It’s Friday, December 11, 2020, and welcome back to The McSpencer Group ... an unrehearsed, hastily assembled program about meta-politics. Joining me is Edward Dutton: his ascots have medical-grade PPE ratings. Main topic: Seven Years of College . . . Down the DrainForgiving a trillion dollars in student loans is now on the table. The Democrats are already winning over the debt-ridden, over-educated Millennial baristas, and now are ready to to seal the deal. And while we’re not against giving these kiddos a break, the fact is, American higher education is so horribly screwed up that debt forgiveness amounts to a band-aide on cancer. Ed and I uncover the real problem—the concept of higher ed as a “gateway to the middle class.” And we offer real solutions: the dramatic shrinking of the Ivory Tower and a new paternalism towards the left half of the Bell Curve. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
It's Friday, December 11th, 2020, and welcome back to The McSpencer Group, an unrehearsed, hastily assembled program about meta-politics.
Joining me is Edward Dutton.
His ascots have medical-grade PPE ratings.
Main topic, seven years of college down the drain.
Forgiving a trillion dollars in student loans is now on the table.
The Democrats are already winning over the debt-ridden, over-educated millennial baristas and now are ready to seal the deal.
And while we're not against giving these kiddos a break, the fact is American higher education is so horribly screwed up that debt forgiveness amounts to a Band-Aid on cancer.
Ed and I uncover the real problem.
The concept of higher ed as a gateway to the middle class.
And we offer real solutions.
The dramatic shrinking of the ivory tower.
And a new paternalism towards the left half of the bell curve.
Good morning for me.
Good evening for you.
How are you?
Good morning.
Well, good evening.
Yes, I'm okay.
Yes, how are you doing?
I'm doing well.
I have a few visitors, so...
Yes, I sometimes am a bit alone out here.
The only people I talk to are children.
Are they intelligent, intellect-stimulating?
They're highly intelligent people, yes.
They're people I've had on the podcast and so on.
We're kind of having a powwow about how we're going to move forward in the future.
So it's very productive.
And fun as well.
So anyway, let's jump into the topic for today.
And that is, at least at the beginning, student loan debt and likely student loan crisis.
But I wanted to talk more broadly about the problems of meritocracy and overstuffed elite.
And then also how we could conceivably reform education in a serious way.
And that could be what we would like to see if we were king of the world, sure.
But also what we can do right now that would be...
Pragmatic for a lot of people.
Because I think this is one of those areas where everyone acknowledges that we're in a massive crisis.
And we don't see that.
During the 1990s and the dot-com bubble, no one or very few people acknowledged that we were in a crisis.
Everyone actually acknowledged that we were in the opposite of a crisis.
This is amazing.
During the mortgage subprime loan bubble, no one acknowledged that that was a crisis.
Very few people.
I've pointed it out, and most people thought it was actually a wonderful thing.
We're in a different situation now in the sense that there is a creeping recognition that we are in a massive student loan problem.
I'll talk a little bit just about my personal experience through this, which is relevant in the sense that, A, I'm in my early 40s, so I actually have a lot of...
I have about two decades of...
Thinking about the college idea and so on.
And then also, I went to a prep school.
So I went somewhere where it was about getting you into college and, in fact, getting you into a good one.
And I know what it feels like to be in that pipeline.
I didn't quite go to Exeter or Lawrenceville or whatever.
I went to St. Mark's.
That was our Texas LARPing version of East Coast Prep School.
We still wore uniforms and went to Episcopalian services twice a week and so on.
But it was a little bit different.
But so in my experience, and again, I had a prep education.
The thought of someone...
In the late 90s saying, I am not going to go to college.
That was almost the same thing as saying, I'm going to join a biker gang or so on.
It was almost unthinkable.
And if you said that, that was outrageous.
Now, college was clearly expensive during this point of the 90s.
If I'm correct, I believe that when I went to the University of Virginia, My parents were paying $15,000 a year as an out-of-state University of Virginia student as an undergrad.
But there were colleges that were more expensive than that.
I think there were some that hit on that $30,000 a year for a small liberal arts college or an Ivy League school or something.
By the time I went to graduate school, I was getting paid to go to school.
Did not pay anything to go to the University of Chicago.
And actually, I was being paid to go to Duke University as a doctoral student.
I was paid a stipend of $15,000 a year.
It was like $1,000 or $1,100 a month or something like that, which is not a lot of money.
It was what it was.
But while I was there in the mid-2000s, I remember undergraduate education at Duke was 40. From what I've heard, tuitions are climbing into the 60s per year at elite schools.
So these are radically surpassing.
I mean, if you look at what's the price of gold or what's the price of a Mercedes-Benz or what's the price of a new suit, these things have gone up, of course, but the education cost is outstripping them without even looking back.
So in the United States, it is becoming extremely difficult to go to college.
Now, no one is really paying for these things.
And I don't know quite when we...
We crossed that Rubicon where most people expected to pay for college.
You would either save or get a job or your parents would give the money to you or so on.
But we crossed a Rubicon at some point in the 90s and 2000s where the vast majority of people were taking out loans.
So college just became this financed thing.
You got a mortgage, effectively, without a house.
And, again, the promise was this was even better than a house because you're going to go get a great job or something like that.
Where we are right now is that student loan debt, and I can share this on the screen, student loan debt is radically surpassing basically mortgage debt.
And other kinds of things.
Let me get an actual number on this.
So student loan debt is climbing rapidly into the trillions.
It is an incredible thing, what is happening.
And the problem with this is that there is an increasing Cynicism on what you can actually do with your degree.
A lot of conservatives have complained about people getting useless degrees in women's studies or multiculturalism or something.
And they were kind of, you know, wagging their finger at millennials.
But I think it's now a different situation.
Millennials, particularly with COVID, are rapidly moving back in with their parents.
The job market is extremely tight.
Millennials are not disagreeing with you when you say this is a worthless degree.
You have people with undergraduates degrees, maybe even master's degrees.
Working as baristas in coffee shops and having really unfathomable amounts of debt.
A middle-class person with a good job would...
You know, cringe at the idea of having $100,000 of debt, even if he was earning good money.
Now that is normal for a young woman.
I discovered recently, well, I didn't know about this because I've been out of the loop of British higher education for such a long time.
It was these leftists having a chat on Twitter, you know, who were post-graduates, and they were talking about their PhD loan.
Their PhD loan.
Now, there's fees and living expenses of doing a doctorate so that they can, what, go on to be an academic on a low salary.
Right.
Well, in my day, you did a PhD if you had funding to do a PhD.
Right.
From the British Academy or whatever.
That's funded me.
That was my experience as well.
I would not have taken out a loan to get a PhD.
I was a doctoral student and I dropped out.
I would not have.
In Britain, but in the...
Up until...
1998, up until the late 80s it might have been, or early 90s, if you went to university, then there were no tuition fees, and the government paid you a small grant to live off.
It was a means-tested grant, so there was an amount your parents would have to contribute.
They won't know how much your father earned.
But you would have a grant of which to live, and no tuition fees, obviously.
And that meant you were kind of like at school.
It was like being at school.
It was school for the very, very clever people.
And it was a tiny majority of people that did it.
When my parents went to university in the early 70s, it was less than 10%.
And it was only growing because more and more things which had previously been separate from the university system and didn't involve degrees, like teacher training colleges and nursing and whatever, were coming under the university.
And that's why it was expanding.
But even so, that was all paid for by the state.
No tuition fees and grant to live off.
And the attitude was that the best people, and only those people, will do the degrees and the government will pay for that to be the case.
And that's still going on in Finland, where I live now.
No tuition fees, grant to live off, and it's highly competitive to get into these universities and the vast majority of people that try to go to university are rejected.
I think the big change, I think, was philosophical, you could say, more than anything.
Because the conception of the Academy...
I mean, again, in the American context, you can see this in terms of the GI Bill and so on for returning soldiers after the Second World War and subsequent wars of, you know, you went out, you risked your life, you earned this, now we're going to bring you into the middle class.
And if you hear a justification...
For academic work, it is overwhelmingly, this is your ticket to the middle class.
And so it becomes a kind of cargo cult where you think that there's some mysterious magic involved with the university that makes you a middle class person.
So you're really putting the cart before the horse.
And the fact is, the origins of these universities...
You could say monasticism or a religious institution.
It is going into a place and contemplating the spheres for better and for worse.
Maybe mostly for worse, but we're only now, in the past 60 to 75 years, thinking that this is your ticket into the middle class.
That was a very different path.
There was a degree switch even before that.
It was your ticket to the middle class, but the number of people that would be able to take up that ticket was extremely limited.
Right.
And there was a very limited number of places.
In England, for example, until 1890, there were three universities.
And so there's a tiny number of universities, tiny number of places.
And so, yes, you would occasionally get people that were born into working class families that would do well at school.
Would get funded, would get scholarships, it was, because there was tuition fees in those days, and they'd have to get scholarships to go to Oxford or Cambridge or Durham or somewhere like that, and they'd go and they'd have a degree.
And for those people, it was a ticket into the middle class.
But once you have a huge expansion of the number of universities, which is what we've seen, and then a huge expansion of the number of courses, to include the Mickey Mouse non-academic nonsense courses, it ceases being a ticket into what would traditionally have been the upper middle class.
It becomes maybe a ticket into...
The middle, you know, the lower middle class, and who didn't need a degree.
Why should they need a degree?
Why on earth should they need to go to university to just do basic admin work or whatever it is, you know, bookkeeping, that kind of thing.
And that's what you're going to end up doing with a lot of these degrees, those kinds of jobs, which in the 80s, nobody had a degree.
The kind of people that would...
My grandfather was the manager of a greenhouse-making company.
Nobody had a degree.
He didn't have a degree.
Nobody had a degree.
Now, the kind of people that are going to do jobs like that are all going to have degrees from...
Rubbish universities.
Yeah, and the master's, in the United States, the master's degree has really replaced the undergraduate degree because, again, it's just a simple inflation in the sense of you create more of these degrees and they become worth less.
I'm not sure.
I'd say it's the PhD, in the sense that you used to be impressed by a degree.
You used to go, so he's got a degree, has he really?
Well, it's a PhD that renders that reaction.
Right.
Well, you're just saying that because you...
No, no, it's 3%, isn't it?
In the 1930s, 3% of people...
I agree, I agree with you.
I agree.
And so the PhD is...
When does that react?
Now a master's just isn't much of anything.
But it's become like the undergraduate degree in the sense that you need that to do advanced information administration work.
And you're expected to have that.
And an undergraduate degree has been inflated out of oblivion.
It is not worth that much.
But again, you're paying more and more every year.
You are paying more and more for a degree that's becoming less and less valuable.
It's only worth something.
And it's worth much less than it used to be.
But it's only worth something if it's from a really good university.
So I would say like a BA from Oxford or Cambridge or whatever out trumps a PhD from the university.
Sheffield or something like that.
Oh, yeah.
But yeah, basically.
Returning to what I was saying, though, you had this issue whereby it was basically an extension of school.
And gradually they got rid of the grant, and there was no grant, and so you had to be funded by your mummy and daddy, and that's what most people were funded by.
And then they brought in a very small tuition fee of £1,000 a year, which is what I was there 20 years ago.
And people's parents just paid that.
So there was an extent to which you...
You were like a child at a school, and you were there to learn, and you could be told, look, if this new knowledge you receive offends you, say what?
Good.
You're here to learn.
This is a good thing, yeah.
That's exactly what we were told when we were there.
There was a sense of humility.
Most of the children, like 40% of the kids at my university, had been to private schools, and up until that time, up until the year 2000, there was corporal punishment.
Legal, all private schools in Britain.
And it's practical, particularly at the public schools.
And so these people were used to...
I'm sure you enjoyed that.
...to obedience and whatever.
And that was the system.
And then they increased the tuition fees to 3,000.
And even then, a lot of people's parents could pay that and would.
When it became 9,000, it was too much for the middle-class parents in the British sector.
And so therefore you've got to get a loan.
And therefore the students are now paying for it themselves.
And that's when it starts to break down because suddenly the students, in a way that had never, ever been the case before.
Ever.
The students are customers.
And that had never been the case.
Because when it was before the Labour government brought in free education in the 40s, it was very rich people.
I mean, daddy's paid the fees or it was poor people who were on scholarships.
And that was who went to university.
And that was it.
And nobody was paying for it themselves personally.
And once you're paying for yourself personally, then you're a customer.
That's an excellent way of articulating it because you become a customer as opposed to being a child.
Even if you are in your 20s or even early 30s, you're still depicted as someone who is there to be schooled.
And you should have a humility in order to...
Be bequeathed this knowledge and experience.
And that is actually the proper role of a student, even if you are an advanced one.
The dynamics of colleges, there's an anomaly whereby now in England you're legally an adult at 18, but until the late 60s you were legally an adult at 21. And the college, and you normally graduate at 21, about 21, and the colleges hadn't updated that.
So there'd be punishments.
I remember that my friend Ollie, his friend, streaked naked through the dining hall of John's College Durham for a bet.
And therefore, they were sent to the mistress, the woman actually, the master of the college.
And as a punishment, they had to like...
Pick up litter and things like this around the college.
I thought you were about to say he was sent to the mistress's office and she was spanked.
And I was like, punishment.
No, I was once at Collingwood College, Durham.
I was once rude to a porter.
This porter, people, they normally were ex-minors.
And once they were told to be minors, they'd get jobs as porters at the college, like Beatles at the college.
And he came in and said we wanted to leave.
Anyone that wasn't part of the college had to go because it was exam time and we were making noise.
And I said to him something like, I'm trying to argue with him.
No, you've got to go.
You can't stay here.
You've got to go.
And I said, you're being incredibly ignorant.
And he reported me for saying that.
And then I was reported to the woman.
Again, it was a woman who was the mistress of Collingwood College.
I had to go and see her.
Like going to see my mistress.
And she said to me, Mr. Dutton, you must understand that a lot of my porters were down the pit at 14. And they're working here at this university with people like yourselves, you know, with the great and the good.
In that regard, I would have thought a word like ignorant was perhaps unwise.
What do you think?
And once I admitted it, once I abased myself, then she just changed the subject.
So I understand you're going to go next year and do a doctorate.
What are you studying?
Oh, really?
Oh, I did theology as well.
So we would like children.
And that's important.
And it was...
That has changed.
And that's a serious problem in terms of...
And when they become it, I don't know if it's this egregious in Britain, but the issue with American college, or not the issue, but one of the major changes with American colleges, and I saw this going to being an undergraduate in the late 90s and early 2000s, and then into my graduate school experience.
But the...
As you are a customer, they treat you like a customer.
And so the development of these gyms, which is good.
I think there should be a gymnasium for students to go to exercise and work out and so on.
But they have...
Turned this into health clubs.
The kind of investment they put into student centers and so on.
The having refrigerators in your dorm room, which is, you know, that happened about 20 years ago.
But just this creation of a kind of lifestyle as opposed to a monastic experience where you don't have a lot of money, but no one has a lot of money.
So there's not a big status problem.
That was the thing when I was a postgrad and I was at the University of Leiden in Holland.
And because I was international, there were all these Americans there as well.
Yeah.
And of course, they were paying American tuition fees, even though they were at Leiden for a term.
And they were.
They couldn't believe it.
They were like, what is this?
If they were comparing it to what they got at their university, at their university, at Leiden, the tuition fee students were paying, like, something token, like 300 euros a year.
Right.
You know, they were confronted with a situation where everything was closed on Sunday.
They literally had no internet access on Sundays.
This is 2003.
No internet access on Sundays unless they went to an internet cafe and paid for it.
Absolutely no internet or anything like that in their rooms.
Wow.
Certainly no fridges in their rooms, not even on sweet loo, nothing like that.
The libraries were open at inconvenient, you know, the library's shut at the 5 o 'clock.
Open at 9, shut at 5. Whereas they used 24-hour access to the library.
And they just couldn't believe it.
And the library just became a student center.
The library was just a place to go get on the internet and hang out and talk to people or whatever.
That's what it was when I was there.
And I had 24-hour access as well.
But yeah, it's become an experience, a lifestyle experience.
And again, you can...
Trick people into paying you $50,000 to $70,000 a year for that just for a little bit.
But particularly these days when you're going home and you have to live with mom and dad and your job prospects are very small.
It's just not going to be worth it.
And it's devalued.
It's not a ticket to the middle class.
And if you buy into this Ponzi, this pyramid scheme, whereby you believe it is a ticket to the middle class, which a lot of them I'm afraid do, then you will be extremely disappointed and bitter and angry that you have kind of been had.
And at the same time, because you've spent so much money on it, then the theories of Leon Festinger and people like that will predict that you can't.
You have to find some way to think that it wasn't a mistake.
You can't admit it's a mistake.
So you'll ironically want fervently and rabidly want to prop up the very system that has screwed you over.
By insisting that, oh, people have to have qualifications and you shouldn't be able to discuss anything if you don't have a specific qualification.
You'll kind of become a credentialist because you've invested so much in that very credential.
And so you'll promote the system of university and say that it's worth doing and that it's important, even though it's the system that screwed you over.
But at the same time, you won't have got into the middle class as you desired.
You'll be bitter and unhappy.
And you'll therefore need to find ways of getting into that middle class.
For example, you won't be...
We won't be able to get a job as a university lecturer because there are literally more people doing doctorates in one theology department in one American university than theology jobs come up in one year.
Oh yeah, I know, I know.
So you won't be able to do that and so therefore you have to come up with, this does two things of course, it destabilizes the middle class because you get these conflicts within the elite, this intra-elite competition fighting each other and you have to come up with some way to...
Get into the middle class, often by attacking those that are in the formal elite, those that have managed it, either from the right or from the left, particularly from the left.
With this whole Black Lives Matter thing and virtue signalling and whatever and saying, oh, there needs to be diversity officers and there needs to be all this new bureaucracy and that's the way of getting into the middle class.
If they don't get into the middle class, then they end up just doing some job they're unhappy with and they're bitter and unhappy and they're therefore fodder for extremist movements.
And that's what over-educated both ends of the political spectrum, but particularly at the left, because they've been inculcated with leftist values and leftist ideas and whatever.
And so the way that you try to play for status in that context is by being more left-wing.
And that's what I think a lot of these white BLM people is about.
So it destabilizes the elite, and it leads to this conflict and polar...
Well, it's one factor of many, but it leads to this conflict and polarization that we see, or it contributes to it.
And that's a serious problem.
We need to reduce the number of people that do degrees.
But unfortunately, what that means is a lot of people will have to accept that their degree was worthless.
They were had.
And I would certainly say to my son when he gets older, I'm not going to say to him, oh, you know, go to university and do a doctorate like Dad did.
Get yourself a trade.
Considering that the direction of higher education is something that I think people as well are increasingly not respecting it.
They're reading in the tabloid newspapers in Britain about the woke dominance of higher ed, about all this nonsense that comes up with higher ed, and it's not something they respect anymore as much.
So I think it probably will.
Yeah, I mean, I agree.
I think there is a major problem, and I think a lot of the solutions are not actually changing the paradigm.
They're trying to prop it up.
I do think it will burst at some point, but I don't think it's going to burst right now.
And before it bursts, I think it will get more intense.
So let me go into this.
So there was Joe Biden, who is...
President-elect.
And he is floating.
Yeah, I know you're sad about that.
I'm not.
I voted for the man.
He is floating the idea of student loan forgiveness.
And even though we learn more about his transition, he is not bringing, or at least as of now, he's not bringing Bernie or Elizabeth Warren into his cabinet.
He's kind of bringing in highly qualified liberals who went to the Harvard Kennedy School of Business or public administration or whatever of government.
And he's bringing in basically upper tier liberals.
This is a centrist.
As I predicted.
But he does want to throw some bones.
And so they have floated the idea through the media of debt relief for students.
This has been endorsed by Elizabeth Warren.
And what we've heard is a relief of $50,000 for people with student loans.
This created the knee-jerk reaction from conservatives of, I paid off my loan, or I am paying off my loan, so why should we give it to you?
This is a...
Wealth transfer from plumbers to over-educated baristas, which is kind of true, but not true.
They're not literally taking money from plumbers and giving it to people, baristas.
But you had the typical conservative reaction to this.
They're taxing the plumbers, and they're using some of that money that they've taxed from them to give it to baristas.
But we need to figure out how they're doing this, and that has not been...
The issue with student loan debt is that it is not normal debt.
If you are 18 years old, a credit card company might give you a credit line of $2,500 or something, but they're not going to just give you $100,000 to spend on something.
You are engaged in government-financed...
So these are the Stafford loans, et cetera, where the government is ultimately backing up those massive loans you're taking out.
And because they're doing this great favor to you, you also have certain duties.
You cannot dissolve a student loan through bankruptcy.
And so this has actually led to people faking their deaths or leaving the country due to student loan issues, which is kind of understandable in a way, although a horrible decision.
But you cannot get rid of a student loan much like you can't get rid of your taxes or you can't get rid of a few other things.
It is there for life.
But again, you are getting more access to capital than you ever would at the age of 18 because the government is seeing this as a public good that it needs to finance.
So people feel trapped.
They feel like debt slaves, understandably.
But the question is, what is this forgiveness?
What does that actually mean?
Is the government going to simply tell the banks, you're going to have to eat this.
You're going to have to eat a trillion dollars in total.
You're going to have to eat $50,000 for all of these millennials who got student loans.
That's one thing, and I would support that.
I've heard some conservatives say the university should pay for it or whatever.
That's not going to happen.
That's just them being knee-jerk and resentful.
Is the government going to make these banks whole?
Is the government going to take out additional debt or print money, which it can just do ad infinitum, basically, and make whole these banks that have funded this disaster?
If they do that, I can have sympathy for the people who are getting debt relief, who are young people without jobs, who can't pay their loans.
I get it.
I have sympathy for them.
I think they should get that.
But let's just also be real about this.
The government is bailing out the banks as much as they are bailing out the students.
That would just reinforce the system.
I mean, we would not change the paradigm ever.
And there's actually been no...
I mean, they want to change the paradigm...
In terms of the Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders liberals, they want to change the paradigm, but not really in a way that we are gesturing towards.
They want to make public colleges free again.
They actually used to be free up until, I think, the 80s, perhaps.
Or 70s.
You could go to Cal Berkeley if you're a California resident effectively for free.
There is a long tradition of this.
Now Cal Berkeley is extremely competitive to get into and it is costly.
University of Virginia is extremely competitive and costly, particularly if you're out of state.
So there's been this transformation.
Are they going to transfer these things back?
To a point where the college education is just this kind of public school.
I've also heard debt-free community college, which I think is kind of a better idea.
I know out here where I live now in Montana, they actually have a Flathead Valley community college that is very pragmatic.
It is like a trade school, from what I understand.
And that seems excellent.
They're training people to be...
Major trades.
You can go and become a dental assistant.
You can do all this stuff.
Really pragmatic stuff.
You should be trained on the job to do.
I do agree with that.
That's apprenticeship.
Let alone waste three years of your life not working when you could be working and earning and learning.
And it's just another level of pointless bureaucracy.
Bring back apprenticeships.
I agree with you.
I'm just saying it's better.
One of the problems as well with this, what you were saying about this ticket into the middle class, is this idea, it's a problem in America to a much greater extent than it is in Britain, that you are a...
Failure, basically, if you are not a member of the middle class.
So this whole aspirational idea that you live in a meritocratic society in which everybody, at least it is perceived, that everybody gets roughly what they deserve.
And so if you don't manage to get into the middle class, despite having the fact that you've had every opportunity to do so, well, then you're just...
You're garbage.
You're just trash.
You're not important.
And that's an appalling system.
Because if you don't have a meritocracy, then if you end up poor, then at least you can just, or not influential or whatever, then at least you can sort of rationalise your situation and say, oh, I could have been someone, but there's the system working against me and whatever.
And you can sort of...
Persuade yourself that you're worth something using that.
And so if you have a meritocracy which says, look, you've got the chance and you've balled it up, then you're nothing and you're bitter and so on.
And secondly, why is it inherently good to be middle class?
It isn't.
We need people of different...
We need people who have brains, but they only need to be a certain percentage of the population.
We also need people with other, less cognitive skills.
And so it shouldn't be.
There should be pride in being a working class American.
And there is none.
I mean, perhaps among people that are very, very religious and a working class, which isn't common, then you have that.
But not really.
I mean, a good example.
Sorry.
It's a problem of a post-industrial economy as well, because I agree that it is healthier to own your situation, to be proud of being working class and maybe having some resentment.
Yeah, that's reasonable.
But to own it.
But the thing is, we're also destroying the working class in the sense that we're removing the very prospect of a lot of those jobs.
Now, you can be a plumber.
Obviously, that's not going away.
You can work in construction.
A lot of these things will never go away.
They can't be outsourced.
But it's more difficult to be a steel worker.
It's more difficult to be an auto worker.
It's impossible to build computers or something like that.
There used to be computer factories in Colorado 30 years ago.
That's kind of unthinkable now.
Those are in China.
So we've destroyed those jobs.
And we're saying, get a degree.
You can enter the information economy and you can sit at a desk and earn $100,000 a year or something.
But the fact is, most of those people who would do real labor are now doing retail.
Or working at an Amazon factory or something.
The economy has transformed to a point where they can't even own being working class if they wanted to.
And it's a terrible situation because either you are being overpaid, doing useless stuff as a...
Information administrator.
Or you're being radically underpaid as a retail worker, and you're not being respected.
People that do these kinds, that's the problem.
And there's this churn, and people don't do the job for very long, McDonald's and whatever.
They need to be unionized.
And there needs to be this value of people of different social classes, whether they work or whatever.
And that's what they're intellectually capable of doing.
It's no good saying, oh, go learn to code.
That is the most pernicious, stupid argument.
Most people are simply not intellectually capable of doing that.
It is an extremely difficult thing.
Sorry, just a bit.
Yes?
I'm sorry, I'm streaming.
I can't.
Yeah.
It's also bizarre to think that we're going to have a nation of computer programmers or something.
I mean, it is a just completely fatuous notion.
If you look at the comedy, that's what always hits me, is the nature of these situation comedies over the years.
America has never really had much in the way of comedies about working class people or lower middle class people.
That are happy to be that, and that's them, and that's life.
That are representative of the American population.
It never has those.
They're always about upper middle class, sort of rich people.
Always.
And it's only, even with the Hollywood films as well, it's only occasionally, very occasionally, with these kind of, you know, sort of independent movies that will look at...
People that are janitors or whatever.
But otherwise, Britain did, used to, have a tradition of comedies that were just about working class life.
And that's what the life of British people.
And that's kind of gone now, as we have become much more of this aspirational culture, where the idea is, if you're working class, you should move out of it.
It's a bad thing to be working class.
And that idea needs to go.
I blame the stature, perhaps, for that idea.
That idea is to go.
People who are working class should be able to be happy and content to be working class.
And the thing is, though, what they want, they don't want change.
They want a place where they're from, where their ancestors were from, like a tribe, where everyone's like them.
That's what they want, and they're happy like that.
And once you start bringing in immigration or whatever, that makes them deeply unhappy.
So that's a big problem.
They need to be left alone.
But I think the meritocracy then has potentially very bad downsides.
And the other downside, which Charles Murray, of course, has looked at in his book, "Coming Apart," is that as you create this meritocracy, you get a situation where people end up dividing more easily to be with other people like themselves.
The clever person always moves out of the village and goes to the university and goes to the city and you end up with these cultural divisions in society which again we are now seeing so there's definite downsides to meritocracy I'm afraid yes absolutely But again, there isn't a stability and occupation like there used to be.
There's your tribe in the sense of your extended family, your ethnic group or regional group.
It's all part of a race or so on.
But there's also a tribe in the sense of your occupation.
And I think as those get disrupted, it's impossible.
You can't be part of that tribe even if you wanted to.
No, that's true.
A lot of professions used to be hereditary.
There have been periods in the past, though, where certain professions die out.
And there are periods of radical change.
And then things calm down and the radical change slows down.
So, for example, before the Industrial Revolution, you had all these people that were hereditary weavers, things like this.
And then the Industrial Revolution, that was the end of that.
But what you did then get was hereditary coal miners, you know, whatever.
And I'm afraid the, what do we call it, the post-industrial revolution was the end of that.
So we're in this...
Are you going to have a hereditary Amazon worker?
Or are you even going to have, I mean, like some union where people are actually proud of doing this?
It does seem to be something like you do temporarily, you hate it, you can't, they're working you to, well, I mean, I don't want to sound...
Too exaggerated here, but they're working these people to death.
I mean, it's the lack of bathroom breaks and getting paid $15 an hour after Bernie got involved.
I mean, it sounds absolutely terrible.
They're utterly unethical.
I mean, what kind of organization is run by a druid with an earring through his left nostril?
I mean, he's obviously some sort of mutant.
I think that's Twitter, isn't it?
Bezos looks a little more like Lex Luthor.
I don't want to buy my books from Waterstones or something because it's appalling what they let them work.
But no, you're right.
It's like Victorian penury work.
It's like begging.
It's not a proper job.
And that's the problem.
It kind of reminds me, I mean, in terms of solutions, you know, Guillaume Fay in Archaeofuturism, which was published in English about 10 or 15 years ago, and it's been published in French for about 20 years, he suggested that we might need to move to a kind of bifurcated society because he's not a conservative reactionary who thinks that we can all...
We should just all go back to the Middle Ages or something like that.
He's realistic enough that we have to move forward.
But for a large amount of the population, we might need to create a kind of somewhat even synthetic World for them where we create occupations like this that they can be attached to and that they can be part of their identity, in fact.
And I know this, you know, basically it's a kind of neo-paternalism.
But there wouldn't be people on top making that decision.
I think in Switzerland they have something like this with agriculture.
So it's for the good of the national psyche that there are farms and people working on farms.
But the farms are uncompetitive and unproductive in comparison to importing the fruit or vegetables and the food.
So they just pay farmers to just, it's like a, what do you call it, a boondoggle, like a non-job.
Farmers are paid to run these farms just so there can be farms.
Yeah.
And so you'd have to be quite a rich society.
You'd have to have quite an excess of money to be able to justify doing that.
But yes, maybe that should be what goes on.
Because what we've got now in England, I'm afraid, is just the welfare system is much more generous in England than it is in America.
You can, without any problem, live off it.
And it's just hereditary casts of people that are on benefits and don't work.
And so they could be made to do...
Some sort of profession in return for some higher.
But I think that's worth it.
And it wouldn't be entirely unproductive.
I mean, in the sense of many of these people who are of lower cognitive abilities and lower just ambition and so on, they can...
Bring us eggs to market.
And it's okay if we pay a little bit more or it's less efficient or something like that.
They can do that.
And it's not like it's unproductive.
We're going to be making our omelets with it.
It's not just insane or something.
They do this with people who are mentally retarded.
Right.
So you get people that, of course, they can't work properly and they can't look after themselves, but there are certain companies that will let them basically work for them so they can feel they're doing something.
I was at a sort of leisure centre in Guildford, and it's called the Spectrum Centre, and a huge number of people that work there are mentally retarded.
Yeah.
I mean, literally, the girl that was working at the bowling alley didn't know her left from her right.
Now, she had someone with her who you could turn to and she said, sorry, it's not actually, don't go left, go right.
But it gave her some self-respect and some dignity in the idea she was doing a job.
And so it would be that sort of thing.
I think that's a good idea.
I haven't read enough yet.
I should read it.
I've read one of the books by him on the colonisation of Europe.
I've read that.
I haven't read enough for Futurism.
Yeah, no, he talks about the incoming bifurcated society, and that's a very interesting aspect of this, because we don't want to also kind of give up on technology as well.
The idea of returning to medievalism has always been a silly notion to begin with.
but how can we basically decisively create dignity for people's lives?
And that we basically lose these liberal illusions of everyone can make it if you just want it hard enough or something like that.
And we actually...
It's what school can you get into more than what you're actually learning.
Can you get into Stanford and hack it for four years?
Okay, your IQ is 140, therefore you can go work here.
No one actually looks at the curriculum and says, oh, look, you've contemplated the spheres for four years.
Now we want to hire you.
It's basically just an IQ test that is funded.
at $200,000 through Wall Street backed up by the US government.
I mean, it is just a totally fraudulent system.
So why don't we...
If we're going to engage in a fraud, basically, why don't we engage in a good fraud and subsidize human dignity and a certain pastoralism?
Subsidize human dignity?
Yes, yes, yes.
I mean, how could anyone say...
We should subsidize human dignity.
And then you wouldn't have, to the same extent anyway, this bitterness and resentment and malaise and envy that is so prevalent among a significant component of the population.
And I think Plato, I mean, again, despite my rages against Platonism, I actually do agree with him on fundamental levels.
You have to subsidize human dignity.
You can't tell the absolute truth to your children, and you can't tell the unvarnished, unadulterated truth to the human population.
And something like a noble lie in the sense of, well, you were born as a bronze person, but actually as a bronze, you are the most important, you are the foundation of society, and you're connected to golden.
You are the foundation that we as a whole can achieve our destiny.
And you are born into this occupation that will be highly dignified, but will be a laboring occupation.
And that is actually a good thing.
That is an ideal society.
That would reduce intramural resentment and would bring a kind of purpose and meaning to people's lives.
I don't see a lot of purpose and meaning and owning of your status of saying, I am working class and I'm proud among Amazon employees in a place where they're increasingly competing with robots.
And being worked to death, and if they collapse, they're fired, or they're replaced by some new robot that they've come up with, or a drone, or whatever.
It's like slavery, but it's worse than slavery, because the slaves were worth something.
They were worth economic value.
They were worth something.
They were a commodity that had been paid for.
These people had just nothing.
Right.
So we can have automation, but then we could have a subsidized human dignity in the sense of creating a status for people and saying, no, you are in charge of bringing healthy, organic eggs and meat.
You have to care for these animals and bring these to our society.
And your life has purpose and meaning.
We couldn't do it without you.
And that's actually not a lie.
I love the way in India, if you basically drop out.
If you're basically a peculiar, odd man that can't get girls, rather than being a resentful, bitter, beaten male that has to go around shooting up at schools and whatever, you become a sadhu.
You become a religious devotee.
Right.
They give you money, and you bless them, and you become part of this, and suddenly you have status, and you're considered on the status of a Brahmin, no matter what caste you are, because you're basically...
A lot of these monks in these kinds of places, not all of them, but that's what a lot of them are, they drop out men that can't get girls, and so they religiously sanctify it, and then it's worth something.
A drop out man can't get girls, go to a temple prostitute.
Then it's not just sordid sex with a hooker.
You're having sex with a god.
And you're not a loser.
And I was thinking the other day, perhaps Finland has this cast of alcoholics that basically retire at 63 and then drink themselves to death.
And maybe they should be conceived of as kind of worshipping Bacchus.
Yeah, exactly.
A kind of Dionysian cult that is important for society.
Yeah, I agree.
We need people that are devoted to Dionysus in this way, and then maybe they won't be happy and stop drinking themselves to death.
Again, people are going to react to these...
Thought experiments is, oh, how crazy and outlandish.
We aren't saying anything as crazy and outlandish as developing a trillion-dollar student loan program in which you lie to people and you get...
Or as just evil as getting people who...
We should be working at a coffee shop or some kind of manual labor, getting them $100,000 or $200,000 in debt due to their useless master's degree.
We're not doing anything like that.
If they find themselves working in this coffee shop or whatever, what's the matter?
Right, take two.
If they find themselves working in this coffee shop or whatever as a consequence of this massive student debt and the inability to get the middle class job, it's because they're competing for a job that they're not capable of doing.
And they've been sold in a competitive society and they've been sold this lie that they are capable of doing it because they've got a degree.
And so they are part of the elite and they should be able to get an elite job.
And rather than get a job which they...
Should be able to do.
They will carry on doing a job which is unsatisfying and is below them in order to try to pursue a job which is above them.
And that is a ridiculous situation.
Like when I was in Chicago and there was this bar and there was this girl that served us and she had a master's degree in dramatic arts or something.
And she'd been working in this bar for years and years.
And as a hobby did acting.
And I'm like, well, yeah, why don't you get a proper job and then...
Keep your hobby.
Yeah, like, you don't need...
Yeah.
It's great that you're doing community theatre.
Like, no one's against that, but you don't need to go get a master's in that or get in debt, you know, for 50 grand or whatever.
I love watching a bunch of elderly people doing Gilbert and Southern Operators.
It's great.
That's more interesting than going and watching professional actors do it.
When they don't hit the high notes and it's, oh, she's trying.
I like the community theater here in Whitefish.
They do good stuff, actually.
I would love to not have them in debt and see various community productions of Les Miserables.
24601!
Are you an English tradition to your local whitefish?
I'm a baritone, so I would be a good Javert, don't you think?
Yeah, baritones normally...
I'm kind of a high baritone.
I have the normal male voice.
I can't hit high notes, but then I'm not like a bass or anything.
Kind of a high baritone.
It's actually a little common male voice.
Are baritones only baddies?
Yeah, they're usually baddies, yeah.
But I like that.
Typecast.
They're out in the darkness.
It would be good if they did the Mormon thing, the Book of Mormon.
