You may have noticed a recurring theme on Do the Math that involves prisons. Inspired by Ishmael, I compare modernity to a prison whose bars few inmates can even detect: prison life is all they’ve ever known. The brain creates a prison that for many becomes more real than the universe itself. The last post cast Richard Feynman as a prisoner of modernity. If challenged about the hypocrisy of eviscerating modernity while enjoying a house, car, grocery store, and internet I tend to point out that a prisoner can offer perhaps the most legitimate complaints about prison or even the entire penal concept. Moreover, if I tried to live an authentic ecological life in my location, I would soon end up in an actual prison after violating any number of property rights and other laws that function to keep people in the modernity pen. Likewise, we know what happens to people who take direct action to disable infrastructures and institutions of modernity, right?

I did, at least, manage to break free from one major harness of modernity. I left my academic job at age 53. In doing so, I took a 75% paycut and effectively said no-thank-you to perhaps millions of dollars of cumulative income. Granted, this is different from a 100% paycut. But I hope it can be appreciated as a substantial step away from the treadmill, imposing a much simpler and lower-impact lifestyle. I don’t pretend to be living in right relationship to the Community of Life, but neither do I feel that I, personally, must accomplish the full journey if I can use my time to help many others start the journey themselves. It will take generations—facilitated by the inevitable dynamic duo of death and replacement. Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day.

Academia is its own sort of prison, which is what we’ll examine here. You’ve no doubt heard much ballyhoo about academic freedom, which sounds great. But maybe that’s akin to a prisoner being allowed unsupervised time in the prison library on account of good behavior. The ostensible freedom has both soft and hard limits.

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