Battleangel | Personal

One busy weekend researching the popular culture of one of the major universities in Sweden (and Europe).
Sounds pretentious doesn’t it? Well that is exactly what I was gonna say about the city and the experience itself.

Not even universities are free of cliches. In this case the grand motto is: “Att tänka fritt är stort, att tänka rätt är större”.
The translation is tricky of course. Words always have various meanings and even I don’t know the “true” purpose of the phrase nor do I know the intentions of the author.
But roughly translated and based on the current cultural hegemony it reads something like: “Freedom of thought is glorious, but there is nothing greater than … groupthink / accepted / proper thinking”.

One would think that what they mean to say is that the scientific way of thinking is greater than anything else. But that is not what the motto says. Rather, it passes judgement and implies a social normative way of looking at the world. All of this is of course a tad ironic when you observe student / university culture anno 2003. There is a duality here but for the most part they all fall to some sort of conformity. Pity their souls.

I’m gonna save the remainder of this subject for a rainy day or a future essay. So, maybe it’s a good thing to finish with a little passing of judgement of my own.

If this is the best that academic life has to offer then god help us all. Really. As I’ve pointed out many times in the past, purely academic achievements are no good. Universities serve many purposes of which one is socialization. This degeneration of certain moral standards could doom or society in the long run. The best thing to hope for is that globalization conforms student culture to a point where foreign universities experience the same rate of social decay. And I’m pretty sure they do. The world is so very predictable these days.

Could be either a curse or a blessing for rigid people like myself who have lost much of the ability of social and cultural mobility and all of a sudden find themselves in the outworlds of the new society. Only time will tell.