In this episode of the podcast, we talk about the perils of higher education and why it should be free for all, and why we should all get a degree. We also discuss the growing problem of anti-intellectualism in higher education, and how to deal with it.
00:02:44.620And I think there's a growing awareness that this is a disaster and that it leads to a lot of unhappiness.
00:02:58.880Not that anti-academia or anti-intellectualism is unusual among conservatives, but it has gotten to a new level over the past, say, five to 10 years.
00:03:10.200There's a growing awareness among normal people that your student loans can just drag your life down and they can never be repaid.
00:03:18.240And you're actually not even repaying the money you owe.
00:03:20.580You're repaying the money you owe times three or more.
00:03:28.420And at the same time, there is a rather conventional notion that we just need to send more people to college.
00:03:37.080Biden very recently has talked about free college for all and so on.
00:03:44.660But 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.
00:03:55.280But 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.
00:04:07.440This is not the 20th century anymore with the GI Bill and all of these kinds of things.
00:04:13.280What are your first reactions to the way I kind of laid out the scene, Ed?
00:04:16.880Well, I agree with something we were saying before we started recording.
00:04:22.640I hadn't heard it phrased in this way before, but you talked about the sort of cargo culticization of higher education.
00:04:31.160And 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 airplanes brought in food or whatever,
00:04:42.660if they just sort of do some childish understanding of what airplanes do, then the cargo will come back.
00:04:48.520And I think I agree with you. That's how the left.
00:04:51.880And we had this in Britain about 20 years ago. That's how they seem to see education.
00:04:56.400If you start from the belief, which you must know on some level is incorrect, but anyway, that the people are broadly intellectually the same,
00:05:04.960then it would seem to. And if you think that a middle class lifestyle or whatever you want to call it is good.
00:05:11.900And if a mark of a middle class lifestyle is a degree, if you think in that kind of simple way where you where you almost reify things as if they're concrete and I'm changing,
00:05:23.640then then it makes sense, doesn't it? Look, those people are successful.
00:05:26.960They have degrees. So if everyone has a degree that everyone will be successful.
00:05:31.060That's that's the simple infantile way of thinking. And of course, it's completely untrue for various reasons.
00:05:39.040It's untrue because a lot of people are intellectually incapable of doing a degree.
00:05:43.960It'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 they're paying for.
00:05:51.080And it's untrue because it devalues the degree and the degree just no longer becomes a marker of being of status and of an entry into the middle class.
00:06:00.120So and you could say you could you could go further.
00:06:02.260You could say that for it is perhaps it is bad for a lot of for a lot of people to have degrees,
00:06:10.540because it will mean that they are basically educated beyond their capacity for rational thought and they and they will believe because they have a degree that their their opinion is worth something and that they should be something important in society.
00:06:25.240And they should and they will kind of feel entitled to be part of the middle class.
00:06:29.180And of course, they'll find that they're not because 50 percent of people in their cohort have degrees.
00:06:34.980And so then they'll become bitter and unpleasant and unhappy.
00:06:37.660And you'll get the kind of polarization that we see in many European countries now.
00:06:43.540So I also there's other things we could put as well, like the amount of knowledge that you retain from your degree is not large.
00:06:52.440It's you forget a lot of things that you learn.
00:06:55.040Of course, of course, and and so the idea that you're creating a better society by having everybody spending a huge amount of time in education is just very badly reasoned through idea.
00:07:07.520And it's just going to make for a very, very it's already has made for a very difficult situation.
00:08:09.440It's gone from 10 percent of the master's degree to 21 percent.
00:08:12.120What'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.
00:08:24.280So I just read that as pure inflation.
00:08:27.840You know, at one point you could go to the movie theater for a quarter.
00:08:46.240And I actually think with the doctor, I mean, basically, as in Britain or I think America as well, in about 1960, it was about four percent of people that had a bachelor's degree.
00:08:55.460And so in that sense, the doctorate is the new bachelor's degree.
00:09:08.840So and so I think that it clearly is just inflation.
00:09:12.420It's not it's not it's not really it's not really a more educated society.
00:09:16.140It's not a society that has more skills.
00:09:18.580It's it's it's not necessary for the functioning of society to have all of these people that have these qualifications.
00:09:25.500It'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.
00:09:39.380Right. And now those people have degrees.
00:09:41.420I remember when I was about 16, I had to do work experience and I had to do work experience.
00:09:47.840I 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.
00:09:57.120Those people now they're called PAs, personal assistants, and they tend to have degrees.
00:10:04.160And that's that's where it's got to basically glorified secretaries.
00:10:08.840That's what you're going to go into with your with your degree.
00:10:12.080And in a society where like Finland, where education is free, that's one thing.
00:10:17.400But 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 in this system of in this bubble, basically.
00:10:38.900I think that's what I would say, actually, because the number of people with bachelor's degree is actually not rising.
00:10:45.480And then it's facing a certain type of legitimacy crisis.
00:10:49.540I'm just speaking from my own perspective, because we live in a different time.
00:10:56.080So 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.
00:11:08.840There 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.
00:11:15.740But basically, 100% of the class went to a college, a lot of them went to elite schools, that is Ivy's.
00:11:23.660At that point, there was so much pressure.
00:11:26.540Like, you know, if you didn't go to college, it was unthinkable.
00:12:27.380It's much more detrimental to your life to go.
00:12:30.280I think it probably still does probably make sense to go to Yale or Stanford or one of those top flight places.
00:12:38.540It's worth the $150,000, $200,000 in debt because you are going to make that back through your connections, et cetera.
00:12:47.860But for a lot of people not going to Yale, not actually learning anything, and not really having those elite connections, it is absolutely decimating.
00:12:58.340I mean, one of the other aspects of this is that, I mean, on the one hand, higher education is moving towards, you know, complete silliness, you know, extreme advanced levels of Marxian analysis and critical race theory to become a hot topic.
00:13:16.900But 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.
00:13:32.980There 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.
00:13:40.400And it was basically, he basically would have, the natural thing to do was just to fail the entire class because they were so bad.
00:13:47.780And he was told by his dean, well, obviously you can't do that.
00:13:50.300Otherwise, the college will close down.
00:13:52.520So, and so it gets to, we're basically just turning up at the, 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.
00:14:04.400So, um, um, they're there to pass their courses and get their credits and that's all they care about.
00:14:21.400And, and so really what a lot of these, you know, you have the inflation of the degree, but what, all that's really happening is that in many cases is the schools are so bad that the, you're just extending education to compensate for the fact that, I don't know,
00:14:34.160perhaps some people are so low in intelligence that they have to have longer to learn the same things than, than, than, than was once the case.
00:14:43.400Well, I think we're also reaching this point where we're kind of hitting a brick wall in terms of division of labor.
00:14:52.180And let, let me, you know, let me back up a little bit.
00:14:55.820There, there is a kind of reactionary, it's, it's very often left-wing, but you, you sometimes will hear this from conservative populists.
00:15:03.120There'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.
00:15:14.620You're going to put all of these workers out of work.
00:15:18.940And the libertarian answer to that is that, well, no, there's, 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.
00:15:33.120And the whole society will be better once we bring in these new technologies.
00:15:40.000And I think to a large degree, that has been a correct analysis of what's happening.
00:15:47.480The division of labor is kind of good for all.
00:15:49.860But 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, you know, outsourced or automated this person's job.
00:16:10.580We don't do that kind of work here in postmodern America anymore.
00:16:14.540So you're going to go become an iOS coder or you're going to go become, you know, they can't do this kind of thing.
00:16:21.680They're running up against a brick wall of their own innate intelligence and skill level.
00:16:26.820And I think with the pushing people into, you know, education and then increasingly in master's degrees, we're having this kind of midwit problem where it's, we have too many elites.
00:16:40.340We 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.
00:16:55.240And there just are not enough jobs for that.
00:17:02.440First of all, that's what Peter Turkin has argued in his, in his, in his, his books on this subject.
00:17:07.820That's what we have. That's why you have a period of polarization.
00:17:10.900We've had periods of polarization before and what you get, but this is very extreme one is, is the over, the over creation of elites, the oversupply of elites that comes about during a time of when, when things are going well.
00:17:22.600And so therefore there's this, there's this optimism and therefore you get this idea of everybody should be educated or whatever.
00:17:29.140You get far too many people that have the, have the qualification and you therefore get intra elite competition.
00:17:34.540You get ruthless fighting within the elites.
00:17:37.460And 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.
00:17:44.660They're going to write back and say, we had so many well-qualified candidates, all this nonsense, which has been going on for years.
00:17:50.360It shouldn't, it shouldn't be like that.
00:17:51.520It should be that the society in short, that society permits about, that there are enough, that the number of places for that position parallel, the number of, of qualifications that can be gotten it.
00:18:03.700That would be the sensible thing to do.
00:18:05.520And that's what Finland used to do until quite recently that you, the attitude of the Finnish government was the Finnish Lutheran church needs this many new priests a year.
00:18:13.780This is therefore how many theology students there will be a year.
00:18:56.540And so that means the society becomes ever more specialized and, and, and ever more efficient and ever less requiring of low skilled jobs.
00:19:06.960So 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.
00:19:15.320The only portion of, of, of society in England, if you, as I've said before, if you divide up between those where both parents work, IQ of a hundred, those where one parent works, IQ of 90, those where neither works, IQ of 80,
00:19:26.440the 85, the only portion that's breeding above replacement fertility is the IQ of 85 and the, the people on the dole.
00:19:32.660And those people are intellectually capable of being, you know, farm laborers and real simple stuff.
00:19:43.180And 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, the upper classes weren't having children.
00:19:52.880Same 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.
00:20:00.920And so they sustain them with bread and circuses and, and you, and you, and you, and that's what we're doing.
00:20:07.260That's what's going to have to have, we, we, we, we already have bread and circuses.
00:20:17.920And I, I think UBI is, is a part of this.
00:20:20.960Um, I, I actually am sympathetic towards UBI, universal basic income as a way of managing this system, but I'm also, I am realistic about it and that I understand it for what it is.
00:20:36.260Uh, it's not going to act like there's some, you know, story that people tell about UBI that, oh, these people will now, they'll be able to relax for a month and then they'll go start a new business and become millionaires or develop a new technology.
00:20:54.500What, 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.
00:21:03.560And I, I think it's actually, it's very interesting.
00:21:06.340I mean, this is a little bit off topic, but it's, it's related.
00:21:09.480So I think I mentioned on our last podcast, I went to McDonald's to get a coffee the other day because I'd run out of coffee.
00:21:17.680Um, McDonald's coffee is not bad to be honest, but anyway.
00:21:20.540They had a $300 signing bonus sign up now to, to come work here, $300 signing bonus, a signing bonus for, for working at McDonald's.
00:21:30.020When I actually went to a convenience store, uh, just the other day, they are offering $15 an hour minimum wage at this convenience.
00:21:38.980So this is what the left is Bernie Sanders, you know, uh, you know, we, we need $15 an hour minimum wage right now.
00:21:46.080This is our greatest, uh, are you doing, are you doing Bernie Sanders or are you doing the Dracula character from the Flintstones special?
00:21:54.240I'm, I'm afraid the latter, my throat, I should not be doing impressions for my folks like this because when I do my Bernie Sanders impression, I start to cough anyway.
00:22:02.660Now I have this, you know, reddened swollen throat.
00:22:06.540So I, I apologize to our audience for my Dracula impression, but, um, you're, you're getting a $15 minimum wage right now and they can't find people.
00:22:17.060Um, at, 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.
00:22:28.840There was also a sign we're going to be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays from here on out.
00:22:33.240We cannot find the staff and what's happening.
00:22:38.900What's happening is people are getting unemployment.
00:22:40.960They've gotten used to a certain thing during Corona virus and they're not really willing to work.
00:22:46.820Now this happened during the black death.
00:22:49.760There was a, you know, not just a decimation, almost halving of the population.
00:22:55.580This was instrumental in creating the middle class.
00:22:59.360Um, wages had to go up because the, the, the labor supply was so small that you had to pay people more to get them, get, to get their attention.
00:23:07.940Um, I think something like that is happening now, but I, I think it's a very different thing.
00:23:16.140While it's the black death, as you say, it was between 40 and 50% of the European population, let's say the population of England was killed, but it was 80% of the laboring class of the serfs and the free laborers, 80%.
00:23:28.420And so, um, they could just charge what they liked and they did.
00:23:33.520And, and, and, and, and then of course you've got very substantial social movement as the cleverer people.
00:23:38.340You've literally got people that have been born in serfs as unfree, becoming magistrates, things like this huge social change.
00:23:46.200Um, and then also towards the end of the Victorian era that, that, so the, the fleeing from the countryside by shepherds and whatever to go in the factories and so on was so huge.
00:23:56.400There were hardly any shepherds there.
00:23:58.340There were fewer shepherds and things that were needed and were needed.
00:24:01.420And so those shepherds could charge whatever fees they wanted.
00:24:15.980Um, so you, you, what, 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.
00:24:28.620And so, um, they could charge whatever they liked.
00:24:31.240And so one thing that you might expect is that, um, 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.
00:24:39.560And you have somebody who is a plumber or something like that with his own business who can earn considerably more.
00:24:44.120Um, 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 sort of necessary.
00:24:54.380So I can see something like that taking place.
00:24:58.940I think that's happening, but I mean, not to be too brutal about this, the, the, the difference in the situation is that half of these people didn't die.
00:25:08.740I mean, coronavirus was a real thing and it's a serious thing, but, um, it's, you know, 600,000 and in, in America, 600,000 people in a context of 330, um, and there, there were excess deaths, but I mean, a lot of people would have died anyway.
00:25:26.460Um, so they're here and something has to be done with them.
00:25:30.600The parallel is that you have a system that is inculcating people with this idea that you, if you don't have a degree, like the kind of system at your school, that society-wide, if you don't have a degree, there's something wrong with you, basically.
00:25:44.520And so, so many people are sucked into that idea, oh, I've got to get a degree.
00:25:49.120And then I, uh, with this, this, this, this dream, this, this lie that, oh, I will be middle-class and important if I have a degree.
00:25:56.660So 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 they may, they're not necessarily low in IQ, but like they're intellectually humble or they, they just do not perceive themselves as anything like elite or anything like that.
00:26:11.180And, and, and often those people will perhaps will be difficult to indoctrinate with the broader societal culture anyway.
00:26:17.680And then it's going to be those people that are going to stay and remain, you know, the plumbers and, uh, the car mechanics and whatever of the, of the, of the future.
00:26:26.680And, but there's just not enough of them.
00:26:28.460And so the result is that it is the, it is the, um, inappropriate roadmap down which the more, um, inculcatable people in the society are being built, are being, are being pushed.
00:26:40.480Which is, which is, which is bringing about this labor shortage.
00:27:14.560If you've got an IQ that, that, that low, um, 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.
00:27:26.540And so the idea when they say, oh, immigrants are taking, taking our jobs.
00:27:34.040But not in a lot of these instances because you just wouldn't be intellectually capable of doing a job like that.
00:27:39.120And it's the, it's the class that when my grandfather was a, my grandfather used to talk about when he was a kid, he referred to them as rough.
00:28:05.140And, um, and, and that, the, 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.
00:28:17.020Well, I would mention that whenever someone in, whenever a young girl in my area is captured by wild bears and taken into a den, uh, they usually come to me to rescue her.
00:28:32.480Some people don't know this about me because I have a intellectual podcast.
00:28:38.300I didn't, I, I have to say you've, you've kept that secret very successfully.
00:28:41.580I didn't, I didn't know that you were the, uh, the Montana equivalent of the WWF rest, the Skinner lived in the, in the wilds, but yeah, it's, it's a, it's a very serious.
00:28:53.340And what, what would eventually presumably happen is that, um, well, there just won't be the money to sustain this underclass.
00:29:00.740And not only that, but that, that, that underclass will be, will be so regarded as so obnoxious and offensive that people, people will just sort of lose all sympathy for them.
00:29:10.720Um, and not only that, one thing that I, I did a video on, on my channel, on you jolly heretic, um, a few days ago is there is a huge, a huge rise by the way of sexually transmitted diseases among these people.
00:29:29.780And, and, and, and that's on top of antibiotics working less well and people being more sort of genetically sick and those people in particular being more, so, so it, it, it, it, it, it augers a future where, where, yeah, there probably will be, you know, it's the bread and circuses phase of Rome.
00:29:45.920Um, and, um, eventually the bread and circuses will run out.
00:30:27.420Uh, but it's, it's a tripartite society and each part is indispensable, though obviously serves a different function.
00:30:35.800It's the most basic division of labor.
00:30:37.660There are those people, guardians who, you know, engage in sword play, ride chariots or badasses will protect you, maybe conquer new land, et cetera.
00:30:48.180Uh, there are those who do the things that need to be done.
00:30:50.840The people who make the shoes, who farm the land, et cetera.
00:30:57.420Um, then there is this other thing that some might consider indispensable, but is actually not.
00:31:03.060And that is those who pray, those who kind of bring society together and congeal it with a religious like system or something.
00:31:12.700Now I would remind everyone that the origins of the university systems do come from the monastery, at least the most recent origins.
00:31:23.060We could go back to the academies in, uh, the Greco-Roman world or the, uh, the Greek world.
00:31:30.120Um, but, and those were secular institutions, although obviously Plato was a deeply kind of religious like thinker.
00:31:37.980Um, but, uh, the Lyceum, but, uh, which gives us the French word for school, but they, they do have a religious component.
00:31:49.340Those people in the academy are there to pray in a way.
00:31:53.480Uh, I think people are wrong when they think of the humanities academia as this kind of silly, on the edge, um, exploring all of this nonsense that's toxic or at best inane.
00:32:11.560Um, 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.
00:32:25.760The academy has never been on the vanguard.
00:32:28.080The academy is about maintaining paradigms and those people who break paradigms are actually very rare.
00:32:35.160I mean, the Ptolemaic system lasted for a thousand or 1400 years that was done very carefully and rigorously by academics who were creating epicycles on epicycles and so on.
00:32:49.600So that is the, that, that is what the academy is there for.
00:32:56.760And I, I guess that's kind of a, and, and congeal the society and serve the state.
00:33:02.760Um, and I guess that's a kind of maybe cynical sounding view of it, but that is my view of it.
00:33:10.720Um, so I, I think when we, when we ask, you know, what do we want from education going forward?
00:33:17.820I, I think we should get rid of a lot of these somewhat kind of romantic notions of there was once a time when there was free thought in the academy or something.
00:33:34.220I'd say, I'd say, I'd say firstly that let's go back even further.
00:33:37.520Um, when a tribe reaches a certain level of complexity, you get clear sexual divisions of labor.
00:33:44.060Uh, 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.
00:33:56.840And then they come back and, and they are men.
00:33:59.520And that, that, that, that's really the kind of start of the, of the education system, this rite of passage.
00:34:05.980And eventually it seems to me that in Western countries, that, that rite of passage, okay, you can talk about the household system as a rite of passage or whatever, but that, that rite of passage is regarded as particularly important for the upper class.
00:34:17.540Eventually, because the upper class are the warriors of the society and so on.
00:34:21.520So the upper class go to school, which is a rite of passage.
00:34:24.580And what these universities were was really an extension of that, of that rite of passage.
00:34:29.620And the idea was to, you go there at 14, for example, in the 1500s, you go to Oxford, Cambridge about 14 years old.
00:34:35.620And, and the idea was to inculcated, was to aid that they would, they would learn the ways of the society.
00:34:40.480So in 16th century England, Oxford and Cambridge, you'd learn things like dancing and etiquette and whatever.
00:34:45.720You'd learn some useful knowledge about law and stuff like that, that you might need to run your, run your lands and so on.
00:34:53.040And you'd learn about theology and that sort of thing.
00:34:56.140And relatively few people actually got a degree.
00:34:58.460Normally they only actually sat the degree if they were going to become priests or relatively senior, vicars, the relatively senior clergy.
00:35:06.460But, but, and a few others did as well, lawyers or whatever, but, but otherwise it was just a rite of passage for the upper class that you, that you went through.
00:35:14.620But what, but what it did permit was something which was 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.
00:35:29.880And so you did get that with the medieval scholastics, that, that is what they were doing.
00:35:33.800And 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, and, 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, and all this sort of thing.
00:35:54.800Then the universities, of course, become looked up to, and they had more status because of this association with sort of brilliance and genius.
00:36:02.320And so then I think you get a cycle where once that happens and it has more status, then it attracts status seekers.
00:36:08.900The status seekers put conformity and, and in displaying their, signaling their conformity to the, the ideas of the society above the truth.
00:36:19.780Um, so eventually then the, the, the, the sort of truth element, the genius element is suppressed and then the university goes into decline and then it just happens all over again.
00:36:30.360And that seems to me to be the sort of priestly cycle of universities.
00:36:34.580And we're definitely in a priestly phase.
00:36:50.860I mean, the, the fact that it's more difficult to get into these universities than it was just say 10 or 20 years ago, there was a greater pool of applicants for the same number of places.
00:37:02.260Yeah, but that's, that's just because of this bubble that has, that has.
00:37:20.960And they're, they're aware that Oxford and Cambridge, let's say, that it's completely woke and that most subjects are just nonsense and that you get in not because you're clever anymore, but because of certain, ticking certain boxes or whatever.
00:37:34.060And so I think there is a degree to which the, the, the status element is now at least under question in a way that it wasn't 20 years ago.
00:37:40.960And you're going through, I mean, if you look about this, the cycle of Oxford University is an example of this.
00:37:46.880So Oxford University has this period where it's an intellectual hothouse.
00:37:51.100It then goes into decline from the 1500s onwards and it becomes perceived as it's just completely run and governed by the church.
00:37:57.680It's a way of upholding the church and it's considered just a sort of finishing school for the English upper class.
00:38:02.660It doesn't have much prestige, really.
00:38:05.180It'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.
00:38:13.020And the, the prestige was at the Scottish universities because they weren't dominated by the, the, the church and also in the universities in Holland and Germany.
00:38:21.600And 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.
00:38:32.260And it's, 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.
00:38:42.060And, and, and, and then managed to outdo them.
00:38:44.880And in doing so, again, created a brief period of time where the emphasis is on truth and whatever.
00:38:52.160And, and, and a, that was good because it attracts clever people back to the university and who had previously gone elsewhere.
00:38:59.100And, and B, it, it, it, it, it, of course, became a hothouse for ideas, which was then useful at the, at the, at the, at the group level.
00:39:07.860For the, for the group that these clever people were generating, these are these fascinating scientific ideas.
00:39:12.760And by about the fifties, I think you, the, it, you know, it's, it's, it midwitter sizes and it attracts status seekers.
00:39:19.160And, and, and then it just, the cycle just is now back where it was.
00:40:35.440Um, but I do think that there is an opening, um, as the university, you know, enters this priestly phase for a lot of learning to occur, you know, in, in using these alternative methods, whether it's small things, whether it's through zoom, um, classes, et cetera.
00:40:55.660Um, because again, it's not serving that truth function, the, the current university system.
00:41:02.300The other thing it's, you know, education is wasted on the young.
00:41:06.200I mean, I think Plato is wrong about most things.
00:41:09.400He was right about this, that the idea of bringing a 19 year old to school, he's hanging out in this almost like amusement park, like place where they, you know, they have big gems.
00:41:23.460They literally will have like water parks at these universities.
00:41:32.320Why are you even, even thinking about that?
00:41:36.720He's going to gain something from reading, you know, Wordsworth or Plato or, or philosophy of any kind.
00:41:44.300I mean, it's just, it's just, 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, who genuinely wants to think about something could actually gain something from these materials.
00:42:02.280We 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.
00:42:16.740And it's just, what a misallocation of resources.
00:42:22.800You think that it means, it means that a lot of those people, then the worst thing is that they have a sense in which, in which people would, even if they had been to university, wouldn't have a few generations earlier.
00:42:44.120And 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.
00:42:56.220So the degree gives them this confidence way beyond their intellectual ability.
00:42:59.740To 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.
00:43:10.740And that's just, who, who, who, who get in on the basis that they have high conscientiousness or something like that, that they have below average IQ.
00:43:18.840And that's, that's an, that's a crazy situation to be in.
00:43:22.240And, um, it's, it's just, it just goes against everything that universities were, were supposed to be, which was for the education of an elite.
00:43:48.820Um, and nobody else should be allowed to go.
00:43:50.420Because it's not, I think in some ways people need to be protected from education.
00:43:56.080Education can be actually very harmful.
00:43:58.400And I'm not, and I'm not just talking about that in the sense of, you know, this, this obviously toxic, you know, critical race theory or advanced levels of feminism or something.
00:44:10.560I'm actually even talking about the classics.
00:44:13.280I think there's a, a somewhat Pollyannish view that you're going to read Hamlet and become a better person.
00:44:20.880You're actually going to read Hamlet, maybe be depressed.
00:44:24.200And in the, in the sense that, you know, education is not, you know, actually pursuing truth is not going to turn you into a happy middle-class goody-goody.
00:44:36.300If you're, if you actually examine many of these things, it might actually shatter your soul.
00:44:42.600So I think most people, probably at least 90% of the population should be protected from education, both in its kind of obviously toxic left-wing elements, but also in terms of its actual good elements.
00:44:57.840There was a British comedy called Yes Minister and a successor called Yes Prime Minister.
00:45:04.660And it's, it's about a British, a British minister of the crown and eventually Prime Minister and his, how we, and his interactions with civil servants.
00:45:11.700And Jim, Jim Hacker, who's the minister, says to his senior civil servant, Sir Humphrey Appleby, he says that the public have the right to know.
00:45:20.060And, and, and, and, and, no, they have the right to be ignorant.
00:45:33.340Well, that, that, that, you know, that, 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.
00:45:47.540It actually, it's not, not just a right, but you could say a blessing.
00:46:07.580But yeah, so it's, it's a very, very similar thing.
00:46:11.520So 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, look at the difficult things I talked about in making sense of race.
00:46:19.740Do they have the right to be ignorant of that?
00:46:23.100Well, that I'm, I'm afraid that 90% of the American public, sadly for our bank accounts are not purchasing this book.
00:46:31.080So I don't, I think we, it's kind of a moot point in a way.
00:46:35.640Well, and also we are, we are avidly attempting to shatter the psyches of the current elite.
00:46:42.520We want them to be unhappy, to throw themselves off bridges and gnash.
00:46:47.940Well, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, to throw themselves off bridges and die, but I said, I certainly want them to be more focused on the truth and on group oriented.
00:46:56.460I was speaking metaphorically, of course.