The Patronizer

The glorious teachers have no use for creatures who knows how to play with the Gods.

AURORA

The Patronizers, or the “glorious teachers”(not actual teachers, most people who occupy the actual role do no such thing and are brilliant in their job), are people who educate you in a scenario where they are not qualified or required to do so. They treat you in a way that is apparently kind and helpful, but their real goal is to make you feel inferior, whether consciously or unconsciously.

A good example of this would be stakeholders in result-based education that is common in most middle schools and high schools in Asian countries. Students strive to reach perfection to get an A to ensure a good future, and we rank our success based on other people’s failures. Certain stakeholders that benefits(whether physically or psychologically or otherwise) would be the Patronizer in this scenario.

The Patronizers are basically anti-villains in my opinion, because they cause bad things to happen with the intention of doing good. Some of them think they are heroes.

The Pin and the Book: Mythology, Religion, and Belief

The Pin: Something I bought from a little shop. It had a Backwards Beast from Norse Mythology.

The Book: The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis from the Chronicles of Narnia.

I have always loved the very old tales of ancient Gods, and what’s intriguing about them is that those Gods are created by humans for humans to worship. I’m interested in the process of the creator of God creating God and why they did it.

(I’m talking from the angle of an atheist, and I totally agree with anyone who is religious because believing in something when the world seems chaotic and filled with uncertainties to you is like lighting a candleflame in the dark.)

An example of this would be what Puddleglum said in the Silver Chair, Chronicles of Narnia. What he said was basically that he would believe in Aslan and the world he came from even if he’s in a world where neither is real.

I found out later that Puddleglum’s words were the “Ontological Proof” in a form suitable for kids.

An example of Ontological Proof from from Ontological Proofs Today by Miroslaw Szatkowski.

So basically I found out that I started to believe in God(or the definition of God) through reading a children’s tale.

That would never have happened if I were to come across a statement that said: “God is real” or “God must exist” in any type of religion because I was raised as an atheist. But I did through reading a story. So I guess that I like to believe in things that I know is fake/artificial because I know I’m outside the 4th Wall and I have an understanding of how it is created, and therefore I feel safe.

I like watching people’s behaviors when they really believe in something. Not just typical religion, any myth that people cling onto. I think I’m trying to step out of my own life and see what I had originally believed in, and if I didn’t believe in them at that time, then what would I have done differently.

A kinda point-blank reason why I like mythology is its otherworldliness. Because ancient myths are very old tales, so they are chronologically far away.

I came to London for a similar reason, because London is a place I’ve only seen in movies, so arriving here does have an “Alice-in-Wonderland” quality from the start. I’m hoping, when I go back to China, I’ll be able to experience this “otherworldliness” from the other side, so I can really delve into the 5000 years of stories that China possesses. （This does makes me rather escapist.)

The Trial Frame

We edit reality to form a story and then mistake that story for the truth.

Derren Brown

When we go buy new glasses we use a trial frame first to find the perfect lense for each individual. I’d like to think that each individual has a metaphorical lense behind their eyes that is linked to their experience and memory that changes their view of the outside world.

So different people might see multiple different Londons for instance, and because of this filter, the outside world we see becomes relatively artificial and each of us would see a fictional version of London in which every individual is the co-writer or co-creator.

Sight and sound are the 2 main senses of how we detect the world. That is why we feel immersed when we watch movies because it occupies one or two of our main senses for a while, and therefore takes over our reality for a few hours.

That being said, what we think of as the “real world” could just be a really realistic video game that sends images or sounds through our main senses, so in this hypothesis, the world is fictional as well, and God does exist because they’re the creator of this world(and they know the ending of everybody’s story).

Concluding the above, I’m updating the definition of my box to the relation between fiction and reality, how fiction impacts reality and how reality could be the foundation of fiction.

Intervention

To define my research topic as the relation between fiction and reality would be a bit abstract, so I tried to lower the topic to a down-to-earth level using an intervention. This intervention mostly focuses on one character, reflecting how fictional characters and their stories impact people’s emotions in real life.

My intervention is a comic strip focusing on a character from the performing arts called ‘Steve’, who fears going onstage because he is afraid of the impact of receiving “likes”.

Steve represents students from general high schools who are shy and might not engage. I was aiming to raise the emotions in my stakeholders by telling a story they might relate to. According to the survey I posted online, people seem to feel very different things while reading the same story (which is definitely expected), from sadness to nonchalant to reasonably happy.

I’ve put posters throughout campus but most of them have been taken down. So I added the interactive poster to my showcase. The online and offline comments are still slowly filling up. I’m glad people relate to Steve and I aim to extend this method of storytelling.

Online Survey： https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdl2smIeQzrmG3AgamdTA60QnhE1eUMlfBuGFpYFw7c0RTWlg/viewform?usp=sf_link

Diary of Uncertainties

My question had changed rather drastically during classes and I’m putting the most recent version down here.

How can individuality within creative students be preserved in a result-based education environment using fictional storytelling?

My passion lies on fiction and mythology and I have personal roots(psychologically and emotionally) in result-based education. The former I aim to form a career(though in what version I’m unsure yet), the latter I aim to understand objectively and create change(because it needs to be done).

As I stated before, result-based education is directly linked to the Patronizer in my Box. The Patronizer is based on a real story, not fiction. But gather similar people up and they form a stereotype or character. We are pushed to form a win/lose meter that is quite popular in Chinese society (another peer in class noted that our society was a somewhat capitalistic communism)(I don’t really know how to react to that except to agree with it).

During tutorials we came to a conclusion that our parents (or the older generation of our families) are the fundamental reason why we took our individual routes, whether it be an act of rebellion or an act of conforming. If society were a maze then our parents would be the ones to push us (using whatever type of method) to one specific route. Without them as a crucial part of the environment we are in, we probably would have picked a very different route.

That being said, I actually wouldn’t have brought a maze at all (for the Box of Uncertainties presentation) not only because that wasn’t my initial metaphor for the box, but it would not necessarily make sense to me at the time when I organized the 4 objects as parallel. But it’s an accurate (though excruciatingly sad in my personal opinion) metaphor. It reminds me of Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes where the main character as well as the mouse are trapped inside an experiment. (Focusing on Algernon the mouse now because it’s a better metaphor) Algernon has to run the maze in every experiment conducted by lab-coated geniuses. It doesn’t have a choice of doing anything else or to know or understand the actual experiment that was its sole reason of existing. (It’s like Algernon is the fictional character and the scientists the writer.)

I came across a different mouse in a different maze created by Claude Shannon. I agree that Theseus the mouse is a brilliant example because the maze (or our background/environment) plays a much bigger part in shaping our pathways (and therefore shapes our interests, strengths, hobbies, etc) than the individual.

All of this makes me think that we might actually be fictional characters with our plot already written out by some unseen creator. If we left the maze and went to a field, we’d be ultimately freer and our choices more original.

I do agree that compared with a maze, where the path is marked out for you, there are, in a way, more things to do because more things are defined by the maze. In a maze you always know which way is your left and right. But I still maintain that your paths will never be original and created by yourself in a maze. An individual will get recognition for their choice because it is defined by the maze itself, so it is recognized by everybody in the maze, but an individual in the field will get to walk a path of their own that is neither left or right by maze standards. They get to form a brand-new definition of their own. So it basically depends on what the individual chooses, recognition or originality.

(Most people pick recognition because true originality doesn’t really give you any happiness, and recognition does.)

TBC.

References

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Theseus and the Maze: https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/19/138508/mighty-mouse/amp/
Ontological Proofs Today by Miroslaw Szatkowski

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Update 3.10

I reread what I wrote in January and the words to me, while honest, did seem a bit naive.

The definition of the Box feels wrong, because the Link between Fiction and Reality could lead to ANYTHING and ANYWHERE, and that explained why my initial intervention in the pop-up showcase was weak in collecting research that was logically linked to the topic of my project.

(But I really enjoyed the feedback of everybody who wrote a message to Steve. I was still guessing the handwriting of each person several weeks later and there is still a poster left hanging at the corner of the canteen. I smile every time I go past it.)