Thread by @shengokai

I just woke up after sleeping for eighteen hours. Eighteen hours.

I blame academia. Or, rather, I blame the unique kind of stress/rage my corner of academia generates on a weekly or daily basis.

I mean, I’m just going to say the quiet part out loud here: we can infer the values of an institution, not only from its shape as indicated by the direction of resources, but by the collective pattern of actions that we otherwise call “habits.”

So when I say an institution habitually does not give a flying fuck about the majority of the individuals that make up its body, this is a statement of institutional direction, of institutional habit embodied in action. It is a quality of the institution.

Still further, it is a quality of the institution as environment which renders it inhospitable to some forms of life. So, when institutional habits indicate that your survival means less than its bottom line, and acts accordingly, that creates an inhospitable environment.

And there’s only so long that an organism or collection of organisms can transact with an inhospitable environment before the organism dies, or it changes itself or the environment to enable survival. Survival is a key term here as merely surviving is not growth.

To get back to the point, when institutional habits indicate that the institution does not mean for you and folks like you to survive it, something must change.

And, to be clear, burning an institution to the ground is a form of change.

I mean:

In any case, I don’t have any good advice for you if you find yourself in an environment, an institution, that demonstrates itself consistently hostile to your survival.

Actually, that’s a lie: reject the notion of resilience as a valued quality. Throw that shit out.

Resilience implies that the inhospitable environment is a natural state of things, and not the result of a collection of intentional and ongoing acts. It places the onus on you to change, not the institution.

Fuck that shit.