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Clever Pseudonym's avatar

I don't know if this reinforces your thesis or dents it with a caveat, but my feeling is that modern academia selects first and foremost for conformity.

All the profs and other professionals I know or grew up with were always color-inside-the-lines rule followers who never skipped school, studied for every test, sweated every grade in every class, dedicated their last 2 years of high school to the SAT and college applications, were basically people who've followed every order, obeyed every authority figure and swallowed every lie since birth. And then you add in the facts of elite overproduction, the scarcity of tenure positions and the sterile, punitive and dogmatic monoculture of modern liberals, and you can see that (as William Deresiewicz put it) our academic institutions have been turned over to Excellent Sheep.

And I don't think "high intelligence" really tells you much about someone except that they have mastered some small corner of the world. I have known many uneducated people who have strong bullshit detectors, and many supposedly "highly intelligent" people who will parrot any talking point if it makes them sound cool and/or radical.

I think we learned all we need to know about the stupidity and conformity of our supposed thought leaders by studying the words, deeds and track records of the 20th-century "engaged intellectual." Of course it starts with Sartre and includes everyone from Sontag to Foucault to Chomsky and so many others, but there was not a single 20th-century Marxist mass murderer who didn't get fully fellated by some academic poser who sang their praises hoping to seem edgy and un-bourgeois. "Highly intelligent" professors can be just as stupid and blind as the rest of us, they just hide it behind institutional prestige, fancy credentials, and ritual incantations of whatever jargon is trendy at the moment.

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bigfatpop's avatar

This is an excellent explanation of what I saw in my circle; now former circle. Some of the most intelligent humans in society turned out to be utter fools.

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