Last Crusade 50: the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
We turn to the question of how to undo the corruption afflicting Universities, the scholarly and scientific world, and education both higher and lower, in general, which is gathered under the heading of the Academy.
Of the several battles in the Last Crusade, this is the least difficult to accomplish and the most difficult to wage, and that for two reasons.
It is easy to accomplish once a sufficiently devoted majority convinces the consensus that the current political, economic, and cultural institutions supporting the educational establishment have achieved the direct opposite of the intended result, namely, educating the youth.
It is difficult to wage, because nothing directly can be done other than to bring public attention and alumni influence to bear on the question.
In the case of grammar school, the institution is supported by government fiat and taxpayer funds: no boycott is possible. The Academy can only be reformed once the political institutions are reformed.
Higher education receives grants from the government and from large private philanthropic organizations or trusts, and their primary mission is to corrupt and control scholarly opinion and scientific research to support current politically convenient frauds and fairy tales, and to control the course of the scientific dialog, so that certain topics are never discussed, and certain research never investigated. The Academy can only be reformed once the donor class is reformed.
Moreover, the bias of the business world makes college degrees necessary even for entry level positions, and this bias continues by inertia long after the original virtue that granted prestige to college graduates has evaporated, or inverted. This grants the brainwashers the false prestige and stolen valor of real scholars and educators, a creature as extinct in the modern day as the honest newspaperman, and it grants unscientific frauds, political activists, and ecopanic-hustling charlatans the lab-coated vestments and aura of infallibility science worshippers bestow upon science. The Academy can only be reformed once the consensus of opinion, both among employers and among the general public, about academics in general and scientists in particular, has been reformed.
Hence in this column, the discussion of reforming the morals and manners of the people, of the business world, and of the political world, would be repetitive. Each man in the Last Crusade must select the battle to which he is called as his vocation. Those called to enter the academic world, and enter the lists against the forces of hell and darkness must resign themselves to fruitless generations of conflict before victory heaves into view.
The political reformation of the current corrupt and overly bloated system consists solely of starving the gluttons.
Academics do no work, so they should not eat our tax dollars. The Academics spread a plague through the minds of the young, and have successfully produced a generation of craven, foolish, hysterical, and sadistic hecklers, know-nothings, arsonists, and yobs.
This column need go into no detail as to what need be done: hang the malefactors, privatize the system, reintroduce competition, allow for electronic classrooms and schools, rescind so-called women’s liberation so that mothers can be liberated once again to go do their jobs of rearing the young. Burn the federal department of Education and pass a constitutional amendment that Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of any academic institutions, nor infringing on the free exercise thereof.
I am kidding about hanging the malefactors, of course. The traditional penalty for heretics who committed a treason of scholarship was burning at the stake. One hopes we need not reach this stage.
This column hence will remark only on what might convince the consensus of the general public, and to identify the main obstacle to conviction.
To convince the consensus, we need only do what was done to us: infiltrate the commanding ground of the press and entertainment industries, and slowly replace academics as they retire, to combine, openly or covertly, against enemy worldviews, philosophies, cults, and ideologies, to explode bad theories and expose insolent wickedness among intellectuals.
No honest man in his right mind would entertain the ideologies of envy, unreason, hysteria, hatred, and death, or grant them more attention than the brief time needed to see their hypocrisy and absurdity, were these ideas not disguised as their own opposites.
The strategic goal of enemy activity over the last several decades and centuries has been to create dishonest men. By having educators teach blatant self-contradictions as truths it is unlawful, dangerous, and shame to question, the teachers encourage a narcissistic and neurotic behavior, namely, the student takes the ideas he is being taught to be a precious and central part of his identity, with the result that any skeptical examination of the merit of the idea is miscast as a vicious personal attack. The neurotic student loses the ability to distinguish between the fashionable yet superficial ideas infecting and stupefying his thought-process, and his own soul, self-image, and self-esteem.
The tremendous advantage we have over them, is that we can work openly, since our ideas both made sense and rest on truth, whereas they must work entirely by stealth, hiding their true purposes ignoring evidence, avoiding logic.
We need only convince those with eyes to see that the educators cannot educate, the scientists cannot discover, the scholars cannot reason, under the current consensus of academic opinion. Once any institution, academia included, makes social justice jihad its primary aim, it loses the ability to carry out its core function.
We need only convince those with eyes to see that teachers cannot teach.
In a healthy society, educating the young was the province of mothers, who read to their children from the Bible, and the education including both morals and booklearning. Private teachers and tutors hired by townships taught basics of reading and writing, ciphering, and figuring. For those who did not go into apprentice work to learn a trade, scholarly work was a private matter, or earning degrees. The Medieval system of Universities of gathered Colleges, usually founded and staffed by holy men, sufficed to produce the greatest civilization history ever recorded or imagination can conceive.
In a healthy school, an educated youth learns how to think for himself, to use skepticism to question his assumptions, and to use reason to answer those questions.
An educated man knows how little he knows, and how the deep questions of life have honest answers on both sides, so that any answer can be doubted in good faith.
But a youth sent through a modern college is indoctrinated, if not brainwashed, to support a number of self-contradictory absurdities, and he is conditioned to react to skepticism as an act of disloyalty.
An indoctrinated man is a zombie. He believes the truth is settled, obvious, and indisputable, because it rests, not on a reasoning process, but on the authority of anonymous experts. He is conditioned to react to questions as personal attacks, and to act as if no good faith disagreement can or can possibly exist.
For him, to question the authority of received opinion is not merely treason, it is blasphemy, and a sign of mental illness. This is why the conclusion that males cannot mate with males – which to the educated man is a self-evident biological truth – is regarded by the zombies as “homophobia” that is, a pathological fear and hatred of sodomites. To oppose socialism, likewise, is “reaction” that is, a pathological and thoughtless fear of change which irrationally operates against one’s own class interests.
Hence, the student who goes to college is brainwashed into being less educated, less able to think for himself, than when he came. What little wisdom he has is taken away, and he is taught foolishness in it place. This is the mere opposite of education.
The enormity, as well as the enormousness, of the fraud perpetrated by the Academic world cannot be overstated. Academics receive Noachian floods of funding from alumni, from the donor class, and from the state, as well as prestige greater than that given the holiest of priesthoods, in return for scientific research and discovery, and for instructing the young in liberal arts and useful sciences. The successful are granted tenure, which renders them, like judges, immune from being held to account for poor performance.
Meanwhile, all efforts at school choice, from vouchers to charter schools, are firmly resisted by public sector Teacher’s unions, who are firmly in control of Democrat Party policy in this area for the foreseeable future. Neither disciplining students nor expelling them is allowed. The children are trained to fail, and to blame failure on some imaginary injustice, such as systematic racism, or evil fairies.
To ruin the educational prospects of their charges may not be a deliberate and satanic policy, but, if it is not deliberate, no one can explain why it just so happens to be the sole and unvarying outcome at which all these policies aim.
We have fed into the glutton mouth of Moloch an endless supply of money, and the minds and souls of three generations of children or more. What has been the result?
In return for our support and treasure fed into the gluttonous mouth of the Academy, this is our payback: the Scientist has produced and endless supply of junk science; the Academician has filled once-distinguished academic journals with nonsense indistinguishable from randomly computer-generated jabberwocky; and the Scholar has degraded the ability even of practical or result-oriented disciplines, like engineering or mathematics, to function; the Reseacher has willingly bankrupted the hard-won prestige of his profession by upholding and promoting an endless series of ecological hoaxes and frauds, meant only to inflate the power of Caesar without aiding the environment; and the Professor is busily destroying knowledge and crippling minds and beckoning on the dark ages.
The purpose of liberal education is to fit a young man to be able to carry out his responsibilities as a free citizen, that is, to be rational and virtuous enough to shoulder the burden of living as a free man.
This consists of three interconnected parts: First, to learn moral virtue from the example of heroes and saints among the lordly and noble dead whose sacrifice formed our civilization; second, to learn from the example of men of letters, philosophers, sages, doctors, jurists and scientists the fine art of reasoning, discussion, and debate, so that he be fit to discuss the great issues of the day with his peers, or, in other words, not to learn what to think, but how to think; and, third, to learn enough of the arts, literature, history and civics, to love our faith, our civilization, laws and customs, our native land, starting with our local community and home, or, in other words, to learn what we have inherited, why it must be preserved, and, when possible, improved, and how to defend this legacy from attack, and pass it intact to the next generation.
To the contrary, the modern student is tempted and lured to fall into the abyss of intellectual pride, in whose void no questioning of the conformist opinion is possible or desirable, and the art of debate and discussion are outlawed as immoral, on the grounds that no legitimate reason to question conformist opinion can or ever will exist. It is always a sin to question dogma, never an honest mistake or an attempt to clarify confusion.
For example, when Professor Wormtongue, educated and conditioned by the enemy educational methods, and speaking for the enemy, says that no truth is absolute, even a schoolboy would naturally ask whether that statement is true under all conditions, that is, an absolute.
When Professor Wormtongue says all human reasoning is in vain, even a schoolboy can ask by what reasoning such a conclusion was reached.
When Professor Wormtongue says reality is a matter of personal preference, even a schoolboy can ask by what standard are those who say that reality is real to be condemned for holding an unreal belief.
When Professor Wormtongue says morality is situational, even a schoolboy would wonder whether the situation of lying to a schoolboy about the nature of morality is one of those situations where dishonesty is permitted.
When Professor Wormtongue says beauty is in the eye of the beholder, even a schoolboy knows how ugly such a statement is to all who look.
When Professor Wormtongue says man is merely one beast among many, no different from any other, even a schoolboy who asks a gnu, tapir, or sloth to confirm the testimony will hear no answer.
When Professor Wormtongue says man has no rights in the singular, but only as a collective, even a schoolboy can ask into what group the Wormtongue by birth was placed to give him the right to say so.
When Professor Wormtongue says the fruit of all the labor of men ought to be redistributed as Caesar decrees, even a schoolboy can see this makes all men into beasts of burden, with no right to speak on any topic, including this one.
When Professor Wormtongue says that God is dead, the Wormtongue is merely confessing that the divine spark called conscience inside him is what he wishes would fall silent and die. Even a schoolboy sees as much.
No one can argue in favor of such absurdities, because they argue against themselves. Mere to name them clearly is to refute them. So the task of the Professor is to see to it that this clarity never comes about.
So what else can the poor Professor do, except break the spirit or the helpless young student placed into his merciless claws, erode the student’s integrity, darken his mind, and warp his sense of right and wrong so far out of alignment that the student dare never ask any such questions, no matter how obviously, not in public, not in private, not even when alone.
A student warned about the trick may, indeed, emerged unscathed and unconvinced, but such resolve is rare. These techniques have been studied diligently and scientifically by everyone from Nazi propagandists to Madison Avenue ad executives.
The psychology involved, when reduced to its simplest, is this: all one need do is convince a man that virtue consists of winning the applause of others, and wisdom consist of agreement with conformity. That is all. Skepticism becomes a sign of doubt, which is treason, and self-esteem is won by flaunting an imaginary, unearned virtue via symbolic public displays of loyalty to the groupthink, and by endless insincere denunciations of all bystanders as enemies.
To cut the student off from all other sources of support is the psychology cultists rely on to baffle and indoctrinate their unwary yet willing victims; to convince the student to take some irredeemable public step is the psychology criminal gangs use to ensure loyalty; to flatter the ego with illusionary victories is the psychology of narcissism; to dismiss reason amid screams and shrieks that emergency or vulnerability makes discussion impossible is the psychology of mass hysteria; to accuse and to believe all accusers, no matter how absurd, without evidence, is the tactic of witch-hunters. All this and more is what the student in a modern educational establishment is conditioned to adopt when he adopts political correctness and social justice jihadism.
Consider the old saying that Republicans think Democrats are imprudent, whereas Democrats think Republicans are evil. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine the truth thereof for himself, but I ask the candid reader first to consider the implications of that saying.
If the saying is true, then, the Republicans are Pragmatists and the Democrats are Ideologues.
To the Pragmatist, political struggles are a matter of practicality. Politics is the art of the possible. Compromise is feasible, because, in life, certain trade-offs may be costly in the short term while beneficial in the long run, or half a loaf be better than no bread.
But to the Ideologue, the struggle is a war of angels and devils, with no compromise possible, no gray areas, and no trade-offs. Compromise is not feasible, because, in life, there can be no compromise between absolute good and absolute evil, any more than a meal which is mostly hale but slightly poisonous can be healthy.
One often wonders why Republicans, when finding extremist or racist or crackpot figures in their midst, act immediately and vocally to denounce and expel such creatures, whereas the Democrats never do.
Again, for Pragmatist, an extremist can be judged on how much good he does versus the damage to the reputation of the party, and anything below that threshold can be tolerated, but one inch beyond that threshold, the denunciation is rapid and sure.
This is why Republicans can be “Big Tent” and welcome those who disagree on many points of a platform, as long as they agree with the basic goals of the Party; but also why racists and neo-Nazis and Alt-Right and others who call themselves Rightwing but are actually Leftists in thought, word and deed, are promptly and utterly renounced. Their goals are antithetical.
Contrariwise, for the Ideologue, the focus is not on the practical art of how to govern the nation, nor how to decide deep questions of economy and wealth, treaty and war, justice, and law, nor the morals and manners of the people. None of this — which is the whole body of politics to the Pragmatist — is politics to the Ideologue.
There is no extreme wing of the Ideologue’s party, because extremism in the cause of absolute goodness is no vice. This is why the middle-of-the-road peaceful socialist has no argument to give against the violent communist, no principle to stand on. He cannot say that the violent means employed by the communist are impractical, for that would make him a Pragmatist, and destroy his own position. Nor can he call the violence immoral, since he does not believe in morality, only in the superficial appearance of morality.
The sole focus for the Ideologue is virtue signaling, that is, the self-absorbed spread of the peacock tail of vanity, seeking public applause for some strength of character he does not possess, to get a reward he did not earn.
The Ideologue wishes to seem wise without being wise, to don the martyr’s halo without suffering death, wounds, inconvenience, or criticism; to grasp the palm of sainthood while whoring around, and to adorn himself with the laurels of heroism while being a mean, small, nasty, and despicable coward.
Hence, the Ideologue need not read laws before passing them, nor examine candidates’ views before voting for them, nor announce programs before enacting them. More to the point, the Ideologue need never consider the results of his allegedly well-intentioned policies and laws. To be concerned with results is a Pragmatist concern. The Ideologue is concerned only with shallow appearances, only with the fashion of the moment.
Moreover, the Ideologue has no self-awareness, no sense of irony when he steps into hypocrisy, no ability to examine his own actions objectively. This is because, in the false world of his own vain imaginings, he is a pristine and superlative angel in a war with devils. He is perfectly good, and all who lack perfect enthusiasm for him are perfectly evil.
A Pragmatic man, seeing something that does not work, is willing to reverse course, and try a different approach. He weighs costs and benefits. He seeks expert opinion, heeds the wisdom of elders, but always makes his own decision on his own – because collective decisions, rule by committee, and groupthink are a logical impossibilities as well an as impractical follies.
A Pragmatist is willing to admit he has been impractical, when he sees his effort overrun their costs, or fail altogether.
But an Ideologue cannot ever admit he was evil. To call himself a sinner, even in a small thing, or even on an unrelated topic, would shatter his vainglory.
An Ideologue cannot compromise with what he considers an absolute evil. He can only win concessions, and wait for an opportunity to strike again.
And, likewise, the Ideologue cannot admit, dare not admit, that there can be two sides to any issue. For him, all cases are closed, all scientific questions are settled, all truth are pellucid, simple, and obvious. One dare never give audience the Devil’s Advocate, because he is of the Devil. Even to listen for a moment is to call down the wrath of the Witchhunters onto oneself.
One of the more strange and more neurotic side effects of the Ideologue psychology is the unwillingness and inability to recognize or admit any virtue, any skill, any admirable characteristic of any kind in the person of someone accused of Wrongthink by the Witchhunters. We have seen this carried out to an absurd degree in the political sphere, but it also happens in the arts and sciences: a scientist in a garish shirt who can land a spaceship on a speeding comet, or an award-winning artist, once accused of thoughtcrime, becomes doubleplus-ungood, and nothing he does or did can be complimented or even tolerated: everything, everything, everything he does must be condemned and absolutely.
Anyone once beloved of the Witchhunters who violates this principle, let us say, for example, J.K. Rowling, no matter if she until then had been the most loyal and effective advocate promoting the ideology of the ideologues, (such as by using her superhuman levels of prestige in the cause of normalizing disgusting sexual perversions to children) immediately becomes prey to being hunted as a witch herself.
For the Ideologue, it cannot be otherwise. To compliment a witch, for example, on her artistic skill, or grant a devil laurels for a scientific breakthrough, is to betray a weakness to the witches, and sympathy for the devil — as if you might be willing to give them a fair hearing. But a fair hearing is the opposite of a witch-hunt, because the whole point of a witch-hunt is only to hunt for witches that do not exist.
A Pragmatist can listen to Wagner’s Ring, for example, and never mind about Wagner’s opinion on Jewry.
Because a Pragmatist waits for evidence, and hears from both prosecution and defense before rendering a verdict, and counts the costs before erecting a tower, he can suspend judgment. He is allowed not to know what is an is not practical, in the days before the evidence is in. There is no shame in speaking of what is unknown to him, or where his experience and wisdom fall short.
But to the Ideologue, goodness is obvious and rests always on the surface: you can judge the content of a man’s character simply and easily, since it is caused by the color of his skin. To wait for evidence would be like hesitating in the choice between angelic and devilish: only devils hesitate, and only because of moral deprivation. The case is closed. The mind is closed.
Finally, when the whole of the world’s Ideologues, as if with one accord, bend their every effort to plunging off the cliff of the disasters that follow from godlessness, socialism, collectivism, irrationalism, totalitarianism, violence, ruin and anarchy, they cannot stop, they cannot hesitate, they cannot slow their mad headlong rush into the abyss. Instead, when the brink of doom looms right before their eyes, they must damn their eyes and redouble their efforts.
Why? Because moderation when the question is a war between perfect angels and perfect devils aids the devils. Compromise is impossible; hesitation is unthinkable; thought, reflection, sobriety is impermissible.
In such a war, of course, the ends justify the means. The Communist kills one hundred million people in the Twentieth Century alone, and, in return for that most massive human sacrifice in all history … achieved nothing whatsoever.
What can make otherwise normal and decent men into bloodthirsty fanatics? Ideology. The conviction that perfection is easy and superficial, and that all opposition is in bad faith.
This is why the student in the modern school, instead of learning the arts of rhetoric and the discipline of logic, learns only one conditioned response to any attempt at discussion or cross-examination: the question is dismissed before it is answered on the grounds that it was asked in bad faith, because only devils and deplorable wretches, paragons of ignorance and evil, would dare ever to doubt the perfection of the self-anointed moral elite.
This is the pith if not the whole of what modern education consists. The Academy strips away the student’s capacity for independent thought, teaching postmodern methods of misinterpreting literature, which, in turn, silences all the eons of human learning past. The student learns to hate reading, to dismiss thinking, and to regard ratiocination as mere vocalizations of bigotry and bias.
As I said, to reform the Academy is the easiest of all the battles to fight, because we need only speak an obvious truth that becomes all the more obvious day by day. It is the hardest battle to win, because the entire institutional structure of politics, the plutocracy, and public education is meant to immunize these frauds, professors, indoctrinators, crackpots, and hoax-mongers from any repercussions of their unparalleled malfeasance.
Shall we reform the Academy? We must begin with ourselves, in prayer and fasting.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
