``It All Begins with a Teacher.''

``It all begins with a teacher.''

The line that I saw stencilled on the back of the internal shuttle bus that triggered an innate rage that prompted this entire tirade that you're about to read.

The words ``honourable'' and ``noble'' floated in my head. That somehow, everything in life is due to the nobleness of the teacher who taught, the ones who made a difference in the lives of many so that they too can be productive members of society.

Sounds wonderful, right? Except it deceptively downplays several important realities.

Firstly, I just finished reading 《巨婴国》, and as a result, I have a slightly stronger sensitivity to actions that feed into the narcissistic self-importance construct. Call it recency bias.

Secondly, not to disparage teaching as a whole, but there isn't truly any specifically ``honourable'' or ``noble'' jobs out there, for the simple reason that society as a whole is a game where all who are a part of it, play their individual parts to uphold it as a whole. Calling any particular job ``essential'' or even with weasel words like ``noble'' dampens this team-play aspect of society that I suspect is an important contribution towards the increased number of class warfare activities that we are observing. The irony is that we all knew and deeply understood this from the very tender years of our lives, what with all the silly (in the eyes of an adult) declarations of children wanting to be soldiers, trashmen, postmen, and the like, only to be ``corrected'' in our thinking later on.

And finally, while the sentiment of teaching being noble in context is implied, many who teach do so for the same reasons why we do whatever we do for our day job---to get paid to pay the bills as part of being in a society. Thus, inasmuch as we have folks who do the [bare] minimum to fulfil their job's requirements, the vast majority of teachers are just doing the bare minimum to be considered as doing their job of teaching. This means less of that emotional labour of being inspirational, or to act as a surrogate parent when the ``true'' parents of the child have failed in their basic duty of care and values inculcation. Therefore, to market that ``nobility'' of being a teacher, is false advertising at best, and a fig leaf to cover for abuse practices of squeezing additional [emotional] labour without the commensurate compensation, a most disingenuous thinking.

``But MT, why so butt-hurt over a single line of advertising on a role that you don't even play a part in?''

It's less about that ``single line of advertising'' but the realisation that we are all proponents of various propaganda without our own realisation, spreading misinformation and disinformation without a care. As I age out, I seem to be gaining an increased awareness of the kinds of narratives that we are taking for granted and spreading as through they were fact, without ever stopping to question ourselves about the veracity, and definitely without considering if the buck should stop with us. Many have said that the rise of the globally accessible Internet would herald a new age of enlightenment, where anyone can learn anything with a much lower barrier of entry as compared to before.

But reality has proven otherwise, and my cynical self is feeling exasperated at the ever-record-breaking levels of stupidity that are occurring. How much of it is just an exposure the so-called background rate of stupidity, and how much of it is due to deliberate agent provocateurs, no one truly knows.

What I do know is that we are truly fucked in this timeline.