I'm optimistic on this renaissance you speak of. Scholarly alternatives will arise, or universities will be hollowed out and open to be reclaimed, but, either way, the intelligent, the curious, the creative, and most importantly, the ambitious, will find a way to congregate again. They usually always have, in some shape or form. For the time being though, I feel as if not having the opportunities a good university system can provide is a great loss for younger generation. If there's anything positive to say about my own lackluster time in college, it was that if I miss anything, it was the ambition, and being in an environment of ambitious people (to say nothing of the often stunning architecture and well-kept grounds on many campuses). I know it was most likely because I kept good company of like-minded individuals, but I remember going to bars, pubs, coffee shops, and just shooting the shit on people's balcony or apartments, talking about what we wanted to do in life, how we were going to do it, and solving the world's problems. Everyone had a big dream they were pursuing. You asked anyone where they saw themselves in ten years, and they'd have a lofty answer and a plan to get there. It made it easy to keep your own ambitions high, being around driven people.
Conversely, nothing feels more stagnating and depressing as working in an office environment and asking that same question to people and getting the answer, "Uh... I'll be here, I hope." Truly creative individuals suffer without a place to congregate and rub elbows, I think, and poisoning the well of universities, where so many of them would begin and launch their ambitions, has most likely robbed this country of millions of great minds, lofty dreams, and good people that could have changed this country for the better, given the right opportunity, who now toil at thankless office jobs or admirably do their best to keep a small business afloat in stormy economic waters. That sense of community that college offers is just one of the many things this country is missing in most places, and one of the most gaping vacancies in so many people's lives. I've long suspected one of the reasons so many people remember college so fondly (and get depressed when they leave) is because it's the one time in the average American's life they: A) live in a generally walkable community B) are exposed to a healthy selection of social contacts, potential friends and romantic partners and C) are allowed to pursue their own interests and passions. Obviously this isn't the case for every college or student, but you get the general gist of it. I believe in Joseph Campbell's "Hero of a Thousand Faces", he makes the argument that going off to university is a form of modern coming-of-age ritual in the West, where boys make the transition to manhood. The fact we're losing this, if we haven't already lost it... is it any real wonder why young adults seem like overgrown children? Especially as college holds their hands and treats them like kindergartners shepherded by an overbearing schoolmarm?
The walkable community aspect is something I hadn't considered before, but yes, this is likely huge. Not just the campus environment, but usually the college town as well. NB there are quite a few schools I've seen that are not walkable in the slightest, particularly the newer ones, and I always find them quite barren and depressing.
There's no question that the Zoomers have been robbed, existing as they do during the collapse of one system and before the birth of whatever we replace it with. But then we're all getting screwed by this. These are not good times to enjoy, but harsh times to endure, and ultimately to build. There is a restless energy moving around society these days, a great many of the young, ambitious, and dissatisfied, who have switched their attention from salvaging the old to creating the new. This makes me optimistic for what comes.
I can say that, before I came to where I am now, the town I went to college in was the one place I lived where I could walk to the corner store and back to my place with no trouble, and the environment was just generally nice and pleasant in a way that I didn't experience living in a bigger city. It really does do wonders for the psyche. I see why so many on the left use "walkable cities" as a talking point, they just don't get why it's basically an impossibility in large American cities, or how to achieve it even if it was (i.e. countries like the Netherlands and Japan achieved this without banning cars, which is pretty much the only way the left seems to conceptualize making walkable cities).
To your second point, you're absolutely right. The future will belong to those who show up. It may not be many, but the driven stand to inherit the future in a way the listless, kvetching, and fundamentally uncreative could never do, even if the opportunity was presented to them on a silver platter. Which it has been, but they seem to just knock the plate over and stomp on the contents until it's mush.
I've been quite fortunate in that almost everywhere I've lived has been walkable. But then, I've spent most of my adult life outside North America. I confess that I find American and Canadian cities to be abominations.
I always thought the coming of age ritual was doing something hard that tested you with some or a lot of danger for a couple of years or more. Then you went to college.
About a decade ago I read an article about how the rate of professors in Universities increased over ten years by 50%, but the rate of increase for admin was 287%. Most of those professors of course were low paid adjunct. That was of course before the acceleration of this DIE madness, so we can imagine what the increase of Admin has been since. That required a 15-20% increase in tuition every year for two decades, so at this point you practically have to be dumb to go to college.
I've been telling young people for years, learn a trade. You'll have a family, house, two cars and a boat by the time those lonely fools after college get halfway through paying their debt.
Admin is a metastatic cancer that has consumed the universities utterly. How crazy is it that tuition has gone up by such a spectacular amount, yet the student-teacher ratio remains unchanged?
The adjunct thing infuriates me. A scholar is paid a measly few thousand dollars to teach a course with 100 students, each of whom pays $1000 for the privilege.
And yes: apprenticing to a trade is a much better option for almost everyone.
I befriended a young adjunct prof when I was in my third attempt at a BA (I was straight A's by that point...Kek). He lived in a shittier apartment than I did. He was 35 and had $150,000 of debt. He figured he might never be able to pay it off. He was much the reason I resisted my profs trying to put me on the path to be a doc. Campus was no place to be even then, In 2000, toxic to anyone with sense. I liked him. The admin I have met since? Repulsive, the bulk of them, sucking off the tit.
I went back to school at 38 and got my masters. Worked for 6 years and returned for my PhD, awarded in 2009. I so regret wasting all that time and money, debt I’m still paying off. Academia has been the biggest disappointment and sadness of my life.
You’re absolutely correct. It has diminished my life force and I have to actively work against cynicism. I was fortunate to have a mentor who helped me learn to think critically and that is the one thing I am thankful for. All other experiences have been life sucking.
It is sad. I always wanted to be a professor in humanities. In graduate school I became a TA, which was supposed to mean that I under some professor, but instead I was actually the only one doing the lecture halls on Friday for Sociology 101 and Sociology of Sport. I got paid practically nothing for it...
I was an RA/TA at a public university in Texas in the 1980s. I solo taught classes that no one else on the faculty was either qualified to teach or willing to teach under the conditions imposed (mathematical economics and history of economic thought). At my highest I was being paid $1500 a month.
I know the daughter of a multi millionaire living in a million dollar home on the bank of the Mississippi River, working in HR at a private university making a lot of money doing nothing.
The admins are where all of the money is at. This is true of medical systems too. The bureaucratic state has become too large to sustain, especially as it is on the backs of grifts and very low paid actual workers...
Same in industry increasingly. We can't get raises for our plant workers so that we can be fully staffed and keep up with our production needs, but they are hiring extra HR directors and managers, each of which is paid the equivalent of 2-3 plant folk. I am not optimistic about how sustainable that pattern will prove.
HR is a cancer. A department with power over hiring and firing basically ends up in charge, because hiring and firing is the main thing that makes the boss the boss. What a surprise that their primary interest would be in hiring more HR people while the actual productive departments wither.
In my University freshman days (this was almost 10 years ago), I did warehouse and related work to pay off tuition (so it was morning to afternoon of classes, 10-12 hour overnight shifts and then 3-5 hours of study).
Even back then HR was a menace. I remember Lowes Canada had a Milton, Ontario warehouse which tripled (maybe even quadrupled) HR staff during the 18-24 months I worked there.
They had no idea how anything worked and were getting paid in essence for "Adult babysitting" (Hint: this never works). And every quarter they would "make up" some new diversity metric and show "progress" on it.
Even back then (mid-2010s) they were such a menace. I am far away from such methods of moneymaking these days, but I can only imagine how filthy it has become since I had my dealings with them.
I've always thought the debt generated by Universities is an attempt to force people to take a corporate, bank, edu or gov job to pay off the debt. Hard to start your own business when you are a debt serf. But then in the history of empire the tendency is to educate more people (make more debt serfs) than the empire has jobs for, so this latest metastatic increase in professional class jobs is like a make work program to keep them from becoming dissidents. I imagine there is nothing at all sustainable about that.
The primary and secondary school system (K-12) is precisely as you describe, purposefully so, based off the Prussian system which was expressly designed to make docile workers for the factories, administrators for the state, and importantly soldiers for the army. The amount of debt modern (post 1980's?) students come out with seems to be both new, and a convenient side effect, but I doubt it is more than that. It seems that most people who start their own companies have college degrees, for instance.
I think instead that indoctrination is the main point of college education of the non-job training type (i.e. not fields directly tied to a job role; women's studies vs accounting). The make work aspect is sort of a cycle, where the culturally indoctrinated are hired into cultural commissar roles, in part to enforce the indoctrination on others, and in part to reward those who enthusiastically support the cultural faction, and encourage those who might to go through the indoctrination process while paying for the privilege. So in order to control society the rulers need to indoctrinate the people into believing they should rule, and those doing the indoctrination need to be paid to do so and be highly respectable, and those that are indoctrinated need to be rewarded for supporting the rulers. Hence the modern interest in promises to forgive student debt: the rulers want MORE people in college for the indoctrination, and are indifferent to the value of the debt aspect.
One thing is certain, those indoctrinated into DEI/Trans ideology brook no questioning of their status in the professional class, nor the elite who pay them.
I think that “confidence” in college is a proxy for confidence in our managerial elite. After all, colleges legitimize their rule the way the Church legitimized medieval kings. This is why I think the drop in support among Democrats is especially significant. For a long time, they thought that AA and DIE would only harm working class badwhite strivers, while their own spawn would be insulated through their ability to navigate the system. Now they are discovering that, without red state freshmen to attack, the diversity is turning on them, and the shrinking pool of jobs has made them targets.
Normally I find blue-on-blue catastrophes hilarious, but it genuinely saddens me that something I grew up revering as one of those working class strivers is so devastated. But I can’t help but feel that colleges are a kind of synecdoche for the GAE, and if we are fortunate, they will share the same fate. America will lose its monopoly on policing the world and become a real country again, disencumbered of its parasitic globalist class, and colleges will lose their monopoly on credentialing elites and selling entry tickets to the middle class, returning to what they once were, places of intellectual and spiritual vitality. God willing I’ll see both in my lifetime.
You're exactly right. I make this very point in the article I link at the end, about standardized testing: the elite is legitimized by the universities. Delegitimize the universities, delegitimize the elite.
Right now we're in a liminal period in which the legitimacy of the pond elite is crumbling fast, but a means of legitimizing a new elite has yet to be settled upon. To a very large degree our task is figuring out how to do that.
In every decadent period of Western Civilization, whenever culture exhausted itself into alternating currents of shock and repetition, we always returned to the well, to the Classics and to faith. I think that the traumas to come will unleash a great longing for those things, and I think the new elite, on some level, will have to be patrons of meaning, for lack of a better term. The people who will rise will be those who can harness myth, myth in the sense of a language of narratives, images, and symbols that will activate a will to life among those who would be led. Augustus had his Vergil, Napoleon had David, etc.
That’s why I sit here between comments writing out the principle parts of the 75 most common irregular Greek verbs. It’s not physics and it’s not diesel engine repair, but I believe in the long run it’s the most practical thing.
This move to the classics I think is already happening on the margins. The sensitive young men, the neohellenic vitalists, are the vanguards of this revival.
Hopefully, the interest in rigour reflects a fundamental need for neural development and excellence. Anything that develops capacity is an attractive alternative to regime sponsored early onset neuronecrosis resulting in zombiefication.
Ultimately, the regime is losing control. This may indicate a crack-up soon. Alternately, the regime simply allows the disaffected to go their own way in the expectation that the disaffected belong to the surplus population and can be written off.
People forget about homeschoolers. The community was growing even before Covid, and now the numbers have doubled since. I would be surprised if the majority of kids learning Latin right now weren’t in that community.
Yep. Latin is a core subject at our homeschool coop. We're Catholic, so we start with rote memorization of prayers, but the middle and high schoolers are learning the language from soup to nuts.
No wonder there's such a strong move in the EU to make it illegal all over.
Here in Sweden, it already is if it's done instead of regular school.
However, running a tax-funded race&sex-segregated moslem school where kids are taught according to the Quran that it is just and right to loot, rape, enslave and pillage the infidel and especially the jew?
Oh, that's a basic human right, see. Those 2 200 000 000+ moslems being a minority...
In the US the fact that we have the freedom to educate our own children and the freedom to own firearms are the two things that give me the most hope for the future.
Do you know of any substacks that discuss the classics from this countercultural perspective? All the classical substacks I've found are unimaginative garbage (e.g. here's my take on the 3rd act of King Lear).
I hope I can contribute. For my part, I try to maxx on gym, library, and the trail. I do it for my faith, for my kids, for my culture, and for the future.
Somewhat unrelated but I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I heard the first part of AI taskforce leader Kamala Harris explain her role: "AI is two letters." I'm sure she has credentials. My extremely bright daughter will be entering her senior year of high school after summer break and we have been talking about her plans after that. I'm thinking she should test out and try for something in Europe she's looking into Germany. I learned a lot in University, but at the same time I got lucky. For the vast majority of the population it's nothing more than a grift...
Don't forget Russia....a Noah's ark culturally. Putin just took Russia out of the Bologna process (which synchronises the recognition of credentials internationally) because, in his view, it was compromised by a lack of rigour. For that alone, Putin is a hero.
I hadn't even realized Russia was part of Bologna. What a shock that an attempt at standardizing higer education across Europe would simply pull everything down to the lowest common denominator.
Standardisation always levels down. Hence it's appeal. Putin pulled himself up by the bootstraps and understands the significance of quality education.
Any profession in which competency has real world consequences (as in...if you are a moron people die) has a very different credentialing protocol. Check out sometime what you have to go through to become an aviation maintenance technician.
I have a friend who worked in an excellent vocational program to become just that, then he logged all of his flight hours and became a commercial pilot. Competence is really important in those fields. It makes it all the more head scratching that so many airlines mandated the jab
These are the very credentialing protocols that have recently come under attack from DEI.
The doctrine that disparate outcomes between groups is de facto wrongful discrimination is very false and very pernicious, but it has provided a very effective Trojan horse with which to invade every possible aspect of human endeavor. Nothing is safe from DEI, and nothing infected by DEI will be safe. Bridges will collapse, planes will disintegrate mid-air, and fast food will take on a whole new meaning because it will give you the runs, but hey, at least we will have diversity!
Our grandchildren will not have indoor plumbing or reliable electricity, they will not be able to spell their own names, but they will have mastered thousands of pronouns.
The only way in which it makes sense to speak of "confidence" in connection with today's academy is in the same sense that it's used in the term "confidence man."
In our lifetimes we prolly will see 🙂 Charles Haywood of The Worthy House confidently gives the crumbling goliath a decade tops. Then,
🗨 there is no connection between joining today’s elite and being part of tomorrow’s elite, which will not be derived from today’s elite. There may be a tiny overlap, but probably not. You must choose.
🗨 There is no way back; all that can be done is first destroy our enemies utterly, and then build a new thing, founded both on the wisdom of the past and the needs, and limitations, of the present.
🗨 knowing yourself is, frankly, not very important. Knowing your duty, and how a society can and should be molded—that is much more crucial.
🗨 College today is mostly a finishing school for feminization, to the extent it is not simply Left indoctrination.
🗨 manual work can also be psychically very fulfilling, because a natural tendency of men is their desire to create, and to be fulfilled by creating, lasting objects to be productively used, to create functional solutions to problems in the real world, and to offer those solutions to others.
🗨 As long as you do not incur massive debt, it may not be the end of the world if you go to college—although it may ruin you psychically, may saddle you with heavy baggage such as the wrong wife, and as I say will, to some extent, be held as a black mark against you in the future.
Starting, but very slowly. Note that the decline in confidence among democrat voters has been much smaller than among everyone else. They're still playing make believe among themselves that academia is mostly functional.
Yet could it be just that much bigger of a bubble?
Wait until reality starts to sink in, say about the war in Ukraine and the West shooting themselves in the foot and after some of the blood splashed on the Russians, shooting themselves in the other foot?
Or when Biden finally totters off the edge of the stage and even the NYTimes realizes he's shark meat? What percentage of supposed intellectuals will cling on? Once that movement away starts to gain momentum, how many will jump ship?
My guess, many of them wake up eventually. However, the deeper the illusion, the more emotionally invested they are in, the harder it will be on them emotionally. I suspect quite a few will be broken by it.
Rolo believes that the creatures of darkness will win, that russia will return to 90s warlordism. First a humiliating peace treaty then the end of putin then warlordism
We are all dancing on thin ice, over the abyss. The highest are simply walking the highest wires.
That which is heavy, falls. That which is the light, rises. The world is coming to an enormous fall. Stay in the light anyway.
Keep in mind, the most effective tool any chief executive can have, is some external force to focus the structure. The West has not only provided that to Putin in spades, but with Yelsin, essentially laid the groundwork for his rise.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The problem is that Russia is not Iraq, or Libya. It has more depth than the West has force. This will be the third time the West has tried, though it has been a constant for much of the modern age.
Our ideas of what Russia is and what Russia is, are different things.
For one thing, our Western framework is European based, where lots of small nations are defined by numerable boundaries, rivers, channels, peninsulas, mountains, etc. So they can maintain animosities for as long as there are peoples to gather into nations. While the East is more open, so the tensions and rivalries have to fluctuate and interact on much more subtle and fluid tribal networks. So all the different ethnicities that make up Russia can't afford those deep and abiding European animosities and fractures. While Europeans cannot conceive otherwise.
Democrats are ideologically possessed. For them, the dysfunction is the function, and that is why they are confident in higher education. If the question were posed in a more subtle manner, you might find that leftists have even less confidence that a university education has any real worth in improving the mind.
Excellent point. I missed that. Postgrad confidence is still higher, but the decline in confidence is twice as high. Anecdotally, I know many who became deeply jaded during their graduate studies.
The rot goes back to when the universities started taking too much grant money, and then demanded that all teachers be doctors.
Some fields don't advance all that much. Doctors -- those who advance the field -- should be rare. Mere mastery in a field such as rhetoric should be sufficient for teaching rhetoric.
For a difficult field such as physics, either the masters programs should be made longer or we should have something in between a Masters Degree and a Doctorate -- an AbD, for example.
This excessive emphasis on "extending the field" created a Cult of Novelty that goes WAY back. This is how splats of paint became Fine Art, and annoying noises became Modern Classical Music 80+ years ago.
The primary function of universities should be to curate and pass on accumulated (old) knowledge to the next generation. Research should be a sideline. Good professors should be granted the PRIVILEGE to have spare time to do research. They should be paid to do teaching -- save for those who write readable books or get patents for doing lucrative research.
Scandinavia and Germany used to offer the Licentiate degree (abbrev. Lic.). I'm not sure if they offer it any more but it used to be common in the STEM fields. Basically, it's more than Masters degree but less than PhD. So, yeah, it's their equivalent of the AbD. If a student took all the required courses and performed research or developed/designed something with it culminating in paper/thesis they received their licentiate degree. They didn't have to defend it or anything as I understand it. I seem to recall a lot of the professors back in the 90s and early 00s had licentiate degrees and not PhDs. I think we need to institute something like that here. Of course, with the way things are politically and culturally the licentiate programs would eventually become corrupted - like everything else...
This is very close to my thinking. In fact to a large degree I think coursework is a waste of time. Most people learn most effectively by doing, rather than being talked at; and, crucially, by doing real things, not pretend activities in a classroom. In the sciences there's no reason that the next generation could not begin their education in working laboratories as junior assistants straight out of high school. Or even earlier, frankly. Much of high school is a waste of time as well.
Depends on the major. Doing research when you are far from caught up in the field is a suboptimal. It really helps to be spun up far enough so that you can read current papers in the field. I wasted a lot of time doing "research" which would have been better spent taking courses, including courses in the math department. (My degree was in theoretical physics. For experimental physics, earlier time in the lab could be useful.)
Frankly, I wish I could have taken all the classes, gotten a job teaching, and THEN begun doing research.
Or, taken all the classes, gotten a job applying what I was taught, and THEN begun doing research.
(Man, doing real world applied physics was quite a wakeup call. All those textbook simplifications go away bigly. In my case it was QA work on the GPS system. There's a half dozen different time systems which are subtly different. There's leap seconds and GENERAL relativity corrections. The Earth precesses, nutates, and wobbles due to shifts in the ice caps. You need to model the not-quite-roundness of the Earth to something like 40th degree spherical harmonics -- including process noise to simulate our uncertain knowledge of such. There's light pressure nudging the satellites. There's both the ionosphere and the troposphere between the base stations and the satellites. The clocks have noise.
There's no assuming an infinitely conducting sphere on a frictionless surface in the real world.)
Did you do graduate studies? My experience has been that a huge part of the scutwork requires very little classroom knowledge. Indeed this is why undergraduates can participate in research projects. The theoretical knowledge is necessary for interpretation, but even here I think a lot more can be picked up on the job, as it were, than we usually think.
PhD in theoretical physics. Was going to focus on general relativity, but switched to nonlinear optics as there was gobs of research money there and more job opportunities in industry. (This was a big mistake. I decided I didn't like that field too late to switch again. And I didn't want to live in New Jersey.)
Anyway, for theoretical physics getting undergrads involved is extremely hard. No academic career for me. Ended up working for a Beltway Bandit.
When it comes to theoretical physics I absolutely agree, there's exceptionally little room for undergraduate involvement. I was thinking much more on the experimental end of things, that being closer to my own background.
That said, I could see a career path that looked more like an extended apprenticeship in a laboratory, during which the students acquire theoretical knowledge as and when it is necessary to advance their ability to contribute to a given project, with graduation into theory coming later. That would have a salutary effect on theorists, by acquainting them with the world outside their Mathmatica notebooks ;) But then, there is the question of aptitude, as well ... many theorists are simply hopeless in the lab, and vice versa for experimentalists.
Witty, informative, amusing. What more can one ask in an essay?
The only substantive debate on universities is whether they get massively purged or do we go for full Dissolution of the Monasteries? Think of all the assets that would be freed up.
I would go even further. Build new agoges, hire frogs to whip new elite into shape - curriculum of mathematics, rhetoric, engineering, martial arts, programming, and weightlifting.
The teacher's unions will ensure that firing the wastrels in the universities is either impossible or prohibitively costly. The only way is to create parallel institutions from the ground up, and attack the weak point of the credentialing protocol hard, so that merit must be recognized and incompetence blocked.
The law is always a player in the game of thrones. Non-Newtonian rapids which the tyrant must negotiate or subvert in order to keep his allies and the mob on side. If he missteps, he's quickly replaced. Kant noted that even in a city of devils, there must be law.
Worth remembering that the assets of the monasteries all went to the state in the form of the tyrannical and bloated Henry VIII, who was given to spectacular waste.
Higher education is largely a time sink for a population whose reproductive health is being mismanaged. Delayed maturation and the postponement of family formation and fertility are integral features of the regime's social engineering. Steering young women into college plays a large rile in this. A sane society would allow women to get pregnant n their 20s, raise their kids, and return to education when the kids are old enough. Life expectancies today make this a viable approach, but it is not even being considered. The regime, industry and the Netflix/social media ideological complex prefers the present approach.
Dumbing down higher education is also inevitable if you seek to constantly expand participation rates and if you need to conceal the hollowing out of education at the primary and secondary levels.
If the state can arrange finance for junk degrees they are capable of arranging things to make timely motherhood practical. It is simply a social choice.
Having children early is important. My parents had two children when they were in their 20s, and two more when my mother was 35 and older. The first two children grew up to be normal, and successful in their own ways. The other two have - issues.
Can't comment on the medical side, but I think that it is best for young people to become parents early, while they have the energy to raise boisterous youngsters.
Also, generational differences can have adverse impacts. Older relatives may easily lose touch with social/cultural conditions and this can compromise their ability to give effective guidance.
My very first aspiration/ambition in life was to become a scholar and enter the Ivory Tower. I can (personally) say: Western Academia is dead. Students do not merely "stay away in droves", but some (like myself and others) outright move to alternate structures for procuring knowledge.
It may sound like a novelty for some: but heading off to University is not the end all or be all for Seeking Knowledge. Prior to the establishment of said institution in the Mediaeval world; young men went to teachers, scholars, etc *in person* and studied at their feet, one-on-one.
The Islamic world has kept this tradition alive and well for over a Millenia. And I can happily say that I can count myself as a Beginning "student of knowledge" in that sphere. Academia's death need not be the "end" that many young scholars and would-be scholars think it is.
It can be a golden opportunity to finally take one's learning more seriously + actively.
"The Islamic world has kept this tradition alive and well for over a Millenia."
Yeah, with zero inventions or advancements not originating from Occidentals to show for it. They couldn't even properly care for all the science they inherited from egyptians, greeks, romans, and all theother cultures of the region.
I was not really speaking to the "Scientific" Knowledge side of things. The "Scientific" field (especially in Western Academia) is a complete Scam. The pursuit of it has basically gotten mankind to a Post-human, Nihilist Dead End.
I was speaking more to Philosophy + Theology; which have always been the primary pursuits, especially when we look at the Ancients and how they used to go about trying to procure Knowledge in a one-on-one fashion.
You know how I feel about DIE, John. So the sooner it happens to these indoctrination centers, the better. I remember the nascent version of woke communism from when I went to college, it wasn't anything like what it has evolved into back then, it was still being developed, still quietly growing like a cancerous tumor.
Only later did it come roaring out of the universities to take over western countries. Now we can see it in all its perversion and depravity, and see the despair it creates in populations that must endure it.
I don't think we've seen anything like the worst of its potential evil. It is hatred of life, resentment refined to an exquisite level of industrial-grade purity that has never before been seen. If allowed to grow into its final form I believe it will be more monstrous by far than any of the beasts unleashed by bolshevism.
Unfortunately, I must agree with you. The bolsheviks did not have the technology at their fingertips that the woke communist have now. The damage they could do was limited by the more primitive system they created. But now? Wow, the woke commies have it far easier in terms of controlling people and destroying those who stand up to them.
Indeed. Also, the bolshies had a genuine respect for science and technology ... let's not forget their space program, for example. These monsters are hostile to the very notion of objectivity, logic, reason, empiricism, etc.
That is also very true, the bolsheviks were focused on class distinctions, not identity. The losers we have now are focused on identity, race, etc. and in the process they destroy that which the bolsheviks were successful at in their time.
One iteration at a time, my friend, one iteration at a time. We have our hands full with this one, and perhaps we can prevent it from morphing into the next one, at least for a while. 😉
Is it communism, or deconstructionism, that is the root concept?
To me, communism was just pushback from the serfs, that then went overboard in its own way.
The guiding principle of this mess seems to be the notion that everything can be deconstructed, from professionalism to biology, but little sense of why structure exists in the first place and so what will replace the old formulations.
ISIS deconstructs with the sword, but we all know the pen is mightier than the sword.
The future is what structure does rise from this cultural necrosis and it will have to be far more conceptually whole, than just a patchwork of old ideals, because that wave of fossil fuels propelling our recent binge is not going to be there, the next time.
Otherwise it's just warlords declaring their divine authority.
What is structure?
For one thing, galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.
It is half the equation and it ignores the other half at its own peril.
Energy is good at deconstructing what can't ride that wave.
How many managers do you need, when much of the manufacturing is shipped overseas?
How much has education simply become a holding pond for youth? While indebting them for life. "You will own nothing and be happy." Or get cancelled.
I have to say, I don't have a lot of personal experience with any form of schooling, having avoided it with a passion, but the broader social and cultural issues are where the real sources of the problems in education go and where they will be solved.
For instance, in armies the people running things are called generals, while specialist is about one rank above private. Yet in our society, the kids who would be natural generalists would be the ones most interested and curious about everything, because they will be the ones to understand how all the parts fit together. Yet in our sick, sick culture, they are diagnosed as attention deficient and medicated until their minds fit back in the box.
Society run by and for the specialists is a Tower of Babel. One that is spiraling down the big rabbit hole to boot.
Do you think that will be solved by skewing college admissions back toward those more marginally proficient in checking the boxes? As a grumpy old white guy, I will be the first to admit we have made delusional thinking into an art form. These diversity hires are just trying to catch up.
Efficiency is to do more with less, until peak efficiency, when we can do everything with nothing.
The big, if not much bigger part of the problem is that what they do "know," is bullshit, that they have to defend with their lives, or loose it all.
One of the better examples is Big Bang theory.
When they realized that cosmic redshift increases proportional to distance in all directions, it either meant that we are at the exact center of the universe, or it was an optical effect. Since there didn't seem to be any medium slowing the light, optical was dismissed. The solution was to argue that space itself expands, because "Spacetime!"
Which totally ignores the central premise on which GR is build, that the speed of light is CONSTANT!
If space is expanding faster than the light crosses it, it's not Constant!
Basically two metrics are being derived from the same light, one based on the speed and one based the spectrum. The argument being the spectrum is like a rubber ruler, that when stretched, the ripples of the waves become longer. Yet it's still taken for granted the speed of light remains the same. Which it has to be, for basic doppler effect. The train moving down the tracks doesn't stretch the tracks, just increases the distance.
If it was actual "spacetime," the speed of light would have to increase, proportional to space expanding, but that would throw a hickey in the explanation for redshift.
I've raised this point in a fair number of discussion boards, with people in the field and they will not accept it, but they have no argument against it.
Being old enough to have followed the development of the field since the 70's, it really was a political dynamic, where the BBT became the totem they had to adhere too.
Safe to say, I could go on for pages, but close by pointing out one way light does redshift over distance, is as multi spectrum 'packets," as the higher frequencies dissipate faster, but that would mean we are sampling a wave front, not observing individual photons having traveled inter dimensional space for billions of years. And if you know anything of the religion that is quantum theory, you know how popular that idea would be.
🗨 Big Bang theory is Biblical Genesis. It is a creation myth. You can't do science with it. You can't prove it. There are no facts or variables to work with.[...] There is a reason why they don't teach us in public school that Father Georges Lemaître invented Big Bang theory. Because the more observant and cagey students in the class would raise their hands and say, “Teacher, I thought we weren't allowed to learn religion in school?”
It wasn't until graduate school that I found out Fr. Lemaitre was the father of the expanding universe (not so much the Big Bang - the name at least came from Fred Hoyle, who was being acerbic).
Then again does the average person know that Maxwell's Laws underlie the operation of electrical devices? I'm reluctant to ascribe to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by incuriosity. Although THAT said, it's certainly the case that astronomers were initially deeply reluctant to accept the BB, because they knew full well its origin and could plainly see its similarity to Let There Be Light.
I have to say I simply assumed the logic was far beyond my ability to question, until reading Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, where he makes the point that, "Omega=1." Essentially the overall expansion of the universe was matched by gravitational attraction and it all suddenly made no sense at all. Given they therefore essentially cancel out. It seemed to me, more of a cosmic convection cycle.
The redshift expansion logically describes Einstein's original purpose of a cosmological constant, a force to balance gravity and prevent the universe from collapsing to a point.
It was only later on, tossing the idea around in my head, that the above point occurred, that it's not relativistic space(time), if the speed of light is not Constant to the frame/observer. Which it expressly is not. Two metrics are being derived from the same light, one based on the speed and one based on the spectrum and if the speed was the numerator, it would be a tired light theory, but as an expanding space theory, the speed is still the denominator, the metric against which this expansion is measured.
Also it was around this time it occurred to me the idea of time as not so much the present moving past to future, but events moving future to past, was more logically explanatory.
As for the political aspects, back in the late 90's, I raised this issue on the Mysteries of the Universe section of the NYTimes forum boards(long gone.) In which I was still trying to work it out as spacetime being physically real and that whatever was falling into black holes, was bubbling up in the spaces between galaxies, when another commentator pointed out it works much better to assume they are metrics based on measures of gravitational mass, that collapse, versus measures based on radiation, that expanded. He had been studying for a PhD in astronomy at the U of Chicago and this was his thesis paper. To which his adviser said that if he wanted to continue down that train of thought, he might want to consider other professional options, then astronomy.
As for how the whole profession decided on this path, it always did leave me in wonder, but you only have to look around today, to see that logic comes a distant second to agreement with the crowd.
While it might seem the most educated would be immune to this, the reality is the dynamic of selection is much more enforced and rigorous, of one generation directing the next, by that very process of education.
'Tis plain inevitable outcome of natural human curiosity having been relentlessly crushed from early kidhood throughout long years of institutional edumacation: Any sufficiently advanced technology becomes indistinguishable from magic 😏
I'm going to college for engineering and I pray to the stars above that I'm not stuck with a bunch of woke mongrels. While I love the humanities, it hurts my soul even more knowing that STEM has gone woke (*cough* Nature, Scientific American, and Science Magazine *cough*). I don't even know how it makes sense for STEM to be woke...there's always been people of color, women, disabled people, etc. in the field. But, then again, I guess that just shows how ignorant to history these "academics" and administrators are.
And then there's the chart of the kids that identify with the Skittles Mafia...I usually spend my daily Ten Minutes Hate on these losers. Mainly because they're a bunch of straight women who want to be "quirky" "minorities" and so choose--or worse, create--some pastel flag (usually "queer") with a strange, technically-should-be-grammatically-correct-but-also-is-just-ridiculous-and-demeaning name, whose atrocious color combos are enough to make an artist gag (I have on several occasions). These people are also the reason why gender and personality have been confused with one another, but that's a rant for another day.
On a better note, that David statue is awesome and these sculptures are now my new obsession.
I hope the program works out for you, but I confess I'm not optimistic. Over the last few years I've noticed that the graduate programs in my own field have been filling up with an entirely different sort of student from the ones I studied alongside not so long ago. My field was always characterized by high IQ, socially awkward nerds, but the new generation have a preponderance of fat blue-haired pronoun people. Their company is terribly unpleasant, but more dispiriting than this is that they're just generally shit at it: remarkably incurious about their own chosen field beyond whatever their narrow subject of research is, and generally incapable of any real insight. They generate graphs and tables ("look! I'm using models!") but don't seem to grasp the purpose of it. Doing science-like things without actually knowing what science is.
Whether it's that the woke schools are preferentially admitting this type, or talented young men are simply staying the hell away because who wants to be around these people, I'm not sure. Probably both tbh.
And yes that Cyborg David statue gives me hope for the future.
I think I experienced every emotion I know while reading all four of those articles over the last thirty minutes. I started off laughing and ended up having an existential crisis. Impressive!
I still remember my 1st semester Organic Chemistry Professor (name redacted, he is still alive)saying “Its a shame I shall have to flunk so many of you. “ as he handed out the final exam. The class that started over flowing a 350 seat auditorium was down to 60 by spring. The good old days!
Among the 250 freshmen of the small STEM college I attended, there were six women. Among the entire student body of 800, both undergraduate and graduate, there was one black. At the time, the school required minimum 700 verbal and 700 math SAT scores to attend. Today they don't look at the SAT at all. They were recently reprimanded by NASA for mismanagement of one of their associated facilities. I suspect they DIEed some time ago.
Our Computer Science department was very effective in weeding out people in the first year. Total bloodbath. Back then the admin got on a professor's case if they didn't give enough people low scores, to which the profs responded only the best were left, and you do not give a good student a D for mere metrics.
Great write up Mr. Carter. You still haven't reached the crux of it yet though, none of this ends until the dollar loses reserve currency status. That is the pillar that holds up all the others you dislike. It took me from 2008 until 2018 to realize that. Kids not going to school because of cost and a degree not gaining you the income to service or discharge that debt? Uncle Joe (or any statist) at this point will bail em out. He isn't bailing out the students, because those job prospects will continue to shrink year by year anyways, he's bailing out the schools. Just like the banks, ask someone why it was wrong to bail out the banks but right to bail out their school debt and watch the smoke come out of their ears.
The crash of the dollar and our "way of life" will also take care of all the other isms you dislike. Collapse isn't the problem, its the salvation of our sanity. Once people can't live their entire lives in abstract ideas due to not being able to "work" in front of a computer all day, things will revert back to the way they were. Deep down in their minds, those who scream loudest about diversity know this, they know they're unworthy and its their last stand in a way.
"[...] the new philosophy takes its bearings by how men live as distinguished from how they ought to live; it despises the concern with imagined republics and imagined principalities. The standard which it recognizes is "low but solid." Its symbol is the Beast Man as opposed to the God Man: it understands man in the light of the sub-human rather than of the super-human. The scheme of a good society which it projects is therefore in principle likely to be actualized by men's efforts or its actualization depends much less on chance than does the classical "utopia": chance is to be conquered, not by abandoning the passionate concern with the goods of chance and the goods of the body but through giving free reign to it."
-- Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, Free Press, 1958
What sense can we make of James Madison's famous Federalist No. 10 today? This is his essay on the danger of divisive and controlling factions to government, and how the Constitution would guard against them. His solution was to eliminate the problem by encouraging factions and fragmenting them, so that none of them could abuse its influence and upend the system, and by structuring the scale of the republic so that no faction could have undue influence and deprive others of their rights.
It's not clear, from Madison's point of view, just who the factions are in our world today. Are they the political parties? The beneficiaries of transfer payments? Is the military-industrial complex a single faction, or many? Likewise with the too-big-to-fail financial elites, or the health-care cartels, the endless political bureaucracies and rent-seekers -- are they unified threats, or a multitude of self-interested parties? Or is the entire system simply overrun?
What strikes us today is the overwhelming enormity of our situation, the unpayable debt and unmeetable liabilities, the intentionally-blown asset bubbles, an economic system that can no longer create the organic credit it requires for growth, and the complete failure of politics to address the situation or even discuss it openly and honestly with the public.
There was a shift not of degree but of kind, the Republic replaced by Empire, particularly after World War II. The "republican remedy" cherished by the Madison could not be maintained in the tide of History, the changes brought by a Lincoln, a Woodrow Wilson, or a Franklin Roosevelt; of new amendments to the Constitution; of innovations such as Keynesianism and unbacked debt-based currency.
"Public choice" economics emerged in the postwar period as an effort to examine the problems inherent in this new world. Bentham and Mill could not have invented it; public choice thought was grounded in the unique situation given by the West: industrial economies (initially) with surplus productivity, with democratic institutions for allocating and dividing the spoils. In what might be putting the cart before the horse, the school of thought attempted to discern political insights from primarily economic analysis.
An important insight from the public choice school was a sort of deep pessimism about these spoils. A subsidy or favor, once granted, tends to perpetuate itself forever because of the asymmetry of costs and benefits for everyone involved. To the beneficiary -- a faction? -- a subsidy is absolutely essential, but to the rest of us, the impact is minimal.
A good example is the Small Business Administration, whose budget of $1 billion is pure gravy for its beneficiaries and the in-house bureaucracy that administers its programs. The agency budget, divided by the number of U.S. taxpayers, is about $7 per person. Those feeding from the trough will fight tooth-and-nail to keep their privilege, but who among us would campaign to end it? Who cares enough to crusade to shut down the SBA? Is $7 worth the effort? Write a letter? An email?
Extend out this analysis across the now-vast Federal government, and add to it sketchy ideas such government expenditures counting as GDP, and we see very quickly what a dire situation we are in. The monster cannot possibly be reformed, the debts cannot possibly be repaid. Why, with the current definitions, cutting government expenditures will cut GDP. We are doomed to failure.
If it were possible to reform the American system, to trim government to its bare essentials and pay off the debt, the last opportunity we had to do this was the mid-90s with the GOP surge led by Gingrich. This was the last chance as an ideological moment, but more importantly as a demographic one, since the Baby Boomers were still in their prime earning years. If the whole project had not crashed and burned so horribly, it would have been possible to tackle the outstanding debt (if not the entitlements) via austerity. But we blew it.
The Weekly Standard, first issue
Our entire economic system now rests on an outrageous fiction, that the debts incurred on the nation since the 20th Century are "money-good", that they can be paid, and that they are binding on current and even future generations. This is a sickening idea, for to the young and those unborn it is odious debt and is not in any way binding on them. In fact, the system is desperate to create any new debts it can, however it can, to keep the game going. At the moment, permanent student loans, 84-month subprime auto loans, and securitized rental housing payments are holding things up.
But "the system" cannot be reformed with policy. The trenches are dug too deep. The factions are secure in their bunkers, enjoying their privileges.
The solution is currency collapse.
The collapse of the Treasury complex, and with it, the U.S. dollar, is the one event that puts a full-stop to the madness that our debt-powered society has become.
In the event of a collapse of the currency, all of the factions feeding off the system, the government workers, the recipients of transfer payments from their betters, the scandalous public pension recipients, will need to make other arrangements. No law, no arguments will be necessary. The checks may still be written, but they will lack any real purchasing power. All dollar-denominated debts and values will have to be revalued in terms of something else, something real.
No one will be spared. It's not as if your employer flips a switch, and your paycheck comes to you as Morgan dollars or Mercury dimes. Institutions simply collapse under these conditions. Most of them, in fact.
It is a fair question whether the United States itself will survive the experience, or if it will fragment into autonomous regions. We quickly get into questions of energy and societal complexity, what will be both manageable and stable in this future. A posh enclave like Loudoun County, VA, will go from the upper echelons to full-on Mad Max in the space of a weekend.
Thomas Hobbes will be the latest intellectual fashion.
More important are questions about whether or not we are still a nation, in the full sense. But that topic is for another day.
Collapse of the Treasury complex and of the Dollar do not necessarily bring back our Old Republic. Classical political thought holds that tyranny follows democratic excess and collapse, and we are very likely to have a series of Caesars.
Vladimir Putin is a Caesar, actually not a bad one at that, but he is what the Russian people needed after their own collapse, and I believe that he does act in the best interests of the Russian Federation. His personal fortune is excessive and an embarrassment; a true statesman would repatriate the bulk of it to the Russian people in their hour of need. But I am not Simonides to Putin's Hiero.
Again, I maintain that just as your regular paycheck will not transform overnight into junk silver, the United States will not magically roll back to republican government under the Constitution circa 1800. The problem is that the citizenry is thoroughly debased and no longer capable of the self-governance required of a free people. An extended period of deprivation and attrition will be needed to get the population into proper shape. The survivors have a chance to emerge as a free people one day, only if they are worthy of it. First we will have a few Caesars.
We are entering a period where all of the classic questions of our (Western) civilization will come to the fore, questions of law and order, of the true natural rights of man, questions of man's right of resistance to a tyrannical sovereign, of the nature of money, of the best political order. Our unserious, ephemeral, late-Modern culture ignored these issues, but they were there all the time, and will continue to be so.
I remember Bush Sr's push for the line item veto. While I realized it had zero chance of passing congress, as it would cede the real power to the executive, It did occur to me a possible compromise would be to break these bills into all their various items, have every legislator assign a percentage value to each one, put them back together in order of preference, then have the president draw the line. "The buck stops here."
So the president would be directly responsible for defect spending, therefore less willing to shoulder that political burden, but the congress would be responsible for deciding priorities and can horse trade around all they want.
We lack any kind of organization (those who dislike our current rulers) but something you could suggest that would really crimp their style and plans, would be a consumption strike. Everyone who reads you and all the other substack sites should only buy things they need (pay your rent, food and maybe a night out drinking at a local place and save everything else). Discharge debt as fast as possible and spend as little as possible and then save the rest. The system would hate that, and they'd also be in a much better position when the next "crisis" comes along if the old job goes kaput.
I got a glimpse of how STEM is getting railroaded in academia last week. I went through a chemistry graduate program a few years ago and the wokeness was still not very prevalent there but...
I took a new job as a gen science and physics teacher for the IB program. IB is cozy with the WEF, and the leader of the workshop I had to take for it prominently wore the circle rainbow pin representing the UN goals for enslavement... I mean "sustainable development".
In the new physics curriculum, there is now an entire module regarding "the greenhouse effect", and it is a requirement to talk about human impact. Ok, but in breakout groups with other teachers, I learned there was also some kind of climate agenda also built into the chemistry and bio subjects. It's beaten into these kid's heads.
Also, they are required to do a study concerning a "global issue". What does that mean? Well, if you're doing your report in STEM, you better be talking about climate change. Nearly every example topic this drone gave was about climatology itself, how solar panels work, or some other kind of environmental activism bullshit. Oh yeah, I think vaccinations and health were given as well.
So, I've decided that when I start I will do what they have been doing: planting seeds of subversion. You bet your bottom dollar I will be talking about the reproducibility crisis, the limitations of consensus, on the influence of money and ideology on results, etc
Subversion was exactly what I was going to suggest. Now, me, I'd have the students study something like the Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis. I suspect they would find this fascinating, unexpected, clearly of relevance to physics, biology, geology, and "global issues" ... and it would subtly subvert the global warming nonsense by demonstrating what a real catastrophe is and just how irrelevant humans are.
For photovoltaics, one might delve into the manufacturing and economics, as well perhaps as how the electrical grid actually works. Students will learn just how impossible that vision of a clean green solar future is.
Seek Miles Mathis. He's been leading the charge against the broken system for decades, and he's probably the most censored man on the planet right now. He is basically rewriting physics from the ground up.
Don't waste your time with controlled opposition fronts like BSI linked below. Like the EU guys, they're designed to draw rebels in and waste everyone's time with conferences, writing essays to each other, debating the same topics over and over again, etc.
My 11-year-old reads at 14th-grade level, according to her most recent standardized test (legal requirement for homeschoolers). This means her comprehension is equal to that of the average college sophomore. At first I was delighted. Then I realized this actually means the average college sophomore can only read as well as a bright 11-year-old.
I was reading at a college level before I finished elementary school, according to some test I was given at the time at least. That's not a brag. It's a comment on how shit the schools are.
On the other end, having graded papers written by college students, and edited the journal articles of graduate students, the command of English prevailing in the universities is abysmal.
I'm optimistic on this renaissance you speak of. Scholarly alternatives will arise, or universities will be hollowed out and open to be reclaimed, but, either way, the intelligent, the curious, the creative, and most importantly, the ambitious, will find a way to congregate again. They usually always have, in some shape or form. For the time being though, I feel as if not having the opportunities a good university system can provide is a great loss for younger generation. If there's anything positive to say about my own lackluster time in college, it was that if I miss anything, it was the ambition, and being in an environment of ambitious people (to say nothing of the often stunning architecture and well-kept grounds on many campuses). I know it was most likely because I kept good company of like-minded individuals, but I remember going to bars, pubs, coffee shops, and just shooting the shit on people's balcony or apartments, talking about what we wanted to do in life, how we were going to do it, and solving the world's problems. Everyone had a big dream they were pursuing. You asked anyone where they saw themselves in ten years, and they'd have a lofty answer and a plan to get there. It made it easy to keep your own ambitions high, being around driven people.
Conversely, nothing feels more stagnating and depressing as working in an office environment and asking that same question to people and getting the answer, "Uh... I'll be here, I hope." Truly creative individuals suffer without a place to congregate and rub elbows, I think, and poisoning the well of universities, where so many of them would begin and launch their ambitions, has most likely robbed this country of millions of great minds, lofty dreams, and good people that could have changed this country for the better, given the right opportunity, who now toil at thankless office jobs or admirably do their best to keep a small business afloat in stormy economic waters. That sense of community that college offers is just one of the many things this country is missing in most places, and one of the most gaping vacancies in so many people's lives. I've long suspected one of the reasons so many people remember college so fondly (and get depressed when they leave) is because it's the one time in the average American's life they: A) live in a generally walkable community B) are exposed to a healthy selection of social contacts, potential friends and romantic partners and C) are allowed to pursue their own interests and passions. Obviously this isn't the case for every college or student, but you get the general gist of it. I believe in Joseph Campbell's "Hero of a Thousand Faces", he makes the argument that going off to university is a form of modern coming-of-age ritual in the West, where boys make the transition to manhood. The fact we're losing this, if we haven't already lost it... is it any real wonder why young adults seem like overgrown children? Especially as college holds their hands and treats them like kindergartners shepherded by an overbearing schoolmarm?
The walkable community aspect is something I hadn't considered before, but yes, this is likely huge. Not just the campus environment, but usually the college town as well. NB there are quite a few schools I've seen that are not walkable in the slightest, particularly the newer ones, and I always find them quite barren and depressing.
There's no question that the Zoomers have been robbed, existing as they do during the collapse of one system and before the birth of whatever we replace it with. But then we're all getting screwed by this. These are not good times to enjoy, but harsh times to endure, and ultimately to build. There is a restless energy moving around society these days, a great many of the young, ambitious, and dissatisfied, who have switched their attention from salvaging the old to creating the new. This makes me optimistic for what comes.
I can say that, before I came to where I am now, the town I went to college in was the one place I lived where I could walk to the corner store and back to my place with no trouble, and the environment was just generally nice and pleasant in a way that I didn't experience living in a bigger city. It really does do wonders for the psyche. I see why so many on the left use "walkable cities" as a talking point, they just don't get why it's basically an impossibility in large American cities, or how to achieve it even if it was (i.e. countries like the Netherlands and Japan achieved this without banning cars, which is pretty much the only way the left seems to conceptualize making walkable cities).
To your second point, you're absolutely right. The future will belong to those who show up. It may not be many, but the driven stand to inherit the future in a way the listless, kvetching, and fundamentally uncreative could never do, even if the opportunity was presented to them on a silver platter. Which it has been, but they seem to just knock the plate over and stomp on the contents until it's mush.
I've been quite fortunate in that almost everywhere I've lived has been walkable. But then, I've spent most of my adult life outside North America. I confess that I find American and Canadian cities to be abominations.
First time I've heard that word, so had to look it up, and yes, the awful things are ubiquitous.
I always thought the coming of age ritual was doing something hard that tested you with some or a lot of danger for a couple of years or more. Then you went to college.
About a decade ago I read an article about how the rate of professors in Universities increased over ten years by 50%, but the rate of increase for admin was 287%. Most of those professors of course were low paid adjunct. That was of course before the acceleration of this DIE madness, so we can imagine what the increase of Admin has been since. That required a 15-20% increase in tuition every year for two decades, so at this point you practically have to be dumb to go to college.
I've been telling young people for years, learn a trade. You'll have a family, house, two cars and a boat by the time those lonely fools after college get halfway through paying their debt.
Admin is a metastatic cancer that has consumed the universities utterly. How crazy is it that tuition has gone up by such a spectacular amount, yet the student-teacher ratio remains unchanged?
The adjunct thing infuriates me. A scholar is paid a measly few thousand dollars to teach a course with 100 students, each of whom pays $1000 for the privilege.
And yes: apprenticing to a trade is a much better option for almost everyone.
I befriended a young adjunct prof when I was in my third attempt at a BA (I was straight A's by that point...Kek). He lived in a shittier apartment than I did. He was 35 and had $150,000 of debt. He figured he might never be able to pay it off. He was much the reason I resisted my profs trying to put me on the path to be a doc. Campus was no place to be even then, In 2000, toxic to anyone with sense. I liked him. The admin I have met since? Repulsive, the bulk of them, sucking off the tit.
It's truly disgusting the degree to which academia degrades those who get sucked into it. The whole thing is a racket.
I went back to school at 38 and got my masters. Worked for 6 years and returned for my PhD, awarded in 2009. I so regret wasting all that time and money, debt I’m still paying off. Academia has been the biggest disappointment and sadness of my life.
It consumes passion, emotional energy, and dreams, and excretes neuroticism, misery, and debt.
You’re absolutely correct. It has diminished my life force and I have to actively work against cynicism. I was fortunate to have a mentor who helped me learn to think critically and that is the one thing I am thankful for. All other experiences have been life sucking.
It is sad. I always wanted to be a professor in humanities. In graduate school I became a TA, which was supposed to mean that I under some professor, but instead I was actually the only one doing the lecture halls on Friday for Sociology 101 and Sociology of Sport. I got paid practically nothing for it...
I was an RA/TA at a public university in Texas in the 1980s. I solo taught classes that no one else on the faculty was either qualified to teach or willing to teach under the conditions imposed (mathematical economics and history of economic thought). At my highest I was being paid $1500 a month.
I had a stipend too but after fees it was less than that and this was in 2002ish!
I know the daughter of a multi millionaire living in a million dollar home on the bank of the Mississippi River, working in HR at a private university making a lot of money doing nothing.
The admins are where all of the money is at. This is true of medical systems too. The bureaucratic state has become too large to sustain, especially as it is on the backs of grifts and very low paid actual workers...
This is the universal truth that is afflicting every sector of society.
Same in industry increasingly. We can't get raises for our plant workers so that we can be fully staffed and keep up with our production needs, but they are hiring extra HR directors and managers, each of which is paid the equivalent of 2-3 plant folk. I am not optimistic about how sustainable that pattern will prove.
HR is a cancer. A department with power over hiring and firing basically ends up in charge, because hiring and firing is the main thing that makes the boss the boss. What a surprise that their primary interest would be in hiring more HR people while the actual productive departments wither.
In my University freshman days (this was almost 10 years ago), I did warehouse and related work to pay off tuition (so it was morning to afternoon of classes, 10-12 hour overnight shifts and then 3-5 hours of study).
Even back then HR was a menace. I remember Lowes Canada had a Milton, Ontario warehouse which tripled (maybe even quadrupled) HR staff during the 18-24 months I worked there.
They had no idea how anything worked and were getting paid in essence for "Adult babysitting" (Hint: this never works). And every quarter they would "make up" some new diversity metric and show "progress" on it.
Even back then (mid-2010s) they were such a menace. I am far away from such methods of moneymaking these days, but I can only imagine how filthy it has become since I had my dealings with them.
They're everywhere, like a fungus. HR Delenda Est.
I've always thought the debt generated by Universities is an attempt to force people to take a corporate, bank, edu or gov job to pay off the debt. Hard to start your own business when you are a debt serf. But then in the history of empire the tendency is to educate more people (make more debt serfs) than the empire has jobs for, so this latest metastatic increase in professional class jobs is like a make work program to keep them from becoming dissidents. I imagine there is nothing at all sustainable about that.
The primary and secondary school system (K-12) is precisely as you describe, purposefully so, based off the Prussian system which was expressly designed to make docile workers for the factories, administrators for the state, and importantly soldiers for the army. The amount of debt modern (post 1980's?) students come out with seems to be both new, and a convenient side effect, but I doubt it is more than that. It seems that most people who start their own companies have college degrees, for instance.
I think instead that indoctrination is the main point of college education of the non-job training type (i.e. not fields directly tied to a job role; women's studies vs accounting). The make work aspect is sort of a cycle, where the culturally indoctrinated are hired into cultural commissar roles, in part to enforce the indoctrination on others, and in part to reward those who enthusiastically support the cultural faction, and encourage those who might to go through the indoctrination process while paying for the privilege. So in order to control society the rulers need to indoctrinate the people into believing they should rule, and those doing the indoctrination need to be paid to do so and be highly respectable, and those that are indoctrinated need to be rewarded for supporting the rulers. Hence the modern interest in promises to forgive student debt: the rulers want MORE people in college for the indoctrination, and are indifferent to the value of the debt aspect.
One thing is certain, those indoctrinated into DEI/Trans ideology brook no questioning of their status in the professional class, nor the elite who pay them.
I think that “confidence” in college is a proxy for confidence in our managerial elite. After all, colleges legitimize their rule the way the Church legitimized medieval kings. This is why I think the drop in support among Democrats is especially significant. For a long time, they thought that AA and DIE would only harm working class badwhite strivers, while their own spawn would be insulated through their ability to navigate the system. Now they are discovering that, without red state freshmen to attack, the diversity is turning on them, and the shrinking pool of jobs has made them targets.
Normally I find blue-on-blue catastrophes hilarious, but it genuinely saddens me that something I grew up revering as one of those working class strivers is so devastated. But I can’t help but feel that colleges are a kind of synecdoche for the GAE, and if we are fortunate, they will share the same fate. America will lose its monopoly on policing the world and become a real country again, disencumbered of its parasitic globalist class, and colleges will lose their monopoly on credentialing elites and selling entry tickets to the middle class, returning to what they once were, places of intellectual and spiritual vitality. God willing I’ll see both in my lifetime.
You're exactly right. I make this very point in the article I link at the end, about standardized testing: the elite is legitimized by the universities. Delegitimize the universities, delegitimize the elite.
Right now we're in a liminal period in which the legitimacy of the pond elite is crumbling fast, but a means of legitimizing a new elite has yet to be settled upon. To a very large degree our task is figuring out how to do that.
In every decadent period of Western Civilization, whenever culture exhausted itself into alternating currents of shock and repetition, we always returned to the well, to the Classics and to faith. I think that the traumas to come will unleash a great longing for those things, and I think the new elite, on some level, will have to be patrons of meaning, for lack of a better term. The people who will rise will be those who can harness myth, myth in the sense of a language of narratives, images, and symbols that will activate a will to life among those who would be led. Augustus had his Vergil, Napoleon had David, etc.
That’s why I sit here between comments writing out the principle parts of the 75 most common irregular Greek verbs. It’s not physics and it’s not diesel engine repair, but I believe in the long run it’s the most practical thing.
This move to the classics I think is already happening on the margins. The sensitive young men, the neohellenic vitalists, are the vanguards of this revival.
Hopefully, the interest in rigour reflects a fundamental need for neural development and excellence. Anything that develops capacity is an attractive alternative to regime sponsored early onset neuronecrosis resulting in zombiefication.
Ultimately, the regime is losing control. This may indicate a crack-up soon. Alternately, the regime simply allows the disaffected to go their own way in the expectation that the disaffected belong to the surplus population and can be written off.
People forget about homeschoolers. The community was growing even before Covid, and now the numbers have doubled since. I would be surprised if the majority of kids learning Latin right now weren’t in that community.
Yep. Latin is a core subject at our homeschool coop. We're Catholic, so we start with rote memorization of prayers, but the middle and high schoolers are learning the language from soup to nuts.
That’s great, and thank you for being the future.
No wonder there's such a strong move in the EU to make it illegal all over.
Here in Sweden, it already is if it's done instead of regular school.
However, running a tax-funded race&sex-segregated moslem school where kids are taught according to the Quran that it is just and right to loot, rape, enslave and pillage the infidel and especially the jew?
Oh, that's a basic human right, see. Those 2 200 000 000+ moslems being a minority...
One of the first things the Nazis did in Germany was ban private (at home) schooling. They wanted everybody within the system.
In the US the fact that we have the freedom to educate our own children and the freedom to own firearms are the two things that give me the most hope for the future.
Do you know of any substacks that discuss the classics from this countercultural perspective? All the classical substacks I've found are unimaginative garbage (e.g. here's my take on the 3rd act of King Lear).
Megha Lillywhite's Classical Ideals might fit your bill 😊 --> classicalideals.substack.com/s/artstack
Thanks!
Off the top of my head, not really, no.
Learning Latin is the best place to start --
https://fatrabbitiron.substack.com/p/secede-latin
YES
You shared much insight in that comment, Librarian!
I hope I can contribute. For my part, I try to maxx on gym, library, and the trail. I do it for my faith, for my kids, for my culture, and for the future.
Somewhat unrelated but I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I heard the first part of AI taskforce leader Kamala Harris explain her role: "AI is two letters." I'm sure she has credentials. My extremely bright daughter will be entering her senior year of high school after summer break and we have been talking about her plans after that. I'm thinking she should test out and try for something in Europe she's looking into Germany. I learned a lot in University, but at the same time I got lucky. For the vast majority of the population it's nothing more than a grift...
I think Kamala has a law degree. Well, she must, as she was a prosecutor.
Definitely consider European universities. My strong impression is that the rot is nowhere near as advanced, and many are probably quite salvageable.
Don't forget Russia....a Noah's ark culturally. Putin just took Russia out of the Bologna process (which synchronises the recognition of credentials internationally) because, in his view, it was compromised by a lack of rigour. For that alone, Putin is a hero.
I hadn't even realized Russia was part of Bologna. What a shock that an attempt at standardizing higer education across Europe would simply pull everything down to the lowest common denominator.
Standardisation always levels down. Hence it's appeal. Putin pulled himself up by the bootstraps and understands the significance of quality education.
The same philo-semitic hero who has allowed russias rothschild bank to produce CBDC's
If Kamala had paid attention in college she would know that “two” is a social construct and that letters are racist. Some elite!
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
ETH Zurich in Switzerland is top notch.
Any profession in which competency has real world consequences (as in...if you are a moron people die) has a very different credentialing protocol. Check out sometime what you have to go through to become an aviation maintenance technician.
You'd think so. Meanwhile at American engineering schools....
I have a friend who worked in an excellent vocational program to become just that, then he logged all of his flight hours and became a commercial pilot. Competence is really important in those fields. It makes it all the more head scratching that so many airlines mandated the jab
Hard truth, that.
Heck, you don't need something as technically advanced as an airplane mechancic, a normal cook is dangerous enough.
"Is it food, or is it Botox", if you see what I mean.
These are the very credentialing protocols that have recently come under attack from DEI.
The doctrine that disparate outcomes between groups is de facto wrongful discrimination is very false and very pernicious, but it has provided a very effective Trojan horse with which to invade every possible aspect of human endeavor. Nothing is safe from DEI, and nothing infected by DEI will be safe. Bridges will collapse, planes will disintegrate mid-air, and fast food will take on a whole new meaning because it will give you the runs, but hey, at least we will have diversity!
Our grandchildren will not have indoor plumbing or reliable electricity, they will not be able to spell their own names, but they will have mastered thousands of pronouns.
Cue Planet Of The Apes meme, where the monkeys discuss philosophy while the slack-jawed caged humans grunt "they/them, xe/xem, ze/zim, sie/hir."
The only way in which it makes sense to speak of "confidence" in connection with today's academy is in the same sense that it's used in the term "confidence man."
Kek.
In our lifetimes we prolly will see 🙂 Charles Haywood of The Worthy House confidently gives the crumbling goliath a decade tops. Then,
🗨 there is no connection between joining today’s elite and being part of tomorrow’s elite, which will not be derived from today’s elite. There may be a tiny overlap, but probably not. You must choose.
His pleasingly structured Advice to the Young 👌 (theworthyhouse.com/2022/08/13/my-advice-to-the-young) brims with clear-eyed insights:
🗨 There is no way back; all that can be done is first destroy our enemies utterly, and then build a new thing, founded both on the wisdom of the past and the needs, and limitations, of the present.
🗨 knowing yourself is, frankly, not very important. Knowing your duty, and how a society can and should be molded—that is much more crucial.
🗨 College today is mostly a finishing school for feminization, to the extent it is not simply Left indoctrination.
🗨 manual work can also be psychically very fulfilling, because a natural tendency of men is their desire to create, and to be fulfilled by creating, lasting objects to be productively used, to create functional solutions to problems in the real world, and to offer those solutions to others.
🗨 As long as you do not incur massive debt, it may not be the end of the world if you go to college—although it may ruin you psychically, may saddle you with heavy baggage such as the wrong wife, and as I say will, to some extent, be held as a black mark against you in the future.
I’d better stop right here 🤭
That was a great article.
Could it be that the credentialed class is starting to see the cracks in their own sick broken collectivist debt trap they created?
Group think almost never ends well, and its as futile as arguing with an idiot.
It always drags you down to the lowest level of human existence and beats you with experience.
Starting, but very slowly. Note that the decline in confidence among democrat voters has been much smaller than among everyone else. They're still playing make believe among themselves that academia is mostly functional.
Yet could it be just that much bigger of a bubble?
Wait until reality starts to sink in, say about the war in Ukraine and the West shooting themselves in the foot and after some of the blood splashed on the Russians, shooting themselves in the other foot?
Or when Biden finally totters off the edge of the stage and even the NYTimes realizes he's shark meat? What percentage of supposed intellectuals will cling on? Once that movement away starts to gain momentum, how many will jump ship?
My guess, many of them wake up eventually. However, the deeper the illusion, the more emotionally invested they are in, the harder it will be on them emotionally. I suspect quite a few will be broken by it.
What, like Ukrainians grabbed up off the streets are broken?
Afghanis? Iraqs?
How many of them protested our colonial escapades?
Our little garden is finite.
Rolo believes that the creatures of darkness will win, that russia will return to 90s warlordism. First a humiliating peace treaty then the end of putin then warlordism
We are all dancing on thin ice, over the abyss. The highest are simply walking the highest wires.
That which is heavy, falls. That which is the light, rises. The world is coming to an enormous fall. Stay in the light anyway.
Keep in mind, the most effective tool any chief executive can have, is some external force to focus the structure. The West has not only provided that to Putin in spades, but with Yelsin, essentially laid the groundwork for his rise.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The problem is that Russia is not Iraq, or Libya. It has more depth than the West has force. This will be the third time the West has tried, though it has been a constant for much of the modern age.
Our ideas of what Russia is and what Russia is, are different things.
For one thing, our Western framework is European based, where lots of small nations are defined by numerable boundaries, rivers, channels, peninsulas, mountains, etc. So they can maintain animosities for as long as there are peoples to gather into nations. While the East is more open, so the tensions and rivalries have to fluctuate and interact on much more subtle and fluid tribal networks. So all the different ethnicities that make up Russia can't afford those deep and abiding European animosities and fractures. While Europeans cannot conceive otherwise.
Democrats are ideologically possessed. For them, the dysfunction is the function, and that is why they are confident in higher education. If the question were posed in a more subtle manner, you might find that leftists have even less confidence that a university education has any real worth in improving the mind.
I think you're on to something. Postgrad degree holders had a bigger decline (-17%) than college degree holders (-10%).
Excellent point. I missed that. Postgrad confidence is still higher, but the decline in confidence is twice as high. Anecdotally, I know many who became deeply jaded during their graduate studies.
Economics 101, produce more than you consume!
Debt addiction seems to have reached terminal velocity, and its only a matter of time before the entire house of cards crumbles.
Charity begins at home, and yet far too many are living in a broken home.
The rot goes back even further.
The rot goes back to when the universities started taking too much grant money, and then demanded that all teachers be doctors.
Some fields don't advance all that much. Doctors -- those who advance the field -- should be rare. Mere mastery in a field such as rhetoric should be sufficient for teaching rhetoric.
For a difficult field such as physics, either the masters programs should be made longer or we should have something in between a Masters Degree and a Doctorate -- an AbD, for example.
This excessive emphasis on "extending the field" created a Cult of Novelty that goes WAY back. This is how splats of paint became Fine Art, and annoying noises became Modern Classical Music 80+ years ago.
The primary function of universities should be to curate and pass on accumulated (old) knowledge to the next generation. Research should be a sideline. Good professors should be granted the PRIVILEGE to have spare time to do research. They should be paid to do teaching -- save for those who write readable books or get patents for doing lucrative research.
Scandinavia and Germany used to offer the Licentiate degree (abbrev. Lic.). I'm not sure if they offer it any more but it used to be common in the STEM fields. Basically, it's more than Masters degree but less than PhD. So, yeah, it's their equivalent of the AbD. If a student took all the required courses and performed research or developed/designed something with it culminating in paper/thesis they received their licentiate degree. They didn't have to defend it or anything as I understand it. I seem to recall a lot of the professors back in the 90s and early 00s had licentiate degrees and not PhDs. I think we need to institute something like that here. Of course, with the way things are politically and culturally the licentiate programs would eventually become corrupted - like everything else...
This is very close to my thinking. In fact to a large degree I think coursework is a waste of time. Most people learn most effectively by doing, rather than being talked at; and, crucially, by doing real things, not pretend activities in a classroom. In the sciences there's no reason that the next generation could not begin their education in working laboratories as junior assistants straight out of high school. Or even earlier, frankly. Much of high school is a waste of time as well.
Depends on the major. Doing research when you are far from caught up in the field is a suboptimal. It really helps to be spun up far enough so that you can read current papers in the field. I wasted a lot of time doing "research" which would have been better spent taking courses, including courses in the math department. (My degree was in theoretical physics. For experimental physics, earlier time in the lab could be useful.)
Frankly, I wish I could have taken all the classes, gotten a job teaching, and THEN begun doing research.
Or, taken all the classes, gotten a job applying what I was taught, and THEN begun doing research.
(Man, doing real world applied physics was quite a wakeup call. All those textbook simplifications go away bigly. In my case it was QA work on the GPS system. There's a half dozen different time systems which are subtly different. There's leap seconds and GENERAL relativity corrections. The Earth precesses, nutates, and wobbles due to shifts in the ice caps. You need to model the not-quite-roundness of the Earth to something like 40th degree spherical harmonics -- including process noise to simulate our uncertain knowledge of such. There's light pressure nudging the satellites. There's both the ionosphere and the troposphere between the base stations and the satellites. The clocks have noise.
There's no assuming an infinitely conducting sphere on a frictionless surface in the real world.)
Did you do graduate studies? My experience has been that a huge part of the scutwork requires very little classroom knowledge. Indeed this is why undergraduates can participate in research projects. The theoretical knowledge is necessary for interpretation, but even here I think a lot more can be picked up on the job, as it were, than we usually think.
PhD in theoretical physics. Was going to focus on general relativity, but switched to nonlinear optics as there was gobs of research money there and more job opportunities in industry. (This was a big mistake. I decided I didn't like that field too late to switch again. And I didn't want to live in New Jersey.)
Anyway, for theoretical physics getting undergrads involved is extremely hard. No academic career for me. Ended up working for a Beltway Bandit.
When it comes to theoretical physics I absolutely agree, there's exceptionally little room for undergraduate involvement. I was thinking much more on the experimental end of things, that being closer to my own background.
That said, I could see a career path that looked more like an extended apprenticeship in a laboratory, during which the students acquire theoretical knowledge as and when it is necessary to advance their ability to contribute to a given project, with graduation into theory coming later. That would have a salutary effect on theorists, by acquainting them with the world outside their Mathmatica notebooks ;) But then, there is the question of aptitude, as well ... many theorists are simply hopeless in the lab, and vice versa for experimentalists.
Witty, informative, amusing. What more can one ask in an essay?
The only substantive debate on universities is whether they get massively purged or do we go for full Dissolution of the Monasteries? Think of all the assets that would be freed up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_monasteries
I for one am all in favor of the latter. Take the endowments, pay off the debt, and toss the admin and the false scholars out on their ears.
The endowments should be used to finance tuition in STEM and properly audited competitive examinations in STEM with lavish prizes for the winners.
I would go even further. Build new agoges, hire frogs to whip new elite into shape - curriculum of mathematics, rhetoric, engineering, martial arts, programming, and weightlifting.
DISSOLUTION NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No purge is ever going to work.
Sadly plausible.
The teacher's unions will ensure that firing the wastrels in the universities is either impossible or prohibitively costly. The only way is to create parallel institutions from the ground up, and attack the weak point of the credentialing protocol hard, so that merit must be recognized and incompetence blocked.
People get too hung up on laws. When the kings came for the churches, the law said they could not do this. The kings did not care.
The law is always a player in the game of thrones. Non-Newtonian rapids which the tyrant must negotiate or subvert in order to keep his allies and the mob on side. If he missteps, he's quickly replaced. Kant noted that even in a city of devils, there must be law.
Worth remembering that the assets of the monasteries all went to the state in the form of the tyrannical and bloated Henry VIII, who was given to spectacular waste.
In the case of England, yes. Similar actions were taken in other countries, eg Sweden, where church bells were melted down to make cannons.
A lot of the assets were distributed to supporters, giving them a stake in the new disposition, or sold to pay debts.
The land was sold off to the cashed up thereby expanding the size of the landowning classes.
Higher education is largely a time sink for a population whose reproductive health is being mismanaged. Delayed maturation and the postponement of family formation and fertility are integral features of the regime's social engineering. Steering young women into college plays a large rile in this. A sane society would allow women to get pregnant n their 20s, raise their kids, and return to education when the kids are old enough. Life expectancies today make this a viable approach, but it is not even being considered. The regime, industry and the Netflix/social media ideological complex prefers the present approach.
Dumbing down higher education is also inevitable if you seek to constantly expand participation rates and if you need to conceal the hollowing out of education at the primary and secondary levels.
Precisely so. A woman's twenties should be for her babies. If she wants a career, she should pursue that in her thirties.
If the state can arrange finance for junk degrees they are capable of arranging things to make timely motherhood practical. It is simply a social choice.
Having children early is important. My parents had two children when they were in their 20s, and two more when my mother was 35 and older. The first two children grew up to be normal, and successful in their own ways. The other two have - issues.
Can't comment on the medical side, but I think that it is best for young people to become parents early, while they have the energy to raise boisterous youngsters.
Also, generational differences can have adverse impacts. Older relatives may easily lose touch with social/cultural conditions and this can compromise their ability to give effective guidance.
My very first aspiration/ambition in life was to become a scholar and enter the Ivory Tower. I can (personally) say: Western Academia is dead. Students do not merely "stay away in droves", but some (like myself and others) outright move to alternate structures for procuring knowledge.
It may sound like a novelty for some: but heading off to University is not the end all or be all for Seeking Knowledge. Prior to the establishment of said institution in the Mediaeval world; young men went to teachers, scholars, etc *in person* and studied at their feet, one-on-one.
The Islamic world has kept this tradition alive and well for over a Millenia. And I can happily say that I can count myself as a Beginning "student of knowledge" in that sphere. Academia's death need not be the "end" that many young scholars and would-be scholars think it is.
It can be a golden opportunity to finally take one's learning more seriously + actively.
"The Islamic world has kept this tradition alive and well for over a Millenia."
Yeah, with zero inventions or advancements not originating from Occidentals to show for it. They couldn't even properly care for all the science they inherited from egyptians, greeks, romans, and all theother cultures of the region.
I was not really speaking to the "Scientific" Knowledge side of things. The "Scientific" field (especially in Western Academia) is a complete Scam. The pursuit of it has basically gotten mankind to a Post-human, Nihilist Dead End.
I was speaking more to Philosophy + Theology; which have always been the primary pursuits, especially when we look at the Ancients and how they used to go about trying to procure Knowledge in a one-on-one fashion.
You know how I feel about DIE, John. So the sooner it happens to these indoctrination centers, the better. I remember the nascent version of woke communism from when I went to college, it wasn't anything like what it has evolved into back then, it was still being developed, still quietly growing like a cancerous tumor.
Only later did it come roaring out of the universities to take over western countries. Now we can see it in all its perversion and depravity, and see the despair it creates in populations that must endure it.
I don't think we've seen anything like the worst of its potential evil. It is hatred of life, resentment refined to an exquisite level of industrial-grade purity that has never before been seen. If allowed to grow into its final form I believe it will be more monstrous by far than any of the beasts unleashed by bolshevism.
Unfortunately, I must agree with you. The bolsheviks did not have the technology at their fingertips that the woke communist have now. The damage they could do was limited by the more primitive system they created. But now? Wow, the woke commies have it far easier in terms of controlling people and destroying those who stand up to them.
Indeed. Also, the bolshies had a genuine respect for science and technology ... let's not forget their space program, for example. These monsters are hostile to the very notion of objectivity, logic, reason, empiricism, etc.
That is also very true, the bolsheviks were focused on class distinctions, not identity. The losers we have now are focused on identity, race, etc. and in the process they destroy that which the bolsheviks were successful at in their time.
Every iteration of this death cult is worse than the last. What comes after bioleninism? I'm thinking technomaoism - machines as the new underclass.
One iteration at a time, my friend, one iteration at a time. We have our hands full with this one, and perhaps we can prevent it from morphing into the next one, at least for a while. 😉
Is it communism, or deconstructionism, that is the root concept?
To me, communism was just pushback from the serfs, that then went overboard in its own way.
The guiding principle of this mess seems to be the notion that everything can be deconstructed, from professionalism to biology, but little sense of why structure exists in the first place and so what will replace the old formulations.
ISIS deconstructs with the sword, but we all know the pen is mightier than the sword.
The future is what structure does rise from this cultural necrosis and it will have to be far more conceptually whole, than just a patchwork of old ideals, because that wave of fossil fuels propelling our recent binge is not going to be there, the next time.
Otherwise it's just warlords declaring their divine authority.
What is structure?
For one thing, galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.
It is half the equation and it ignores the other half at its own peril.
Energy is good at deconstructing what can't ride that wave.
How many managers do you need, when much of the manufacturing is shipped overseas?
How much has education simply become a holding pond for youth? While indebting them for life. "You will own nothing and be happy." Or get cancelled.
I have to say, I don't have a lot of personal experience with any form of schooling, having avoided it with a passion, but the broader social and cultural issues are where the real sources of the problems in education go and where they will be solved.
For instance, in armies the people running things are called generals, while specialist is about one rank above private. Yet in our society, the kids who would be natural generalists would be the ones most interested and curious about everything, because they will be the ones to understand how all the parts fit together. Yet in our sick, sick culture, they are diagnosed as attention deficient and medicated until their minds fit back in the box.
Society run by and for the specialists is a Tower of Babel. One that is spiraling down the big rabbit hole to boot.
Do you think that will be solved by skewing college admissions back toward those more marginally proficient in checking the boxes? As a grumpy old white guy, I will be the first to admit we have made delusional thinking into an art form. These diversity hires are just trying to catch up.
To paraphrase, it's patches all the way down.
The hyperspecialization of intellectual life is certainly a huge problem. They know more and more about less and less.
Efficiency is to do more with less, until peak efficiency, when we can do everything with nothing.
The big, if not much bigger part of the problem is that what they do "know," is bullshit, that they have to defend with their lives, or loose it all.
One of the better examples is Big Bang theory.
When they realized that cosmic redshift increases proportional to distance in all directions, it either meant that we are at the exact center of the universe, or it was an optical effect. Since there didn't seem to be any medium slowing the light, optical was dismissed. The solution was to argue that space itself expands, because "Spacetime!"
Which totally ignores the central premise on which GR is build, that the speed of light is CONSTANT!
If space is expanding faster than the light crosses it, it's not Constant!
Basically two metrics are being derived from the same light, one based on the speed and one based the spectrum. The argument being the spectrum is like a rubber ruler, that when stretched, the ripples of the waves become longer. Yet it's still taken for granted the speed of light remains the same. Which it has to be, for basic doppler effect. The train moving down the tracks doesn't stretch the tracks, just increases the distance.
If it was actual "spacetime," the speed of light would have to increase, proportional to space expanding, but that would throw a hickey in the explanation for redshift.
I've raised this point in a fair number of discussion boards, with people in the field and they will not accept it, but they have no argument against it.
Being old enough to have followed the development of the field since the 70's, it really was a political dynamic, where the BBT became the totem they had to adhere too.
Safe to say, I could go on for pages, but close by pointing out one way light does redshift over distance, is as multi spectrum 'packets," as the higher frequencies dissipate faster, but that would mean we are sampling a wave front, not observing individual photons having traveled inter dimensional space for billions of years. And if you know anything of the religion that is quantum theory, you know how popular that idea would be.
Close with an interview you would like;
http://worrydream.com/refs/Mead%20-%20American%20Spectator%20Interview.html
🗨 Big Bang theory is Biblical Genesis. It is a creation myth. You can't do science with it. You can't prove it. There are no facts or variables to work with.[...] There is a reason why they don't teach us in public school that Father Georges Lemaître invented Big Bang theory. Because the more observant and cagey students in the class would raise their hands and say, “Teacher, I thought we weren't allowed to learn religion in school?”
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
From Official Stories: Counter-Arguments for a Culture in Need by inimitable Liam Scheff, unbekoming.substack.com/i/100954277/the-big-electric-bang
It wasn't until graduate school that I found out Fr. Lemaitre was the father of the expanding universe (not so much the Big Bang - the name at least came from Fred Hoyle, who was being acerbic).
Then again does the average person know that Maxwell's Laws underlie the operation of electrical devices? I'm reluctant to ascribe to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by incuriosity. Although THAT said, it's certainly the case that astronomers were initially deeply reluctant to accept the BB, because they knew full well its origin and could plainly see its similarity to Let There Be Light.
I have to say I simply assumed the logic was far beyond my ability to question, until reading Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, where he makes the point that, "Omega=1." Essentially the overall expansion of the universe was matched by gravitational attraction and it all suddenly made no sense at all. Given they therefore essentially cancel out. It seemed to me, more of a cosmic convection cycle.
The redshift expansion logically describes Einstein's original purpose of a cosmological constant, a force to balance gravity and prevent the universe from collapsing to a point.
It was only later on, tossing the idea around in my head, that the above point occurred, that it's not relativistic space(time), if the speed of light is not Constant to the frame/observer. Which it expressly is not. Two metrics are being derived from the same light, one based on the speed and one based on the spectrum and if the speed was the numerator, it would be a tired light theory, but as an expanding space theory, the speed is still the denominator, the metric against which this expansion is measured.
Also it was around this time it occurred to me the idea of time as not so much the present moving past to future, but events moving future to past, was more logically explanatory.
As for the political aspects, back in the late 90's, I raised this issue on the Mysteries of the Universe section of the NYTimes forum boards(long gone.) In which I was still trying to work it out as spacetime being physically real and that whatever was falling into black holes, was bubbling up in the spaces between galaxies, when another commentator pointed out it works much better to assume they are metrics based on measures of gravitational mass, that collapse, versus measures based on radiation, that expanded. He had been studying for a PhD in astronomy at the U of Chicago and this was his thesis paper. To which his adviser said that if he wanted to continue down that train of thought, he might want to consider other professional options, then astronomy.
As for how the whole profession decided on this path, it always did leave me in wonder, but you only have to look around today, to see that logic comes a distant second to agreement with the crowd.
While it might seem the most educated would be immune to this, the reality is the dynamic of selection is much more enforced and rigorous, of one generation directing the next, by that very process of education.
💬 the speed was the numerator,[...] the speed is still the denominator, the metric against which this expansion is measured
A fun term Wittgenstein's Ruler has been coined by N N Taleb for circular cases just like this 😉
🗨 unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.
'Tis plain inevitable outcome of natural human curiosity having been relentlessly crushed from early kidhood throughout long years of institutional edumacation: Any sufficiently advanced technology becomes indistinguishable from magic 😏
Then again, pressure is what turns carbon into diamonds.
The bull is power. The matador is art.
As he described it, a "cosmic egg."
I'm going to college for engineering and I pray to the stars above that I'm not stuck with a bunch of woke mongrels. While I love the humanities, it hurts my soul even more knowing that STEM has gone woke (*cough* Nature, Scientific American, and Science Magazine *cough*). I don't even know how it makes sense for STEM to be woke...there's always been people of color, women, disabled people, etc. in the field. But, then again, I guess that just shows how ignorant to history these "academics" and administrators are.
And then there's the chart of the kids that identify with the Skittles Mafia...I usually spend my daily Ten Minutes Hate on these losers. Mainly because they're a bunch of straight women who want to be "quirky" "minorities" and so choose--or worse, create--some pastel flag (usually "queer") with a strange, technically-should-be-grammatically-correct-but-also-is-just-ridiculous-and-demeaning name, whose atrocious color combos are enough to make an artist gag (I have on several occasions). These people are also the reason why gender and personality have been confused with one another, but that's a rant for another day.
On a better note, that David statue is awesome and these sculptures are now my new obsession.
I hope the program works out for you, but I confess I'm not optimistic. Over the last few years I've noticed that the graduate programs in my own field have been filling up with an entirely different sort of student from the ones I studied alongside not so long ago. My field was always characterized by high IQ, socially awkward nerds, but the new generation have a preponderance of fat blue-haired pronoun people. Their company is terribly unpleasant, but more dispiriting than this is that they're just generally shit at it: remarkably incurious about their own chosen field beyond whatever their narrow subject of research is, and generally incapable of any real insight. They generate graphs and tables ("look! I'm using models!") but don't seem to grasp the purpose of it. Doing science-like things without actually knowing what science is.
Whether it's that the woke schools are preferentially admitting this type, or talented young men are simply staying the hell away because who wants to be around these people, I'm not sure. Probably both tbh.
And yes that Cyborg David statue gives me hope for the future.
Speaking of atrocious colour combos, welcome to The Poisoned Palette (from Rainbow Blight in 4 parts 👌) --> markbisone.substack.com/i/130431714/the-poisoned-palette
I think I experienced every emotion I know while reading all four of those articles over the last thirty minutes. I started off laughing and ended up having an existential crisis. Impressive!
Excellent!
I still remember my 1st semester Organic Chemistry Professor (name redacted, he is still alive)saying “Its a shame I shall have to flunk so many of you. “ as he handed out the final exam. The class that started over flowing a 350 seat auditorium was down to 60 by spring. The good old days!
Among the 250 freshmen of the small STEM college I attended, there were six women. Among the entire student body of 800, both undergraduate and graduate, there was one black. At the time, the school required minimum 700 verbal and 700 math SAT scores to attend. Today they don't look at the SAT at all. They were recently reprimanded by NASA for mismanagement of one of their associated facilities. I suspect they DIEed some time ago.
Our Computer Science department was very effective in weeding out people in the first year. Total bloodbath. Back then the admin got on a professor's case if they didn't give enough people low scores, to which the profs responded only the best were left, and you do not give a good student a D for mere metrics.
Great write up Mr. Carter. You still haven't reached the crux of it yet though, none of this ends until the dollar loses reserve currency status. That is the pillar that holds up all the others you dislike. It took me from 2008 until 2018 to realize that. Kids not going to school because of cost and a degree not gaining you the income to service or discharge that debt? Uncle Joe (or any statist) at this point will bail em out. He isn't bailing out the students, because those job prospects will continue to shrink year by year anyways, he's bailing out the schools. Just like the banks, ask someone why it was wrong to bail out the banks but right to bail out their school debt and watch the smoke come out of their ears.
The crash of the dollar and our "way of life" will also take care of all the other isms you dislike. Collapse isn't the problem, its the salvation of our sanity. Once people can't live their entire lives in abstract ideas due to not being able to "work" in front of a computer all day, things will revert back to the way they were. Deep down in their minds, those who scream loudest about diversity know this, they know they're unworthy and its their last stand in a way.
Check out my essay on Potemkin Prosperity. I meant exactly this point.
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Currency Collapse is an Agency of Reform
"[...] the new philosophy takes its bearings by how men live as distinguished from how they ought to live; it despises the concern with imagined republics and imagined principalities. The standard which it recognizes is "low but solid." Its symbol is the Beast Man as opposed to the God Man: it understands man in the light of the sub-human rather than of the super-human. The scheme of a good society which it projects is therefore in principle likely to be actualized by men's efforts or its actualization depends much less on chance than does the classical "utopia": chance is to be conquered, not by abandoning the passionate concern with the goods of chance and the goods of the body but through giving free reign to it."
-- Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, Free Press, 1958
What sense can we make of James Madison's famous Federalist No. 10 today? This is his essay on the danger of divisive and controlling factions to government, and how the Constitution would guard against them. His solution was to eliminate the problem by encouraging factions and fragmenting them, so that none of them could abuse its influence and upend the system, and by structuring the scale of the republic so that no faction could have undue influence and deprive others of their rights.
It's not clear, from Madison's point of view, just who the factions are in our world today. Are they the political parties? The beneficiaries of transfer payments? Is the military-industrial complex a single faction, or many? Likewise with the too-big-to-fail financial elites, or the health-care cartels, the endless political bureaucracies and rent-seekers -- are they unified threats, or a multitude of self-interested parties? Or is the entire system simply overrun?
What strikes us today is the overwhelming enormity of our situation, the unpayable debt and unmeetable liabilities, the intentionally-blown asset bubbles, an economic system that can no longer create the organic credit it requires for growth, and the complete failure of politics to address the situation or even discuss it openly and honestly with the public.
There was a shift not of degree but of kind, the Republic replaced by Empire, particularly after World War II. The "republican remedy" cherished by the Madison could not be maintained in the tide of History, the changes brought by a Lincoln, a Woodrow Wilson, or a Franklin Roosevelt; of new amendments to the Constitution; of innovations such as Keynesianism and unbacked debt-based currency.
"Public choice" economics emerged in the postwar period as an effort to examine the problems inherent in this new world. Bentham and Mill could not have invented it; public choice thought was grounded in the unique situation given by the West: industrial economies (initially) with surplus productivity, with democratic institutions for allocating and dividing the spoils. In what might be putting the cart before the horse, the school of thought attempted to discern political insights from primarily economic analysis.
An important insight from the public choice school was a sort of deep pessimism about these spoils. A subsidy or favor, once granted, tends to perpetuate itself forever because of the asymmetry of costs and benefits for everyone involved. To the beneficiary -- a faction? -- a subsidy is absolutely essential, but to the rest of us, the impact is minimal.
A good example is the Small Business Administration, whose budget of $1 billion is pure gravy for its beneficiaries and the in-house bureaucracy that administers its programs. The agency budget, divided by the number of U.S. taxpayers, is about $7 per person. Those feeding from the trough will fight tooth-and-nail to keep their privilege, but who among us would campaign to end it? Who cares enough to crusade to shut down the SBA? Is $7 worth the effort? Write a letter? An email?
Extend out this analysis across the now-vast Federal government, and add to it sketchy ideas such government expenditures counting as GDP, and we see very quickly what a dire situation we are in. The monster cannot possibly be reformed, the debts cannot possibly be repaid. Why, with the current definitions, cutting government expenditures will cut GDP. We are doomed to failure.
If it were possible to reform the American system, to trim government to its bare essentials and pay off the debt, the last opportunity we had to do this was the mid-90s with the GOP surge led by Gingrich. This was the last chance as an ideological moment, but more importantly as a demographic one, since the Baby Boomers were still in their prime earning years. If the whole project had not crashed and burned so horribly, it would have been possible to tackle the outstanding debt (if not the entitlements) via austerity. But we blew it.
The Weekly Standard, first issue
Our entire economic system now rests on an outrageous fiction, that the debts incurred on the nation since the 20th Century are "money-good", that they can be paid, and that they are binding on current and even future generations. This is a sickening idea, for to the young and those unborn it is odious debt and is not in any way binding on them. In fact, the system is desperate to create any new debts it can, however it can, to keep the game going. At the moment, permanent student loans, 84-month subprime auto loans, and securitized rental housing payments are holding things up.
But "the system" cannot be reformed with policy. The trenches are dug too deep. The factions are secure in their bunkers, enjoying their privileges.
The solution is currency collapse.
The collapse of the Treasury complex, and with it, the U.S. dollar, is the one event that puts a full-stop to the madness that our debt-powered society has become.
In the event of a collapse of the currency, all of the factions feeding off the system, the government workers, the recipients of transfer payments from their betters, the scandalous public pension recipients, will need to make other arrangements. No law, no arguments will be necessary. The checks may still be written, but they will lack any real purchasing power. All dollar-denominated debts and values will have to be revalued in terms of something else, something real.
No one will be spared. It's not as if your employer flips a switch, and your paycheck comes to you as Morgan dollars or Mercury dimes. Institutions simply collapse under these conditions. Most of them, in fact.
It is a fair question whether the United States itself will survive the experience, or if it will fragment into autonomous regions. We quickly get into questions of energy and societal complexity, what will be both manageable and stable in this future. A posh enclave like Loudoun County, VA, will go from the upper echelons to full-on Mad Max in the space of a weekend.
Thomas Hobbes will be the latest intellectual fashion.
More important are questions about whether or not we are still a nation, in the full sense. But that topic is for another day.
Collapse of the Treasury complex and of the Dollar do not necessarily bring back our Old Republic. Classical political thought holds that tyranny follows democratic excess and collapse, and we are very likely to have a series of Caesars.
Vladimir Putin is a Caesar, actually not a bad one at that, but he is what the Russian people needed after their own collapse, and I believe that he does act in the best interests of the Russian Federation. His personal fortune is excessive and an embarrassment; a true statesman would repatriate the bulk of it to the Russian people in their hour of need. But I am not Simonides to Putin's Hiero.
Again, I maintain that just as your regular paycheck will not transform overnight into junk silver, the United States will not magically roll back to republican government under the Constitution circa 1800. The problem is that the citizenry is thoroughly debased and no longer capable of the self-governance required of a free people. An extended period of deprivation and attrition will be needed to get the population into proper shape. The survivors have a chance to emerge as a free people one day, only if they are worthy of it. First we will have a few Caesars.
We are entering a period where all of the classic questions of our (Western) civilization will come to the fore, questions of law and order, of the true natural rights of man, questions of man's right of resistance to a tyrannical sovereign, of the nature of money, of the best political order. Our unserious, ephemeral, late-Modern culture ignored these issues, but they were there all the time, and will continue to be so.
I remember Bush Sr's push for the line item veto. While I realized it had zero chance of passing congress, as it would cede the real power to the executive, It did occur to me a possible compromise would be to break these bills into all their various items, have every legislator assign a percentage value to each one, put them back together in order of preference, then have the president draw the line. "The buck stops here."
So the president would be directly responsible for defect spending, therefore less willing to shoulder that political burden, but the congress would be responsible for deciding priorities and can horse trade around all they want.
Indeed, the money printing machine at the Fed is the engine driving this. And so much else besides. I've written a fair bit on it, actually.
We lack any kind of organization (those who dislike our current rulers) but something you could suggest that would really crimp their style and plans, would be a consumption strike. Everyone who reads you and all the other substack sites should only buy things they need (pay your rent, food and maybe a night out drinking at a local place and save everything else). Discharge debt as fast as possible and spend as little as possible and then save the rest. The system would hate that, and they'd also be in a much better position when the next "crisis" comes along if the old job goes kaput.
I sort of already suggested this in my Omni-Boycott essay.
EXCELLENT piece, bro!
Thank you!
I got a glimpse of how STEM is getting railroaded in academia last week. I went through a chemistry graduate program a few years ago and the wokeness was still not very prevalent there but...
I took a new job as a gen science and physics teacher for the IB program. IB is cozy with the WEF, and the leader of the workshop I had to take for it prominently wore the circle rainbow pin representing the UN goals for enslavement... I mean "sustainable development".
In the new physics curriculum, there is now an entire module regarding "the greenhouse effect", and it is a requirement to talk about human impact. Ok, but in breakout groups with other teachers, I learned there was also some kind of climate agenda also built into the chemistry and bio subjects. It's beaten into these kid's heads.
Also, they are required to do a study concerning a "global issue". What does that mean? Well, if you're doing your report in STEM, you better be talking about climate change. Nearly every example topic this drone gave was about climatology itself, how solar panels work, or some other kind of environmental activism bullshit. Oh yeah, I think vaccinations and health were given as well.
So, I've decided that when I start I will do what they have been doing: planting seeds of subversion. You bet your bottom dollar I will be talking about the reproducibility crisis, the limitations of consensus, on the influence of money and ideology on results, etc
Subversion was exactly what I was going to suggest. Now, me, I'd have the students study something like the Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis. I suspect they would find this fascinating, unexpected, clearly of relevance to physics, biology, geology, and "global issues" ... and it would subtly subvert the global warming nonsense by demonstrating what a real catastrophe is and just how irrelevant humans are.
For photovoltaics, one might delve into the manufacturing and economics, as well perhaps as how the electrical grid actually works. Students will learn just how impossible that vision of a clean green solar future is.
You may find the BSI site (Broken Science Initiative; brokenscience.org) a useful resource in that thankless underground rebel business of yours 😇
BSI smells like another do-nothing waste of time CIA front. Gregg Glassman, the Crossfit CEO? Seriously?
From anosmia you suffer not 🙂
Seek Miles Mathis. He's been leading the charge against the broken system for decades, and he's probably the most censored man on the planet right now. He is basically rewriting physics from the ground up.
http://milesmathis.com/best2.pdf
Don't waste your time with controlled opposition fronts like BSI linked below. Like the EU guys, they're designed to draw rebels in and waste everyone's time with conferences, writing essays to each other, debating the same topics over and over again, etc.
My 11-year-old reads at 14th-grade level, according to her most recent standardized test (legal requirement for homeschoolers). This means her comprehension is equal to that of the average college sophomore. At first I was delighted. Then I realized this actually means the average college sophomore can only read as well as a bright 11-year-old.
I was reading at a college level before I finished elementary school, according to some test I was given at the time at least. That's not a brag. It's a comment on how shit the schools are.
On the other end, having graded papers written by college students, and edited the journal articles of graduate students, the command of English prevailing in the universities is abysmal.
It's a TRADEGY, I tell you!
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/07/11/the-university-and-college-unions-misspelt-strikes-leaflet-sums-up-everything-thats-wrong-with-higher-education/
LMAO