Why is it that the the smartest people are often the most unintelligent? Why is academia full of presumably bright people with such foolish or shallow ideas? And why do so many of them think the same way? Why are they so predictable? (And please, I am speaking of generalities here; I am well aware of the exceptions.)
Academia seems to be a culture, like the MSM, that is simply so permeated with the leftist worldview — and all of its many hidden assumptions — that it is utterly blind to those assumptions. And because academics mostly associate with their own psychoclass, they come to regard their worldview as normative instead of an aberration — even an illness of the soul. Thus, they may not be so much arrogant as clueless. And the more elite the university, the more predictable they are. For example, professors at so-called “elite” universities are much more likely to be irreligious than those from junior colleges and state universities. It’s like a Darwinian process of natural selction, in which the dark academic environment selects only the metaphysically blind, who are somehow able to “see” there, like those fish at the bottom of the sea.
For example, most of the psychology journals I see are so dopey as to be laughable. And I mean that literally. (Let me say at the outset that there are a number of excellent psychoanalytic journals, but psychoanalysis is not exactly an academic discipline but a clinical one; it only becomes stupid in the hands of academics.) I don’t subscribe to any of the big journals in my field. In fact, I’m not even a member of my professional association, the American Psychological Association, because it’s just a front for a totolerantarian gang of leftist activists. But I do see some of the journals laying around the office, and I do occasionally flip through them for a laugh. To say that they are shallow does not even begin to address the problem. Virtually every issue has some big study about multiculturalism and the need for what is called cultural competence.
I just picked up one of these journals the other day, and read an article that was one of a multi-part series on cultural competence. This one had to do with cultural competence toward Muslim patients… wait, I mean clients… no, consumers of mental health services. (This shifting name for the object of clinical attention is another obnoxious artifact of the PC virus — as if we can make a sick person well by calling him a “consumer” instead of a “patient.”) Among other things, I learned that, in dealing with Muslims — especially Shia Muslims — one must be sensitive to their core value of martyrdom.
Now this is fascinating, because the idea is presented absolutely without irony or self-awareness. Yes, the PC impulse is a totalitarian one, but it doesn’t feel that way to the person infected with it. Rather, I am sure they simply feel earnest. They are merely following their “do-gooder” impulse to provide me with the information I need to assist Muslim consumers of mental health services to be better martyrs. The idea that a cultural belief or practice can be a priori sick is unknown — even unthinkable — to them. This particular writer has been so thoroughly brainwashed by political correctness, multiculturalism, and moral relativism, that she has no idea how sick she is — or how very much in need she is for a kind of ideological psychotherapy that is unavailable to her — unless she were lucky enough to stumble upon a Dr. Sanity, or ShrinkWrapped, or Theodore Dalrymple. I’m sure there are others, but the fact that we know their names tells you how rare and exceptional they are.
Speaking of insular, take a look at a comment made by that atheistic tool, Sam Harris. I bring it up because it demonstrates how beautifully the idiotarianism of atheism merges with the idiotarianism of leftism (yes, I realize that there are some atheistic conservatives, but they are obviously in the minority). With reference to the Islamic threat, Harris said that Europe has been “very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.” And why are those who recognize the threat fascists? Because they are not politically correct liberals. There is no connecting of the dots, no mental ability to see the causal nexus between the inherent foolishness of leftism and their blindness to the threat of radical Islam. Harris’ mind “cannot go there,” very much like the perennially clueless New York Times, which often publishes variations on the theme of “Crime Down Despite Increase in Prison Population.” How is it possible that fascists such as me, or Mark Steyn, or Charles Johnson, are so easily able to see the Islamic threat? It makes no sense. We’re fascists. We’re the destroyers of civilization. This does not bode well for the future of civilization.
A magazine such as Psychology Today represents stupidity squared, because it mostly boils down the nonsense of academia for a semi-literate audience, in the same way that Time or Newsweek purvey idiotarian liberal conventional wisdom to the 8th grade mass-mentality. In fact, Psychology Today recently published an article entitled The Ideological Animal that enters the realm of the “beyond stupid.” I mean this literally, for a stupid person is merely stupid, but it takes real intelligence to push past the limits of stupidity into something beyond it. I know this may sound “rash” or polemic to some, but the effect of bad ideas during the 20th century alone was utterly catastrophic. Both Marxism and fascism were not just ideas, but entire systems of thought carefully worked out by intellectuals.
We are surrounded by bad ideas and their toxic consequences. A free marketplace will tend to eliminate bad ideas — or at least it has a chance to — whereas in academia or government, since they are free from market discipline, bad ideas can become entrenched and almost impossible to eliminate, as in the educational establishment, or the state department, or our tax system, or social security. In each case, any person with common sense can see the problem, and yet, there is nothing we can do about it. A bad idea, like a mind parasite, becomes like a living entity with its own momentum and its own desire to go on being.
There is another point I wished One Cosmos would have expanded on. It is obvious to me that for all their talk of open-mindedness and tolerance, the only thing liberals tolerate is their own opinion. Whether through intimidation, omission, or censorship, liberals have squelched free-speech in our universities and centers of academic thought. The result is our teachers, media elite, (and I use that term loosely) and campuses are as open to other voices and opinions as Pravda. In some ares of our country, such as urban areas, intellectual diversity is utterly dead.
Liberals are not for free speech or open debate. The Fairness Doctrine is just another example of liberals trying to censor voices in an industry already dominated by leftists. And the only thing worse then their opression of other voices is their bankrupt value system. The embrace of Hugo Chavez by Cindy Treason and the left is just another example of their moral bankrupcy. Hugo had moved from anti-Bush lefty to Dictator, with hardly a peep from the left and the leftist media.
But they are liberals, and who gives a damn about free speech as long as the rhetoric is leftist…….???
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