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June 7, 2021 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
47:17
Against Education

Ed Dutton and Richard Spencer discuss the disaster that is the Western—and particularly American—education industry and how to chart a different path. 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

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It goes against everything that universities were supposed to be, which was for the education of elite.
There shouldn't be no tuition fees, but it should be free for, let's say, top 5 or 10% of the society.
And that's it.
Nobody else.
Education can be actually very harmful.
And I'm not just talking about that in the sense of, you know, this obviously toxic...
You know, critical race theory or advanced levels of feminism or something.
I'm actually even talking about the classics.
I think there's a somewhat Pollyannish view that you're going to read Hamlet and become a better person.
You're actually going to read Hamlet and maybe be depressed.
Actually pursuing truth is not going to turn you into a happy, middle-class goody-goody.
If you actually examine many of these things, it might actually shatter your soul.
Thank you.
All right, Ed, how are you doing?
I'm okay, yes.
I've had a fun weekend.
I went with my son yesterday to a thing called Tivvully, which is a fairground.
And I went on all the rides, the roller coasters and whatever, except the one where you go upside down.
Both me and my son agreed we did not want to be upside down.
But apart from that, it was very good.
And you?
That reminds me of the good old days of going to Six Flags when I was a kid.
I can't wait to relive those.
Well, as you can probably tell, because I'm using an avatar and my voice...
Is not as euphonious as usual.
I am ill.
I seem to have caught a bug of some sort.
I have a very sore throat.
So I am just taking it easy.
I don't want to show myself on camera because I have to admit it.
I'm in a bathrobe right now.
So for a mere $9.95 a month, you can subscribe to my OnlyFans account, which is me in bathrobes lounging about.
Eating hamburgers.
It's a bargain, really.
Eating hamburgers with a special kind of cheese.
Yeah, exactly.
Well worth it.
So, let's talk about something serious.
I don't think we've ever dived into the higher education issue in general.
I think both of us have experience in higher education.
We actually got to the top, although I dove off, jumped out, escaped the last minute before We both know what it's like inside.
And I think there's a growing awareness that this...
There's two things.
There's a growing awareness that this is a disaster and that it leads to a lot of unhappiness.
Not that...
Anti-academia or anti-intellectualism even is unusual among conservatives, but it has gotten to a new level over the past, say, five to ten years.
There's a growing awareness among normal people that your student loans can just drag your life down and they can never be repaid.
You're actually not even repaying the money you owe.
You're repaying the money you owe times three or more.
A growing awareness of that, and at the same time, there is a rather conventional notion that we just need to send more people to college.
Biden very recently has talked about free college for all and so on.
But what I think is different this time, I mean, Biden's obviously a highly conventional kind of retrograde politician, and he's an old man.
But what I think is interesting now is that there is actually more pushback, and that pushback has a lot more legitimacy, and that we're kind of recognizing that this doesn't work.
This is not the 20th century anymore.
With the GI Bill and all these kinds of things.
What are your first reactions to the way I kind of laid out the scene, Ed?
I agree with something we were saying before we started recording.
I hadn't heard it phrased in this way before, but you talked about the sort of cargo culticization.
Of higher education.
And that's the idea that you don't really understand what's going on, but you just sort of go through the motions like these people in the South Seas that think that because aeroplanes brought in food or whatever, if they just sort of do some childish understanding of what aeroplanes do, then the cargo will come back.
And I think I agree with you.
That's how the left...
And we had this in Britain about 20 years ago.
That's how they seem to see...
Education, if you start from the belief, which you must know on some level is incorrect, but anyway, that people are broadly intellectually the same, then it would seem to...
And if you think that a middle-class lifestyle, or whatever you want to call it, is good, and if a mark of a middle-class lifestyle is a degree, if you think in that kind of simple way, where you almost reify things as if they're concrete and unchanging...
Then it makes sense, doesn't it?
Look, those people are successful.
They have degrees.
So if everyone has a degree, then everyone will be successful.
That's the simple...
Infantile way of thinking.
And of course, it's completely untrue for various reasons.
It's untrue because a lot of people are intellectually incapable of doing a degree.
It's untrue because once you get mass participation in a degree, it just lowers the standards of the degrees so that people can get the degrees that they're paying for.
And it's untrue because it devalues the degree and the degree just no longer becomes a marker of status and of an entry into the middle class.
And you could go further.
You could say that...
Perhaps it is bad for a lot of people to have degrees because it will mean that they are basically educated beyond their capacity for rational thought.
And they will believe, because they have a degree, that their opinion is worth something, and that they should be something important in society, and they will kind of feel entitled to be part of the middle class.
And, of course, they'll find that they're not, because 50% of people in their cohort have degrees.
And so then they'll become bitter and unpleasant and unhappy, and you'll get the kind of polarization that we see in many European countries now.
Are things we could put as well.
Like the amount of knowledge that you retain from your degree is not large.
You forget a lot of things that you learn.
Of course.
And so the idea that you're creating a better society by having everybody spending a huge amount of time in education is just a very badly reasoned through idea.
And it's just going to make...
It already has made for a very difficult situation.
Well, let me jump in.
I mean, it's weird that we're even talking about we need more people to get education and so on when education is exploding.
So the cost of education is easily outpacing inflation.
It is just going up every year, and that is due to debt financing, which we'll go into a little bit later.
The facts are the facts.
Now, things are kind of plateauing right now.
We actually might very well have reached a peak.
But if you look back over the 20 years, there is basically a doubling.
I mean, we've gone from 29% of the population getting a bachelor's degree to close to 50%.
The number of people with doctorates has more than doubled.
It's gone from 2% to 4%.
The master's degree is the fascinating one.
It has almost exactly doubled.
It's gone from 10% with a master's degree to 21%.
What's interesting is that the number of people with a master's degree is creeping up closer to the number of people with a bachelor's degree 20 years ago.
So I just read that as pure inflation.
At one point, you could go to the movie theater for a quarter.
Now it's $7.50 or whatever.
So at one point, a bachelor's degree was worth this much in terms of getting your foot in the door, etc., giving you status.
Now you need a master's degree.
With the doctor, I mean, basically, in Britain, and I think America as well, in about 1960, it was about 4% of people that had a bachelor's degree.
And so, in that sense, the doctorate is the new bachelor's degree.
And it kind of is, because it's the thing that gives people sort of look up to it, even now, if a person has a doctorate.
And so, I think that it clearly is just inflation.
It's not really a more educated society.
It's not a society that has more skills.
It's not necessary for the functioning of society to have all of these people that have these qualifications.
It's perfectly obvious that most people that have degrees just do the kind of office manager type jobs that their parents did and their grandparents did without having a degree.
And now those people have degrees.
I remember when I was about 16, I had to do work experience.
And I did work experience in a solicitor's office, and you had these secretaries, and that's what they were, secretaries that were doing this, that, and the other, who were born, let's say, in the early 60s.
Those people now, they're called PAs, personal assistants, and they tend to have degrees.
And that's where it's got to.
They're basically glorified secretaries.
That's what you're going to go into with your degree.
And in a society where...
Like Finland, where education is free, that's one thing.
But in a society like Britain or America, where it involves encumbering yourself with a vast amount of debt, you're just creating a Ponzi scheme of people with just completely useless degrees that they don't need, that they have to have in order to compete in this system, in this bubble, basically.
Yes, exactly.
I think it's peaking.
I think that's what I would say, actually, because the number of people with bachelor's degree is actually not rising.
And then it's facing a certain type of legitimacy crisis.
I'm just speaking from my own perspective, because we live in a different time.
So this was more than 20 years ago when I graduated from prep school in 1997.
From St. Mark's School of Texas, All Boys Prep School, basically had 100% of the class go to college.
There was always maybe one or two who didn't want to go and probably wanted to go tour Europe or hang out for a year or something like that.
But basically, 100% of the class went to a college.
A lot of them went to elite schools.
That is Ivy's.
At that point, there was so much pressure.
If you didn't go to college, it was unthinkable.
You were a loser.
But it wasn't even an option, to be honest, for me.
It was just a pressure to get into a higher and higher tier college and to get an internship, etc.
That was at a point where a lot of these universities weren't debt-financed.
Your parents would pony up.
It was at least somewhat affordable.
Ten years later, going to an elite school was $50,000 a year room and board for an undergraduate education.
I don't even know where it is now, but it is just so rapidly outpacing inflation.
It's not even funny.
They have huge amounts, a huge pool of people to go to these elite schools from international.
It is much more difficult to get in.
It's much more detrimental to your life to go.
I think it probably still does probably make sense to go to Yale or Stanford or one of those top flight places.
It's worth the $150,000, $200,000 in debt because you are going to make that back through your connections, etc.
But for a lot of people not going to Yale, not actually learning anything, and not really having those elite connections, it is absolutely decimating.
One of the other aspects of this is that, on the one hand, higher education is moving towards complete silliness.
You know, extreme advanced levels of Marxian analysis and critical race theory has become a hot topic.
But on another level, they've had to do very rudimentary skill.
Teaching.
Stuff that should have taken place in high school or maybe even middle school in terms of basic grammar and essay writing.
There was a very interesting essay that I read many years ago by F. Roger Devlin about him teaching at a community college or something like this.
And he basically would have...
The natural thing to do was just to fail the entire class because they were so bad.
And he was told by his dean, well, obviously you can't do that, otherwise the college will close down.
And so we're basically just turning up.
These people are not there to be scholars or anything like that, even though they might be doing pseudo-scholarly degrees, scholarly degrees in theory, like English literature or something like that.
They're there to pass their courses and get their credits, and that's all they care about.
They don't care about anything else.
And he was basically teaching them the basics of how to write an essay.
Yeah, like a five-paragraph essay.
And that should have been taught at school.
Yeah, exactly.
You have the inflation of the degree, but all that's really happening is that in many cases the schools are so bad that you're just extending education to compensate for the fact that perhaps some people are so low in intelligence that they have to have longer to learn the same things than was once the case.
I think we're also reaching this point where we're kind of hitting a brick wall in terms of Division of labor.
And let me back up a little bit.
There is a kind of reactionary, it's very often left-wing, but you sometimes will hear this from conservative populists.
There's a kind of reaction, almost Luddite-type perspective on the division of labor of, I can't believe you're bringing in these new machines.
You're going to put all of these workers out of work.
They've got families, etc.
And the libertarian answer to that is that, well, no, this is going to be radically more efficient and there's going to be more capital investment so that those people are going to actually earn higher wages and the whole society will be better once we bring in these new technologies.
has been a correct analysis of what's happening.
The division of labor is kind of good for all.
But I think we're reaching this point in human development where we're running up against a kind of wall of IQ in the sense that, okay, so you've outsourced or automated this person's job.
We don't do that kind of work here in postmodern America anymore.
So you're going to go become an iOS coder or you're going to go become...
They can't do this kind of thing.
They're running up against a brick wall of their own innate intelligence and skill level.
And I think with the pushing people into education and then increasingly in master's degrees, we're having this kind of midwit problem where we have too many elites.
We have too many people with $50,000 to $100,000 of student loan debt, a master's degree in international relations, who want to be writing papers or working for the Biden administration or something.
And there just are not enough jobs for that, and they can't do it anyway.
No, it's two points, I think, that salient.
First of all, that's what Peter Turkin has argued in his books on this subject.
That's why you have a period of polarization.
We've had periods of polarisation before.
And what you get, but this is a very extreme one, is the overcreation of elites, the oversupply of elites that comes about during a time when things are going well.
And so therefore there's this optimism and therefore you get this idea that everybody should be educated or whatever, everybody should do a law degree.
You get far too many people that have the qualification and you therefore get intra-elite competition.
You get ruthless fighting within the elites.
And that's what we're now seeing among the elites of my generation and particularly younger than that.
Where there's just every job you would apply for, they're going to write back and say, we had so many well-qualified candidates, all this nonsense, which has been going on for years.
It shouldn't be like that.
It should be that the society permits that the number of places for that position parallel the number of qualifications that can be got in it.
That would be the sensible thing to do.
And that's what Finland used to do until quite recently.
The attitude of the Finnish government was...
The Finnish Lutheran Church needs this many new priests a year.
This is therefore how many theology students there will be a year.
That's it.
And so you never get this problem.
Now you do, because they've liberalized things.
So that's the first thing.
You always get this inter-relite competition.
The second thing that's more salient is in a society, you have a society of declining IQ, which we definitely have.
But also you have a society where the declining IQ is in a sense being cloaked by the fact that we are continuing to develop.
So we're continuing even though much more slowly than we used to, a slower speed because IQ is lower.
So there's fewer macro innovations and micro innovations, but they're still happening.
We're still developing.
And so that means the society becomes ever more specialized and ever more efficient and ever less...
Requiring of low-skilled jobs.
So you're going to get a situation where there's more and more and more and more and more people that can only do low-skilled jobs, very low-skilled jobs, because that's who's breeding.
The only portion of society in England, as I've said before, if you divide up between those where both parents work, IQ of 100, those where one parent works, IQ of 90, those where neither works, IQ of 80, 85, the only portion that's breeding above replacement fertility is the IQ of 85. The people on the dole.
And those people are intellectually capable of being, you know, farm labourers and real simple stuff.
Yeah.
And that's who's growing.
And so what we would expect to happen, it's rather like in the decline of Rome, you had a similar kind of phenomenon on a smaller scale, that it was the upper classes weren't having children, same kind of thing that we see now, the people that are more intelligent aren't having kids.
The underclass grows, but Rome is still developing, and so they sustain them with bread and circuses.
And that's what we're doing.
That's what's going to have to happen.
We already have bread and circuses.
It's called welfare.
Oh, and the health service, and the vast majority.
Yeah, and I think UBI is a part of this.
I actually am sympathetic towards UBI, universal basic income.
As a way of managing this system, but I am realistic about it and I understand it for what it is.
There's some story that people tell about UBI that, oh, these people will now be able to relax for a month and then they'll go start a new business and become millionaires.
Develop a new technology or go to the lab and experiment.
I mean, that's nonsense.
I mean, let's just be honest right now that what they're going to be doing is hanging out and playing video games and watching Marvel movies.
And I think it's actually very interesting.
I mean, this is a little bit off topic, but it's related.
So I think I mentioned on our last podcast, I went to McDonald's to get coffee the other day because I'd run out of coffee.
McDonald's coffee is not bad, to be honest.
But anyway, they had a $300 signing bonus.
Sign up now to come work here.
$300 signing bonus.
A signing bonus for working at McDonald's.
That's remarkable.
I actually went to a convenience store just the other day.
They are offering $15 an hour minimum wage at this convenience store.
This is what the left is Bernie Sanders.
You know, we need $15 an hour minimum wage right now.
This is our greatest...
Are you doing Bernie Sanders or are you doing the Dracula character from the Flintstones special?
I'm afraid the latter.
I should not be doing impressions for my thoughts like this because when I do my Bernie Sanders impression, I start to cough anyway.
Now I have this reddened, swollen throat.
So I apologize to our audience for my Dracula impression.
You're getting a $15 minimum wage right now, and they can't find people.
They're still help-wanted.
At one of the places that's like a sports bar here that I ate at not too long ago, it was packed.
Tons of people getting drinks, watching the game, having fun.
There was also a sign, we're going to be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays from here on out.
We cannot find...
The staff.
And what's happening, I mean, this is a real thing.
What's happening is people are getting unemployment, they've gotten used to a certain thing during coronavirus, and they're not really willing to work.
Now, this happened during the Black Death.
There was not just a decimation, almost halving of the population.
This was instrumental in creating the middle class.
Wages had to go up because the labor supply was so small that you had to pay people more to get them, to get their attention.
I think something like that is happening now, but I think it's a very different thing.
There's two parallels I can think of.
One is the Black Death, as you say.
It was between 40 and 50% of the population of England was killed, but it was 80% of the laboring class, of the serfs and the free laborers.
80%.
And so they could just charge what they liked, and they did.
And then, of course, you've got very substantial social movement as the cleverer people.
You've literally got people that have been born as serfs, as perfectly unfree, becoming magistrates, things like this.
Huge social change.
And then also towards the end of the Victorian era, the fleeing from the countryside by shepherds and whatever to go in the factories and so on was so huge.
There were hardly any...
Shepherds left.
There were fewer shepherds than were needed.
And so those shepherds could charge whatever fees they wanted, and they did.
And you have people going, for goodness sake, this shepherd of mine, he pays for dancing classes in the local town.
He has brass bedposts.
I mean, this is ridiculous.
So one thing that you would expect, before the rise of the Polish...
Immigrants and the Eastern European immigrants coming to Britain, you did get this, was that you would have, let's say, plumbers.
There just weren't enough plumbers.
And so they could charge whatever they liked.
And so one thing that you might expect is that, and I think this is already happening, is that you have all of these people that have their useless degrees competing for their middle-class jobs, and you have somebody who is a plumber or something like that with his own business who can earn considerably more.
And so he has lower status in the sense that he's less educated, but he has higher status in the sense that he has more access to resources and is more just necessary.
I can see something like that taking place.
I think that's happening, but not to be too brutal about this, the difference in the situation is that half of these people didn't die.
I mean, coronavirus was a real thing, and it's a serious thing, but...
In America, 600,000 people in a context of 330.
There were excess deaths, but a lot of people would have died anyway.
So they're here, and something has to be done with them.
The parallel is that you have a system that is inculcating people with this idea that if you don't have a degree, like the kind of system at your school...
But society-wide, if you don't have a degree, there's something wrong with you, basically.
And so, so many people are sucked into that idea, oh, I've got to get a degree, and then with this...
This dream, this lie that, oh, I will be middle class and important if I have a degree, so I'm going to go to have a degree.
And you're just going to get a sector of society that, for every reason, and maybe they're not necessarily low in IQ, but they're intellectually humble, or they just do not perceive themselves as anything like elite or anything like that.
That's not how they see themselves.
And often those people perhaps will be...
Difficult to indoctrinate with the broader societal culture anyway.
And then it's going to be those people that are going to stay and remain, you know, the plumbers and the car mechanics and whatever of the future.
But there's just not enough of them.
And so the result is that it is the inappropriate roadmap down which the more inculcatable people in the society are being built, are being pushed, which is bringing about.
This labor shortage.
Yeah, oh, I don't disagree with anything you're saying.
I'm just saying that that mass of underclass is still out there.
This mass of people didn't die in the latest Black Death, and they're going to have to be dealt with in some way.
A mass of people with IQs around 80 who cannot become iOS app coders.
Well, they can't come anything.
I know, yeah.
If you've got an IQ that low, you would have difficulty holding down even the most menial job because you'd make mistakes and you'd be lazy and you'd do it in a slapdash fashion.
And so the idea when they say, oh, immigrants are taking our jobs.
No, they're not.
In the sense they're not.
In some cases they are, yes, but not in a lot of these instances because you just wouldn't be intellectually capable of doing a job like that.
And it's the class that when my grandfather used to talk about when he was a kid, he referred to them as rough.
So you'd have working class, that was him, we're working class, and then you had rough.
And these were the kind of people that would do poaching, wartime spids, dodgy people.
And those people are probably now about a fifth of society.
And based on the data that I'm...
I've seen that they will be, by the end of the century, like three-fifths of society.
Right.
Well, I would mention that whenever a young girl in my area is captured by wild bears and taken into a den, they usually come to me to rescue her.
I'm known as a rough type.
Some people don't know this about me because I have an intellectual podcast.
I didn't.
I have to say, you've kept that secret very successfully.
I didn't know that you were the Montana equivalent of the WWF wrestler Skinner that lived in the wild.
But yeah, it's very serious.
And what would eventually presumably happen is that there just won't be the money to sustain this underclass.
That's what will happen.
And not only that, but that underclass will be so regarded as so obnoxious and offensive.
That people will just sort of lose all sympathy for them.
And not only that, one thing that I did a video on my channel, on Jolly Heretic, a few days ago, there was a huge rise, by the way, of sexually transmitted diseases among these people.
It's absolutely enormous.
Yeah, I saw that video.
Huge rise.
It's very concerning.
Incredible.
And that's on top of antibiotics working less well and people being more genetically sick and those people in particular being more genetically sick.
So it augurs a future where, yeah, there probably will be.
It's the bread and circuses phase of Rome.
And eventually the bread and circuses will run out.
Right.
Let's finish off this discussion with a more philosophical topic, and that is, what is the role of the university?
Let me think about it this way.
In Aryan society, there are those who fight, those who work, those who pray.
This is not too different from a Platonic conception of a Golden class, a silver, and a bronze class.
So that's slightly different.
But it's a tripartite society, and each part is indispensable, though obviously serves a different function.
It's the most basic division of labor.
There are those people, guardians, who engage in sword play, ride chariots, or badasses will protect you, maybe conquer new land, etc.
There are those who do the things that need to be done, the people who make the shoes, who farm the land, etc.
Also indispensable.
Then there is this other thing that some might consider indispensable, but is actually not.
And that is those who pray, those who kind of bring society together and congeal it with a religious-like system or something.
Now, I would remind everyone that...
We could go back to the academies in the Greco-Roman world or the Greek world, and those were secular institutions, although obviously Plato was a deeply religious-like thinker, the Lyceum, which gives us the French word for school.
But they do have a religious component.
Those people in the academy are there to pray, in a way.
I think people are wrong when they think of the humanities, academia, as this kind of silly, on-the-edge, exploring all of this nonsense that's toxic or, at best, inane.
The fact is, they are there to justify the current system.
And they're, in many ways, behind social trends and seeking to kind of intellectually rationalize social trends.
They are not on the vanguard.
The academy has never been on the vanguard.
The academy is about maintaining paradigms.
And those people who break paradigms are actually very rare.
The Ptolemaic system lasted for 1,000 or 1,400 years.
That was done very carefully and rigorously by academics who were creating epicycles on epicycles and so on.
So that is what the academy is there for.
It is to rationalize power.
And I guess that's kind of a...
And congeal the society and serve the state.
And I guess that's a kind of maybe cynical sounding view of it, but that is my view of it.
So I think when we ask, you know, what do we want from education going forward?
I think we should get rid of a lot of these somewhat kind of romantic notions.
There was once a time when there was free thought in the academy or something.
There's never been free thought in the academy.
I'd slightly nuance this.
I'd say two things.
I'd say firstly, let's go back even further.
When a tribe reaches a certain level of complexity...
You get clear sexual divisions of labour, and then you start to get this idea that the males need to be taken away from the tribe for a period and inculcated with the ideas of the tribe, inculcated with the beliefs of the tribe and turned into warriors for the tribe, and then they come back and they are men.
And that's really the kind of start of the education system, this rite of passage.
And eventually, it seems to me that in Western countries, that rite of passage, okay, you can talk about the household system as a rite of passage or whatever, but that rite of passage is regarded as particularly important for the upper class, eventually, because the upper class are the warriors of the society and so on.
So the upper class go to school, which is a rite of passage, and what these universities were was really an extension.
Of that rite of passage.
And the idea was to...
You'd go there at 14, for example, in the 1500s.
You'd go to Oxford Cambridge about 14 years old.
And the idea was to...
They would learn the ways of the society.
So in 16th century England, Oxford and Cambridge, you'd learn things like dancing and etiquette and whatever.
You'd learn some useful knowledge about law and stuff like that that you might need to...
Run your lands and so on.
And you'd learn about theology and that sort of thing.
And relatively few people actually got a degree.
Normally they only actually sat the degree if they were going to become priests or vicars, the relatively senior clergy.
But a few others did as well, lawyers or whatever.
But otherwise it was just a rite of passage for the upper class that you went through.
But what it did permit...
Good for the group, which was, you could say, which was a place where people could genuinely discuss and test ideas, at least within certain limits, and thus push the boundaries.
And so you did get that with the medieval scholastics, that that is what they were doing.
And so there was a sense in which, and this, because these new ideas were considered beneficial in some way, you know, this emphasis on logic, which then permeated out to the society and sort of made people...
Look at things in a more logical, rational fashion, which is going to assist you in terms of group selection with warfare and all this sort of thing.
Then the universities, of course, become looked up to and they have more status because of this association with sort of brilliance and genius.
And so then I think you get a cycle where once that happens and it has more status, then it attracts status seekers.
The status seekers put conformity and displaying their...
Signaling their conformity to the ideas of the society above the truth.
So eventually then the truth element, the genius element, is suppressed.
And then the university goes into decline.
And then it just happens all over again.
And that seems to me to be the sort of priestly cycle of universities.
We're definitely in a priestly phase.
Yeah, we're pretty much peak priesthood here, I think.
Right.
But I would say that we are, in a weird way, At this peak of the university system, the status is not falling away.
I mean, the fact that it's more difficult to get into these universities than it was just, say, 10 or 20 years ago.
There's a greater pool of applicants for the same number of places.
Yeah, but that's just because of this bubble that has...
I agree.
Yeah, I totally agree.
But what I'm saying is that it's...
The status keeps going up.
I'm not sure that's the case because they're seriously questioning.
People are seriously questioning, even in mainstream newspapers now, what the hell is happening at the universities.
And they're aware that Oxford and Cambridge, let's say, is completely woke and that most subjects are just nonsense and that you get in not because you're clever anymore, but because of...
Ticking certain boxes or whatever.
And so I think there is a degree to which the status element is now at least under question in a way that it wasn't 20 years ago.
And you're going through, I mean, if you look about the cycle of Oxford University as an example of this.
So Oxford University has this period where it's an intellectual hothouse.
It then goes into decline from the 1500s onwards, and it becomes perceived as it's just completely run and governed by the church.
It's a way of upholding the church, and it's considered just a sort of finishing school for the English upper class.
It doesn't have much prestige, really.
It's just like the equivalent these days of an English upper class person who's not very bright going to, I don't know, agricultural college for a few years or something like that.
And the prestige was at the Scottish universities because they weren't dominated by the church and also the universities in Holland and Germany.
And so genuinely intellectual English people would actually go to universities there, either just go to universities there or spend time at them during their grand tour.
And then it was only in 1870 when Oxford was very low ebb that it reformed to imitate these German and Dutch and Scottish universities.
And then managed to outdo them.
And in doing so, again, created a brief period of time where the emphasis is on truth and whatever.
And A, that was good because it attracts clever people back to the university who had previously gone elsewhere.
And B, it, of course, became a hothouse for ideas, which was then useful at the group level.
For the group, these clever people were generating these fascinating scientific ideas.
And by about the 50s, I think it midwitter sizes and it attracts status seekers.
And then the cycle just is now back where it was.
Right.
And it's interesting...
Oh, go ahead.
Finish your thought.
Sorry, yeah, that's all I was going to say.
Okay.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting for...
For people like us who are, you know, some would say on the fringe, but the alternative to this system, I mean, we are both actively trying to educate people.
I went through a two-month-long course with many people where we closely read some very classic text, and we read them, again, closely, and we also read them.
It's interesting to ask, what function is that serving?
It really is serving truth.
We are attempting to get truth and to expand ourselves to have greater human flourishing.
We aren't able to serve that function of either justifying the society religiously, the priestly element of the academy.
We're simply not serving a function of creating great ideas for industry or something.
We're not trying to do that either.
But I do think that there is an opening as the university enters this priestly phase for a lot of learning to occur.
You know, in using these alternative methods, whether it's small things, whether it's through Zoom classes, etc.
Because, again, it's not serving that truth function, the current university system.
The other thing, it's, you know, education is wasted on the young.
I mean, I think Plato is wrong about most things.
He was right about this, that the idea of He's bringing a 19-year-old to school.
He's hanging out in this almost amusement park-like place where they have big gems.
They literally will have water parks at these universities.
Everything's taken care of.
He goes to all these keg parties and gets drunk.
He's chasing girls.
Why are you even thinking that he's going to gain something from reading Wordsworth or Plato?
Or philosophy of any kind.
It's kind of a joke.
Whereas someone who actually does have some life experience, who is not going to be a full-time student, but who can kind of take a break from the hustle and bustle, and who genuinely wants to think about something, could actually gain something from these materials.
We are spending billions of dollars on midwits, or in many cases, simply dumb people, throwing You know, the classics at them, or throwing, you know, post-Marxism at them.
And it's just, what a misallocation of resources.
What a silly thing to do.
It means that a lot of those people, then the worst thing is that they have a sense in which people, even if they had been to university, wouldn't have a few generations earlier that, oh, I'm important, I'm part of the elite, I should get involved in politics.
I should write things.
I should this, that and the other.
And what you get is just their inane, illogical, emotionally driven ramblings, which if they didn't have the degree, they probably wouldn't engage in.
But they do have the degree.
So the degree gives them this confidence way beyond their intellectual ability.
To be clear, there are people now in a society where 50% of people go to university, there are going to be people with IQs of 97 or whatever that are at universities.
And that's just who get in on the basis that they have high conscientiousness or something like that, that they have below average IQ.
That is the situation.
And that's a crazy situation to be in.
And it just goes against everything that universities were supposed to be, which was for the education of an elite.
This is an elite thing.
And also I think about payment.
I personally take the view that we have free schooling.
So I think that universities should be free.
There shouldn't be no tuition fees, but it should be free for, let's say, the top 5 or 10% of the society.
And that's it.
Nobody else.
And nobody else should be allowed to go.
I think in some ways people need to be protected from education.
Education can be actually very harmful.
And I'm not just talking about that in the sense of this obviously toxic...
Critical race theory or advanced levels of feminism or something.
I'm actually even talking about the classics.
I think there's a somewhat Pollyannish view that you're going to read Hamlet and become a better person.
You're actually going to read Hamlet and maybe be depressed.
In the sense that education is not...
Actually pursuing truth is not going to turn you into a happy middle-class goody-goody.
If you actually examine many of these things, it might actually shatter your soul.
I think most people, probably at least 90% of the population, should be protected from education, both in its obviously toxic left-wing elements, but also in terms of its...
There was a British comedy called Yes, Minister, and a successor called Yes, Prime Minister.
I don't know if you've seen it.
It's about a British minister of the Crown, eventually Prime Minister, and his interactions with civil servants.
Jim Hacker, who's the minister, says to his senior civil servant, Sir Humphrey Appleby, the public have the right to know.
No, they have the right to be ignorant.
Exactly.
And this just sort of sums up the attitude.
They have the right not to know.
Right.
Well, that's obvious.
That was probably said in jest.
But it actually, ignorance is a kind of right in the sense that you're not burdened with things that only a few people should be burdened with.
It actually, it's not just a right, but you could say a blessing.
You could say it's a duty.
We deliberately keep children ignorant for that reason, don't we?
Exactly.
Do you think I'm going to tell my child that Santa Claus doesn't exist?
Are you insane?
I'm not some sadist in the name of the truth or something.
No.
He does exist, though.
I've seen him.
Yeah, so it's a very, very similar thing.
So you've got to ask yourself about...
But the problem with that, though, is it raises the kind of questions of, well, look at the difficult things I talked about in making sense of race.
Do they have the right to be ignorant of that?
Right.
Well...
I'm afraid that 90% of the American public, sadly for our bank accounts, are not purchasing this book.
I think it's kind of a moot point in a way.
Also, we are avidly attempting to shatter the psyches of the current elite.
We want them to be unhappy, to throw themselves off bridges.
I don't know how to throw themselves off bridges and die, but I certainly want them to be more focused on the truth and on group oriented.
I was speaking metaphorically, of course.
Anyway, I apologize for my voice.
Hopefully I'm understandable, but Ed, very good discussion.
And let's just put a bookmark in it right there.
And I will talk to you soon, my friend.
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