Bill Mahar on Friday

[Sympthsical]

48. I'm ambivalent about academia on account

Not in an anti-intellectual way (though I do think a lot of what goes on these days is a lot of circular pseudo-intellectual masturbation, particularly in the social sciences. "We disappear up our own assholes, but we do it intellectually!" )

The problem is that it's a largely a bubbled environment of epistemic closure, and only a very narrow band of ideas or thinking are entertained. To compound this, many of these ideas cannot be written on human skin or applied to a real, practical world where human nature must be taken into consideration on a macro scale.

So what works in an academic setting has nearly zero bearing on the real world or how average people act or think. It's all masturbatory. However, our media and cultural elite seize these ideologies or ideas and then try to push them on everyone else.

People really don't like that.

It's one of the forces at work in the CRT debate. I know many people on our side want to say, "Oh, they're just racists." There's some of that, but it's not that. It's the idea that some edict came from above and is being forced down onto them and their children. There is an impulsive, reactive, visceral, "No!" that will be spoken to it. CRT could be the best thing in the world, but that "No!" will result when it's imposed from above in this way. And no amount of, "Agree with this or you're racist," is going to magically undo that kind of reflexive resistance.

People aren't that complicated if you spend time actually listening to them instead of assuming what they're saying and all the bad motives implicit therein. But we don't listen too much. Feels like, more and more, all we do is assume motives and condemn. Which is fine.

But it doesn't make for winning allies.