Besiege Walled Cities

"Okay," I said as I pointed to the whiteboard. "Start throwing ideas at me. Let's get the obvious ones out of the way first."

"Well, the most obvious plan of attack is to simply publish an academic paper."

"Good," I said as I scribbled his suggestion on the board. "That's a terrible idea, but good."

"It's obvious," Zac replied, "but why is it so terrible?"

"It's terrible precisely because it is obvious." I grabbed The Art Of War from Zac's hands and flipped open to a highlighted page. "The worst strategy of all is to besiege walled cities. Writing an academic paper is playing squarely by their rules. It's like walking up to the fortress walls in the clear light of day and having a thousand archers shoot me down.

Firstly, I'm at a massive disadvantage because I have no experience writing an academic paper. In theory, I can submit a paper to most journals without any formal academic qualifications. In practice, the paper needs to abide by stringent rules that one only learns within the academic system. It's a whole culture that I'm not a part of — yet if I don't follow their rules, I'm not getting published. I personally have zero desire to learn the ins and outs of word counts and formatting requirements and all the restrictive regulations and wanky vocabulary of academic protocol that will dull my ability to communicate effectively. It all sounds rather boring.

Secondly, even if I could submit a paper, it still has to pass through peer review before being taken seriously. Other academics have to deem my paper worthy of publishing. This may work relatively well for vetting incremental improvements on existing knowledge, but it's also an excellent way of shutting down counterintuitive or threatening ideas before they have the chance to develop and blossom. It's like walking inside the fortress walls and yelling, 'The King is an imposter!' What do you think is going to happen? Your work is being reviewed by the King's most ardent supporters. Their research money is tied up in projects that support the King. If I threaten the King, I threaten their livelihood and their pride. They'll have to admit they were wrong, and no one likes doing that. As much as scientists want to believe they purely work in pursuit of the truth, they don't. They're selfish humans, like you and I. They are flawed and subject to cognitive bias, which is further amplified by systemic forces. As an aside, I’d also love to know who peer-reviewed King Materialism before letting him into the castle. There is literally no evidence to support materialism and plenty of evidence that falsifies it.

But let's say the paper gets approved and published. Then what? Well, it will probably be ignored. A paper's legitimacy and popularity increase when others cite it, use it in their own work, and teach it. Again, this is like walking into the town square with a book about Queen Consciousness and expecting King Materialism's soldiers to take the time to read it, build upon it and teach it to their children. Their children already have perfectly good systems in place for learning about King Materialism. Being the first to deviate from the norm requires courage, and we've already established how little of that there is in our society these days.

Furthermore, the likelihood of someone reading my paper and taking the time to fully understand it is low. The crux of the idea is incredibly simple, but it is also highly counterintuitive. If I sum it up in a sentence or a paragraph, people think I'm a 'woo woo' crackpot. But if I explain it all properly, it will take hours and hours of reading. We've built a busy society focused on incremental gains, not revolutionary, chaotic, and time-consuming breakthroughs. Everyone wants the answer straight away. That's why we love snippets on Twitter, and listicles on Buzzfeed, and soundbites on the news, and one-sentence answers in political debates. If I want the world to understand a breathtakingly simple concept that generates highly complex emergent patterns, I need to hold their attention for an extended period of time. An academic paper will be seen by very few people and will put everyone to sleep before they even get to the punchline.

So then one might say, 'Just publish your work in a book! That way, you'll be free from the academic rules and word count requirements.' But that's not entirely true. If I want the book published by a reputable publisher that's respected by the academic community, I'll once again be subject to word counts and academic rules. And that's if I could get a publishing deal, which I couldn't with zero credentials to my name.

So then what? 'Just self-publish!' one might say. Ah, but that won't do either. If you self-publish your theory and have no credibility to fall back on, you'll earn the label 'crackpot' without anyone ever bothering to listen to what you have to say. The implication is simple: serious work gets published by serious academic publishers. Only delusional, renegade cranks who complain about the close-mindedness of the academic system would ever self-publish. God forbid someone outside the academic system has the audacity to think for themselves but doesn't want to put the distribution of their novel perspective in the hands of another rule-following, neat, and orderly capitalistic institution.

And while I'm on the topic, it's important to point out how fucked up the academic publishing system is, anyway. Governments fund the research published in these commercial journals, but scientists write the articles, review, and edit them for free. The journals take all that free labor, turn around, and charge huge amounts of money to access the research that the public paid for with their taxes.

My work has been funded purely from my own pocket — from my own blood, sweat, and fucking tears. I haven't been paid a cent for the thousands of hours I've spent trying to solve this riddle. And yet, if I want my ideas taken seriously, I'm expected to hand over my life's work to a journal so they can profit off it? Fuck no. It's exploitation in broad daylight. Yet, everyone puts up with it because academics are funded, rewarded, and promoted based on the impact of the journals in which they publish. They need to read those journals, and they need to submit their papers to them.

And lastly, King Materialism's supporters are scientists, not artists. They're not creatives. They're generally terrible at seeing counterintuitive things, which is why we're in this mess in the first place. David Bohm was a very credible physicist of the previous century. When he asserted that the observer is the observed, his ideas didn't get a foothold. Same with Einstein and relativity, which the community initially thought was ridiculous.

Howard Aiken once said, 'Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.' Charles Bukowski articulated a similar sentiment in his poetry..."

Not wanting solitude
Not understanding solitude
They will attempt to destroy anything
That differs from their own
Not being able to create art
They will not understand art
They will consider their failure as creators
Only as a failure of the world

"So," I continued, "in conclusion, writing an academic paper is the worst possible idea because there is no leverage in it. It's like a small, unarmed David walking up to Goliath to engage in combat on the behemoth's terms. I'll get my head chopped off before the battle even begins."

"Fair enough," Zac shrugged.