"The ‘sexist’ and ‘racist’ discrimination of yore was founded primarily in the idea that other groups couldn’t do things, because they lacked the ability; when an individual from one of those ‘oppressed’ groups demonstrated that ability, they were given seats at the big boys table. The wokeites make no such claim: they don’t say that white guys lack the ability to do things, but rather that in order to correct ‘historical inequities’, they should be prevented regardless of ability ... indeed that the very notion of ‘merit’ is merely a synonym for patriarchal white supremacy. There’s no amount of hard work that can bust through such a barrier. "
That's one of the best critiques I have EVER seen with regard to today's racial policies. It's *more pernicious* than the policies of old because it cannot be overcome by merit. This argument needs to be pushed more often.
It crystallized for me over the last week or so. There's nothing like living through a type of tyranny to generate insight into it. Seems obvious in retrospect because these clowns have literally been saying exactly this, that merit is irrelevant to them, for years now ... but it's such a demonically alien mindset that the mind recoils, "Surely they can't really mean it?" and therefore doesn't work out the implications.
It can be overcome by lying though. By transitioning or finding a long lost relationship with a Native Tribe. It's like it's designed to compromise integrity.
The saddest part is that capable people of all stripes are likewise oppressed by the system. They are reduced to skin tone and sex like replaceable parts in a meat grinder. You end up at a root inversion: appointing a black female Supreme Court Justice who can't say what a woman is.
Yep. I have a friend who teaches high school Spanish and is also a black woman. She's highly intelligent and good at what she does. She despises the woke shit, because everyone assumes she got the job on the basis of identity. Told me how she went off on the other teachers (all AWFLs, naturally) at a faculty meeting because they wanted to basically just give the black students free A's.
This system degrades everyone who participates in it. Even the winners win a booby prize.
Man, I completely get where you're coming from and have had a similar experience. I went to law school after the Army and did relatively well, a lot better than some of my darker-skinned classmates who got great offers from big firms. If you're a white male who comes from old money and has connections among the elite class, you can still do well; unfortunately, my network is all regular people with regular jobs who are struggling to open doors for themselves, let alone others. Ultimately I got a non-legal job I was absurdly overqualified for in a government agency, not because of my legal training and experience, but because I played identity politics in the only way I could: as a veteran. Of the white guys who were hired around the same time I was, they all were either GWOT veterans, licensed attorneys, or both (as I was) -- compared to some of our black female coworkers who were hired based on bachelor degrees from HBCUs, without veteran status and without any meaningful professional credentials. Once in, I realized I had gone from the frying pan into the fire: the only white people I saw in leadership roles were Boomers, and as that generation has retired, the leadership roles have been backfilled with minorities and women who make the management in the movie Office Space look brilliant by comparison.
If you're white and male and don't like getting fucked up the ass or wearing a dress, if you go the college-educated professional route you are pretty much screwed ... that is, unless you come from money, because the elite class still is largely white and looks out very much for their own, even as they foist all this DEI shit on the rest of us.
I've been thinking about going the skilled trades route, but have never shown any aptitude for being a handyman, so I don't know how that would go. I need to find a vocation for which I have some aptitude where you succeed or fail based truly on merit, not bullshit political games. Still trying to figure that part out.
I do know that working under a DEI regime is hell on earth. You are supposed to pretend that nonwhite management who cannot write a coherent paragraph somehow are actually your superiors based on their merit, because acknowledging the truth is racist and sexist and that's the worst thing anyone can be -- although somehow white men are the only ones ever guilty of that, even though every other group openly practices in-group preference, because being anti-white and anti-male is ESG. You are supposed to go along with the religious mythology that this same society that openly disfavors white men is somehow systemically racist and patriarchal and that all these diversity hires had to overcome so much discrimination to get where they are, even though they are situated in the hierarchy above white men who are orders of magnitude more qualified. You're supposed to pretend and then pretend that nobody is pretending. It's real psychological torture.
Anyway, it sucks what has happened to you. Maybe now would be a good time to go paid on your substack. Yours is really the best one out there that I've come across, and that's saying something, because there are some damn good writers here on substack. I would have gotten a paid subscription to yours a long time ago if it was available. Hopefully that old cliché, about how whenever one door closes another one opens, will be true on your case!
Thanks for sharing your story, and for the encouragement.
Honestly man every time I hear a story like yours, it reminds me that I shouldn't get too wrapped up in my own bullshit. It's nothing personnel kid, as the 4chan saying goes. This is happening to all of us. It's everywhere. And we all hate it.
In your case, you've got a law degree: why not go into private practice? I think that's increasingly the answer, maybe basically the only answer. The institutional path is closed to us, and on the odd chance you squeak in it's intolerable. That being the case, taking our various talents and finding ways to deploy them without having to do so through institutions seems like the best play. Not an easy play maybe but easy is a relative thing, and look at the alternatives.
Institutions derange everyone. They foster weird, contrived, psychologies that mould people to impersonal systems that in real life are operated by people who lack the courage or insight to behave properly, so the institutions themselves functions as a passive-aggressive theatre of cruelty. Our species did not evolve to live in such an environment and the people who thrive in them are frequently the sort who would once have been driven off a cliff or left to be eaten by cave-bears.
The practical solution us to have rich parents...in the absence of which adapt and be cheerful.
You're exactly right about that! The culture in these institutions is corrosive and alters your baseline for standards of professionalism and such, which can make it hard to go back to a saner work environment based on production and competence. It's like being stranded on a remote wilderness island for years; if you survived with your sanity intact, you would probably face a rough adjustment going back to civilization.
It is the white collar version of the dependency and docility that develops in prisoners serving long sentences, they become institutionalised (an appropriate term).
The underlying problem is the overproduction of graduates and the lack of opportunities for material reward and social recognition in alternatives to the college/white collar world. Throw in the realities of HBD, average differences in IQ and socio-cultural issues and you have a recipe for misery and tension.
Having said that, the torture is having morons giving orders to subordinates who could run rings around them. This is an age-old problem in all hierarchies. In the old days this was managed in a ruthless but practical way by keeping the people illiterate and ruthlessly rationing education so that most people did not realise their betters were nothing of the sort. We, however, are living in a period of change. There are too many overeducated or overqualified workers, too few jobs for them, political pressure for diversity/equity and an economy deformed by deindustrialisation. Add female managers who feel intimidated by men and threatened by subordinates with brains. It does not make for happiness.
I once worked in a unit devoted to the betterment of what I'd best describe as an equity target.
It was an eye-opener. I had a 'favoured son' colleague (who belonged to the target group) who only showed up to work intermittently. Many months into the job I discovered that whenever he came in to work, he would dump his in-tray into mine. Thus I ended up doing the work of two people. All of my colleagues knew about it. None bothered to tip me off. A friend in an adjacent unit was told by his boss not to bother ever applying for promotion because those were never going to be awarded to whites. It was profoundly demoralsing and a disgraceful way to treat young guys just starting out, but when you are young you just don't know any better and you put up with it. Looking back, the best thing to do in a toxic situation is get out.
Yeah, it's ultimately not about increasing real opportunity for excellence among minorities, it's about dividing and conquering the working class by inflaming racial and ethnic grievances. And the overproduction of would-be elites is a real problem. You learn just enough to see how the sausage is made, but you are still low enough on the totem pole that you either have to eat that nasty sausage or go hungry. The solution, as you noted, is to get out...and that's the part I'm trying to figure out now.
Not so sure that I agree 100% with you about self-employment...maybe 80%. Not everybody has the capacity. Self-employment is pretty easy for people with extensive savings, substantial assets or readily-marketable skill sets or generous and cashed up family.
The key thing for disaffected wage-slaves is wellbeing and the first step is to mentally/emotionally separate from the system. Working in a bad job (albeit with a healthy mindset) may be better (at least in the short term) than escaping and living in anxiety over the economic insecurity. Especially for those who need to build savings for the great escape. Second step is relationships of all sorts.
There are two essential tactics for maximising chances of a successful transition. 1) Identify and consult with people who have done it or who are working in conditions that you want for yourself. 2) Make a detailed plan with a schedule/calendar. You may not fulfill even half the steps laid out, but concrete plans help you stay active and no matter what else simply being active in your pursuit of your goals always helps. Plans change, but the activity itself can be useful no matter what.
"Do I really want to spend the rest of my life biting my tongue around the zampolit, publicly agreeing with what I privately despise, all so I can collect a paycheck from a failing institution that’s become a twisted parody of what it once was?" That's the thing that'll catch the conscience of the king. conservative British professor of sociology I know hid his despondency so well over twenty years, but you can see it behind his eyes, eating away at his soul, one performative nod in agreement at a time.
Last spring I went to England the moment they finally dropped their nonsense requirements. But the "public health" dictatorship in our little failed state to the south of you was still "requiring" a negative test for the World's Deadliest Virus™ for re-entry.
Giving in to the pharmafia racket made it the most excruciating 13 dollars I ever pried out of my wallet, down in the basement of a London travel agency.*
Back in the hotel I followed the instructions to take the test and upload the results, with great difficulty and multiple phone calls as the directions on the test did not jibe at all with what I saw on the upload site.
Finally got the result certified. Then neither British Airways, Heathrow, nor Logan ever asked for it.
When I got home I successfully disputed the credit card charge.
Tiny victories in the hopeless Battle to Restore Sanity.
*Where the three employees informed me I'd have to put on a mask. I replied politely that I did not and would not, and that they should not either, and fired off a couple of my standard lines about having a science education that prevented me wearing a useless talisman. And wouldn't ya know they acquiesced, engaged me on the topic, and seemed to agree.
Ha. Canada's stupid ArriveCAN app told me I needed a negative test result to enter, so I scrambled to get it, then neither the app nor the border guard even asked for it. Luckily it was free. Or maybe unluckily since now I can't obtain the satisfaction of forcing them to cough up.
The part under your asterisk is the best part of your story.
I just want to salute your courage and integrity for refusing to mouth the modern loyalty oath/profession of faith that our New Left commissars demand from everyone under their authority.
I know you can't eat dignity but at least you will always be able to look at yourself in the mirror, and at least you will save your soul from being gnawed away by constant lies and shameful groveling.
The New Left Crit Theorists are the enemies of freedom and the termites of civilization and it is just a matter of time before their entire project collapses, as their only passion is resentment and their only interest is the destruction of all the things they could never achieve, that is anything of lasting beauty or worth, anything that requires skill, talent, rigor and imagination. May they all be cursed to live forever in the joyless punitive small and ugly world they are working to create.
Things may seem bleak now but at least you never sold your soul, and that puts you way ahead of all these bootlickers who willingly embrace their struggle sessions, which may save their paychecks but will mark them forever as lowly cowards.
As that pale stale white man Emerson said, Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Not selling my soul was precisely why I didn't write one ... and why I didn't get the jab. Some things can be sold for money, but can't be bought for it.
Well shit I was damn near in withdrawal, furtively checking for John Carter in my inbox and then I read this, and while I'm sorry to hear about your troubles I'm thrilled you're going to have more time to write! I, and many more will happily pay to read your stuff. This is mostly just another version of what's already in the comments but here goes anyway. The government closing down took out my small geophysics company. Was pretty devastating for awhile and when I recovered I figured, fuck it. Sold everything I own but the dog, renovated an old camper and put it on my 1 ton and thats where I live, traveling has been a blast, summer in the Yukon and wintering on the backroads of Vancouver Island worked out great and I'm set to do it again this year. I'm not giving any of these sleazy thieving governments (municipal, territorial or federal) a penny more than I have to, I've saved and owe no one, I can live cheap and work under the table here and there. I honestly don't even know how to function in this broken system. I'm talented, smart and a hard worker - but that's not a commodity anymore, and being a Pureblood makes me an unemployable pariah so I'm going to ride it out, read great substacks like this to help keep my sanity while it all implodes. Tons of people have surprised themselves with how well they can both adapt and flourish in this strange time and I've absolutely no doubt you will too. Welcome to the party and welcome home!
You're a geophysicist who summers in the Yukon? Man I have the coolest readers. Sounds like you've found a way to surf the wave that's washing over this world. What do you do for Internet? Starlink?
just to clarify - I am not the geophysicist, my business partner is, I am the grunt/everything else for the company. Nope - we have internet up here but it is expensive and slow compared to urban areas. I know a few people who are out in the bush and use starlink and like it. On the road I use Maple Wifi - gives you internet wherever you can get cell.
As far as I can figure it, anyone who wants to cling to any kind of integrity or avoid this collectivist bull#^#@ has to go Amish.
Meaning we have to forge our own communities of trades, professions, banks, services, entertainment...everything and harden them against the inevitable collapse of the Screwed Up Society around us.
Maybe the key is get back to small town living where we buy and work locally as much as possible. Forget online shopping as much as possible. Coop food stores etc...
As James Kunstler is fond of saying, we are in the Long Emergency and likely headed back to a world made by hand.
John, you don't need to cut off your dick. Just put on a wig & a dress & tell them you're transitioning!
Seriously, tho, welcome to my world! I went to a career counselor/headhunter shortly after college. This was late 70s, when "the girls" were funneled straight into the secretarial pool, for the eye-candy to catch husbands & the uglies to do everybody's bidding...He had me take a test, just very simple arithmetic & I forget what else. Simple stuff. He then sat down with me & broke the bad news. "You're going to have a hard time getting a job. You're just too intelligent. The people who should hire you never will, because they fear in 6 months you'll have their job. This will be a problem for you for the rest of your life."
40+ years later, and time proved him right.
That was your mistake, John. You positively ooze brilliance. The DEI is just the excuse du jour for mediocrity hiring incompetence to protect their own mediocre asses. You should have started coasting years ago, & stayed hidden behind the pack.
I could almost write an article on this subject. Maybe I will, if I can hang on to my line of thought long enough to get critters fed & tucked in ...
I admire your tenacity, but if participating with socialists is your objective, might I suggest a bit of undercover work. I have spent some years in the intelligence business, where I was required to maintain a cover. I lied to my wife, and everyone else. We don't have to be completely open and honest with everyone we meet, and sometimes telling people what they want to hear makes them more receptive to eventually learning the truth.
Search the archives or family stories and find an indigenous ancestor. It worked for a highly successful US senator. Tell them you love equity and then teach equality. You have to get in the door before you can do the job.
Saving the academy is important. Future generations depend on getting competently educated. Few today are getting that. Working from the inside is more effective than complaining from the outside.
I saw an excellent film about a character also called John Carter who pretended to be dead in order to get his job done. Good model.
Saving the academy in the broadest sense is crucial. Whether its current instantiation as the university is salvageable is debatable. I'm of the opinion that a new form for the function is needed.
We all thank you deeply for being a liar and a deciever. Due to people like you that have no shame in manipulating others, society is where it is. Maybe you should reflect on that before advising honest people to lie their way into corrupt institutions. Do you think that someone honest and who takes pride in pursuing real science, can survive in the current corrupt beyond any possibility of fixing academia?
Yes, yes, yes... You are using deceiving and manipulation only on liars. Hypocrisy at its finest. Continue being a winner. Soon, when everything will implode around you, it might dawn on you that due to winners like you everyone loses in the end, including you.
I think you've been spared, frankly. It would be a quiet sustained death. The era of academia is over anyway. What's left is a giant welfare state. I can't imagine a worse place, although in the past it was quite nice and still is for many ensconced in it for a long time.
Now is the time to put together the life that you really want to lead and not a life that is beholden to others. I'm excited about your journey. And especially about your ideas that you are writing here.
I'm sure you can make a good living on substack and as an "influencer" and we need to hear from you more often and on a deeper level.
Best of luck. I gave up ever getting a tenure track position 5 years ago and went back to my previous career. I have no regrets. Academia is dead, and so is much of society.
This situation is the result of opening up immigration, and not even the 1965 immigration reform. Well before that, post Civil War, mass immigration brought in people with no connection to America. Some of their children and grandchildren integrated, but many were full of resentment. They took over academia starting in the 30s and 40s, and were ready to preach their Anti-American resentments to the Baby Boomers, resulting in the 60s radicals.
Then we lost the ability to objectively measure ability in the early 70s with a pair of Supreme Court cases. Add in affirmative action and everything has gotten worse.
As a Gen X member, I knew I would be discriminated against. It happened in various ways. I ended up doing fine in life overall, but this has happened to many more than just me. This weakened society in general, as midwits and incompetent took control.
This is at all levels of society, as our federal government is also full of idiots, such as those who planned and manage the Ukrainian War and Covid.
IQ and aptitude testing being made illegal on the grounds of disparate impact (and how did that not make people go, hold on a minute!) was a big accelerant. Forced an entire generation into college and therefore exposed to the influence of the anti-western communists that had taken the system over. Direct line between that and the present breakdown.
John, the book "Political Ponerology" explains what you have described as "negative selection". That is, incompetent people being selected to perform functions that they are not capable of performing mainly because they adhere to a certain ideology.
Here's a quote from the book:
Psychopathic individuals generally stay away from social organizations characterized by reason and ethical discipline. After all, these were created by that other world of normal people so foreign to them. They therefore hold various social ideologies in contempt, at the same time discerning all their actual failings. However, once the process of poneric transformation of some human union into its yet undefined cartoon counterpart has begun and advanced sufficiently, they perceive this fact with almost infallible sensitivity: a circle has been created wherein they can hide their failings and psychological differentness, find their own modus vivendi, and maybe even realize their youthful Utopian dream. They thereupon begin infiltrating the rank and file of such a movement; pretending to be sincere adherents poses them no difficulty, since it is second nature for them to play a role and hide behind the mask of normal people. ;...'
They initially perform subordinate functions in such a movement and execute the leaders’ orders, especially whenever something needs to be done which inspires revulsion in others. Their evident zealotry and cynicism gives rise to criticism on the part of the union’s more reasonable members, but it also earns the respect of some its revolutionaries. [...] Thus they climb up the organizational ladder, gain influence, and almost involuntarily bend the contents of the entire group to their own way of experiencing reality and to the goals derived from their deviant nature. A mysterious disease is already raging inside the union. The adherents of the original ideology feel ever more constricted by powers they do not understand; they start fighting with demons and making mistakes. [...]
If such a movement is to triumph by revolutionary means and in the name of freedom, the welfare of the people, and social justice, this can only bring about further transformation of a governmental system thus created into a macro-social pathological phenomenon. Within this system, the common man is blamed for not having been born a psychopath, and is considered good for nothing except hard work, fighting and dying to protect a system of government he can neither sufficiently comprehend nor ever consider to be his own. [...]
An ever-strengthening network of psychopathic and related individuals gradually starts to dominate, overshadowing the others. [...]
I shall accept the denomination of pathocracy for a system of government thus created, wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people. The name thus selected above all underscores the basic quality of the macrosocial psychopathological phenomenon, which differentiates it from the many possible social systems dominated by normal people’s structure, custom, and law. [...]
Such a system of government has nowhere to go but down. Any leadership position, (down to village headman and community cooperative managers, not to mention the directors of police units, and special services police personnel, and activists in the pathocratic party) must be filled by individuals whose feeling of linkage to such a regime is conditioned by corresponding psychological deviations, which are inherited as a rule. However, such people become more valuable because they constitute a very small percentage of the population. Their intellectual level or professional skills cannot be taken into account, since people representing superior abilities are even harder to find. After such a system has lasted several years, one hundred percent of all the cases of essential psychopathy are involved in pathocratic activity; they are considered the most loyal, even though some of them were formerly involved on the other side in some way.
Under such conditions, no area of social life can develop normally, whether in economics, culture, science, technology, administration, etc. Pathocracy progressively paralyzes everything. [...]
If such and many managerial positions are assumed by individuals deprived of sufficient abilities to feel and understand most other people, and who also betray deficiencies in technical imagination and practical skills—(faculties indispensable for governing economic and political matters) this must result in an exceptionally serious crisis in all areas, both within the country in question and with regard to international relations. Within, the situation shall become unbearable even for those citizens who were able to feather their nest into a relatively comfortable modus vivendi. Outside, other societies start to feel the pathological quality of the phenomenon quite distinctly. Such a state of affairs cannot last long. [...]
End quoted section.
The book goes into much more detail than I have quoted above, including later stages of the societal disease. My main point is this: it appears that all positions of influence MUST be filled by pathological individuals or those who owe their advancement to the pathological system. The good news is that this process builds in its inevitable collapse.
Now, to get to the point: pathological types cannot infiltrate and take over any group or society without hiding who and what they are initially; they wear a Mask of Sanity (TM Hervey Cleckley), a necessary disguise as intra-species predators (Hare & Babiak). Normal humans who are unaware of the dynamic simply have no defense. How the heck can they survive under such a regime. Many don't.
I researched and wrote extensively about the problem beginning during the Bush administration, and the problem appeared intractable. The only thing I could say at the end of it (and this was pre "Political Ponerology:) was the following:
It seems certain from the evidence that a positive transformation of human nature isn’t going to come about through a great spiritual awakening, socio-economic reforms, or a spontaneous desire among the peoples of the world to be nice to each other. But it’s quite possible that, in the long run, the psychopathic program of suffering will lose out because misery is not a stable strategy. In a state of increasing misery, victims will seek to escape it; and this seeking will ultimately lead them to inquire into the true state of their misery, and that may lead to a society of intelligent people who will have the collective capacity to do so.
So, you basically have to play the "long game" and learn to survive strategically for the duration.
Oh, also read "In Broad Daylight" by Harry MacLean. It's a microcosmic example of what the West is experiencing on a much larger scale. Ken McElroy was a psychopath terrorizing several Missouri counties. McElroy's end is instructive.
It’s now fashionable for the unfashionable to decline to download ArriveCan, walk through customs, ignore the public health officers and continue on your way.
I gave up the dream of becoming a math professor when I saw the quota systems coming in and realized they'd need to discriminate massively against white males for the coming decades.
Do you know about the No White Guilt community? Meets tomorrow at 2 PM EST. White positive! Love, Hope and Redemption! Very good concepts, very good people. NoWhiteGuilt.org Great books, too. Come hang out with Your People! (Or check the archives for topics of particular interest.) Here's a clip of his I found worth sharing: Men Can’t Continue to be Obsequious to Our Women https://youtu.be/OPxM4-se--g
Sorry to say it, but welcome to the club man. Do you have any industry experience? If you can program or do other complicated stuff you might be able to elide right over, possibly make more money than you would as an academic. I really, deeply miss teaching, but, well, some more money helps.
Rollins' trade school idea isn't terrible, too. Industry isn't great, depending on the industry and the position, and corporate tends towards a lot of the same DEI crap as academia, although not quite so hard. Bigger companies seem worse than smaller, and companies that make things and positions close to making things are better across the board. (Amazing how that works... apparently atoms don't give a shit about your pronouns.) I have thought about getting a trade job too, although it would be a bit of a hit in the wallet, but the recent trend seems to be away from actually doing things well, and it is frustrating as all hell.
Anyway, stay strong, and if you are ever back in the states near Philly, drop me an email and I'll buy you a drink.
Yep, it's all over. I'm not special and don't delude myself that I am. Well, aside from in one respect - a decent salary and modest needs have conspired to leave me with a very comfortable cushion, so I've got time to figure things out. From what I've seen not many can claim the same these days.
"The ‘sexist’ and ‘racist’ discrimination of yore was founded primarily in the idea that other groups couldn’t do things, because they lacked the ability; when an individual from one of those ‘oppressed’ groups demonstrated that ability, they were given seats at the big boys table. The wokeites make no such claim: they don’t say that white guys lack the ability to do things, but rather that in order to correct ‘historical inequities’, they should be prevented regardless of ability ... indeed that the very notion of ‘merit’ is merely a synonym for patriarchal white supremacy. There’s no amount of hard work that can bust through such a barrier. "
That's one of the best critiques I have EVER seen with regard to today's racial policies. It's *more pernicious* than the policies of old because it cannot be overcome by merit. This argument needs to be pushed more often.
It crystallized for me over the last week or so. There's nothing like living through a type of tyranny to generate insight into it. Seems obvious in retrospect because these clowns have literally been saying exactly this, that merit is irrelevant to them, for years now ... but it's such a demonically alien mindset that the mind recoils, "Surely they can't really mean it?" and therefore doesn't work out the implications.
Heh. Trannie Tyranny...
It can be overcome by lying though. By transitioning or finding a long lost relationship with a Native Tribe. It's like it's designed to compromise integrity.
You penetrate to the essence of the woke enterprise.
The saddest part is that capable people of all stripes are likewise oppressed by the system. They are reduced to skin tone and sex like replaceable parts in a meat grinder. You end up at a root inversion: appointing a black female Supreme Court Justice who can't say what a woman is.
Yep. I have a friend who teaches high school Spanish and is also a black woman. She's highly intelligent and good at what she does. She despises the woke shit, because everyone assumes she got the job on the basis of identity. Told me how she went off on the other teachers (all AWFLs, naturally) at a faculty meeting because they wanted to basically just give the black students free A's.
This system degrades everyone who participates in it. Even the winners win a booby prize.
Man, I completely get where you're coming from and have had a similar experience. I went to law school after the Army and did relatively well, a lot better than some of my darker-skinned classmates who got great offers from big firms. If you're a white male who comes from old money and has connections among the elite class, you can still do well; unfortunately, my network is all regular people with regular jobs who are struggling to open doors for themselves, let alone others. Ultimately I got a non-legal job I was absurdly overqualified for in a government agency, not because of my legal training and experience, but because I played identity politics in the only way I could: as a veteran. Of the white guys who were hired around the same time I was, they all were either GWOT veterans, licensed attorneys, or both (as I was) -- compared to some of our black female coworkers who were hired based on bachelor degrees from HBCUs, without veteran status and without any meaningful professional credentials. Once in, I realized I had gone from the frying pan into the fire: the only white people I saw in leadership roles were Boomers, and as that generation has retired, the leadership roles have been backfilled with minorities and women who make the management in the movie Office Space look brilliant by comparison.
If you're white and male and don't like getting fucked up the ass or wearing a dress, if you go the college-educated professional route you are pretty much screwed ... that is, unless you come from money, because the elite class still is largely white and looks out very much for their own, even as they foist all this DEI shit on the rest of us.
I've been thinking about going the skilled trades route, but have never shown any aptitude for being a handyman, so I don't know how that would go. I need to find a vocation for which I have some aptitude where you succeed or fail based truly on merit, not bullshit political games. Still trying to figure that part out.
I do know that working under a DEI regime is hell on earth. You are supposed to pretend that nonwhite management who cannot write a coherent paragraph somehow are actually your superiors based on their merit, because acknowledging the truth is racist and sexist and that's the worst thing anyone can be -- although somehow white men are the only ones ever guilty of that, even though every other group openly practices in-group preference, because being anti-white and anti-male is ESG. You are supposed to go along with the religious mythology that this same society that openly disfavors white men is somehow systemically racist and patriarchal and that all these diversity hires had to overcome so much discrimination to get where they are, even though they are situated in the hierarchy above white men who are orders of magnitude more qualified. You're supposed to pretend and then pretend that nobody is pretending. It's real psychological torture.
Anyway, it sucks what has happened to you. Maybe now would be a good time to go paid on your substack. Yours is really the best one out there that I've come across, and that's saying something, because there are some damn good writers here on substack. I would have gotten a paid subscription to yours a long time ago if it was available. Hopefully that old cliché, about how whenever one door closes another one opens, will be true on your case!
Thanks for sharing your story, and for the encouragement.
Honestly man every time I hear a story like yours, it reminds me that I shouldn't get too wrapped up in my own bullshit. It's nothing personnel kid, as the 4chan saying goes. This is happening to all of us. It's everywhere. And we all hate it.
In your case, you've got a law degree: why not go into private practice? I think that's increasingly the answer, maybe basically the only answer. The institutional path is closed to us, and on the odd chance you squeak in it's intolerable. That being the case, taking our various talents and finding ways to deploy them without having to do so through institutions seems like the best play. Not an easy play maybe but easy is a relative thing, and look at the alternatives.
Institutions derange everyone. They foster weird, contrived, psychologies that mould people to impersonal systems that in real life are operated by people who lack the courage or insight to behave properly, so the institutions themselves functions as a passive-aggressive theatre of cruelty. Our species did not evolve to live in such an environment and the people who thrive in them are frequently the sort who would once have been driven off a cliff or left to be eaten by cave-bears.
The practical solution us to have rich parents...in the absence of which adapt and be cheerful.
You're exactly right about that! The culture in these institutions is corrosive and alters your baseline for standards of professionalism and such, which can make it hard to go back to a saner work environment based on production and competence. It's like being stranded on a remote wilderness island for years; if you survived with your sanity intact, you would probably face a rough adjustment going back to civilization.
It is the white collar version of the dependency and docility that develops in prisoners serving long sentences, they become institutionalised (an appropriate term).
That's more or less what I think will happen, too. I just hope we still have internal plumbing by the time it all comes down.
The underlying problem is the overproduction of graduates and the lack of opportunities for material reward and social recognition in alternatives to the college/white collar world. Throw in the realities of HBD, average differences in IQ and socio-cultural issues and you have a recipe for misery and tension.
Having said that, the torture is having morons giving orders to subordinates who could run rings around them. This is an age-old problem in all hierarchies. In the old days this was managed in a ruthless but practical way by keeping the people illiterate and ruthlessly rationing education so that most people did not realise their betters were nothing of the sort. We, however, are living in a period of change. There are too many overeducated or overqualified workers, too few jobs for them, political pressure for diversity/equity and an economy deformed by deindustrialisation. Add female managers who feel intimidated by men and threatened by subordinates with brains. It does not make for happiness.
I once worked in a unit devoted to the betterment of what I'd best describe as an equity target.
It was an eye-opener. I had a 'favoured son' colleague (who belonged to the target group) who only showed up to work intermittently. Many months into the job I discovered that whenever he came in to work, he would dump his in-tray into mine. Thus I ended up doing the work of two people. All of my colleagues knew about it. None bothered to tip me off. A friend in an adjacent unit was told by his boss not to bother ever applying for promotion because those were never going to be awarded to whites. It was profoundly demoralsing and a disgraceful way to treat young guys just starting out, but when you are young you just don't know any better and you put up with it. Looking back, the best thing to do in a toxic situation is get out.
Yeah, it's ultimately not about increasing real opportunity for excellence among minorities, it's about dividing and conquering the working class by inflaming racial and ethnic grievances. And the overproduction of would-be elites is a real problem. You learn just enough to see how the sausage is made, but you are still low enough on the totem pole that you either have to eat that nasty sausage or go hungry. The solution, as you noted, is to get out...and that's the part I'm trying to figure out now.
Self-employment is the way to go. Why give people who hate you power over you?
Not so sure that I agree 100% with you about self-employment...maybe 80%. Not everybody has the capacity. Self-employment is pretty easy for people with extensive savings, substantial assets or readily-marketable skill sets or generous and cashed up family.
The key thing for disaffected wage-slaves is wellbeing and the first step is to mentally/emotionally separate from the system. Working in a bad job (albeit with a healthy mindset) may be better (at least in the short term) than escaping and living in anxiety over the economic insecurity. Especially for those who need to build savings for the great escape. Second step is relationships of all sorts.
There are two essential tactics for maximising chances of a successful transition. 1) Identify and consult with people who have done it or who are working in conditions that you want for yourself. 2) Make a detailed plan with a schedule/calendar. You may not fulfill even half the steps laid out, but concrete plans help you stay active and no matter what else simply being active in your pursuit of your goals always helps. Plans change, but the activity itself can be useful no matter what.
"Do I really want to spend the rest of my life biting my tongue around the zampolit, publicly agreeing with what I privately despise, all so I can collect a paycheck from a failing institution that’s become a twisted parody of what it once was?" That's the thing that'll catch the conscience of the king. conservative British professor of sociology I know hid his despondency so well over twenty years, but you can see it behind his eyes, eating away at his soul, one performative nod in agreement at a time.
Great piece, JC. I feel ye re the test.
Last spring I went to England the moment they finally dropped their nonsense requirements. But the "public health" dictatorship in our little failed state to the south of you was still "requiring" a negative test for the World's Deadliest Virus™ for re-entry.
Giving in to the pharmafia racket made it the most excruciating 13 dollars I ever pried out of my wallet, down in the basement of a London travel agency.*
Back in the hotel I followed the instructions to take the test and upload the results, with great difficulty and multiple phone calls as the directions on the test did not jibe at all with what I saw on the upload site.
Finally got the result certified. Then neither British Airways, Heathrow, nor Logan ever asked for it.
When I got home I successfully disputed the credit card charge.
Tiny victories in the hopeless Battle to Restore Sanity.
*Where the three employees informed me I'd have to put on a mask. I replied politely that I did not and would not, and that they should not either, and fired off a couple of my standard lines about having a science education that prevented me wearing a useless talisman. And wouldn't ya know they acquiesced, engaged me on the topic, and seemed to agree.
Ha. Canada's stupid ArriveCAN app told me I needed a negative test result to enter, so I scrambled to get it, then neither the app nor the border guard even asked for it. Luckily it was free. Or maybe unluckily since now I can't obtain the satisfaction of forcing them to cough up.
The part under your asterisk is the best part of your story.
I just want to salute your courage and integrity for refusing to mouth the modern loyalty oath/profession of faith that our New Left commissars demand from everyone under their authority.
I know you can't eat dignity but at least you will always be able to look at yourself in the mirror, and at least you will save your soul from being gnawed away by constant lies and shameful groveling.
The New Left Crit Theorists are the enemies of freedom and the termites of civilization and it is just a matter of time before their entire project collapses, as their only passion is resentment and their only interest is the destruction of all the things they could never achieve, that is anything of lasting beauty or worth, anything that requires skill, talent, rigor and imagination. May they all be cursed to live forever in the joyless punitive small and ugly world they are working to create.
Things may seem bleak now but at least you never sold your soul, and that puts you way ahead of all these bootlickers who willingly embrace their struggle sessions, which may save their paychecks but will mark them forever as lowly cowards.
As that pale stale white man Emerson said, Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Not selling my soul was precisely why I didn't write one ... and why I didn't get the jab. Some things can be sold for money, but can't be bought for it.
AMEN!
Well shit I was damn near in withdrawal, furtively checking for John Carter in my inbox and then I read this, and while I'm sorry to hear about your troubles I'm thrilled you're going to have more time to write! I, and many more will happily pay to read your stuff. This is mostly just another version of what's already in the comments but here goes anyway. The government closing down took out my small geophysics company. Was pretty devastating for awhile and when I recovered I figured, fuck it. Sold everything I own but the dog, renovated an old camper and put it on my 1 ton and thats where I live, traveling has been a blast, summer in the Yukon and wintering on the backroads of Vancouver Island worked out great and I'm set to do it again this year. I'm not giving any of these sleazy thieving governments (municipal, territorial or federal) a penny more than I have to, I've saved and owe no one, I can live cheap and work under the table here and there. I honestly don't even know how to function in this broken system. I'm talented, smart and a hard worker - but that's not a commodity anymore, and being a Pureblood makes me an unemployable pariah so I'm going to ride it out, read great substacks like this to help keep my sanity while it all implodes. Tons of people have surprised themselves with how well they can both adapt and flourish in this strange time and I've absolutely no doubt you will too. Welcome to the party and welcome home!
You're a geophysicist who summers in the Yukon? Man I have the coolest readers. Sounds like you've found a way to surf the wave that's washing over this world. What do you do for Internet? Starlink?
just to clarify - I am not the geophysicist, my business partner is, I am the grunt/everything else for the company. Nope - we have internet up here but it is expensive and slow compared to urban areas. I know a few people who are out in the bush and use starlink and like it. On the road I use Maple Wifi - gives you internet wherever you can get cell.
As far as I can figure it, anyone who wants to cling to any kind of integrity or avoid this collectivist bull#^#@ has to go Amish.
Meaning we have to forge our own communities of trades, professions, banks, services, entertainment...everything and harden them against the inevitable collapse of the Screwed Up Society around us.
Maybe the key is get back to small town living where we buy and work locally as much as possible. Forget online shopping as much as possible. Coop food stores etc...
As James Kunstler is fond of saying, we are in the Long Emergency and likely headed back to a world made by hand.
John, you don't need to cut off your dick. Just put on a wig & a dress & tell them you're transitioning!
Seriously, tho, welcome to my world! I went to a career counselor/headhunter shortly after college. This was late 70s, when "the girls" were funneled straight into the secretarial pool, for the eye-candy to catch husbands & the uglies to do everybody's bidding...He had me take a test, just very simple arithmetic & I forget what else. Simple stuff. He then sat down with me & broke the bad news. "You're going to have a hard time getting a job. You're just too intelligent. The people who should hire you never will, because they fear in 6 months you'll have their job. This will be a problem for you for the rest of your life."
40+ years later, and time proved him right.
That was your mistake, John. You positively ooze brilliance. The DEI is just the excuse du jour for mediocrity hiring incompetence to protect their own mediocre asses. You should have started coasting years ago, & stayed hidden behind the pack.
I could almost write an article on this subject. Maybe I will, if I can hang on to my line of thought long enough to get critters fed & tucked in ...
Man. I remember a time when Anglos shook their heads in dismay at cultures that cut the tall poppies.
I admire your tenacity, but if participating with socialists is your objective, might I suggest a bit of undercover work. I have spent some years in the intelligence business, where I was required to maintain a cover. I lied to my wife, and everyone else. We don't have to be completely open and honest with everyone we meet, and sometimes telling people what they want to hear makes them more receptive to eventually learning the truth.
Search the archives or family stories and find an indigenous ancestor. It worked for a highly successful US senator. Tell them you love equity and then teach equality. You have to get in the door before you can do the job.
Saving the academy is important. Future generations depend on getting competently educated. Few today are getting that. Working from the inside is more effective than complaining from the outside.
I saw an excellent film about a character also called John Carter who pretended to be dead in order to get his job done. Good model.
Saving the academy in the broadest sense is crucial. Whether its current instantiation as the university is salvageable is debatable. I'm of the opinion that a new form for the function is needed.
We all thank you deeply for being a liar and a deciever. Due to people like you that have no shame in manipulating others, society is where it is. Maybe you should reflect on that before advising honest people to lie their way into corrupt institutions. Do you think that someone honest and who takes pride in pursuing real science, can survive in the current corrupt beyond any possibility of fixing academia?
You're welcome. Honest losers can take consolation in their pristine integrity. Winning is better. Lying to liars is not a vice, except to the naive.
Yes, yes, yes... You are using deceiving and manipulation only on liars. Hypocrisy at its finest. Continue being a winner. Soon, when everything will implode around you, it might dawn on you that due to winners like you everyone loses in the end, including you.
I think you've been spared, frankly. It would be a quiet sustained death. The era of academia is over anyway. What's left is a giant welfare state. I can't imagine a worse place, although in the past it was quite nice and still is for many ensconced in it for a long time.
Now is the time to put together the life that you really want to lead and not a life that is beholden to others. I'm excited about your journey. And especially about your ideas that you are writing here.
I'm sure you can make a good living on substack and as an "influencer" and we need to hear from you more often and on a deeper level.
Best of luck. I gave up ever getting a tenure track position 5 years ago and went back to my previous career. I have no regrets. Academia is dead, and so is much of society.
This situation is the result of opening up immigration, and not even the 1965 immigration reform. Well before that, post Civil War, mass immigration brought in people with no connection to America. Some of their children and grandchildren integrated, but many were full of resentment. They took over academia starting in the 30s and 40s, and were ready to preach their Anti-American resentments to the Baby Boomers, resulting in the 60s radicals.
Then we lost the ability to objectively measure ability in the early 70s with a pair of Supreme Court cases. Add in affirmative action and everything has gotten worse.
As a Gen X member, I knew I would be discriminated against. It happened in various ways. I ended up doing fine in life overall, but this has happened to many more than just me. This weakened society in general, as midwits and incompetent took control.
This is at all levels of society, as our federal government is also full of idiots, such as those who planned and manage the Ukrainian War and Covid.
IQ and aptitude testing being made illegal on the grounds of disparate impact (and how did that not make people go, hold on a minute!) was a big accelerant. Forced an entire generation into college and therefore exposed to the influence of the anti-western communists that had taken the system over. Direct line between that and the present breakdown.
John, the book "Political Ponerology" explains what you have described as "negative selection". That is, incompetent people being selected to perform functions that they are not capable of performing mainly because they adhere to a certain ideology.
Here's a quote from the book:
Psychopathic individuals generally stay away from social organizations characterized by reason and ethical discipline. After all, these were created by that other world of normal people so foreign to them. They therefore hold various social ideologies in contempt, at the same time discerning all their actual failings. However, once the process of poneric transformation of some human union into its yet undefined cartoon counterpart has begun and advanced sufficiently, they perceive this fact with almost infallible sensitivity: a circle has been created wherein they can hide their failings and psychological differentness, find their own modus vivendi, and maybe even realize their youthful Utopian dream. They thereupon begin infiltrating the rank and file of such a movement; pretending to be sincere adherents poses them no difficulty, since it is second nature for them to play a role and hide behind the mask of normal people. ;...'
They initially perform subordinate functions in such a movement and execute the leaders’ orders, especially whenever something needs to be done which inspires revulsion in others. Their evident zealotry and cynicism gives rise to criticism on the part of the union’s more reasonable members, but it also earns the respect of some its revolutionaries. [...] Thus they climb up the organizational ladder, gain influence, and almost involuntarily bend the contents of the entire group to their own way of experiencing reality and to the goals derived from their deviant nature. A mysterious disease is already raging inside the union. The adherents of the original ideology feel ever more constricted by powers they do not understand; they start fighting with demons and making mistakes. [...]
If such a movement is to triumph by revolutionary means and in the name of freedom, the welfare of the people, and social justice, this can only bring about further transformation of a governmental system thus created into a macro-social pathological phenomenon. Within this system, the common man is blamed for not having been born a psychopath, and is considered good for nothing except hard work, fighting and dying to protect a system of government he can neither sufficiently comprehend nor ever consider to be his own. [...]
An ever-strengthening network of psychopathic and related individuals gradually starts to dominate, overshadowing the others. [...]
I shall accept the denomination of pathocracy for a system of government thus created, wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people. The name thus selected above all underscores the basic quality of the macrosocial psychopathological phenomenon, which differentiates it from the many possible social systems dominated by normal people’s structure, custom, and law. [...]
Such a system of government has nowhere to go but down. Any leadership position, (down to village headman and community cooperative managers, not to mention the directors of police units, and special services police personnel, and activists in the pathocratic party) must be filled by individuals whose feeling of linkage to such a regime is conditioned by corresponding psychological deviations, which are inherited as a rule. However, such people become more valuable because they constitute a very small percentage of the population. Their intellectual level or professional skills cannot be taken into account, since people representing superior abilities are even harder to find. After such a system has lasted several years, one hundred percent of all the cases of essential psychopathy are involved in pathocratic activity; they are considered the most loyal, even though some of them were formerly involved on the other side in some way.
Under such conditions, no area of social life can develop normally, whether in economics, culture, science, technology, administration, etc. Pathocracy progressively paralyzes everything. [...]
If such and many managerial positions are assumed by individuals deprived of sufficient abilities to feel and understand most other people, and who also betray deficiencies in technical imagination and practical skills—(faculties indispensable for governing economic and political matters) this must result in an exceptionally serious crisis in all areas, both within the country in question and with regard to international relations. Within, the situation shall become unbearable even for those citizens who were able to feather their nest into a relatively comfortable modus vivendi. Outside, other societies start to feel the pathological quality of the phenomenon quite distinctly. Such a state of affairs cannot last long. [...]
End quoted section.
The book goes into much more detail than I have quoted above, including later stages of the societal disease. My main point is this: it appears that all positions of influence MUST be filled by pathological individuals or those who owe their advancement to the pathological system. The good news is that this process builds in its inevitable collapse.
Now, to get to the point: pathological types cannot infiltrate and take over any group or society without hiding who and what they are initially; they wear a Mask of Sanity (TM Hervey Cleckley), a necessary disguise as intra-species predators (Hare & Babiak). Normal humans who are unaware of the dynamic simply have no defense. How the heck can they survive under such a regime. Many don't.
I researched and wrote extensively about the problem beginning during the Bush administration, and the problem appeared intractable. The only thing I could say at the end of it (and this was pre "Political Ponerology:) was the following:
It seems certain from the evidence that a positive transformation of human nature isn’t going to come about through a great spiritual awakening, socio-economic reforms, or a spontaneous desire among the peoples of the world to be nice to each other. But it’s quite possible that, in the long run, the psychopathic program of suffering will lose out because misery is not a stable strategy. In a state of increasing misery, victims will seek to escape it; and this seeking will ultimately lead them to inquire into the true state of their misery, and that may lead to a society of intelligent people who will have the collective capacity to do so.
So, you basically have to play the "long game" and learn to survive strategically for the duration.
Oh, also read "In Broad Daylight" by Harry MacLean. It's a microcosmic example of what the West is experiencing on a much larger scale. Ken McElroy was a psychopath terrorizing several Missouri counties. McElroy's end is instructive.
An older friend told me 10 years ago....
We (white dudes) are now the minority, not by sheer numbers, but by the coming policies....
So true
LLTH (long live the hydra)!
It’s now fashionable for the unfashionable to decline to download ArriveCan, walk through customs, ignore the public health officers and continue on your way.
Welcome home to the frozen gulag! freecanada.win
I was gonna do that but my mom freaked out lol
My heart goes out to you.
I gave up the dream of becoming a math professor when I saw the quota systems coming in and realized they'd need to discriminate massively against white males for the coming decades.
Do you know about the No White Guilt community? Meets tomorrow at 2 PM EST. White positive! Love, Hope and Redemption! Very good concepts, very good people. NoWhiteGuilt.org Great books, too. Come hang out with Your People! (Or check the archives for topics of particular interest.) Here's a clip of his I found worth sharing: Men Can’t Continue to be Obsequious to Our Women https://youtu.be/OPxM4-se--g
I've heard of them. I've been plugged into that general corner of the internet for years - it's where all the most interesting people are.
Sorry to say it, but welcome to the club man. Do you have any industry experience? If you can program or do other complicated stuff you might be able to elide right over, possibly make more money than you would as an academic. I really, deeply miss teaching, but, well, some more money helps.
Rollins' trade school idea isn't terrible, too. Industry isn't great, depending on the industry and the position, and corporate tends towards a lot of the same DEI crap as academia, although not quite so hard. Bigger companies seem worse than smaller, and companies that make things and positions close to making things are better across the board. (Amazing how that works... apparently atoms don't give a shit about your pronouns.) I have thought about getting a trade job too, although it would be a bit of a hit in the wallet, but the recent trend seems to be away from actually doing things well, and it is frustrating as all hell.
Anyway, stay strong, and if you are ever back in the states near Philly, drop me an email and I'll buy you a drink.
Yep, it's all over. I'm not special and don't delude myself that I am. Well, aside from in one respect - a decent salary and modest needs have conspired to leave me with a very comfortable cushion, so I've got time to figure things out. From what I've seen not many can claim the same these days.