07-15-2019, 07:28 AM
(07-14-2019, 04:12 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(07-13-2019, 09:11 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: I wonder why a lot of people consider academia a place of free and critical thinking for most people. It's usually a place where people shout dogma where others are forced into believing what they say.
Once upon a time, that was the way it actually worked. I remember taking a government course from a Marxist in college. I didn't even find out he was a Marxist until afterwards. In class, he was happy when we could just think clearly.
But that was back when Silents, who like to look at both sides of the question (endlessly), were in charge. Academia has since been perverted for political purposes, and that's all the Millenials have been exposed to.
Quote:Academia usually knows nothing about the real world and cares nothing for practicality. The liberals want us to go many years to be brainwashed just to get a living wage while learning no practical skills. They also claim to care about the wages of the worker while trying to import the entire third world and encouraging the worst labor abuses in places like China.
They've basically knuckled under to the elites that pay them to indoctrinate people into a culture which permits the elites to drive costs down with imported labor, so that those elites can further increase their profits. I miss the days when the elites made their money by providing better products to the masses.
With the caveat that I cannot speak for college professors because I am not one -- much of academic life offers little opportunity to brainwash students into believing some political agenda. In discussion of intellectual antiquity (basically anything before about 1950), professors must discuss something so basic as Platonic philosophy without running into anachronisms that students bring into academic life. We all know about the Holocaust; we generally recognize colonialism as a mistake; we cannot escape the subtle infiltration of Freudian thought that explains much in human nature; we all consider chattel slavery as a moral abomination; we cannot undo Karl Marx establishing the terminology of much of social science. Of those anachronisms, Karl Marx may inculcate fewer problems in discussing intellectual antiquity because his social ideas have serious flaws (Marx oversimplified history and showed excessive optimism in human progress through the intellect and political change) and most significantly because the people (Marxist-Leninists) who took him most seriously and developed a philosophy whose basis was his teachings have created a system that almost everyone finds obsolete. How obsolete is Marxism-Leninism? It has become a narrow cult. Aside from the dwindling number of those who call for a proletarian revolution and seizure of the means of production to cut out the capitalists and ensure that the bounties of modern productivity go to the proletariat or into investment that central planners direct, the people who now seem most informed by Marxism are those who accept his depiction of capitalist depravity correct -- and glorious. The people who owe the most to Karl Marx are those who want capitalism to serve themselves alone but to offer the common man the dubious honor of enriching and pampering those elites. Socialist realism as an aesthetic has proved deficient because didactic purposes have denied any possibility of criticism for artistic, musical, or literary failures.
To truly mess people up intellectually, nothing could ever be more effective than Christian Protestant fundamentalism; ironically it is comparatively new (even the word fundamentalism originates only in 1926 with the appearance of the book The Fundamentals), except for the soul-crushing, mind-sapping effects of mass low culture.
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(You probably have figured why I use the stream of periods -- a change of direction. You are right).
Among the generations that the Millennial Generation can have gotten to know, they knew elderly GIs as the last relics of a time similar to theirs in a world that they were too good for. But they could have never have known GI youth except in old newsreels. By current standards, GI youth was hardscrabble. They are the last to have any memory of the 1920s, the last gasp of the Gilded ethos in which the plutocrats were kings and everyone else had to beg for the scraps from the table after having worked for them for little. They were young enough to pick up the pieces when that ethos imploded in 1929. Above all they made America great as a military power as necessary for keeping the SS, Gestapo, and Kempeitai out of America and in deterring Soviet expansion. The GI Generation developed some good habits that caused America to prosper for more than economic elites. They could have seen the Silent of getting the best of all worlds -- massive reform of society in the Great Depression and in the wake of World War II -- except in political power. They saw economic elites among Boomers as the worst such monsters in American history, the sorts who exploit others yet insist upon praise as benefactors -- at least among generations that Millennial adults can know. Slave-owning Transcendental planters going into the American Civil War had no guilty feelings about owning slaves; they presented themselves as the best thing that could have ever happened to Africans who needed the guidance of the planters to keep those Africans from becoming dangerous savages. Millennial kids never met that attitude. They may have some fond recollections of Boomer parents who saw themselves more as victims of the bureaucratic, monopolistic capitalism of recent times. Generation X? This is now the generation that most shapes American culture, and except for a few well-rewarded sell-outs to the Boomer economic elite they cannot avoid expressing what they really feel about economic exploitation.
The System has so far treated the Millennial Generation badly, and it is not fooled. They know that America has been more equitable in the recent past. They have little stake in the trickle-down economy that demands greater sacrifices but allows the benefits to trickle down as low-paying, servile jobs. They are at best technically trained yet denied access to liberal education. As the oldest of the Millennial Generation approach midlife they find elderly Boomers in charge, and that those in charge are the very worst manifestations of the Idealist way -- extreme narcissists who exploit at will yet insist that they are benefactors to those that they exploit and dehumanize, people who see the proles as livestock if docile and servile, but vermin to be exterminated if they get too 'uppity'.
Donald Trump is more symptom than cause. We have a political heritage, including a Constitution, that interferes with his impulsive and infantile desires to reshape America. His dictatorial style can succeed only if collaborators can successfully gut the checks and balances of the system and give him the powers of a Lenin, Mussolini, Mao, Duvalier, or Saddam. The 2018 midterm election shows that Americans, especially Millennial adults, are getting wise to this. Whether such is a blip or a portent of a trend will become evident in 2020.
The mainstream media, which now include some Millennial journalists, have turned completely against Donald Trump and his dubious agenda of inequity and division. Millennial voters are hostile to everything about President Trump. He has nothing to offer but pain, shame, grief, and poverty. His idea of stewardship of resources is to burn through them at a greater rate as evidence of prosperity. People do not prosper, and neither do nations, by burning through resources.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
