“It turns out to eradicate the intellectuals, all you have to do is educate them.”
Academia is guilty! Academia is guilty for telling students what to think, not teaching them how to think. Modern academia has been corrupted and influenced by a wide range of special interests, from Bill Gates, federal government, teachers unions, corporations, mega-donors, think tanks… you name it. None of them seem concerned with cultivating critical thought or healthy, robust individuals ready to tackle the normative problems in society and thrive, as it should. Modern academia creates a dependency and deference on others to ‘know’ what to think. The longer one is exposed to academia, the more dependent one becomes. Academia is enforcing intellectual compliance with little interest in pursuing truth. It is said that the highly educated on the political Left have every bit as whack-a-do ideas as the uneducated on the Right. However, only one of those groups has power. Things are not falling apart because of the working classes or conservatives, no matter how much the educated liberal bourgeoisie project their blame and disparage them from their Ivory Towers.
Academia does not teach folks to become self sufficient or problem solvers. It is preparation for work and selling your soul to a large bureaucracy. People with advanced degrees generally move into the government or large corporations, where they go along to get along. At no time in their life experience do they come to understand how the ‘real world’ actually works. They think they know, but it’s all theory and derivatives. Collectively the ‘educated’ apply their theories to the real world, and despite their studies, charts, and commissions, and possibly the best of intentions, they totally fuck it up, as they lack experience and deep understanding. Even worse, because the overly educated tend to be conformists, they actively inhibit the questioning needed for innovation and advancing knowledge. We saw this during the pandemic, where the highly educated took on blob-like characteristics, moving in unison as their superiors directed. The ‘educated’ did not question a thing, they dutifully complied and proceeded to chastise anyone with curiosity or attempting to critically examine the information. They still don’t question a thing. If I was testing to see how well a certain population of people can be manipulated the most educated performed magnificently and believed everything they are told by academic leadership. Academia is captured, it has become the Borg, seeking to assimilate those with divergent thought. It turns out to eradicate the intellectuals, all you have to do is educate them.
“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” – National Commission on Excellence in Education (1983)
Terrifyingly these people influence and are those in power. The don’t create win/win scenarios, the signs of intelligence, instead they are bandits, specializing in befitting themselves at the expense of others, and helping those in power do it a scale. The ‘educated’ are the “administrative state” numbering in the millions, all competing for non-essential, bullshit jobs but are highly prized and considered prestigious by insiders. In the United States of America today, the ‘educated’ are parasitical in effect and do more to inhibit progress than spur innovation and indelible progress.
The philosophy dominating the West is Materialism. It has us looking outside of ourselves for meaning. Academia has become little more than a superficial credentializing mechanism, so people can meet arbitrary exclusions and feel superior to others. Education and learning opportunities has never been more abundant, but credentials, what people need for jobs, can only be obtain through institutions. What we call education in 2023 is better described as institutionalization or indoctrination. It is where authoritarians and their loyalists are made.
We go into debt to the very same organizations that indoctrinate us to become obedient workers for them. That’s not freedom or pursuit of happiness, that is learned helplessness.