Poisonous Academics
John Sydenham
I have a doctorate and played for Academia for a few years. It was probably the mortgage that made me leave but I had become unhappy with the whole system as well. When I lifted my nose from the laboratory bench and lowered my head from clouds of scientific thought what I saw was deeply disturbing. I was employed in the organisational equivalent of a Victorian corporation. I was lucky, I had worked elsewhere for a couple of years before getting a paid doctorate so knew that the world could be better than academia. After a year as postdoc I hopped out and I am glad to have had the experience and a lucky escape.
One of the stakes that Tony Blair drove into the heart of British society was to massively expand the universities. The BBC recently had the shocking headline: “The symbolic target of 50% at university reached”. This gives me a sinking feeling as I imagine all of these young minds being poisoned by academia.
Perhaps the biggest problem with such a huge academic influence is that academics believe they are separate from the people. They are “other”.
In the past people belonged to a family and local groups with similar interests and aspirations. This may have felt suffocating for late teenagers but this feeling tends to dissipate as they get their own families. Blair was an academic Trotskyist who had learnt from Marxist texts that family and local attachments were a major obstacle to socialism. New Labour set about removing children from the family before they could learn fully about life.
The children are transported to universities where they are delivered into the hands of academics. In the humanities faculties the teachers have developed a method of separating themselves from their object of study and regard all groups as equivalent. In doing this they have become separate from the society that pays them.
If you have been educated in the humanities you will probably believe that the academic method is correct. You may think that it is “objective” to regard societies as “other”. In doing this it is you who become “other”.
Groups in society evolve to provide a land that is suitable for their children. When they have children they are no longer academic observers of society: they are society. Social groups are mainly subjective preferences, they are not objective. If a social group is managed entirely objectively the love, pleasure and meaning of the group will be removed. The people will, and do, go insane (See “All the world is queer save thee and me”). The group that takes this path of ignoring the emotional needs of the people will be replaced by other groups.
The arrogance of the humanities faculties leads to a dangerous misunderstanding of human society and history. There was an excellent example recently in the “The Conquistadors” TV series that was produced by an American company and shown on “PBS”. Historian after historian accused the Spanish of “racism” when the truth was simpler: the Spanish were a group who wanted to make the Americas into a place and society fit for their own children within their own society. Had they allowed the previous population to participate fully in governance the Spanish would have become Aztecs or Incas etc. The Spanish were conquerors, it is in the name “Conquistadors”, they were not simple settlers hoping for a bit of land.
Of course, the nimble witted, socialist academic deals with the dissonance between evil racism and evil conquest by redefining “racism” as the adherence to any social group. All families, all groups become “racist” by this definition and the academic politicians hope that the population are sufficiently stupid to think they mean unreasoning hatred of people with dark skins is racism when they actually mean that adherence to a family, group or nation is racism. In this way they hope they can persuade everyone that they should be “other”, like them, with no real home, no affection for any place or people and no real future.
If the academic historians were to have abandoned “racism” as a condemnation of all groups they would have had to confront the true nature of society as groups who have a subjective ideal for their children that gives their life meaning and belonging.
The answer to the problem of the poisonous academics is to transfer funds out of humanities faculties at universities and invest it properly in local technical education. What New Labour did by using universities as finishing schools for socialists needs to be publicised. They have ruined thousands of young lives with debt, mental health and political problems and this must be reversed.