Matt MacDonald

There's something about my name that I've never particularly liked. If you grew up in rural Nova Scotia (a.k.a. "New Scotland") as I did, it's all too easy to get lost in the crowd of the countless other Matt MacDonalds who live here. I've always felt that my uniqueness as an individual has somehow been
overshadowed the ordinariness of my name. Along with some of the other formative experiences I've had in my life, I think that this feeling of anonymity within a name has played a decisive role in leading me to the sorts of interests and ideas that I'll be discussing on this blog.

In 1999, at the age of 16, I "rose out" of the compulsory state-run school system and began to pursue my own educational path as an "unschooler" for what would have been grades 11 and 12. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of unschooling, it's basically a radical form of self-directed homeschooling in which the student pursues their own interests with the aid of adult facilitators and community mentors who direct them to relevant resources and hands-on experiential learning opportunities. (For more info, see "Unschooling Undefined," by Eric Anderson and The Teenage Liberation Handbook, by Grace Llewellyn, the latter of which was particularly influential on me back in the day.)

Around this same time, I first became involved with activism, which began by starting a regional chapter of a group called, Youth for Environmental Action along with some of my former schoolmates. As many may recall, 1999 was also the year of the now-infamous "Battle of Seattle" during which anti-globalization protesters successfully shut down the 3rd Annual Ministerial Conference of The World Trade Organization in Seattle, Washington. I can still recall watching the media coverage of the protests and thinking to myself, "I need to be involved in this!" Two years later, in April 2001, I attended the demonstrations against the Free Trade Area of The Americas (FTAA) in Quebec City with a group of students from Saint Francis Xavier University. It was estimated that roughly 30,000 people were in attendance.

This was also the in-road into my long and fairly convoluted university education. After getting back to Nova Scotia from Quebec City, I managed to get accepted into St. FX despite not having an official high school diploma. I accomplished this based on an impromptu interview with the Dean of Arts and a portfolio of writing I'd done while unschooling. Since that time, I've attended numerous post-secondary institutions, including the University of King's College and the Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) where I obtained a cooking certificate that I'll never use. However, the vast majority
of my university experience was spent at Mount Saint Vincent University where I majored in Cultural Studies for nearly 3 years.

While my BA remains incomplete for personal reasons, my passion for my field of study has never waned and, in the spirit of genuine unschooling, I am constantly reading, researching, and educating myself in my spare time simply because it's what I love. My sociopolitical views have changed significantly since the early days of my involvement with the anti-globalization movement; and, while I'm no longer involved in social activism of any kind, I have some ideas to share that I think would be of interest to activists and academics alike. Some people may appreciate what I have to say, some may find it offensive or incendiary, and some may not even care. Wherever you fall along that continuum, I'm not looking to convert you or to win any arguments. I'm just looking to add my perspective to ongoing
discourses that I feel have become too narrow and too predictable.

The postmodern condition is a reality whether we like it or not. Rigid ideological doctrines are dying and claims of objective truth are being reduced to blatant parodies of themselves. False binaries like "the Individual vs. the Collective," "the Left vs. the Right," "the People vs. the Elite," "the
Macro vs the Micro," "the Self vs. the Other" are all untenable under contemporary conditions. While the so-called "right wing," with their reactionary efforts to either preserve the status-quo or turn the clocks back to the 1950s, represent the low-hanging fruit of contemporary sociopolitical debate, the left, with its fixation on "models" and "frameworks" for solving all of the world's injustices, has proven itself equally incapable of adapting to these changing circumstances.

It's time to leave the comfort of fixed ideologies behind and venture into the unknown -- an unknown where even the concept of the Self is open to interpretation.

"They say of God, names name me not. That holds good of me: no concept expresses me, nothing that is designated as my essence exhausts me; they are only names."

- Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own