How did shitlibs take over the university?
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Poast new message in this thread
Date: June 28th, 2015 12:31 PM Author: motley mentally impaired macaca locus
Universities should be conservative institutions: they're built on tradition and hierarchy. So why the change?
Also, why are the most INTELLECTUAL cuckservatives all Catholics?
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2921657&forum_id=2#28216289) |
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Date: June 28th, 2015 5:51 PM Author: Cordovan Lascivious Stead Stain
But they definitely change the culture. They're still there. Before, Japan had absolutely 0 immigration of any kind.
If you don't think that rootless global capitalism is conservatism, that's fine, but the GOP big money loves immigrants and keeping them a second class citizens.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2921657&forum_id=2#28217977)
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Date: June 28th, 2015 1:11 PM Author: Stimulating Market
only true in humanities and soft social sciences.
main reasons imo:
1) professors in the humanities are poor as fuck.
2) history is basically about people in power fucking over people without power. i'm not really opposed to this dynamic, but, since humanities depts. focus on historical problems and since most professors identify with proles due to the sustained poverty wrought by graduate school and low assistant prof and vap salaries, it leads to a very lefty dynamic.
3) continued popularity of french theory and the frankfurt school, both of which are deeply rooted in marxist historical analysis, even when they deviate.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2921657&forum_id=2#28216395) |
Date: June 28th, 2015 1:19 PM Author: buck-toothed multi-colored trailer park
Vietnam draft dodging.
XOXOHTH
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2921657&forum_id=2#28216429) |
Date: June 28th, 2015 1:26 PM Author: Charismatic sadistic institution
I feel like academia is something that is inherently geared towards shitlibs. People who are conservative usually go elsewhere.
The same rule applies to unionized workers and government employees.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2921657&forum_id=2#28216463) |
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Date: June 28th, 2015 3:09 PM Author: vibrant frozen queen of the night
Combination of this post and the one above, that people who learn more and think more are more liberal.
I read plenty of conservative websites, but I never see what I would call an examination or inquiry into conservative motivations and goals. E.g., it isn't really acceptable as a conservative to say, catholicism obviously isn't real/true but it works well to manage and control the dregs of society and therefore I favor catholicism continuing. You pretty much have to be either legitimately religious or say I respect everyone's right to sincerely held religious beliefs. You can't move outside of that realm and still fit in with current conservatives. So, academia will necessarily be more liberal because academia is ideally examining both liberal and conservative ideas. For the most part, only liberals will do that.
TLDR, in my opinion, current conservatives can't actually examine their own system without no longer being conservative.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2921657&forum_id=2#28217021) |
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Date: June 28th, 2015 4:01 PM Author: smoky bearded orchestra pit
This morning The Telegraph reported that world-famous biologist James Watson said he is selling the Nobel Prize medal he won in 1962 for discovering the structure of DNA because he has been ostracized. The Nobel laureate is also having financial trouble because of remarks he made seven years ago; remarks that he is not willing to take back even now.
In an interview with the Sunday Times in October 2007, Professor Watson is quoted as saying he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”. Testing, really? Did the eminent scientist consider that if Americans were to be tested based on a Nigerian curriculum most would fail?
To make matters worse, in what was to him an apology, Dr Watson recently said “I apologize… [the journalist] somehow wrote that I worried about the people in Africa because of their low IQ – and you’re not supposed to say that.” Oh yes; you are not supposed to say that because you are supposed to know better!
http://www.riskscience.umich.edu/nobel-prize-winner-james-watson-unrepentant-racism/
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2921657&forum_id=2#28217354) |
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Date: June 28th, 2015 3:49 PM Author: vibrant frozen queen of the night
Moreso than conservatives.
Looking at abortion (since it's contentious from all different angles), I would say the lib position is roughly trying to balance the rights of a woman to control her own life with the rights of the biological offspring. That's a tough question with a lot of thorny issues.
The con position is essentially no abortions except in the case of rape or incest. Well, that's a fair and a principled stand to take. But the problem is, we have tons of children all over the world alive right now who lack the resources to have a meaningful life. So you end up with conservatives taking two principled positions: No abortions except in rape or incest, and free market. Well, how are you against abortions and then in favor of less public funding for schools and poverty programs that help these very same kids? It's bizarre to say that a 2-year old needs to get a job or richer parents if they want a fair shot.
Libs are willing to confront the fact that we are killing a viable human fetus because we have competing priorities and we can't make everyone happy. Conservatives are living in a fantasy world where those fetuses aren't then born to poor mothers where both mother and child need our help. It's incredibly cruel to make abortions and birth control available only to the wealthy, which is where the conservative position takes us. (You'll always be able to fly to Europe and get an abortion, or get birth control by prescription). But conservative are incredibly intellectually dishonest and don't confront the tradeoff. There's no perfect answer, so they just take two completely contradictory principled positions.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2921657&forum_id=2#28217291) |
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Date: June 28th, 2015 4:56 PM Author: Exhilarant zippy mad cow disease
Not everyone on the right is a stereotypical tea party tard.
Abortions has been a great thing for society. Anything that keeps low IQ minorities from breeding like rabbits is beneficial.
Today's "conservatives" will die out in about 15-20 years. They're a flash in the pan.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2921657&forum_id=2#28217686) |
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Date: June 28th, 2015 5:04 PM Author: vibrant frozen queen of the night
I think cons fall into three groups currently: Big Business, Tea Party, Libertarian.
None of those three has a coherent philosophy that can be examined in any serious sense without the underlying conservatism being disregarded.
I'm a "libertarian" because I support as few laws as are necessary to protect the rights of others. The only people who wouldn't meet that definition are people who favor morality laws.
The current iteration of libertarianism (impotent, angry white males) that supports the flat tax and not curbing negative externalities is a joke.
Big business is actually the worst because they use the idiots in the other two wings to directly steal from others. Nothing conservative about that.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2921657&forum_id=2#28217720) |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 1:45 PM Author: vibrant frozen queen of the night
Both will be preferred by an amoral individual with money.
There isn't necessarily a valid reason why it's the case for those without money. Basically it's a principle opposing government action or interference with businesses that they have been led to believe is a cornerstone of "America."
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2921657&forum_id=2#28223283)
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Date: June 28th, 2015 5:41 PM Author: Vigorous sapphire national
Liberal =/= shitlib.
A shitlib is not merely someone who doesn't want school vouchers or who supports the ACA. A shitlib is not merely someone who thinks the Charleston shooting signifies a need for tighter gun controls or gun bans in this country. A shitlib is not a mere Keynesian economist or down-the-ticket Democrat.
'Shitlib' probably doesn't have a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, but they are the kind of people who:
(+) espouse the view, whether or not they actually believe or understand it, that truth is relative, varies by perspective, or is constituted by our choices, actions, or attitudes;
(+) assign a pride of place to identity, and considers identity to be basically declarative, except when identity is a component of oppression or its inverse, privilege, in which case there are some rules;
(+) values subtlety over clarity;
(+) believes in and uses terms like narrative, hegemony and alterity to describe the construction of reality itself, which they believe is a fundamentally social process that can be either cooperative or combative;
(+) leans into the notion of ubiquitous 'text', that the 'signified' is everywhere;
(+) believes in partiality, fragmentation, aporia, irony, 'play', and the devolution of meaning upon and into organic, memetic, reproductive, and other accidental processes, and sees as fundamentally mistaken the ideas of agency and authorship (except, again, when necessary for the operation of oppression);
(+) sees invisible oppression as the central threat to decent existence;
(+) sees moral discourse as meaningless or false, but for the harm principle as applied to hedonic or some kind of 'identity-based' dignitary value, which is incontrovertibly true;
(+) would pretend to, but ultimately not, understand all of the gobbledegook I've just written.
These are the kinds of people who sit at the top of the shitlib pyramid. These people aren't the same kind of people who post of Jezebel, etc. (who are also shitlib, but acolytes and dilettantes rather than shitlib elders); instead, these relative arcane shitlib ideas get filtered down through various media, through undergraduate training, etc. It takes a 130-140 I.Q., mentally ill person to truly convince him or herself of the nonsense above and deeply engage with it. It's like studying theosophy; it's nonsense made up of very deep cuts. And, like theosophy, it's a few people responsible for generating the basically incomprehensible garbage that constitutes the canon, and a bunch of losers who read it, repeat it, and conclude that we're all just sweat beads on the head of God and that the Illuminati controls the Fed.
The complex discourse surrounding, say, irony and synthetic dialectic boils down, in popular culture, to the expression: "really?," which is tantamount to gobsmacked irony at a dialectical thesis. "I can't even" is another way of, say, suggesting the primacy of emotive content in the social construction of self, institutions, etc., or a way of suggesting that your interlocutor's point hasn't the popular support to be real. Transgenderism stands pars pro toto for the triumph of declarative identity. etc.
The influence of this pack of charlatans, sophists, and confidence men and women on our popular culture cannot, at this point, be overstated. They have absolutely exploded onto the scene, and are taking territory in the popular zeitgeist faster than ISIS is taking Syria.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2921657&forum_id=2#28217919) |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 2:47 AM Author: Cracking Blue Spot Dog Poop
Can't. Too much work for this shitbort. However, it would largely amount to subjecting askav to a critique of moral and intellectual standards laid out in his own post. As one particularly egregious example, he claims to valorize clarity over subtlety yet employs the same euphonious but semantically hollow and ultimately obfuscatory tropes that he accuses shitlib mandarins of deploying, such as the following:
"and the devolution of meaning upon and into organic, memetic, reproductive, and other accidental processes,"
It's rather interesting how much of his bellowing is fundamentally an autobiographical projection, especially the part about mentally ill, high IQ acadweebs with tendency toward intellectual charlatanism.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2921657&forum_id=2#28221338) |
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Date: June 29th, 2015 10:00 AM Author: Vigorous sapphire national
Where do I claim to valorize subtlety over clarity? I would either valorize it or I wouldn't. And anyway, I do no such thing. Rather, I describe the postmodern roots of shitlibs. I make no particular claim about what I like; and, in fact, that is among the shitlibby things I don't hate.
And yeah, I used language like they would use. I'm sorry you don't follow it. To be fair: neither do I, and neither does anyone.
Re: intellectual charlatanism, good thing I make no claims on an intellectual life or having any kind of intellectual insight. Good thing I don't publish. Good thing I stay in my lane and do business-y things. I wonder if the same can be said of shitlibs?
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2921657&forum_id=2#28222023)
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Date: June 28th, 2015 6:00 PM Author: Exhilarant zippy mad cow disease
The difference between "liberals" and shitlibs is academic. The democratic party is 100% defined by SJWs, race-baiters, and treasonous Jews at this point.
Until blue collar union workers and other supposedly reasonable people rebel against their Bolshevik masters, there's no need to speak of them like they're actually a force in society.
You have some salient points about shitlib academics. But none of that would filter down to the common people if it weren't for the Jew media.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2921657&forum_id=2#28218037) |
Date: June 29th, 2015 2:22 AM Author: harsh pistol kitchen
i don't understand how there is not at least one elite 'conservative' university.
there are always a small minority of conservative types in top university departments. and there are always wealthy conservatives who end up donating to liberal schools, as alumni.
why wouldn't these people naturally coalesce into a critical mass at a single school, where a conservative culture/reputation would take hold over time.
it seems like this would have happened.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2921657&forum_id=2#28221235) |
Date: June 29th, 2015 8:36 AM Author: alcoholic location
xo Nozick
Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?
by Robert Nozick
Nozick attributes left-leaning intellectual’s animosity to capitalism to the difference in value judgments between formal schools and capitalist society at large.
It is surprising that intellectuals oppose capitalism so. Other groups of comparable socio-economic status do not show the same degree of opposition in the same proportions. Statistically, then, intellectuals are an anomaly.
Not all intellectuals are on the “left.” Like other groups, their opinions are spread along a curve. But in their case, the curve is shifted and skewed to the political left.
By intellectuals, I do not mean all people of intelligence or of a certain level of education, but those who, in their vocation, deal with ideas as expressed in words, shaping the word flow others receive. These wordsmiths include poets, novelists, literary critics, newspaper and magazine journalists, and many professors. It does not include those who primarily produce and transmit quantitatively or mathematically formulated information (the numbersmiths) or those working in visual media, painters, sculptors, cameramen. Unlike the wordsmiths, people in these occupations do not disproportionately oppose capitalism. The wordsmiths are concentrated in certain occupational sites: academia, the media, government bureaucracy.
Wordsmith intellectuals fare well in capitalist society; there they have great freedom to formulate, encounter, and propagate new ideas, to read and discuss them. Their occupational skills are in demand, their income much above average. Why then do they disproportionately oppose capitalism? Indeed, some data suggest that the more prosperous and successful the intellectual, the more likely he is to oppose capitalism. This opposition to capitalism is mainly “from the left” but not solely so. Yeats, Eliot, and Pound opposed market society from the right.
The opposition of wordsmith intellectuals to capitalism is a fact of social significance. They shape our ideas and images of society; they state the policy alternatives bureaucracies consider. From treatises to slogans, they give us the sentences to express ourselves. Their opposition matters, especially in a society that depends increasingly upon the explicit formulation and dissemination of information.
We can distinguish two types of explanation for the relatively high proportion of intellectuals in opposition to capitalism. One type finds a factor unique to the anti-capitalist intellectuals. The second type of explanation identifies a factor applying to all intellectuals, a force propelling them toward anti-capitalist views. Whether it pushes any particular intellectual over into anti-capitalism will depend upon the other forces acting upon him. In the aggregate, though, since it makes anti-capitalism more likely for each intellectual, such a factor will produce a larger proportion of anti-capitalist intellectuals. Our explanation will be of this second type. We will identify a factor which tilts intellectuals toward anti-capitalist attitudes but does not guarantee it in any particular case.
The Value of Intellectuals
Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued people in a society, those with the most prestige and power, those with the greatest rewards. Intellectuals feel entitled to this. But, by and large, a capitalist society does not honor its intellectuals. Ludwig von Mises explains the special resentment of intellectuals, in contrast to workers, by saying they mix socially with successful capitalists and so have them as a salient comparison group and are humiliated by their lesser status. However, even those intellectuals who do not mix socially are similarly resentful, while merely mixing is not enough—the sports and dancing instructors who cater to the rich and have affairs with them are not noticeably anti-capitalist.
Why then do contemporary intellectuals feel entitled to the highest rewards their society has to offer and resentful when they do not receive this? Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution “to each according to his merit or value.” Apart from the gifts, inheritances, and gambling winnings that occur in a free society, the market distributes to those who satisfy the perceived market-expressed demands of others, and how much it so distributes depends on how much is demanded and how great the alternative supply is. Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus.
Why do wordsmith intellectuals think they are most valuable, and why do they think distribution should be in accordance with value? Note that this latter principle is not a necessary one. Other distributional patterns have been proposed, including equal distribution, distribution according to moral merit, distribution according to need. Indeed, there need not be any pattern of distribution a society is aiming to achieve, even a society concerned with justice. The justice of a distribution may reside in its arising from a just process of voluntary exchange of justly acquired property and services. Whatever outcome is produced by that process will be just, but there is no particular pattern the outcome must fit. Why, then, do wordsmiths view themselves as most valuable and accept the principle of distribution in accordance with value?
From the beginnings of recorded thought, intellectuals have told us their activity is most valuable. Plato valued the rational faculty above courage and the appetites and deemed that philosophers should rule; Aristotle held that intellectual contemplation was the highest activity. It is not surprising that surviving texts record this high evaluation of intellectual activity. The people who formulated evaluations, who wrote them down with reasons to back them up, were intellectuals, after all. They were praising themselves. Those who valued other things more than thinking things through with words, whether hunting or power or uninterrupted sensual pleasure, did not bother to leave enduring written records. Only the intellectual worked out a theory of who was best.
The Schooling of Intellectuals
What factor produced feelings of superior value on the part of intellectuals? I want to focus on one institution in particular: schools. As book knowledge became increasingly important, schooling—the education together in classes of young people in reading and book knowledge—spread. Schools became the major institution outside of the family to shape the attitudes of young people, and almost all those who later became intellectuals went through schools. There they were successful. They were judged against others and deemed superior. They were praised and rewarded, the teacher’s favorites. How could they fail to see themselves as superior? Daily, they experienced differences in facility with ideas, in quick-wittedness. The schools told them, and showed them, they were better.
The schools, too, exhibited and thereby taught the principle of reward in accordance with (intellectual) merit. To the intellectually meritorious went the praise, the teacher’s smiles, and the highest grades. In the currency the schools had to offer, the smartest constituted the upper class. Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards.
The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority “entitled” them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?
In saying that intellectuals feel entitled to the highest rewards the general society can offer (wealth, status, etc.), I do not mean that intellectuals hold these rewards to be the highest goods. Perhaps they value more the intrinsic rewards of intellectual activity or the esteem of the ages. Nevertheless, they also feel entitled to the highest appreciation from the general society, to the most and best it has to offer, paltry though that may be. I don’t mean to emphasize especially the rewards that find their way into the intellectuals’ pockets or even reach them personally. Identifying themselves as intellectuals, they can resent the fact that intellectual activity is not most highly valued and rewarded.
The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school’s hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements. The school system thereby produces anti-capitalist feeling among intellectuals. Rather, it produces anti-capitalist feeling among verbal intellectuals. Why do the numbersmiths not develop the same attitudes as these wordsmiths? I conjecture that these quantitatively bright children, although they get good grades on the relevant examinations, do not receive the same face-to-face attention and approval from the teachers as do the verbally bright children. It is the verbal skills that bring these personal rewards from the teacher, and apparently it is these rewards that especially shape the sense of entitlement.
Central Planning in the Classroom
There is a further point to be added. The (future) wordsmith intellectuals are successful within the formal, official social system of the schools, wherein the relevant rewards are distributed by the central authority of the teacher. The schools contain another informal social system within classrooms, hallways, and schoolyards, wherein rewards are distributed not by central direction but spontaneously at the pleasure and whim of schoolmates. Here the intellectuals do less well.
It is not surprising, therefore, that distribution of goods and rewards via a centrally organized distributional mechanism later strikes intellectuals as more appropriate than the “anarchy and chaos” of the marketplace. For distribution in a centrally planned socialist society stands to distribution in a capitalist society as distribution by the teacher stands to distribution by the schoolyard and hallway.
Our explanation does not postulate that (future) intellectuals constitute a majority even of the academic upper class of the school. This group may consist mostly of those with substantial (but not overwhelming) bookish skills along with social grace, strong motivation to please, friendliness, winning ways, and an ability to play by (and to seem to be following) the rules. Such pupils, too, will be highly regarded and rewarded by the teacher, and they will do extremely well in the wider society, as well. (And do well within the informal social system of the school. So they will not especially accept the norms of the school’s formal system.) Our explanation hypothesizes that (future) intellectuals are disproportionately represented in that portion of the schools’ (official) upper class that will experience relative downward mobility. Or, rather, in the group that predicts for itself a declining future. The animus will arise before the move into the wider world and the experience of an actual decline in status, at the point when the clever pupil realizes he (probably) will fare less well in the wider society than in his current school situation. This unintended consequence of the school system, the anti-capitalist animus of intellectuals, is, of course, reinforced when pupils read or are taught by intellectuals who present those very anti-capitalist attitudes.
No doubt, some wordsmith intellectuals were cantankerous and questioning pupils and so were disapproved of by their teachers. Did they too learn the lesson that the best should get the highest rewards and think, despite their teachers, that they themselves were best and so start with an early resentment against the school system’s distribution? Clearly, on this and the other issues discussed here, we need data on the school experiences of future wordsmith intellectuals to refine and test our hypotheses.
Stated as a general point, it is hardly contestable that the norms within schools will affect the normative beliefs of people after they leave the schools. The schools, after all, are the major non-familial society that children learn to operate in, and hence schooling constitutes their preparation for the larger non-familial society. It is not surprising that those successful by the norms of a school system should resent a society, adhering to different norms, which does not grant them the same success. Nor, when those are the very ones who go on to shape a society’s self-image, its evaluation of itself, is it surprising when the society’s verbally responsive portion turns against it. If you were designing a society, you would not seek to design it so that the wordsmiths, with all their influence, were schooled into animus against the norms of the society.
Our explanation of the disproportionate anti-capitalism of intellectuals is based upon a very plausible sociological generalization.
In a society where one extra-familial system or institution, the first young people enter, distributes rewards, those who do the very best therein will tend to internalize the norms of this institution and expect the wider society to operate in accordance with these norms; they will feel entitled to distributive shares in accordance with these norms or (at least) to a relative position equal to the one these norms would yield. Moreover, those constituting the upper class within the hierarchy of this first extra-familial institution who then experience (or foresee experiencing) movement to a lower relative position in the wider society will, because of their feeling of frustrated entitlement, tend to oppose the wider social system and feel animus toward its norms.
Notice that this is not a deterministic law. Not all those who experience downward social mobility will turn against the system. Such downward mobility, though, is a factor which tends to produce effects in that direction, and so will show itself in differing proportions at the aggregate level. We might distinguish ways an upper class can move down: it can get less than another group or (while no group moves above it) it can tie, failing to get more than those previously deemed lower. It is the first type of downward mobility which especially rankles and outrages; the second type is far more tolerable. Many intellectuals (say they) favor equality while only a small number call for an aristocracy of intellectuals. Our hypothesis speaks of the first type of downward mobility as especially productive of resentment and animus.
The school system imparts and rewards only some skills relevant to later success (it is, after all, a specialized institution) so its reward system will differ from that of the wider society. This guarantees that some, in moving to the wider society, will experience downward social mobility and its attendant consequences. Earlier I said that intellectuals want the society to be the schools writ large. Now we see that the resentment due to a frustrated sense of entitlement stems from the fact that the schools (as a specialized first extra-familial social system) are not the society writ small.
Our explanation now seems to predict the (disproportionate) resentment of schooled intellectuals against their society whatever its nature, whether capitalist or communist. (Intellectuals are disproportionately opposed to capitalism as compared with other groups of similar socioeconomic status within capitalist society. It is another question whether they are disproportionately opposed as compared with the degree of opposition of intellectuals in other societies to those societies.) Clearly, then, data about the attitudes of intellectuals within communist countries toward apparatchiks would be relevant; will those intellectuals feel animus toward that system?
Our hypothesis needs to be refined so that it does not apply (or apply as strongly) to every society. Must the school systems in every society inevitably produce anti-societal animus in the intellectuals who do not receive that society’s highest rewards? Probably not. A capitalist society is peculiar in that it seems to announce that it is open and responsive only to talent, individual initiative, personal merit. Growing up in an inherited caste or feudal society creates no expectation that reward will or should be in accordance with personal value. Despite the created expectation, a capitalist society rewards people only insofar as they serve the market-expressed desires of others; it rewards in accordance with economic contribution, not in accordance with personal value. However, it comes close enough to rewarding in accordance with value—value and contribution will very often be intermingled—so as to nurture the expectation produced by the schools. The ethos of the wider society is close enough to that of the schools so that the nearness creates resentment. Capitalist societies reward individual accomplishment or announce they do, and so they leave the intellectual, who considers himself most accomplished, particularly bitter.
Another factor, I think, plays a role. Schools will tend to produce such anti-capitalist attitudes the more they are attended together by a diversity of people. When almost all of those who will be economically successful are attending separate schools, the intellectuals will not have acquired that attitude of being superior to them. But even if many children of the upper class attend separate schools, an open society will have other schools that also include many who will become economically successful as entrepreneurs, and the intellectuals later will resentfully remember how superior they were academically to their peers who advanced more richly and powerfully. The openness of the society has another consequence, as well. The pupils, future wordsmiths and others, will not know how they will fare in the future. They can hope for anything. A society closed to advancement destroys those hopes early. In an open capitalist society, the pupils are not resigned early to limits on their advancement and social mobility, the society seems to announce that the most capable and valuable will rise to the very top, their schools have already given the academically most gifted the message that they are most valuable and deserving of the greatest rewards, and later these very pupils with the highest encouragement and hopes see others of their peers, whom they know and saw to be less meritorious, rising higher than they themselves, taking the foremost rewards to which they themselves felt themselves entitled. Is it any wonder they bear that society an animus?
Some Further Hypotheses
We have refined the hypothesis somewhat. It is not simply formal schools but formal schooling in a specified social context that produces anti-capitalist animus in (wordsmith) intellectuals. No doubt, the hypothesis requires further refining. But enough. It is time to turn the hypothesis over to the social scientists, to take it from armchair speculations in the study and give it to those who will immerse themselves in more particular facts and data. We can point, however, to some areas where our hypothesis might yield testable consequences and predictions. First, one might predict that the more meritocratic a country’s school system, the more likely its intellectuals are to be on the left. (Consider France.) Second, those intellectuals who were “late bloomers” in school would not have developed the same sense of entitlement to the very highest rewards; therefore, a lower percentage of the late-bloomer intellectuals will be anti-capitalist than of the early bloomers. Third, we limited our hypothesis to those societies (unlike Indian caste society) where the successful student plausibly could expect further comparable success in the wider society. In Western society, women have not heretofore plausibly held such expectations, so we would not expect the female students who constituted part of the academic upper class yet later underwent downward mobility to show the same anti-capitalist animus as male intellectuals. We might predict, then, that the more a society is known to move toward equality in occupational opportunity between women and men, the more its female intellectuals will exhibit the same disproportionate anti-capitalism its male intellectuals show.
Some readers may doubt this explanation of the anti-capitalism of intellectuals. Be this as it may, I think that an important phenomenon has been identified. The sociological generalization we have stated is intuitively compelling; something like it must be true. Some important effect therefore must be produced in that portion of the school’s upper class that experiences downward social mobility, some antagonism to the wider society must get generated. If that effect is not the disproportionate opposition of the intellectuals, then what is it? We started with a puzzling phenomenon in need of an explanation. We have found, I think, an explanatory factor that (once stated) is so obvious that we must believe it explains some real phenomenon.
Originally appeared in Cato Policy Report January/February 1998
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