City of Dinuka
This model can be described as an integrative psychological-philosophical, mythopoetic, symbolic “CBT-adjacent” framework. It uses narrative and archetypal imagery—the Cave, the Mirror Room, the Good Friend, the Triforce, and the City of Dinuka—to externalize and dramatize inner psychological processes. Like CBT, it involves recognizing cognitive distortions, observing conditioned thought patterns, and consciously replacing reactive negativity with more adaptive responses such as compassion and insight. However, it extends beyond standard CBT by incorporating Platonic metaphysics (the Form of the Good), Aristotelian flourishing (eudaimonia), Jungian shadow integration (Grey to White), and virtue ethics (Wisdom, Courage, Power in harmony). The result is not merely a therapeutic technique, but a symbolic model of self-integration in which psychological healing, ethical development, and existential meaning converge into a coherent vision of human flourishing.
(The following is my original, unedited version of the City of Dinuka)
Ascent from the Cave
Long ago, the primordial Dinuka—a nomadic traveller—took shelter in the Caves of Negativity to escape the cyclic storms of samsara.
Within the Cave and the sub-rooms of the Selective School, illuminated only by the shadows of societal constructs, he learned to take comfort in negativity: endlessly assessing, comparing, evaluating, and competing. What began as shelter became conditioning. What felt like protection became imprisonment.
Dinuka became a prisoner in the Cave System—Prisoner 84150986X (VTAC Student no.)—reduced to a number, burdened by a negative self-image, and eventually by mental illness.
Not knowing where to turn, he began reading philosophy. In doing so, he cultivated a philosophical disposition—and from this disposition emerged the Good Friend.
The ‘Good Friend’ was a self-created daimon: a benevolent inner spirit. Eudaimonia—flourishing—means ‘eu’ (good) + ‘daimon’ (spirit) + ‘ia’. Unlike the ‘Fake Friends’ [3] of the societal cave construct, the ‘Good Friend’ was a true Kalyāna-mittatā [1][2]. The ‘Good Friend’ unbound Dinuka and guided him through the shadows. Dinuka became Neo-Dinuka: an escapee of the Cave Matrix.
In the training rooms of the cave system, the ‘Good Friend’ helped Neo-Dinuka loosen his grip on past traumas and painful memories, release aversion and delusion, open the realm of forgiveness, and affirm his own positive qualities. It helped Neo Dinuka untangle the webs of negative thinking and recognize the patterns beneath them. It is here that the Tri-force of Courage emanated from Neo-Dinuka’s heart and became in his possession.
The Mirror Room
At the heart of the Cave lay the Mirror Room [4], a circular chamber of obsidian glass, reflecting Neo-Dinuka in a thousand forms: the Achiever, the Failure, the Philosopher, the Jealous One, the Child, the Superior Thinker—every conditioned self he had ever been.
There, Grey Dinuka waited.
At first, he seemed unassuming—still, passive, almost serene. Neo-Dinuka approached, the ‘Good Friend’ at his side, and felt the weight of anticipation.
Only when he tried to pass through the room did Grey Dinuka transform. Shadows flared, robes expanded, and the calm eyes sharpened to a luminous intensity. Where once he was subtle, now he was a powerful Grey Wizard, conjuring mental spells, illusions, and distortions, and even flipping CBT techniques back onto Neo-Dinuka (i.e. weaponizing unhelpful Rules and Assumptions)
He conjured memories as indictments, reshaped past failures into grand accusations, and cast comparison like lightning. Every spell was drawn from Neo-Dinuka’s own psyche: aversion, shame, fear, and anger.
With each reactive thought, each flicker of aversion, Grey Dinuka grew stronger. From a mild trickster, he became a mage of formidable power.
The Duel of Insight
Neo-Dinuka felt the surge of negative volition—anger, aversion, frustration—but the ‘Good Friend’ whispered:
“See the pattern. Each reaction fuels him. You are not required to win with force.”
Neo-Dinuka paused. He observed. He noticed the illusions for what they were: conjurings, projections of his own conditioned psyche.
Slowly, deliberately, he began to discard aversion and anger, replacing reactive energy with calmness and Metta. Every thought freed from negativity diminished Grey Dinuka’s aura.
At last, Neo-Dinuka understood the secret: to defeat Grey Dinuka, he must project Metta toward him—acknowledge him not as an enemy, but as a fragment of himself shaped by trauma and fear.
With that compassion, he stepped forward and embraced Grey Dinuka.
Grey → White
The embrace was luminous. Grey Dinuka trembled, his robes shifting, his aura softening. Neo-Dinuka spoke silently:
“I see you. I see how hurt and fear shaped you. I honor your struggle, and I will not fight you, but understand you.”
Grey Dinuka’s fear and rigidity melted under the warmth of Metta. His form brightened, softened, and expanded, until he became White Dinuka—healed, integrated, luminous.
White Dinuka did not follow Neo-Dinuka. He remained in the Mirror Room—a sanctuary of reconciled selfhood, free and whole. But he bestowed upon Neo-Dinuka the Tri-force of Power.
Ascent to the Surface
As Neo-Dinuka emerged from the mouth of the Cave, sunlight spilled across the horizon, painting the world in gold and warmth. The oppressive shadows that had bound him for so long receded, and clarity settled like a calm tide in his mind.
The ‘Good Friend’ revealed its final form: radiant and transcendent, Spirit Dinuka soared into the sky as a Raven Patronus. Its feathers shimmered with ethereal light, circling above like a sentinel of higher consciousness. Before departing, it touched Neo-Dinuka with the Tri-force of Wisdom, embedding insight, discernment, and the clarity of ethical alignment deep within him.
Neo-Dinuka felt the culmination of his journey: Courage had already blossomed in the heart of the Cave, facing fear and conditioned negativity; Power had been tempered and integrated in the embrace of Grey into White; and now Wisdom illuminated the path forward, synthesizing all that he had learned into a single, coherent vision of self. In that moment, the complete Triforce resided within him—Courage, Power, and Wisdom aligned in harmony.
From this inner clarity, Neo-Dinuka looked upon the open horizon and envisioned a world made manifest from his integrated psyche. With deliberate intention, he built the City of Dinuka. Its foundations were not stone alone, but the principles of the Triforce:
Ruler Guardians, guided by the Tri-force of Wisdom, would govern with insight and ethical clarity.
Auxiliaries, embodiments of the Tri-force of Courage, would protect and uphold the city’s harmony with disciplined strength.
Producers, nourished by the Tri-force of Power, would generate wealth, status, and energy, their desires directed constructively to sustain and enrich the community.
City of Dinuka
The City of Dinuka rose as a living reflection of Neo-Dinuka’s integrated psyche—a society in which each part fulfilled its role, desires and virtues aligned, and justice flourished. The sun illuminated its towers, casting long shadows of balance and harmony, a visible testament to the journey from the Cave, through insight, courage, and power, to a world shaped by the Form of the Good itself.
The City of Dinuka was more than a settlement of stone and light—it was a mirror of the mind fully integrated. Each district, each guardian and producer, reflected the balance of the Triforce within a single being: wisdom guiding decisions, courage facing challenges, and power harnessed with awareness. In this way, the city embodied sound mental health, psychological stability, and human flourishing. It was a living testament to what occurs when the self is whole, when trauma has been faced and integrated, when desires are understood and tempered, and when insight illuminates every action. Neo-Dinuka had built not just a city, but a psyche in perfect equilibrium, a flourishing human being made manifest in the world.
It was then that Neo-Dinuka became Administrator-Dinuka [06].
Using all the blocks of insight that he had accumulated from his philosophical readings, Administrator-Dinuka began to create the architecture of the City of Dinuka.
(In my original concept as featured in my third ebook ‘Across the Flood: Meditations on Mind Modernity and Samsara’ [07] the idea was to use components of insight to build a spacecraft to cross the flood of Samsara. Here, with the ‘City of Dinuka’ the task changes to building a city; the nature of each building block however remains the same.)
Click here to read some of the building blocks.
Note: As my building blocks are largely Buddhist in nature, the city that Administrator-Dinuka builds has largely Buddhist architecture. But this is not to say that other cities can be different.
At the heart of the megametropolis of the City of Dinuka he built the pyramidal Jedi-Temple to house the city’s Ruler Guardians.
He wrote up the Code of Dinuka [05] for the citizens of the City of Dinuka to live by:
I am more than what the cave society renders me.
I am more than what outside social agents render me.
I have my own unique view of the world outside the social construct.
I am not insane for seeing things differently.
I will let go of past dark memories that were manufactured in the cave.
I do not need to project a fake positive impression onto anyone.
I am more than the impressions and evaluations of me in other people’s minds.
I am a Jedi Knight: I can let go of anger and aversion.
I am just as special and important as everyone else.
I will look past the decrees of competition and scarcity.
I will unlearn the modules of competition.
I unpeg my feelings of brilliance to social modes of verification.
I unpeg the need for social agents to validate and verify me.
Access to the upper levels of the Jedi-Temple was not restricted to the Ruler-Guardians alone. The highest chambers were open to all citizens of the City of Dinuka.
There, a vast public library stood — an ever-expanding archive of philosophy, psychology, science, and contemplative literature. Every citizen could enter freely, study deeply, and expand the architecture of their own mind. Knowledge was not hoarded; it was cultivated collectively.
Adjacent to the library was a great meditation hall — silent, luminous, and open to all. Here, citizens gathered not to compete, but to steady the currents of their own volition.
They were encouraged to cultivate Metta:
May I be happy and content.
May all beings in the universe be happy and content.
May I forgive others for any past transgressions against me.
May others forgive me for any past transgressions I have committed.
As Metta was cultivated throughout the neural citizens of the City, the atmosphere itself began to change. Reactive energies softened. Comparison lost its sharp edge. Aversion dissolved more swiftly.
The City became imbued with a subtle protective force — not through domination, but through shared intentional goodwill.
The final and most difficult cultivation within the City was forgiveness.
Not forgetting.
Not excusing.
But releasing the reactive charge that bound the past to the present.
To extend Metta even toward those perceived to have caused harm was to reclaim one’s own volitional energy.
When forgiveness powered the aura of the City, the floodgates of recovery opened — not because the past was erased, but because it no longer governed the present.
Administrator-Dinuka then built a beautiful Garden of Forgiveness within the City.
At the shrine to his parents, he inscribed:
I forgive my dear, loving parents.
They only wanted what was best for me.
They traversed hardship themselves.
They love me regardless of my lack of formal education.
Even without credibility or status, they continue loving me deeply.
They make sacrifices so that I may be happy.
I feel ultimately blessed to have come to them.
The Garden contained other monuments as well — dedicated to those whom Dinuka forgave. Even where harm had been perceived, each monument reminded the neural citizens of the City to relinquish aversion, anger, and hatred.
For in the City of Dinuka, forgiveness was not weakness.
It was infrastructure.
It was then that Administrator-Dinuka became Jedi-Dinuka.
Dinuka and the Societal Cave System
(Background to The City of Dinuka)
Dinuka was born in Ceylon and migrated to Terra Australis in 1991 with his parents. It was not an easy time to arrive. Australia was in the grip of recession — the one Paul Keating would later describe as “the recession we had to have.”
Despite their education, Prema and Mapa struggled to secure professional employment. Financial strain seeped into the household. Arguments flared, then cooled, then flared again. Dinuka did not understand the words, but he absorbed the tension — the tightness in the air, the urgency beneath his parents’ hopes.
To stabilize their future, they opened a Sri Lankan restaurant. Long hours in the kitchen became the cost of survival. Oil, spice, heat, exhaustion — and always the quiet dream that their only son would transcend this struggle. He would enter a prestigious selective school. He would become what they could not. The sacrifice would be justified.
Dinuka did not disappoint. He passed the entrance examination and was admitted. The trajectory seemed sealed. He completed his VCE with an ENTER of 98.00 and gained admission to Monash University to study Aerospace Engineering and Commerce. The script was unfolding perfectly. Hardship had yielded fruit.
But beneath the surface, something was tightening.
In 2007, during a Buddhist pilgrimage in India, that tightening gave way to fracture.
In the months before the trip, he had begun to feel suffocated by an unspoken cultural script — the quiet current that carried ambitious young migrants toward a narrow ideal of success: doctor, engineer, lawyer. Prestige. Status. Comparison. He noticed it in conversations among families, in the pride that bordered on rivalry, in the subtle measuring of whose child had achieved more.
At a temple courtyard in India, something shifted. Unease turned into certainty. He became convinced that strangers were speaking about him — that their glances concealed threat. The feeling hardened into belief. It did not feel irrational; it felt undeniable.
He told no one.
On returning to Sri Lanka for a brief interim before university resumed, everything appeared normal. Or so it seemed.
During a pilgrimage to Adam's Peak with relatives, the experience returned — intensified. At the summit, he felt certain that strangers intended to grab him and throw him over the edge. Again, he remained silent. Outwardly composed. Inwardly altered.
Something fundamental had distorted.
Back in Australia, his thinking became increasingly abstract. He collected light bulbs obsessively. He spent entire days constructing and soldering electrical circuits, attempting to control laser devices with intricate precision. Patterns seemed everywhere — hidden systems waiting to be decoded.
Then, in early 2008, during his second year at Monash, another rupture occurred — quieter, but more devastating. He could no longer comprehend his lectures. Concepts that once felt effortless became impenetrable. Words dissolved before meaning could form. Weeks passed. The gap widened.
Eventually, he told his parents he was struggling. They took him to a GP. There, for the first time, he admitted that he had been feeling suicidal.
He was referred to a psychiatrist at Monash Medical Centre and subsequently admitted to the Dandenong Acacia Adult Acute Psychiatric Ward. He remained an inpatient for approximately four weeks.
During this time, his parents seemed preoccupied with securing an intermission letter from the university. The possibility of not completing his degree felt inconceivable to them — almost morally transgressive for a respectable Sri Lankan family. The narrative of success had to remain intact.
He was diagnosed with Schizoaffective Disorder — a condition sharing features with schizophrenia, but accompanied by mood disturbance.
Over the next two years he attempted to resume his studies intermittently, but a severe relapse led to readmission, this time to P-Block at Monash Medical Centre. There, his treating team administered fourteen sessions of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Much of what followed exists only in fragments — memory blurred, time indistinct.
Eventually, he was discharged to a step-down Community Care Unit in Doveton, where he lived independently for nearly two years. Afterward, he returned to his parents’ home in Noble Park.
It was during this period of slow reconstruction that something unexpected emerged. He began reading philosophy obsessively, amassing shelves of Penguin Classics. He turned toward meditation — not as a performance of spirituality, but as a method of stabilising the mind that had once fractured.
Reflection on Psychosis
(The purpose of this section is to reframe my psychosis from a tragic outcome to one that saved me deus ex machina style and put me on a new trajectory leading away from my cave system)
The first thing I remember is sitting under a tree within the Mayabodhi Temple complex (in India), staring up at the leaves. Then I remember walking at a different location, encountering their glares (the strangers) and hearing them talk about me. It was quite scary. There I was, dressed in my white clothes for sila, observing them all around me as they began to gossip about me, critiquing my appearance and character. Mum, who was there, attests that this never happened. This was my first ever episode of psychosis. I later learned that the term psychosis relates to loss of grounding with the collective reality. But what is reality, really? A similar experience happened a few weeks later whilst at Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka. I had climbed the ascent and arrived at the summit in the early hours of the morning with my cousin to watch the sunrise, but as I huddled with them it felt very much like many strangers were becoming hostile to me and plotting to kill me by throwing me off the peak. This was my second episode of psychosis.
The two events have similar characteristics; they both involve the hostile convergence of complete strangers onto my person. What are my thoughts on this convergence? Well, I believe in a dream state the subconscious can attack things that are foreign to it; they attack like white blood cells fighting an infection [03]. I believe that both events were hallucinatory projections of my psyche. There was something foreign in my mind: a splinter. I will talk about that later on. Unknownst to the people around me (i.e. parents, family, relatives) when these episodes of psychosis took place I was very troubled and tormented internally. In many respects, the extent of the torment was not fully realizable to myself. On the surface my life seemed perfect or textbook to the stock Sri Lankan arbitrator: I was enrolled in a top university, did really well in the first year, and I had been awarded an academic scholarship. But things were volatile on so many levels. I was in a toxic relationship with my father; whom on a domestic level I felt had emotionally abused and traumatized my mother and I throughout the duration of the time we had run the restaurant, and I felt had no hint of emotional or moral accountability.Also, from observing the behavior of the other Sri Lankans in the tour group, who seemed obsessed with social status and credibility, I was having serious doubts about the trajectory of my own life.
I believe that these factors resulted in my psyche projecting or launching this experience for me as a way to set in motion a subsequent and gradual awakening from a nasty, nightmarish dream [01]. It was as if my mind was highlighting or drawing attention to the fact that a splinter had long existed within it; like, I knew something was troubling with the nature of the world but couldn’t exactly pinpoint it, until now [02]. It may seem very strange that I say that, because in a plain perspective this was the start of my dealings with mental illness, something that completely sabotaged my bright future in society. But I really think that these episodes of psychosis really saved me and placed me a more rewarding path of self discovery where I have had a chance and leisure time to read many philosophy books and meditate; I have been given a very, very rare opportunity to unlearn or unhinge myself from the nature of societal conditioning that I have personally come to recognize as enslaving people in a cycle of thirst and suffering. In many ways, my psyche sabotaging my trajectory was like a deus ex machina moment. I say that because I believe there is always a thread of the divine (embedded in their psyche) in each and every person or being in the constituent cosmos that is capable of interceding on our fates.
Melbourne High School
(This is taken from a chapter of my first book ‘Project Maelstrom: A Recovery from Schizo-Affective Disorder’ and is included here to provide background and context to the role of parents and education systems in ensnaring people within societal constructs and expectations.)
When I was a kid, I dreamed of being a starfighter pilot. Let me try to paint a picture of my childhood. I had two droids: R1-J6 (Mum) and R-9P0 (Dad). R1-J6 was an astromech and R-9P0 was a protocol. They were put to work in the ‘moister-farm’; this is the term I use to describe the Restaurant that my family owned. This lower-middle class dry and desolate desert world was effectively Terra Australis (Australia). By R1-J6 I mean mum. And by R-9P0 I mean dad. Mum was short, a little plump, resourceful, and always emotionally repairing things. Dad was tall, prone to incessant worry and anxiety; plus had a golden vanity. R-9P0 would get animated about many things, but mostly the conditions on Terra Australis which the family had migrated to in 1991. He would sometimes whack R1-J6 on the dome. But this I mean that my mum and dad frequently argued. Just like Luke, in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977), who becomes caught in a somber moment of reflection whilst taking in the binary sunset [00], I pondered my own fate in universe, and also felt my dreams of escaping the lower-middle class to a better life quashed by negative circumstance.
Why do I call my parents droids? Well, because in my mind they had been programmed by the culture that they grew up in. R-9P0 (Dad) was adamant to push me up the social ladder. R1-J6 (Mum) felt the need to project onto me the idea of marrying a nice, homely Sinhalese girl. Both of them were certain that I could achieve this through the tools of a grand Education. And eons before I had even finished grade 2 of primary school it had become their ambitious project that I get admitted into Melbourne High School, or MHS. ‘Gedera’ was the name of my parent’s Sri Lankan restaurant located in East Caulfield, just near the railway station and the precincts of the Monash University campus. The name meant ‘home’ in Sinhalese and was selected by my parents to describe the authentic, homestyle nature of the cuisine they dished up. I had a room at the back with a desk and a bed. The room doubled as a storage room. By storage room, I mean it was also where they kept the bags of onions, drums of cooking oil, buckets of salt and containers of ghee. The ochre, worn out carpet was splattered with stains, and the windows were reinforced with metal security bars. Apart from my desk there was a bed and a small TV. This was to be the cell that spiraled me into madness. But more on that later.
In 2001 I was in year 8 at Salesian College in Chadstone. My first two years of high school had been positive in that I was fitting in, reaping good marks and doing a bunch of extra-curricular activities. But this all changed one afternoon after school. I remember sitting in the back of the restaurant, munching on some Red Rooster, when R-9P0, smiling exuberantly; which was rare; waltzed in with an envelope. I fiddled with it, noticing that it had been addressed to me, but was already opened. Inside it contained a letter of congratulations for being accepted into Melbourne High School. On my first day at MHS I distinctly remember getting off the train at South Yarra and walking up the wrong direction up the platform. When I did eventually find my way to the ‘Castle on the Hill,’ I huddled with everyone else at the front doors. Four years later in November 2005, after completing my VCE, it was through the same doors that I exited. But what exactly do I remember of my time there? I remember going to the AIRTC camps in year 9. I remember doing a film study of Looking for Alibrandi (2000) in year 9 English and ruminating on how Josephine’s crush John Barton commits suicide under the weight of the academic expectation placed on him by society and his father [01]. I remember vomiting in the toilets out of anxiety just before my very first exam. I remember walking past the homeless man outside St Yarra station who was always playing the ukulele every morning before school. I remember the assemblies with the distinguished guests and all the singing. I remember feeling quite jaded and jealous at all the honors bestowed upon fellow students in the form of academic awards and school colors. I remember playing Tetris on my TI-83 calculator. I remember getting detention for failing a Japanese SAC one time. I remember my Units 3/4 Media final-assessment multimedia project being accepted into VCE Top Designs. I remember getting 98.00 for my ENTER Score at the end of it all.
But mostly. I remember wanting to be a pilot. In year 12 I even applied for a pilot scholarship granted by the company Mobile. I got to the final interview stage; I even had a test flight in a light commercial Cessna with an instructor as part of the application process. It was my first time at the hands of a real aircraft, and I even managed to land it at one of the runway strips at Moorabbin Airport via the instructions of the instructor. VCE was a pressure cooker. Everyone told me that was a good thing. It would sharpen my focus, they said. But what no one recognized the very real emotional cost of being put under intense pressure to study under the backdrop of a dysfunctional family life. I was very much troubled inside, and in 2010, in circumstance that I will detail at a later point, I tried to kill myself by swallowing 80 Seroquel tablets. I woke up in a hospital ICU. The thing that hurt the most was overhearing R-9P0, completely denying to a doctor that he had placed any pressure on me. And as R1-J6 sat by my ICU bed working away at repairing by feeding me a packet of Pad Thai she had brought from my favorite restaurant in an effort to cheer me up. I felt like singing the school motto ‘Honor the Work’ [02]. How much I hated that stupid song. Sitting in the ICU I felt like it was all a very twisted joke. In this book I aim to describe my recovery or ascension from the dark pit, or cave of ignorance I had been born a prisoner; one that pertained to the idea of receiving an education simply for the purposes of ladder climbing, and attaining honor, rank and fame.
Academic Award Badges
Ever since final assembly in year 9, when I saw the Academic Award Badges (AABs) being gifted to the most outstanding students in my year level, the idea of achieving one for myself in subsequent years had been seeded into my mind. AABs were awarded based on how the school deemed you ranked against other students based on your final report card. Because of frenzied competition this often required an immaculate flush of A+’s across all of your subjects. By year 10 the culture of competition was beginning to sink deep into my mindset.
Getting those required A+’s became quite an obsessive enterprise; it became very easy to get caught up in the study culture. The ‘good’ poster student bannered up by the school was in perpetual study mode. See, I wanted a badge so badly to wear on my blazer just to demand respect from my peers. It sounds so silly, but badges were a big thing amongst students. If people didn’t think you worthy of a badge they would cut you down to bring this to your attention (kinda like stolen valour).This was a vanity and ego thing; jealousy manifesting in refusing to admit or recognize other people being elevated to you via their badges. Badges weren’t the only distinguishing features of the uniform. You could also be awarded tie colours, or you could also have your blazer pocket embroidered with titles.
I wasn’t always such a jealous person. There was just something toxic about being in that environment; I was like Gollum and the illusive academic award badge was like the ring poisoning my thoughts. So, I ended up studying ridiculously hard for the entirety of my time at Melbourne High. It was like being caught in a spell. I remember in year 11 my Maths Methods teacher (Dr. G, that’s what we called him) was handing back our marked final papers. I ended up receiving two A+’s for my papers. which I was delighted in; I had done very well in all my other subjects that year and an academic award badge seemed a very real possibility. I had only lost a few marks on my A+ maths papers, and another student in the class asked me how I had gone. I communicated my marks, smiling with a sense of achievement.
I had expected him to at least congratulate me, but instead his first reaction was to violently spam the table with his fists because I had beaten him. He had been a recipient of an AAB the year before (which he had been wearing on his blazer at the time). He did congratulate me, but it was rather an afterthought. It did reveal to me the ridiculous extent that we as students were all caught up in a cave system of competition where shadows of concepts like honor (the school’s motto was ‘Honour the Work’) were cast on the classroom walls. Were we much different to the prisoners in the cave, each competing for awards, honours and titles in naming the shadows on the walls. The school would probably argue that uniform distinctions such as badges, tie colors and pocket embroidery are there to celebrate student achievement based on meritocracy, but I think this is put forward as a reason to mask the sense of competition and division it fuels; the system flourishes on division and manufacturing an idea of scarcity in academic achievement. Is this just to mold us for the purpose of the grander mechanism of society?