Ancient Texts and The Big Club That You Ain’t In
There’s an old George Carlin quote that I think about from time to time. I saw the man himself perform this monolog live, several times. A small line from the speech has become a bit of a meme now that Carlin has passed: “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” It’s a slogan for anyone who rightly recognizes that a small cabal of obscenely wealthy elites control the world to the detriment of the vast majority of humanity. Today, I’d like to look at the quote in the larger context of the entire monolog. Apologies for a very long quotation. I’ve split it into paragraphs to make it a bit more readable, but to get the real poetry of it (and I’m not joking about that) you should watch the man himself.
But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything.
They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking.
They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, ’cause they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.
You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people…white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on…good honest hard-working people continue…these are people of modest means…continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you at all…at all…at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.
-George Carlin
I basically agree with everything George Carlin says in this monolog. Education sucks and it will never get better. It will never get better because it is not in the interests of the ruling class. This may sound like a conspiracy theory, but it is a fact. Any aspect of the curriculum that encourages children to seriously consider that the status quo may be wrong, or that it may not serve their generation as it has served their parents’ will immediately become the target of partisan attacks. These attacks are targeted, vicious, and increasing in number. This is of course necessary to prevent anti-establishment, even revolutionary ideologies from taking root as the wealth inequality and environmental catastrophe reach their respective transparently obvious tipping points. Education must therefore be stripped to the bare minimum of what a child needs to function in society to avoid nurturing any problematic tendencies. The grand hope of AI is that the bare minimum of what a child needs to know will become effectively nothing, and that public education and its inherent risks to the wealthy can be done away with entirely.
I’m in a somewhat unique position among people in the “book” space in that I absolutely loathed my compulsory education. Admittedly, I wasn’t in the best headspace during my teen years, but I got very little out of public education. I cheated my way through junior high and high school. English class was such a waste of time that it didn’t even require cheating. In fact, I wrote papers for other students for money. A casual reader of this blog may have noticed, that I’m blessed with an innate talent for writing passable 10-page papers on just about anything whether I’ve done the reading or not. I love the sound of my keyboard clacking.
It wasn’t until college that I finally stopped my slacking and started actually engaging with my education. College is one of those increasingly obscure and inaccessible institutions where you might actually find something of value. It was there that I first encountered a concept that changed my outlook on a number of things: The Bible as Literature.
I was raised in a version of Christianity that very much believed in the supernatural. Recent news stories of our Secretary of Defense informing troops that they are on a divine mission come as no surprise to me. I was told as a child that it was necessary for Israel to control the region and to build The Third Temple to usher in the return of Christ and the final days. Members of my family still caution me that any dissenting views on Israel may place me on the wrong side of judgement day. This magical aspect of Christianity with its prophecies and apocalyptic visions was fascinating to me. I was very interested in esoteric Christian belief long before I had any idea what that meant. As I got older my interest became more a matter of intellectual curiosity than faith. Ironically, it was studying the bible that weakened and ultimately broke my faith. This was in the early 2000’s and the internet, where I spent most of my time, was filled with edgy atheists dunking on Christians. In time, even my intellectual interest in the bible would wane, partially do to these thorough debunks. (In a bizarre twist, these same communities would later give the MAGA movement much of its appeal to internet weirdos.)
So often did I see the absurdity of The Bible used as a cudgel to bludgeon Christian apologists that it never occurred to me that any non-believer would (or could) find literary value in The Bible. It was a staunchly atheist lesbian who first taught me how the books of the bible were written, edited, and compiled into a loosely agreed upon canon. She was interested in the bible as a cultural artifact, not as the literal divine word of God. With the additional context of history, language, text preservation, and manuscript cross referencing this book finally started to make sense to me. I finally understood what we were doing here, and how it was intended to be used by a priestly caste that schooled in all of this context. I also started to understand how atheists and Christians would often manage to talk right past one another in debates.
This new context didn’t restore my faith of course, far from it. I have no more respect for an elite cabal of priests who use their secret (or at the very least obscure) knowledge to manipulate peasants than I have for the cabal of ultra-wealthy elites who does the same thing today. At the same time, I realized that the solution wasn’t as simple as just putting a native-language translation of the bible into the hands of the common man so that they could read and understand for themselves. Even if the words are translated into accessible, modern language, the authors’ intended meanings will be lost on an audience in 2026 who has not had additional instruction on the historical and cultural contexts in which these authors existed. This is a powerful example of Carlin’s larger point about education.
For many (but certainly not all) Christians, The Bible is a sacred tome containing the literal Word of God. If they understand that it was composed by multiple authors over millennia, they believe that each author was divinely inspired. A human held the pen, but God wrote the words. The more one learns about The Bible, though, the more one realizes that this is not what its authors or its original audience thought. This explains many of the contradictions inherent in The Bible. When we separate the data from the dogma, to borrow a phrase from biblical scholar Dan McClellan, we start to see the bible for what it is: a collection of texts that profoundly influenced mainstream Christian thought at the time when they were compiled. They were not originally thought to be written by God, but rather, that somewhere within them was contained the true wisdom of God or at least the wisdom of his chosen prophets and people.
When ancient texts are prepared for publication it is often not just a simple matter of translating the ancient manuscript. There are often many manuscripts from many different times and locations, and they often differ…sometimes greatly…in terms of completeness and in the text itself. Generally, older is considered to be more authentic, but there are exceptions. But in the case of the bible there are numerous examples of choices that must be made when selecting which version of a manuscript to translate.
Prior to the printing press, books needed to be copied by hand. In proper conditions parchment, papyrus, vellum This was a labor-intensive and error prone process. Even the most disciplined scribes make mistakes. Sometimes the scribe or the individual commissioning the copy intentionally alter the texts to suit their own agendas or pet theories. Then there’s the cost of writing down any material in the first place. Ink and “paper” were not cheap. In much of the world, texts were written on animal skins. There were many competing uses for that animal skin of much more practical and immediate importance.
Any ancient text that makes it to the modern age comes with a history that is at least as interesting as the text itself. These histories are not usually taught in high school English classes. They’re complicated and time consuming, but studying them reveals the very important role that human hands play in the preservation of information. As a society, we understand that history is written by victors and that texts can be biased. Still, I think that most of us fail to understand just how much we take for granted, and how many ways there are for information to be manipulated. A simple translation choice can turn a benign adjective into a demonic entity (see, Belial).
For better or worse, we are ruled by people who turn to ancient books of wisdom to justify their beliefs and their policies. Understanding the words that these books contain is only half the battle. We must also understand what these books are and what they were intended to be and how they have been manipulated by human hands over a period of millennia. If History provides the answer to “what happened?” then studying these texts is often the key to understanding “why it happened that way.”
It would be a step in the right direction for educators to take their units on The Illiad, The Odyssey, and Beowulf as an opportunity to discuss the complicated history of preserving, translating, and disseminating the ancient stories and belief systems that shape our society. A common criticism students have had against curriculum’s since the dawn of time is “when am I going to use this?” Teaching context as well as content provides an easy answer to these questions. A greater understanding of influential stories and ideas, along with how those stories and ideas can be manipulated will make the student into an individual capable of recognizing attempts at manipulation and resisting them.
Public schools should really only have one goal in my opinion. Students must learn how to learn. They must learn how to reason, how to discern high quality information from low quality information, how to verify the information they receive, and ultimately how apply that information to their benefit. Of course, this means that students must develop basic literacy and numeracy. But even that is in service of the broader goal of learning how to learn. Literacy and numeracy is how a student accesses information, but it does not teach them how to use information. It doesn’t teach them how to reason.
But f course that’s Carlin’s point. Politicians are able to hide behind education funding precisely because they can pour an endless amount of money into ensuring that the kids can solve harder math problems and read larger words, while simultaneously politicizing and fighting any attempt to teach them how to use those abilities to advocate for and to improve their position in society. That portion of education will be left up to the parents, privileging those students belonging to families for whom the system already works.
The manipulation of religion and culture to extract wealth from the most vulnerable and funnel it to the upper echelons of society will remain hidden in plain sight. The evidence will be easily available for anyone who knows where to look for it. The manipulators will maintain that all one has to do is seek knowledge and they shall find it. There’s no conspiracy to keep America’s children stupid. There are so many things for children to learn, we just don’t have time to teach them to question those things more deeply. That would enter into the realm of philosophy, and it may threaten the careful indoctrination parents are attempting to instill in their children. Maybe they can learn it in college if their parents can afford it? We can teach The Odyssey, but we can’t teach what The Odyssey really means.
