Do Nothing and Fix Everything
by Maha Altuwaijri
Paul Kjellberg can often be seen walking around the campus of Whittier College with his dog, Rusty. His attire is pretty laid back, a pair of jeans and a solid-colored t-shirt under his plaid button-up shirt. Just like his fashion sense, he has a rather laid-back personality. “You can call me Paul” he announced to our freshman writing class in 2018.
It turned out to be more of a discussion-based philosophy class than a writing class and everyone seemed to prefer it that way. He never lectured in that class. Instead, we all sat at a long table facing each other as though it was a conference meeting. He always listened intently to what his students said, focusing so intensely it felt as though he was analyzing the words as they were spoken.
If you were participating in the discussion by putting in your two cents merely for the participation credits, as I did, I assure you, you wouldn’t get away with it. He would follow up every response a student had with, “and…, go on,” or, “…how so?” He would ask a question and get a response only to ask another question about the response. His goal wasn’t to make things difficult, but rather, he genuinely wanted to hear what students had to say, he wanted us to develop our thoughts and truly learn, not just pass a class.
As a matter of fact, he strongly dislikes grades, so much so that he developed a point system in which students’ grades are completely in their hands. One day in class, he asked us why we were listening to him. Baffled by the question, the class responded by saying they listened because he was the teacher and they were paying him to share his knowledge.
“Why do you believe what I have to say?” he further inquired. “Why do you trust me?”
“Because you have a PhD” one student responded.
“Credentials, you went to Stanford” another student added.
“You guys think I’m qualified to teach you simply because I attended an Ivy League, but let me tell you something, Ivy Leagues are a scam,” he said.
The more I engaged with him, the sooner I realized that this isn’t the only unconventional opinion he has.
“If you had the entire world’s attention for one minute what would you say?” I asked him, expecting him to share a profound lesson he had learned or, at the very least, a quote that resonated with him.
“Nothing. Nothing, nothing,” he responded, shaking his head as we sat outside of Chillin’, a popular boba joint in Uptown Whittier.
His dog, Rusty, was sitting by his side and in front of him on the table, a simple black coffee. “I completely lost faith in the ability of saying anything as a method of enlightening people,” he explained. “The answers we are looking for are not in a library, because if they were, we would already have them, but they’re in the silence. So, listening is more important to us than speaking at this point.”
“If you had the entire world’s attention for one minute, what would you say?”
Kjellberg is appalled that society and academics are more concerned with writing and speaking rather than reading and listening. As a teacher, he despises lecturing because he knows students wouldn’t truly learn that way. Occasionally, he holds Quaker meetings in his classes wherein the entire class would sit in a circle in silence. No one would speak unless they had a profound or important message to share. After anyone spoke, we’d sit in silence again before another person could speak to allow the message time to sink in and be analyzed.
Growing up, he didn’t have an interest in a particular career. His father thought the best career option was the one that would make the most money. He was a neurosurgeon and advised Kjellberg to become a lawyer because he believed lawyers make more money than doctors. Following his father’s advice, Kjellberg worked at a law firm only to find out that pursuit was not for him. Wondering whether he was fighting for the right side or the wrong side of the case troubled him. “I didn’t wanna be a lawyer anymore,” he said. “I wanted to do something good but the problem was I wasn’t sure what was good.”
In an attempt to figure it out, he studied philosophy and became a professor at Whittier College. Now, he believes his purpose as a teacher isn’t simply to relay information to his students, but, rather, it is to teach people how to read.
“You read like shit, that’s a problem,” he said about the younger generation, “but that’s okay. My generation can’t figure out how to work our phones. So, we share what we know. More and more I see my job as a teacher as sort of like Socrates said, as a midwife. Not so much teaching people but helping students to learn.”
He does takes his career seriously as he is not only responsible for himself but for his students as well. “We are the teachers of this society,” he explained, “and if this society screws up that’s on us.”
“You read like shit, that’s a problem.”
Kjellberg was most troubled by the second Gulf War, and he sees that a changing point in his life. “I lost a lot of faith in a lot of things at that time,” he says, and you can hear it in his voice.
Although he doesn’t consider himself spiritual or religious, Kjellberg is deeply invested in the idea of repentance. He acknowledges that humanity has committed some deeply horrific acts, but he sees the light at the end of the tunnel. “There is forgiveness… but in order to make things better you’ve got to admit that you’ve made a mistake otherwise how can you ever improve?”
Although he has been teaching for quite some time and is now nearing retirement, he doesn’t consider himself particularly successful. He feels as though he hasn’t fulfilled his “doing good” for the world that he escaped a law career for.
As a teacher, one of his goals is to “sell repentance.” He strives to get his students to listen to their conscience, to acknowledge not only the wrongdoing they’ve committed against themselves, but injustices they have done to the environment and humanity on a wide scale, and retract from them in order to rectify the damages. Unfortunately, however, he hasn’t figured out how to do that given that “there is not much on the market in America for repentance.”
When the Gulf War started, Kjellberg withdrew from the American Philosophical Association and stopped listening to music because neither of them addressed or acknowledged America’s wrongdoing. “The most I aspire to at this point is kind of limiting the damage… if I got really good at limiting the damage I would consider that successful.”
Rather than doing things, Kjellberg believes it is wisest to not do anything. Not in the way of throwing in the towel and literally doing nothing, but in the way that a “forest does nothing” he said just before Rusty interrupted, barking in excitement upon seeing another dog passing by.
It’s important to be pissed at yourself first and foremost.
“What does the universe do?” he continued. “Where’s the universe going? The universe isn’t going anywhere to the extent that we think of ourselves as going somewhere, doing something. We are running counter to the nature of existence and that’s gonna have bad consequences.”
We are living human beings, we obviously need to do things like study, go to work, take care of ourselves, etc., but the trick, Kjellberg says, is to do things while also doing nothing. “Walking is the same as constantly falling forward, right?” he explained. “The trick is to fall without losing your balance, to learn how to do things without stopping doing nothing.”
In a world with constant expansion, consumption and development, sustainability tends to lose out. Kjellberg doesn’t think it is in our best interest to keep advancing in technology. He sees nothing wrong with standing pat. “A well-run culture stays where it is.”
In the midst of a chaotic world, a world where success is measured with a number in a bank account, a world where sea levels are rising, and pollution has gotten out of hand, where civilizations fight rather than communicate and people like the Kardashians have more influence on the population than noble people do, simplicity is often forgotten and people like Paul Kjellberg are harder to find.
There are endless problems in our world that demand to be fixed, from social justice issues to climate issues, but rather than doing things and saying things like we always have, maybe it’s time for a different approach, do nothing and stay silent.
“There is a widespread tendency to point fingers at people,” Kjellberg said. “It’s important to be pissed at yourself first and foremost and to be disappointed in yourself first and foremost because you’re the first thing that you can change.”
