“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood” – Marie Curie.

Dear Climate Healers,

The Invisible Curriculum of Planet A

Vaclav Havel, writing about life under Czechoslovakian totalitarianism, described how oppressive systems persist not through the overt violence of the state, but through the daily compliance of ordinary people with what everyone knows to be lies. A shopkeeper places a sign in his window

‘Workers of the world, unite!’

He does not believe it, but places the sign anyway because everyone else does, and dissent is costly. The sign is not propaganda so much as ritual, a daily act of self-deception that keeps the whole structure standing.

A Guide to Planet B applies precisely this insight to our own civilizational moment. In the post-war system built around animal husbandry and endless growth, millions of policymakers, institutions, and individuals place their own metaphorical signs in the window every day:

1. ‘Protein is only found in animal foods;’
2. ‘Calcium is only found in dairy foods;’
3. ‘Human well-being requires endless economic growth;’
4. ‘Consumption and commodification are necessary for social cohesion;’
5. ‘Humans are separate from Nature and exceptional;’
6. ‘Fossil fuels are the leading cause of ecological breakdown;’ and
7. ‘Technology will solve all environmental constraints.’

These are all, as any cursory rational examination would reveal, lies. Not everyone believes them, but nearly everyone enacts them, and in enacting them, keeps the Planet A Operating System that generates the PolyCrisis running.

This chronicle is about how these myths are transmitted through Institutional MisEducation, the formal apparatus of schools, universities, curricula, and credentialing systems. These myths are not peripheral misunderstandings easily corrected by better teaching. They are fundamental to the Operating System of our civilization and function as invisible controllers that shape what can be thought, what counts as realistic, and what alternatives are literally unimaginable within their framework.

A myth is not simply a falsehood. It is a narrative that contains an element of truth but functions as an unconscious controller that bounds the solution space before any problem-solving even begins.

The Systemic Architecture of Myth Transmission

There is a fundamental distinction between myths and axioms that is crucial for understanding what Institutional MisEducation actually does.

Myths operate unconsciously. You do not choose to believe them, but absorb them through culture, education, media, and institutions until they become “common sense,” not a perspective on reality, but reality itself.

Axioms, by contrast, are explicitly chosen, consciously held principles designed to produce specific outcomes. They are testable, falsifiable, and editable. They are systems engineering tools, not dogma.

The genius of myths is their invisibility. We do not argue against them because we do not see them. The educational institution’s deepest function is to install myths invisibly, to present the contestable as settled, the historically specific as natural, the ideologically constructed as simply the way things are. Eight mechanisms do most of this work:

• Disciplinary fragmentation: economics is taught without ecology, biology without ethics, medicine without nutrition, and engineering without planetary limits. The systemic view that would reveal the myths’ connections to each other and to the PolyCrisis cannot form in a mind educated in sealed compartments.
• Epistemological hierarchy: treating quantitative, reductionist, and market-compatible knowledge as more prestigious than qualitative, relational, and ecological knowledge.
• Normalization of baselines: the economy as currently structured is presented as ‘the economy,’ as though no other form of economic organization has existed or could exist. Animal agriculture appears as a feature of reality, not a recent historical choice with specific and well-documented consequences.
• Curricular omission: planetary boundaries, the full accounting of animal agriculture’s impacts, the science of animal sentience, the history of indigenous sustainable civilizations, are all systematically absent from mainstream curricula.
• Authority structures: the pedagogy of transmission from expert to novice teaches, through its own form, that knowledge is a possession of institutions rather than a capacity of communities and living systems.
• Temporal truncation: teaching symptom management within time horizons calibrated to electoral cycles and quarterly reports, in a shrunken context of very recent history, disregarding natural cycles that operate on very different time scales.
• Hidden Curricula of Cafeteria Food Culture: the normalization of animal food primacy in cafeterias despite the profligate resource usage for producing it propagates the protein and calcium myths.
• Industry Capture: corporate sponsorship and alumni donations that constrain what new questions can be asked, let alone answered.

These mechanisms operate not through conspiracy but through institutional momentum. The teacher propagates the myths because their teacher propagated them. The textbook embeds the myths because the discipline’s founders embedded them. The curriculum committee maintains the myths because the funding structure rewards continuity. The result is a civilizational reproduction machine, fashioning each generation of graduates as competent inhabitants of Planet A, and constitutively unable to perceive its foundational myths.

How the Myths Work Together: A System of Thought Prisons

A Guide to Planet B shows how the foundational myths of Planet A form a mutually reinforcing system. They are not seven independent errors but a coherent, interlocking worldview that keeps Planet A functioning.

The Growth myth requires the Consumption myth, since the economy must grow and therefore we must consume more. The Consumption myth requires the Commodification myth, since growth through consumption requires that everything be purchasable. The Commodification myth enables the Separation myth, since treating Nature as natural capital and animals as “livestock” requires the prior belief that they exist for human use. The Separation myth validates the Protein and Calcium myths, since if animals are resources, they can be framed as nutritional necessities. The Protein and Calcium myths sustain the Mis-specified Responsibility myth, since if animal products are biologically necessary, the system producing them cannot be the primary cause of ecological breakdown. And the Mis-specified Responsibility myth enables the Technology myth, since if the problem is mainly energy, and if we need animal products anyway, then we need better farming methods and cleaner energy, not system transformation. The Technology myth, in turn, feeds back into the Growth myth as innovation enables more growth, and more growth funds more innovation. The circle closes.

These myths work together to make animal agriculture seem simultaneously economically necessary (growth, consumption), personally necessary (protein, calcium), natural and normal (separation from Nature), someone else’s responsibility (mis-specified responsibility), and fixable through better methods (technological solutions). Together, they create a prison of thought in which Planet A seems not like a choice, but reality itself.

Institutional MisEducation does not merely transmit each myth in isolation. It transmits the system. Economics education, medical education, engineering education, nutrition education, environmental science and STEM prestige all reinforce each other, because they are all products of the same civilizational Operating System, built to reproduce it in each generation of graduates.

This is why incremental curriculum reform, such as adding a sustainability module here or a unit on animal welfare there, consistently fails to shift the underlying orientation. You cannot debug the myths one at a time while leaving the system that generates them intact. The myths work together to make every proposed alternative seem unrealistic, dangerous, naïve, or outside the scope of consideration.

In the next chronicle, we will explore how the Planet B axioms debunk and undo these myths and we will suggest non-coercive steps that all educational institutions could take to cease miseducating their students.

With much love,