Suspicious: The Hermeneutic of Paranoia
Religions, mythologies, ontologies, aesthetic movements, revolutions social or scientific, philosophical arguments and political institutions are all central for the program I teach in at Grenfell Campus (Interdisciplinary Humanities). These are what we study and we study them on the assumption (which I have rarely known to be defeated) that they repay close and serious examination. This means we proceed on the opposite basis to what many people seem to think is an educated attitude to the world. I refer here to what I have previously written about the hermeneutic of paranoia. This is the popular attitude that the purpose of education is not appreciation of the complexity of human culture but rather the rote ‘debunking’ of ‘claims’. For this view culture is all ‘bullshit’. Education, as we practice it, is ‘indoctrination’ or ‘brainwashing’. In the popular mind this attitude is what is thought of as ‘bold’ or ‘iconoclastic’ and is the attitude of ‘free-thinkers’. This is because cultu