Credential Goblins Assemble! Degrees Now Officially Worth Less Than Monopoly Money

Spread the love

Loading

by el gato malo

I was chatting with some Gatopals™ the other day, several of whom have advanced degrees in psychology, psychosociology, and clinical psychology.

*(I keep weird company, what can I tell you?)*

One such pal, Muel Mith, said this:

“We need to expand on the idea that degrees and academia, particularly the empirical sciences—when left open to those who seek power and officiality instead of objectivity and knowledge—essentially become the perfect vehicle, or peacetime ‘army,’ to advance an agenda onto an unwilling population.

It has all the communicative and compartmentalization of modern armies, and the injection of ideologically driven nonsense into what is supposed to be unbiased objectivity makes for absolutist zealots.

They will push baseless ideology with the certitude of 2+2=4.

It’s dangerous.”

I think this is very, very right.

But, being the eternal optimist out here in the arena of the reputation economy, I also sense it’s going to go another way. Academia and credentialism reached some sort of apogee in recent decades in terms of trust, credibility, and influence. But the institutions themselves have so rotted from within that their output has become pure garbage—the kind of garbage that no one can any longer ignore.

Festering and fetid, its stench pervades everything these credential goblins touch, and every new title and degree that they bestow upon one another in their giant backrub circle of dogmatic collusion.

This has debased their once-sound reputational currency to the point where no one cares what they think, and they have become laughingstocks and absurdities. What once stood as validation now stands as indictment. “MPH” (Masters in Public Health) now makes me think: “You’re likely a dullard, mathematically and statistically illiterate, polluted with pseudoscientific doctrine, and would not know which end of a ‘science’ to hold if someone handed it to you.”

Is this entirely fair? Probably not. There are likely a few folks of sound mind and process in the basket, good eggs among the rotten apples. But taken as a whole, the discipline is bereft and broken, a meaningless miasma menacing the public with its lunacy and breakage.

And this is true of nearly every academic field and endeavor.

It’s all gone hopelessly “Pete Tong” and inhabits some sort of Dunning-Kruger effect of having no idea how stupid it sounds.

There is going to need to be some sort of “great unpicking,” where we go back through the social and hard sciences alike, rip out all the utter nonsense that has been so interwoven into their one-time functional structures, and return them to something suited to purpose.

And the place to start this is freedom of discourse because that is the hardware upon which the reputation economy runs.

Matt Tabby (now an honorary cat for having been so insightful) beautifully lays out some salients here, in particular how useless and cosseted our current aristocracy of intellectuals and fact-checkers has become.

It’s time to bring back duels—not in the street and played for blood, but at least in the open agora and played for cred, with no quarter asked or given. That’s the basis of reality. It’s also the basis for the new tribe that is emerging, a tribe that will sweep before it this cavalcade of corrupt clowns and restore meaning and efficacy to the system of the world.

“The Three Meowsketeers”

I am not the only one noticing this, and frankly, I think Zuby is right about the process but perhaps overly pessimistic about the timeline.

We’re already halfway there.

COVID was indeed a great reset, but it was not the one the WEF wanted. It was a reset of vision, a reset of perspective, a reset of inclination, and a reset of trust. It was a massive sorting hat that reshaped the tribes of the world in vast and meaningful fashion and has caused a new one to emerge.

Huge numbers of people who thought they were different realized they were the same. Large, distributed groups of high-function, high-ethics people assembled into strongly functional machines, able to solve problems, assess data, make sense of the senseless, and grow solidarity from the chaos that was intended to break us.

Unity coalesced amidst the division, and those who built the world want the world back—because pretending these credential factory wizards of weaksauce are going to learn from their mistakes or grow some morality is simply not an option anymore.

Don’t let them blame you or act like this is some unprovoked or reactionary assault. Those who punch others and take their things don’t get to play the victim when they pick on the wrong person.

And oh boy, have they.

Not everyone folds when placed under pressure. Some people focus. And once you have seen the monster come out of the closet, as so many of us did in and under the days and regimes COVIDian—once one has seen its capacity, its methods, and its motives—nobody is putting baby in a corner again.

Not now.

Not ever.

Do not underestimate the power of what has happened and what will happen next. The same people who drove “the experts” from their temples and left their allegedly scientific disciplines in ruins find organization and purpose once more. They begin to jump like chain lightning from ivory tower to ivory tower, razing them to the ground in a neo-enlightenment and an end to this dark age.

On every field, “the experts” are now going to have to fight “the amateurs,” and they are going to get trounced, over and over, until these wanton weenies of woo-woo are forced to concede the field back to those who actually know how to do things and prize merit and accuracy over entitlement masquerading as inclusivity and empathy.

These people are not empathetic. They are predators preying like vampires upon the empathy of others. It’s always *you* who must care about them and their “needs.” Always *you* who must include that which they demand, while they will countenance no such inclusion of any idea or individual not just like them.

And the jig is up for their crybully capers. Their own doctrines are so toxic that they have rendered infertile their once-fecund fields.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

And the world has moved on. The tribe has moved on and, perhaps more importantly, changed focus and awareness. Our tribe are the imaginers, the builders, the makers, the founders: the people who actually make the world run and create the systems that make it flourish. The people who have always had to be right for a living—not just slavishly ideologically pure or parlor game clever.

These useless modern aristocrats have no idea what they have awakened because they do not know people like us. They are used to thinking that success comes from privilege and position and have too long inhabited a cargo cult, mistaking mandated preferencing and hiring for capability and functional capacity.

They have no idea that they have no idea what they are doing.

They think that the big chair or the shiny hat is the finish line, not the starting line.

They have no idea how to do the work of being a builder. They do not even know what that work is. These cartoon cutouts of competence are human pratfalls—punchlines that mock themselves. Every time you elect them or put them in power, they wreck whatever they touch and discredit themselves and their ideas, until the point where companies and agencies cannot do with supercomputers what they once did with slide rules.

They cannot fight us; they have no idea how.

We just need to get organized and effective, and this is already happening. The “tech bros” got gulled in by DEI and weaponized empathy. Now they see the error and are massing. Finance, life science, business builders of every stripe—large and small, from store owners to nuclear engineers, coders to plumbers—are massing.

And they are massively pissed off.

Everyone has had it. Everyone has found one another, and it’s becoming okay to say, “Enough is enough.”

The view that we can just be “nose to the grindstone and do our thing and expect to be left reasonably enough alone to tolerate the rest” is gone.

Everyone knows this fight has to happen.

And I think a lot of us are starting to warm up to how much fun this is going to be.

But it won’t be much of a fight.

Frankly, it’s going to be a walkover.

These people woke the lions, and they have no idea what lions are like.

They are about to find out, because lion tribe are the original “fuck around and find out” people. And damn near everyone is with us, because “government by an aristocracy of deluded, out-of-touch, incompetent scolds” is not much of an alternative.

They can keep trying to spin their tiny minority viewpoints as majority and mainstream, but we’re way past the Rubicon where that works. Now they are just plowing salt into their own fields and breaking their own weapons upon the anvil of reality.

The internet routes around damage.

Censorship is damage.

Lies are damage.

Propaganda is damage.

Hallucinations must ultimately collide with reality, and the collision is coming—and coming right soon.

“Entitled to your own facts” is not a thing.

The masses of humanity have been slapped awake.

The facile differences and “systemic isms” to divide and conquer us—political party, race, gender, religion—have been revealed for what they are: fake fights induced by nasty children shaking the jar to make us fight one another. The other bugs they smash you into are not your enemy. It’s the one doing the smashing that needs to go—the one putting you in jars and tossing you around.

Going back to sleep is not an option.

Accepting a credentialed class to technocrat our way to the future is not an option.

We need to build around this, enhance, and instantiate our tribe. We need to sink deep roots of a tribe that can stand against the depredations to come and hold the line—a tribe able to keep its composure when all others lose theirs. A bolster to keep the mob from going critical in the next round of induced fear, compelling us once more to trade rights for the illusion of safety.

That which has been seen cannot be unseen.

Those who took the red pills cannot go back into the matrix.

A state cannot win a war with its builders. Even with unspeakable violence and suppression, it cannot win. It just weakens itself. Such war constitutes civilizational autoimmune disease—it’s the body attacking the heart, the lungs, the brain. In the end, it leaves nothing.

Every inch forward we move as a tribe will make us stronger, better organized, more united, confident, and capable. Inches become yards, and yards become miles.

The road to tyranny starts with not believing that it can happen here and is greased with people telling you to stop overreacting, believing in conspiracies, or being an extremist.

Those are stories for gormless children.

And story time is over.

It is not extreme to want liberty—liberty for peaceful people to order their lives as they choose, liberty to work and build and raise their families.

What’s extreme is to claim dominion over such people.

Such claims may only be enforced against those who lack unity and the courage to stand.

And this is why the future lies with the new tribe supplanting the old—with truth-seekers and liberty-lovers taking back charge from this aristocracy of oppressive wreckers and getting on with building a future without them.

It will be a quiet revolution of supplanting the dysfunctional with the functional, and a return to high-trust and trustworthy systems.

Systems colonized by fools can be retaken by the competent, repurposed, and dismantled.

It may seem like it needs to be like this:

Insert grim, chaotic image of destruction.

But the reality is it can be like this:

Insert image of calm, constructive collaboration and order.

And we’re already here—underpinning everything, ready and able.

We just need to go make it so.

Kobayashi Maru.

If the game cannot be won, change the rules.

Read more

5 3 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of

1 Comment
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Ahh… such a breath of fresh intellectual air!