling them what to believe, basically. Not introducing them to the richness and possibilities of each thing as a complexity that remains to be understood, but giving finished answers. Giving them a world ready to use but not to get too involved in personally.
25:51 Oh I like that. A.S. Neill in his writing on Summerhill talked about how he didn’t even know if his own children were able to be self regulated and develop their own way of looking at things, it just was such a challenge for him.
Yeah, the teacher really can’t do anything more than be enthusiastic about living and discovering. And that can’t avoid being communicated if the teacher is really living his life that way.
26:40 I like that. What else do you think a teacher should be in the most valuable sense? What can a teacher’s role be?
Oh, everyone has accumulated lots of experiences and so sharing your perspective on your experiences—when when someone is really listening to you—everything you say is flavoured by your experiences. When you expand on describing your experience and perspectives, your intelligible to the person who is seeing them as part of your personality. You aren’t saying “here’s this definitely known bit of stuff that you should stuff into your memory.” But “here is the pattern of problems that I experienced.” And just in using language you’re always ultimately asking your listener to invent what I’m saying. You have to share your minds: I’ll invent it whilst I’m saying it, if you’ll invent it along with me.
28:32 Yeah I like that, and when I got to share my version of what we talked about it gonna be another creation.
Yeah, and Alfred North Whitehead made that very explicit when he said no sentence is complete and explicit in itself, it always implies everything.
28:55 I think that’s great. Is that part of his fundamental stages of learning: romance, precision, and generalization? Is that part of the generalization?
Yeah. What is most personal is also most general and universal. If you really are involved in something and share that involvement it involves the whole world as you understand it. So personal and universal can’t be separated.
29:36 Wow. Didn’t Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay on self-reliance say something like “that whatever is felt by me, is true for everyone.” I think he describes it differently but is that kind of what you was getting at?
Yeah Emerson was very good.
29:58 One of my buddies is a philosophy PhD, and he became fluent in German so he could study Hegel and Nietzsche and one of the stories he told me about Nietzsche was that he carried around a bookbag with him a lot wherever he went and it had his favourite books. And my buddy was telling me that he abhorred American writers with the exception of Emerson. He carried around essays of Emerson's. He loved reading Emerson it always made him happy and helped his thinking, I guess.
30:42 One of the things you said earlier, Ray, which I thought was interesting, was about literature from different periods giving us a window into that time period. And then you said later that when you share stories, when we talk about what we’re excited about, that that might be a window for someone else into some new world. And it got me thinking about Tolstoy for some reason. Because I remember reading somewhere that Tolstoy started an experimental school and he apparently didn’t teach writing in any kind of traditional way. He just wanted people to write. He wanted people’s stories to come out. He wanted the content to come out. And he didn’t grade or look at punctuation or grammar. Because he thought that eventually that would just correct itself. What he really wanted was the story. What someone was trying to say. Just write that.
Yeah I didn’t know that about Tolstoy. But at Montana State I was given two or three writing courses every term. And the department had instructions on how to grade papers. The policy, I think, was to fail 50% of the first term students. They had an absolute weighted grade: spelling and commas, semicolons and so on. And my first few weeks my students were doing the standard 50% absolute horrible grammar and punctuation. And they were they were writing idiotic stuff.
After about five or six weeks I told the classes that I just couldn’t stand reading any more of that kind of junk. That from then on I was going to ignore the mechanics, and grade them totally on whether they said something sensible that I could stand to read. Immediately their language became fluid and they all, from that point on, failed to fail.
33:22 Wow! It’s almost like they were getting a chance to say what they really wanted to say finally.
Yeah, and that’s how language works. The form follows the meaning. If you focus on the form you destroy the meaning. And that means that your form has nothing to hang on so the form becomes extremely bad.
A deck of cards, so to speak, almost. It reminds me of Biology.
Yeah in 1968 when students were rebelling against University formalism and such, one of our Biology professors said “students have to be treated with authority and firmness. They want to learn to speak a language before they learn the alphabet or the rules.” She wanted to teach Science the same way she conceived that people learn language. But in fact you learn the language before you learn the alphabet.
34:59 Right. I remember reading in one of A.S. Neill's accounts of Summerhill about a boy who couldn’t read. Didn’t want to read. Had no interest in reading. He was 16 years old, 17 years old, still didn’t want to read. And then he decided he wanted to pass some state exam to prove he had done the high school equivalent. He studied for a couple months. Basically taught himself how to read. Became a carpenter, I think A.S. Neill said, and had three wonderful boys and made a living the rest of his life and had his own business and just did so well. It kind of made me think of that.
Yeah, I think that applies to everything. You learn the language before you learn the alphabet and how to punctuate. Every five or six year old has thousands of words of vocabulary and can use them to communicate. When you begin studying Physics or Chemistry or Biology you should start with the language and learn the punctuation later.
36:30 It seems to me that when it becomes meaningful in some context, the punctuation and a grammar is something you’ll learn at that point, right?
Yeah exactly. It only has meaning in terms of meaning. You have to have a meaning there before the mechanics has any reality.
That makes sense.
36:58 Ray, going back to Blake College. At some point the Blake college experience kind of ended for everyone. Can you talk about that a little bit? Why did that happen? And what were some extreme positives, even though it ended, that came out of that?
Oh. Several people went to good graduate schools. Some became painters. One became a Playwright. And they all went on doing what they wanted to do.
The reason it came to an end was the Vietnam War was going on. First we had a visit from the Cultural AttachĂ© that said he wanted to just learn what Americans were doing with a school in Mexico. But he asked me why, if I was a linguist graduate student, why I hadn’t become involved with the Summer Linguistics Institute Project. And that was a CIA front organization to train the Indians to be obedient, basically. When I told him I just wasn’t interested in Biblical translations he put me down as some kind of subversive.
Then a couple of years later a guy in an army uniform—which was illegal in Mexico at that time, to wear a foreign uniform—he came way out to Valle de Bravo and introduced himself as the military AttachĂ© of the embassy and said he wanted to interview us. I assume he asked each of us similar questions. But he did it in private. He spent half an hour in my bedroom asking me what my view of the war was. What it’s purpose was. And I told him I thought it’s basic motivation was economic.
It was several months after that that a series of events that could only have been organized by some higher powers took place in which they organized several levels: including newspaper reporters and Madalyn Murray, and a guy who had identified himself as from Chicago. He had clippings showing that he was a janitor posing as a communist for the FBI. And, in Valle de Bravo, he ingratiated himself as an expatriate American. My father got acquainted with him. Got him drunk several afternoons. Learned his story. He showed credentials from both FBI Marine Corps retired and CIA. And that guy married Madalyn Murray. She had the project of becoming president of Blake College, and the outcome basically was that she fed her stories to the embassy and the the local police and the newspapers that the school is a front for Fidel Castro and for drug production and smuggling.
41:53 My gosh. So when Madalyn Murray got involved you thought her motivations were pretty benign, didn’t you?
Yeah. It started in Maryland. She was accused of beating up two policeman causing one to have a heart attack. And was wanted for assault among other things and went to Hawaii. And so it looked like she had been persecuted for her Atheism, and she claimed to be a Lawyer and Sociology Professor. And so she came to teach Sociology. But even before she got there it came out that her plan was to have me removed and take over the school. After she got there she married this embassy contact Dick O'Hair.
Okay. So this happened after her campaign against the schools in America? With the Pledge of Allegiance being got out of the classrooms and so on and so forth?
Yeah. All of that was prior.
Wow. So the government just really didn’t want college-bound American students to be going to Mexico to learn how to think for themselves.
Yeah. Especially during the Vietnam War 1964 and 1965 they didn’t want dissenters also with the possibility of not being drafted so soon.
Did you ever think about doing what you had done at Blake again at some point?
Oh yeah, repeatedly! Following that experience I had acquaintances in the government. One guy became a lifelong friend and years later, when his wife was drunk, she let it out that his business was surveillance. Every time I would get an idea of going somewhere, like to send El Salvador or Nicaragua, he would warn me that it wasn’t a good place for staying alive.
So you trusted him enough? He was a good enough friend that he had some inner knowledge of how they were watching various situations and people and such?
Yeah, right after he warned me about not going to Salvador, a union guy I knew was planning to go with a group of union organizers from the Northwest. I knew from personal experience that he was phobic for marijuana. Because he didn’t want his union activities stigmatized by being associated. Even staying in a room where someone was smoking marijuana. But the night before he was to leave to go to Salvador, his apartment was raided and marijuana was planted. He was held in jail, I think, only long enough to miss his flight. And the guys that got there were all murdered while sitting in the restaurant. So he had a caretaker in the government.
Geez. Wow. It seems to me it’s just one thing to the next that is stigmatized in order to assert power or control over a population. It seems kind of crazy.
Yeah. There are, here and there, the good people in bad places who can modify the evil a little bit. But basically the whole apparatus is set up to be obedient to the big purposes.
47:05 Do you feel that the winds have changed? Be it if they go into a more free direction, just one little act at a time?
Yeah. I started getting discouraged in the late 1960s following the Blake thing. And I started seeing that the U.S. was being treated as on a course to becoming just more of the third world. That the masses of the U.S. weren’t on a course of democracy. I think that is what we’ve been seeing progressively. And I think this current thing of the pandemic—or the “plandemic”—is a late stage of the process of shaking down small businesses. Getting them out of the way.
Like the Gates Foundation and the United Nations Agriculture Organization are—right now—in process in Africa of destroying small subsistence agriculture and replacing it with giant industrial soybean farms. And the same thing— do you know The Corbett Report?
I’ve heard of it, I haven’t watched any of it.
They have a good episode, it’s called Was There Foreknowledge of the Plandemic?. It shows that the Federal Reserve was doing drastic, historically novel stuff already in September of last year that looked like the beginning of what was only announced several weeks ago as the multi-trillion-dollar bailout. They were starting on this multi-trillion-dollar pre bailout already in September.
And an Agency of the Defence Intelligence Agency, according to an ABC news item that was multiply confirmed—many sources confirmed it—that this Medical Intelligence Branch reported that around the end of November a virus was on the move in Wuhan. But China didn’t mention it until late December and didn’t start taking action until, I think, the 23rd of January. But our Defence Intelligence Agency already reported it before the Chinese knew about it.
50:46 So disheartening. In light of that, everything seems to be as corrupt and confusing and bizarre as ever. Do you think it makes sense for more and more people—bringing it back to education—to be trying to do their own thing? And to gather that institutionalized kind of a schematic? Or do you think it’s impossible, almost, to do our own thing?
Well, you’re not going to be able to organize on the internet any more. Organization on a person-to-person basis, I think, is necessary. And organization basically means communication. The putting of education processes into action: making it live. The system is basically being modified from the top down, shaking down all of the dissent by creating unemployment: making them dependent on whatever they can get together, and on the way to becoming a total serfs.
The people who are sensing that something is wrong with the system that they have believed in, they’re ripe for a new way of being. And I think education has to be at the foundation of that. Otherwise a fanatical kind of fascism would be an alternative to the well-organized, sort of, invisible fascism that is in process.
53:09 Yeah. Well I’m glad you say that about education. I feel that in my bones too. That it kind of starts with education. Do we have to wear a costume in some ways? Like in certain places we go and act like we’re following the rules, so to speak, but be communicating in those interpersonal relationships—
Yeah. The big outward form doesn’t matter if you’re alive on the inside. You can create new life forms fully across the system and then it will at some point be unnecessary to maintain the disguise.
54:01 It’s a game in some ways, right? You can play that game in many different ways. In my mind flexibility is a hallmark of intelligence. We can be smart enough to know what hat we have to wear in what room, and also have those meaningful conversations, and that time for thought behind closed doors. I don’t know, Ray, do you ever feel like you’re being watched, in a minor way, with some of the stuff that you’ve been working on over the years?
Oh, for many years I was sure of it with that guy whose wife said he worked in surveillance. No matter where I went he would contact me. I would have neglected to stay in touch with him but he always knew what I was doing. For example, he wasn’t there when Blake College was shut down, but he knew exactly what had happened and where I’d gone. I asked him how he knew and he said he was in—I think it was—Switzerland when he “read it in an international newspaper.”
55:24 Wow. You seem so insightful to me. Information is inspiring. And you’re helping reshape and rework how people feel about Biology and health. And just being able to think for ourselves. Do you ever worry that someone’s gonna shut it down, or say enough is enough?
Oh, years ago I stopped doing personal consultations because the medical people were sending spies. Ridiculous people who didn’t even know how to dress appropriately. They looked like they were going to a doctor’s office.
56:13 Wow. Do you know who David Icke is?
Oh yeah.
David Icke did an interview, with Brian Rose (I think is his name). He has a podcast called London real in the UK. And he’s been gaining popularity over the years—
Yeah, I think I saw that very one on the Coronavirus?
Yeah, yeah. So the people at YouTube, the people at LinkedIn, the people at Facebook, the people at all the major places where this could be listed or put on a platform: they banned it. They took it down. They completely obliterated this video. So Brian Rose is going to put out a Part Three with David Icke. He’s hoping more people than in the history of any internet thing will watch it. But he had to build his own platform so that it could be shown.
I think it was probably Part One that I saw. But I watched the whole thing and I didn’t see anything that I didn’t agree with. He has the ability to be so far outside the system that he doesn’t swallow any of the propaganda.
That’s cool to know, and hear your thoughts on that. I guess the Part Three is going to be in eight days or something. So I’m curious to see how that goes. And how long it stays on the internet.
57:54 So, Ray, this idea that learning is important to life. I want to bring it back here. I just think it’s the whole reason we’re doing this and I want to come back to it. The idea that learning is an inherent desire. An inherent part of life. A part of evolution. A part of development. Can you talk a little bit about that? Where does that come from? It doesn’t have to be taught. You don’t have to force someone to learn, right? Where does learning come from?
Oh it’s something that starts with amoebas, maybe—probably—bacteria. Everything is organized and cognitive all the way down to the molecular level. As soon as it’s definable as life cognition is there. Few biologists are actually able to feel empathy towards a situation, an organism. But those who look with empathy, with a Carl Rogers attitude towards life, listening rather than imposing belief, see that cognition and learning are the basic reflex of life.
Where there’s the ability to metabolize and move there is understanding and adaptation. You wouldn’t have life without adaptation, and there’s always intelligence involved in adapting. Every day you wake up you’re going to have to adapt to a whole new world. Everything has changed while you were asleep. And the process of breathing, of your heart beating, it all is cognitive. And so you have to listen to yourself while listening to things you’re understanding. Otherwise you will mistake what’s happening in yourself for what exists in the world.
Schooling consists largely in training people to get a little model of the world in themselves, which they can then impose for the rest of their lives as they interact with the world. But if you listen to the events in your own body, meaning that you’re having empathy with what you’re looking at, then you can see how much of it is you’re history. And then you can see what is actually the history of the message or the behaviour in front of you.
01:01:34 Wow, that’s powerful. A lot of people think rocks and pieces of plastic, for example, are inanimate. But even rocks and plastic are sensitive and can listen and can learn, right?
Yeah. That little Encyclopedia I mentioned before; when I was seven or eight I started looking at that because the school books weren’t at all interesting. I found J.C. Bose described in the Encyclopedia and got interested in his experiments. He called one of his devices a “Crescometer”. He could amplify the growth of a, seemingly inert, vegetable or plant ten thousand times or so, so that you could see it projected on a screen as it grew. He would provide stimulus of various sorts, and show that the plant was reacting with emotion in response. He said that everything shows emotion—or a “reaction”—to stimulation, even minerals.
And at that time [there was] a physicist Michael Polanyi who later became a philosopher. I don’t think he knew he was following in Bose's footsteps. Bose said that all substances displayed the same properties that life does, just in a different form. Including learning and fatigue and so on. Polanyi demonstrated that over and over through the 1920s working with metal crystals and metallurgy.
#23
Which 1920s work By Michael Polanyi demonstrated metal crystals have life-like properties?
That the mechanistic idea of inert so-called material substance was very far off of reality. It wasn’t a matter of atom-to-atom organization. Energy was spread out over a wide area. And the structure went below the surface.
That explains why aeroplanes have to be finely polished if they’re going to be supersonic. Because the stresses of a microscopic scratch on the surface will spread the influence over a great range. Polanyi demonstrated that working the surface of a crystal changed the whole depths properties of resistance and memory of the crystal.
Oh my gosh. Wow. I wonder sometimes how more people don’t hear these things or learn these things. It seems so many of us ravage the Earth as if we came into it, instead of that we came out of it. From it. And it’s organic just like us. It literally is us in some way. It’s crazy to me to think that so many people blindly steal from that which gives us our life.
Yeah. I think of it as kind of a heresy against life that came to be known as as Mechanistic Materialist Science: the official science philosophy of the 20th century.
01:06:40 You had a line once that I really liked. You said “the attempt to steer a person can make it hard for them to move, because it inactivates their own guidance system.” I feel the natural learning process at work in all of life. The best thing you can do is get out of the way. Do you agree with that?
Oh yeah. The person has everything needed except the answer to each question as it comes up.
I like that. My experience in recent years, Ray—because I’ve been doing this teaching profession for some years now too—and it seems, more and more, like students are just becoming better and better capable of just regurgitating information. But farther and farther from being able to look at unique situations in many different ways. I like this idea that really what we what to do is create a situation where we are looking for real problems and then coming up with questions that really matter.
01:08:04 In your eyes, what are the real problems? And what are some questions that really matter?
Oh understanding what a cell is, what an organism is, and what substance is, and what mind is. The biggest questions are still the most needing clear understanding: What causes sickness and ageing?
At the root of these questions are a deeper exploration of life that will move us into a different way of being, you think?
Yeah. If the present project of the ruling class goes ahead, basically everyone is a mechanical deadness. Dead inside. Because they only have the role set for them by the outside system. If we all start living fully, and realizing that the future is only ours to be lived and created, it should have nothing at all to do with the plans made in Davos Editors note: Davos is the Swiss town which hosts the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum. or Washington or wherever.
01:09:53 Yeah. Yeah. Wherever did that idea of competition come from? Of being needed in life? Or in other words, does competition hurt or does it help in the learning process? What are your thoughts on that?
Oh. It helps in the mechanistic system. The theory of learning for a computer, originally was that you punch holes in a card and limit the possibilities by the holes you punch. When you are very full of holes you have defined its behaviour most concretely. But the actual way an organism works is that each time it achieves a new synthesis it becomes a new question-asker. So the hole situation changes every time you learn something. And so you’re a bigger and better question-asker every time you assimilate the answer to a question or a problem. Whereas the training doctrine is that you’ve become more adept at following instructions.
Is opposition a different thing than competition? That’s a different thing entirely, right? Is opposition good versus competition?
It depends on what you’re opposing. If you’re opposing imposition that’s very constructive.
What about collaboration? Where does that work into it? Sounds like collaboration would just be a part of everything we’re talking about?
Everything is collaborative.
01:12:04 So Ray. I’d love to go back a step in an individuals life, if you don’t mind. I’m really loving this. If we were gonna go to a young person’s life. What does an ideal day of learning—or of life—look like for a 3 to 11 year old in your eyes?
Oh. It’s necessary to have organisms around. The more organisms the better as long as they aren’t dangerous. And that includes people. There should be people talking. That was one of the things that I thought was most important as a little kid: watching adults talk and listening to them. Not having anything to say myself but just listening to what they were doing. Meanwhile I would be attending to what whatever might be the concern a more private way.
For example, watching how the hairs on my arm made rainbows as they turned in light and starting to wonder how light works. [Wondering] what light is. And then [wondering] how does the eye perceive it. The total openness, hearing what’s going on in the world. Not approving it or disapproving it especially, just knowing that it’s happening: having the undefined world all around you. Watching how flies wash their face, for example.
That’s really cool. So this is like Science beginning it’s life in you, right?
Yeah, my first little experiments, I think I was about a year old or so, watching, when I cried, how the water in my eyes affected the image. Refracting the light. Changing the color and distorting the image.
01:15:15 Wow. So, Ray, what is Science on a fundamental level? Away from the business of science, can you, in a simple way, sum up “what is Science?”
It’s open learning. The idea that learning isn’t finished. You’re always wanting to check it against reality and reality is always changing. And so it’s always giving you opportunities for changing your mind.
So truly a never-ending process?
Yeah, yeah. That’s where Science and Education are the same thing, really.
Wow that’s really cool. I love how you talked about a community of organisms and not necessarily “people”. But all of life is important. It reminds me of the expression “it takes a village.” Practically speaking it does take a village, right?
Oh yeah. Flies and snails and plants and everything included.
01:16:37 That’s really cool. Aside from that village of organisms, if you were going to make available a library, or an atelier, a kind of workshop or learning space for a young learner, would you have anything in there? Could you talk about what you might have in that workshop or what kind of books you would put in there?
I think two or three various kinds of Encyclopedia would be good. Once you learn the alphabet it’s really nice to get an idea or a question and look out at the world and see what you think about it, and then see what you can find other people have thought about it, looking up ideas in the encyclopedia.
01:17:35 Do you think there’s anything online? I know with technology now we can do that so easily. Do you think there’s anything that’s trustworthy or any kind of way we can use online in the trustworthy way in that regard?
Not really. Not trustworthy for sure! You have to know that Intelligence organizations devote a great amount of energy to Wikipedia, for example.
01:18:02 What are some good hardcopy Encyclopedia or books? Would you recommend any?
Oh. After the old Funk & Wagnalls Editors note: Funk & Wagnalls first published it’s encyclopedia in 1912. that we had at home I’ve always used the Britannica’s. I like to have the 1910 or 1911 edition, or the 1930s and 1950s editions because the 1960-something edition was dumbed down. Editors note: The 14th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica was the last published before William Benton took over in 1943.
Okay. Do they still make the Encyclopedia Britannica, do you know?
Yeah but I haven’t looked at them since I saw how they’d damaged the 1960s new editions. You can find the old ones at used book stores very often.
01:19:01 What are some other sources of information you recommend? Where can we go for information that’s more “what is”, verses what’s being taught.
Oh, if you’re near a good library—the libraries have pretty well been weeded out and censored—but you can still often find things that the censors missed.
It’s about reading as much as you can and learning to sift through it yourself? Learning to trust your own guidance system and make critical decisions about what you’re taking in?
Yeah. And it has to be a library where you can actually go look at the shelves of books. Not have to write down what you want the librarian to bring you.
01:20:07 Got it. Okay. Ray, what about nature? How can nature—being outside—play a vital role? Or does it play a vital role?
Yeah. Ordinary natural things as they occur—even at the age of three or four—you’re generalizing and making philosophical inferences from everything you see around you. It can be dust on old leaves as much as nice running rivers and mountains and such. But just watching what happens by itself is so complex that you, in perceiving it, you have to interpret it. And if you don’t have someone telling you how to perceive it so you can make it useful, then your childish brain just naturally tends to get a philosophical, general approach to it.
That’s really cool. And I like how you said it doesn’t matter where it is. It could be anywhere. It doesn’t have to be some River in a grove of Redwoods. It could literally just be out in your backyard, right?
Right! Backyard nature.
Ray, Thoreau once wrote “the primal act of mobility connects us with our essential wildness, and brings us to a spring of spiritual vitality that would otherwise be methodically dried out by our sedentary civilization.” And I contrast this with the classroom. Most classrooms are in four walls. Some of them don’t even have windows. And you’re just stuck in these desks. And it really befuddles me that kids are asked to sit at a desk for 60 minutes and listen to someone lecture. Aristotle, allegedly, had the habit of strolling while giving lectures.
01:22:43 Do you think the wandering, or strolling, or just getting out for a walk every day, is important?
Yeah. If you can’t get up and walk around every time you feel like it you’re a prisoner. It damages your brain as well as your body. Sitting for, whatever, six hours a day in classrooms. Doing that for years. It’s horrible for the bodily health as well as the brain and it’s health.
So it goes right along with the dogmatic forcing of ideas into young people’s minds. It applies perfectly with that, sounds like.
01:23:35 Speaking of the prisons that you mentioned, 75% of UK students spend less time outdoors than prison inmates. I can imagine that in the U.S. that number is exceeded or at least matched.
Yeah. Like the Superintendent of Public Instruction who said “education doesn’t have anything to do with what students know.” It’s the obedience that is the essence of education according to the understanding of the people who control it.
Yeah. And din’t Ivan Illich have a lot to say about that? He has an interesting quote. It’s related to medicine but I think it’s really all institutions. He says “Modern medicine’s a negation of health. It is not organized to serve human health but only itself.” Which reminds me of Education as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.
01:24:47 So, Ray, do you think a more self-directed educational experience for more people could eventually flip the industry of medicine and medical culture on it’s head? And Educational culture?
I think a very important place to start is totally revising Medical School. When I first taught Endocrinology I think it was at the Naturopathic School in Portland. They were just trying to get going. And they accepted people who were interested in becoming Naturopaths. One of my students was a 30 something year old taxi driver. She was from Seattle and she had to have a living map of the city alive in her awareness. She could take that mentality and understand the body and the Hormones and the Nutrients in a way that a taxi driver’s much better at then someone who has got A’s from Yale, for example.
When I went back to teach single lectures about, I guess, eight years later or so, when the school was successful, they were admitting only, basically, straight-A students from the best colleges. And those students were just about the most horrible class I ever had. What they wanted was me to give them a recipe. They thought that medicine consisted in learning recipes for treating diseases.
Wow. And that’s just not how the organism works in various contexts, right?
Yeah. And that’s why medicine is killing people. The official studies show medical accidents killing something between 220,000 per year and 440,000 per year, not counting hospital infections of about a 100,000 per year. Just those numbers rank medical accidents with Cancer and Heart Disease for number of people dying per year. But that’s accidents from a medical perspective. One Hospital [in Germany] ventilating people was having 60% mortality from the Coronavirus. A hospital nearby that stopped that conventional use of ventilators had a 0% mortality. So you can put down a very large portion of the coronavirus deaths to medical stupidity not accidents. They’re doing what they were taught to do properly and thus killing people. When you add that to the recognized medical actions, medicine is something like Genocide or World War.
01:28:39 That’s insane. I recently was hearing some commentary on heart stroke. Heart disease patients have been not coming in recently because they’re afraid to go into an environment where all these people are going in with the COVID symptoms. And this commentary was saying they think a lot of people are dying at home, alone, because they’re not getting the medical attention. But I’m wondering if the reverse of that is also true. That some people are not going in and actually it’s saving their lives not getting medical attention, in some way.
Yeah. From that observation in Germany of the two hospitals with different approaches, that was Luciano Gattinoni who mentioned that. If that sort of thing is true then you’re saving your life by lightening the hospital.
01:29:45 You know that idea that habits take a while to cement themselves: human behaviour is hard to change. I wonder if some things as basic as not wanting to go to the hospital will last in people? Or do you think people will just go right back to their ways, as before?
I think that would be nice to hope for. That people realize they can get by without doing their stupid job.
01:30:26 Yeah. I wonder if some are actually realising that they can make ends meet [without their old jobs]. It seems like a lot of people have been so brainwashed. And rely on that check.
A very big part of the work done in the U.S. currently is just, basically, to make the person stay in the office 40 hours a week full-time. When I did nutrition counselling for a while, 40, 50 years ago I found that that was what the employer had in mind. Even when there was no work to be done you were supposed to be there from 9AM to 5PM or whatever.
And it’s stops people from thinking about what they’re really interested in. Then when they go home they’re so tired that we just turn on the old TV. It just eliminates the time for thinking.
It kind of reminds me of a Noam Chomsky line. I think you said once that, similarly, students who go to college and then pay these massive debt they put themselves through school and they’re unlikely to think about changing society. Because when they get trapped in these systems of debt they can’t afford, anymore, the time to think.
01:32:01 Ray. I had a question that’s related to Murray Bookchin have you—
Yeah I read several of his pamphlets and little things in the 70s, I guess it was.
Okay. He talks about a more decentralized, almost anarchist, society similar to Ivan Illich, correct?
Yeah. That kind of decentralization, I think, is the only way a large population can make a society work without destroying people’s health and mentality. A consumer co-op, for example, should be an organizing principle. If consumers demand that products change, that can be a big pressure. And then the people can have various kinds of cooperative ways of meeting those consumer demands.
Interesting. So I haven’t read a lot of his stuff but I want to read more of it. Sounds really interesting.
01:33:28 A friend of mine posed a really good question. You might have answered it in what you just said. But, because a lot of our scientific development seems very equipment intensive, only large organizations with a lot of funding can actually do these experiments. I think you even mentioned in one of your articles once, that in the 1960s there was a government lab with equipment that no one else had. And therefore it couldn’t be replicated. How—
Yeah. A great opportunity for fraud.
Yeah. So, in a decentralized society without large organizations and huge funding sources, will equipment related science go away? Or is it gonna be like what you said, that those demands are gonna be met by the cooperative interests?
One of the reasons I went to graduate school for a PhD in Biology was that I had many experiments in mind that required equipment of various sorts. When I got there I would just wander around the building peeking in labs and seeing what people were doing. At that time people weren’t so secretive and protective of what they were doing. And I got to use all kinds of different lab equipment, just as a visitor.
Interesting. But now do you think the same opportunities would be had by people?
No, I’ve heard people express attitudes that you have to be qualified to have access to certain instruments.
01:35:40 Did you read the book Seeing Red?
No, I have not.
An astronomer observed galaxies that were receding, approaching the speed of light, connected with a string of matter to a galaxy that wasn’t receding at the speed of light. He collected pictures of a lot of those. And people started realizing that was a challenge to the basic dogma about the redshift representing expansion of the universe. If you see galaxies that are connected with a continuous stream of matter but with different redshifts, that makes it impossible to explain the redshift in the conventional way. So what they did was not let him use the big telescopes any more.
01:36:52 Oh my gosh. That’s part of my friend’s question. If we get to a more decentralized situation and if a small number of very scientifically inquisitive people want to do Science, is it gonna recreate this small clique of Scientific elites? Where you have to be one of those people to study it?
Take away the control of the corporations who are keeping, basically, a culture of secrecy. [Prevent] classified research done at universities, for example. Transcriber’s note: It’s unclear whether Ray means corporate secrecy prevents classified research, or banning classified research would end corporate secrecy. But twenty years ago they were, basically, selling the universities to the corporations for funding. Having a lot of the research tied in to the military and corporation-private property idea of knowledge. That whole concept of knowledge is incompatible with knowledge. So I think changing the ownership of the instruments, making them public like they used to be still in 1970.
If the overall values of the decentralized community are that of collaboration and togetherness that probably won’t happen? Is what you’re saying?
Yeah.
01:38:42 Interesting. Do you think that education will rise in a decentralized environment?
You know the No Child Left Behind thing where they created standardized exams?
Yep. Yeah.
Blake College accepted the pre-existing Graduate Record Exams and didn’t offer any organized survey of knowledge. But just by being themselves they, for some reason, we’re able to, in very short lengths of time, master the conventionally accepted knowledge. And I think if you ask “why” they’re in school, then you say “well they have to know these things.” Then when you’re ready to go to Medical School, for example, say “here’s the test that you have to take.” For whatever you do, driving a taxi, and reading the encyclopedia, or whatever, that’s adequate preparation. So you can save thousands of hours of sitting in classrooms.
The University of Chicago under Robert Hutchins for 1929 for 10 or 12 years that was their policy. Some people could get their bachelor’s degree in half a year or so.
I mean it makes so much sense in terms of the humanitarian side of it and being a happy person and living a satisfied life. It makes so much sense. Not creating this apathetic situation for years and years and years, just so that people can become a “worker bee” in the system.
And not only for gaining entrance to the Medical School or Law School or whatever, Graduate School. If you say a Doctor or a Lawyer can’t practice unless they know certain things, well, there must be an exam for telling whether someone knows those things or not. [So long as there’s an exam, you don’t need a] Medical School even, or Law School. Each person has their own way of learning those things. Let them practice.
So in a decentralized state these professions will look totally different, yeah?
Yeah. Milton Friedman himself, the Chicago School conservative Economist, he described licensing as something destroying civilization.
01:42:26 Wow. Ray, did 20th century Soviet-bloc countries experiment with some of these things? And can we learn anything from that?
Geez. So are there other examples of things we can learn from what they were doing?
Oh. Yeah. A lot of good Science was really developing in those early years with between wars. Psychology, Philosophy, Education ideas, learning ideas, therapeutic ideas.
Yeah.
01:43:54 Okay awesome. How can someone get a book like that or any of the books that you’ve written?
Okay, so someone could just email you at raypeatsnewsletter@gmail.com and they can ask those kinds of questions, “How to sign up to your newsletter”, “How to get copies of some of the books that you’ve written”?
Yeah.
01:44:26 Okay great. Are you familiar with Charlotte Iserbyt? Editor’s note: Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt wrote The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America in 1999. Have you ever heard of her?
I don’t recognize it.
Okay. I guess she did some critique on the foundational works of modern education. But it really just piggybacks on the stuff that you’ve said and I wanted to hear if you had any more thoughts to it. She said the foundational works of modern education were very open in their design end-goal worldwide scientific socialism, where all decisions are in fact to be made by the experts and not by the citizens. A thinking, questioning citizen may be desirable for Republic, but it is very dangerous to the scientific dictatorship. I think scientific dictatorship is the opposite of what would be good according to Illich's stuff and Bookchin's idea of decentralization, right?
Starting about 1950 there were people subsidized by the CIA basically laying out the blueprint for exactly that.
Ray, this has been amazing. A couple things before we close. I’m just so grateful for your time. I think a lot of people are really going to love this. This is really a treat for me too.
There’s so many people that are bad-mouthing homeschooling or just doing something different as far as education. Some of the common arguments I’ve heard are: “kids will miss out on routine, discipline, socialisation”. These are all things you’ve already touched on.
01:46:21 But do you have anything else to add to that when someone critiques an experimental education?
Well, the state is making itself involved even in home education to a horrible extent.
I know, yeah. Yeah I know, they in some ways determine what curriculum they think needs to be covered.
Exactly. That should be totally held off for some kind of a big exam day 15 years later.
Yeah. So what can we do? I mean legally speaking is there any way to do an education that’s actually free. In some states I know they’ll put parents in jail if their kids don’t go to school!
Yeah. The same thing if you don’t take your kids to the doctor for vaccination they can put you in jail for child abuse.
Just amazing. So what can we do?
Resist.
Yeah. Until they take us away, right?
Yeah. Invent new ways of resisting and enlightening the oppressors.
Yeah play the game in subversive ways, right?
Yeah, some of the oppressors are open to change from learning.
01:47:49 Well that’s hopeful. Ray, I’d like to close on an Einstein quote. I’ve seen it on the internet attached to an image and I want to throw this out there.
But the Einstein quote is “that everybody is a genius. That if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live it’s whole life believing it is stupid.” It reminds me of that story you told me earlier about the kid who came into your college, who by all the testing standards showed that he was basically dumb. When given the chance to craft an education and a way of thinking that was his own he revealed that he was nothing of the sort
And so, this image is all the animals lined up. They have a bird, and a monkey, and an elephant, and a fish, and a seal, and a dog. And they’re all lined up in front of a table. There’s a judge behind the table and the judge says “for a fair selection everybody has to take the same exam. Please climb that tree over there.” To me that just epitomizes this strange and backwards world we live in and some of the opportunity we have to oppose that.
Yeah. If you want to do something else there should be a different exam for it.
Exactly. Well I guess cheers to continuing to try to come up with ways to craft a meaningful existence, right?
Yep.
Awesome. Well, Ray, thank you so much for your time and to the other person in the house. I’m sure it’s a lot to let you do these interviews so I appreciate her giving you the time to do this. And thanks for letting us get into your life for a little bit. It’s really awesome.
Okay. Thank you.
You’re welcome. My pleasure.