The closing of the Millennial mind
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
How different would the western world be today if more people had read The Closing of the American Mind in 1987 when it was published? Shortly after publication, the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War was won by the West. Marxism proper had comprehensively failed and Fukuyama naively told us that history was at an end. However in our schools, colleges and universities cultural Marxist enemies remained firmly entrenched, living behind our lines and at our expense.
That treacherous cadre has convinced generations of the luckiest people in the World that they are oppressed. It has turned citizen against citizen on spurious grounds of race, gender and sexual orientation. It has created false contradictions to be resolved by the ever more powerful state it craves. It has sought to enforce by stealth an ideology that has failed everywhere it has been tried.
It has poisoned the wells of our civilisation. All around at present you can hear the robotic, monotonous drone of the journalists, politicians and other opinion formers whose minds it has warped. Ideologically entirely ad idem, its members vie only to divorce their notions ever more widely from reality and to "no platform" anyone sane enough to laugh. Most on "social science" courses would have done better to leave school at eighteen and join the real world than to wallow in this academic mire.
"Drain the swamp" is a fine and noble slogan. The vilest and most difficult swamp to be drained is academia. It won't be easy, but unless it is achieved all other efforts are a waste of time.
Quite. The average lifetime uplift in earnings is now not much more than the cost to the student. Given that the uplift is still high for STEM and other "hard" degrees, the soft ones that produce below average financial returns are an extravagance. The next step will be to trap them in lifetime public "service" by waiving repayments for state minions.
Posted by: Tom | Sunday, November 20, 2016 at 10:22 PM
Don't forget student loans is a nice way of getting students to fund their own unemployment benefit whilst keeping them off the unemployment figures.
They are so stupid believing the hype about any new fangled degree being the key to the treasure chest, they don't realize the con being played on them.
Posted by: barnacle bill | Sunday, November 20, 2016 at 08:03 AM
The simplest way to drain the academia swamp is to cut off all it's government subsidies including student loans) and let it exist in the real world.
Posted by: Antisthenes | Friday, November 18, 2016 at 12:04 PM
Spot on.
Posted by: Bemused | Thursday, November 17, 2016 at 06:28 AM
Identity Politics appears to be the worst manifestation of this idiocy. Those practising it appear oblivious of its self-contradictory nature.
O tempora, O mores!
Posted by: Chromatistes | Wednesday, November 16, 2016 at 09:14 PM
Great post, and nice to see you're back. I only found out at samizdata. I have a lot of reading to do.
Posted by: Dom | Wednesday, November 16, 2016 at 09:14 PM