BONEDIGGRE BYTE-SIZE [01] — BOKTAI: THE SUN IS IN YOUR HAND (2003, GBA, Konami Computer Entertainment Japan)

A population trained early and well in philosophical inquiry would not simply "think better", but also begin to ask whether the terms under which it lives are negotiable. This would be a liability from the standpoint of systemic stability.

I believe this is why the absence of philosophy is not just curricular but embedded in how society's problems are framed. Questions are typically presented as technical, managerial, or psychological rather than conceptual. One is invited to optimize within a structure, not to interrogate the structure itself, which is the difference between asking how to be more productive and asking why productivity should function as a measure of worth in the first place. The former question scales while the latter one metastasizes.

Even the much-celebrated emphasis on “critical thinking” is, in practice, carefully domesticated. Students are taught to evaluate arguments, spot fallacies, weigh evidence, which are very admirable and... quite safe. What they are not systematically encouraged to do is turn that critical apparatus against the background assumptions that make their evaluative frameworks possible. In other words, they are trained to be competent within an academic game, but not to question the game itself.

Obviously, a society cannot function if every individual is perpetually renegotiating their most basic commitments. At some point, one must act, cooperate, trust, or defer to others, but philosophy introduces friction into these processes. Not necessarily paralysis, but a drag coefficient on certainty. A small cadre of people engaging in that work can be tolerated, even valorized as “intellectuals”; however, a generalization of that disposition would be… less convenient.

So British soldiers and missionaries started getting malaria in India. The traditional preventative/cure for malaria before the advent of effective antiparasitics was quinine.

In order to get soldiers to drink it, tonic water became the palatable way to consume quinine. They mixed it with gin, which has its own history of being connected to the Anglo-Dutch wars, and added lime as the common preventative for scurvy. So it became a colonial cure-all and popular cocktail among a certain class at the same time.