Yeah, one of my fond dreams from my youth was of _The Glass Bead Game_ and the possibility that such a system could exist, but these days, no one seems to have heard of Hesse.
Required reading when I was in my early twenties, now 50 years ago. I don't think I could stand it now - I found the prose style somewhat irritating back then (possibly some crappy translations are partially to blame).
I read Glass Bead much later in life, and had a completely different interpretation of the novel than anything I've read online. (I too have never met anyone who's read more than Siddhartha)
Isn't the whole novel a joke on the formal yet perhaps empty intellectualism of the developing modern world? The character latches onto the formal structures of the elaborate hierarchy, climbs the ladder and reaches its zenith. All the while being the expert in a game that seems like the sort of game two hallucinating LLMs would invent as a game/language to understand humans.
Spoiler.
Having reached the highest in his order, he begins to see the emptiness of his order and realises that teaching the (elite) youth from the real world is the grandest aspiration one can have, and promptly dies after jumping in a lake and having a heart attack, before even giving one formal lesson to the youth.
The first time I read The Glass Bead Game, the ending (of the first bit) made me laugh for about three minutes straight.
My impression after reading most of the book was that Knecht's life was pretty good. I couldn't shake the feeling that, whether or not the Game was worth dedicating so many lives to, the act of dedication was giving the players a great many benefits. I knew there were a bunch of pages remaining, and I expected the book to make some kind of statement of similarity between dedication to pointless academia vs tangible life.
And then Hesse killed him off by drowning him in a pond, and followed it up with a bunch of doubly fictional essays.
I've always viewed it as a tragedy and commentary on how intellectual ivory towers are meaningless unless they are opened up and afford interaction with the greater world, and that the rôle of education is to ensure that each student becomes the best possible version of themselves in body, and intellect, and spirit.
That said, it was the "Glass Bead Game" which captured my cupidity.
