RadixJournal - Against Education

00:00:00.000 It goes against everything that universities were supposed to be, which was for the education of elite.

00:00:05.480 There shouldn't be no tuition fees, but it should be free for, let's say, top 5 or 10 percent of the society.

00:00:10.820 And that's it. Nobody else.

00:00:11.980 Education can be actually very harmful.

00:00:14.600 And I'm not just talking about that in the sense of, you know, this obviously toxic, you know,

00:00:22.200 critical race theory or advanced levels of feminism or something.

00:00:26.360 I'm actually even talking about the classics.

00:00:28.980 I think there's a somewhat Pollyannish view that you're going to read Hamlet and become a better person.

00:00:36.840 You're actually going to read Hamlet, maybe be depressed.

00:00:40.020 Actually pursuing truth is not going to turn you into a happy middle class goody-goody.

00:00:46.920 If you actually examine many of these things, it might actually shatter your soul.

00:00:58.980 All right, Ed, how are you doing?

00:01:02.360 I'm okay, yes.

00:01:03.240 I've had a fun weekend.

00:01:05.240 I went with my son yesterday to a thing called Tiv Bully, which is a fairground.

00:01:09.840 And I went on all the rides, the roller coasters and the whatever, except the one where you go upside down.

00:01:18.160 Both me and my son agreed we did not want to be upside down.

00:01:21.380 But apart from that, it was very good.

00:01:23.140 And you?

00:01:23.400 That reminds me of the good old days of going to Six Flags when I was a kid.

00:01:27.300 I can't wait to relive those.

00:01:29.560 Well, as you can probably tell, because I'm using an avatar and my voice is not as euphonious as usual.

00:01:37.980 I am ill.

00:01:39.120 I seem to have caught a bug of some sort.

00:01:41.560 I have a very sore throat.

00:01:43.320 So I am just taking it easy.

00:01:45.000 I don't want to show myself on camera because I have to admit it.

00:01:49.280 I'm in a bathrobe right now.

00:01:51.700 So for a mere $9.95 a month, you can subscribe to my OnlyFans account, which is me in bathrobes lounging about.

00:02:03.820 Eating hamburgers.

00:02:05.000 It's a bargain, really.

00:02:06.580 Yeah.

00:02:07.360 Eating hamburgers with a special kind of cheese.

00:02:10.160 Yeah, exactly.

00:02:10.820 As you're known for.

00:02:12.040 Yeah, yeah.

00:02:13.920 Well worth it.

00:02:14.760 So let's talk about something serious.

00:02:18.280 I don't think we've ever dived into the higher education issue in general.

00:02:26.540 I think both of us have experience in higher education.

00:02:29.700 We actually got to the top, although I dove off, jumped out, escaped the last minute before actually getting a degree.

00:02:39.820 You actually got a PhD.

00:02:41.880 We both know what it's like inside.

00:02:44.620 And I think there's a growing awareness that this is a disaster and that it leads to a lot of unhappiness.

00:02:58.880 Not 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.

00:03:10.200 There's a growing awareness among normal people that your student loans can just drag your life down and they can never be repaid.

00:03:18.240 And you're actually not even repaying the money you owe.

00:03:20.580 You're repaying the money you owe times three or more.

00:03:24.360 There's a growing awareness of that.

00:03:28.420 And at the same time, there is a rather conventional notion that we just need to send more people to college.

00:03:37.080 Biden very recently has talked about free college for all and so on.

00:03:44.660 But 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.

00:03:55.280 But 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.

00:04:07.440 This is not the 20th century anymore with the GI Bill and all of these kinds of things.

00:04:13.280 What are your first reactions to the way I kind of laid out the scene, Ed?

00:04:16.880 Well, I agree with something we were saying before we started recording.

00:04:22.640 I hadn't heard it phrased in this way before, but you talked about the sort of cargo culticization of higher education.

00:04:31.160 And 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,

00:04:42.660 if they just sort of do some childish understanding of what airplanes do, then the cargo will come back.

00:04:48.520 And I think I agree with you. That's how the left.

00:04:51.880 And we had this in Britain about 20 years ago. That's how they seem to see education.

00:04:56.400 If you start from the belief, which you must know on some level is incorrect, but anyway, that the people are broadly intellectually the same,

00:05:04.960 then it would seem to. And if you think that a middle class lifestyle or whatever you want to call it is good.

00:05:11.900 And 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,

00:05:23.640 then then it makes sense, doesn't it? Look, those people are successful.

00:05:26.960 They have degrees. So if everyone has a degree that everyone will be successful.

00:05:31.060 That's that's the simple infantile way of thinking. And of course, it's completely untrue for various reasons.

00:05:39.040 It's untrue because a lot of people are intellectually incapable of doing a degree.

00:05:43.960 It'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.

00:05:51.080 And 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.

00:06:00.120 So and you could say you could you could go further.

00:06:02.260 You could say that for it is perhaps it is bad for a lot of for a lot of people to have degrees,

00:06:10.540 because 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.

00:06:25.240 And they should and they will kind of feel entitled to be part of the middle class.

00:06:29.180 And of course, they'll find that they're not because 50 percent of people in their cohort have degrees.

00:06:34.980 And so then they'll become bitter and unpleasant and unhappy.

00:06:37.660 And you'll get the kind of polarization that we see in many European countries now.

00:06:43.540 So 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.

00:06:52.440 It's you forget a lot of things that you learn.

00:06:55.040 Of 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.

00:07:07.520 And it's just going to make for a very, very it's already has made for a very difficult situation.

00:07:14.600 Well, let me let me jump in.

00:07:15.580 I mean, it's weird that we're even talking about we need more people to get education and so on when education is exploding.

00:07:24.340 So the cost of education is easily outpacing inflation.

00:07:30.460 It is just going up in every every year.

00:07:32.720 And that is due to debt financing, which all which we'll go into a little bit later.

00:07:38.040 But the facts are the facts.

00:07:40.680 Now, things are kind of plateauing right now.

00:07:43.580 We actually might very well have reached a peak.

00:07:46.660 But if you look back over the 20 years, there is basically a doubling.

00:07:51.500 I mean, that we've you know, we've gone from 29 percent of the population getting a bachelor's degree to close to 50.

00:07:59.540 The number of people with doctorates has more than doubled.

00:08:03.040 It's gone from two to four percent.

00:08:05.200 The master's degree is the fascinating one.

00:08:07.580 It is almost exactly doubled.

00:08:09.440 It's gone from 10 percent of the master's degree to 21 percent.

00:08:12.120 What'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.

00:08:24.280 So I just read that as pure inflation.

00:08:27.840 You know, at one point you could go to the movie theater for a quarter.

00:08:31.480 You know, now it's 750 or whatever.

00:08:33.920 So at one point, a bachelor's degree was worth this much in terms of getting your foot in the door, et cetera, giving you status.

00:08:44.500 Now you need a master's degree.

00:08:46.240 And 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.

00:08:55.460 And so in that sense, the doctorate is the new bachelor's degree.

00:09:01.700 And that's insane.

00:09:03.140 And it kind of is because it's the thing that gives people sort of look up to it even now.

00:09:07.260 The person has a doctorate.

00:09:08.840 So and so I think that it clearly is just inflation.

00:09:12.420 It's not it's not it's not really it's not really a more educated society.

00:09:16.140 It's not a society that has more skills.

00:09:18.580 It's it's it's not necessary for the functioning of society to have all of these people that have these qualifications.

00:09:25.500 It'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.

00:09:39.380 Right. And now those people have degrees.

00:09:41.420 I remember when I was about 16, I had to do work experience and I had to do work experience.

00:09:47.840 I 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.

00:09:57.120 Those people now they're called PAs, personal assistants, and they tend to have degrees.

00:10:04.160 And that's that's where it's got to basically glorified secretaries. 1.00

00:10:08.840 That's what you're going to go into with your with your degree.

00:10:12.080 And in a society where like Finland, where education is free, that's one thing.

00:10:17.400 But 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.

00:10:33.600 Yes, exactly.

00:10:34.600 Which will surely one day burst.

00:10:36.240 I think it's peaking.

00:10:38.900 I think that's what I would say, actually, because the number of people with bachelor's degree is actually not rising.

00:10:45.480 And then it's facing a certain type of legitimacy crisis.

00:10:49.540 I'm just speaking from my own perspective, because we live in a different time.

00:10:56.080 So 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.

00:11:08.840 There 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.

00:11:15.740 But basically, 100% of the class went to a college, a lot of them went to elite schools, that is Ivy's.

00:11:23.660 At that point, there was so much pressure.

00:11:26.540 Like, you know, if you didn't go to college, it was unthinkable. 1.00

00:11:31.440 You were a loser. 0.98

00:11:32.540 But it wasn't even an option, to be honest, for me. 0.99

00:11:37.080 It was just a pressure to get into a higher and higher tier college and to get an internship and et cetera.

00:11:44.620 That was at a point where a lot of college, this was back in 2000, where a lot of these universities weren't debt financed.

00:11:53.120 Your parents would pony up.

00:11:55.320 It was at least somewhat affordable.

00:11:58.640 Well, you know, 10 years later, going to an elite school was $50,000 a year room and board for an undergraduate education.

00:12:07.320 I don't even know where it is now, but it is just so rapidly outpacing inflation.

00:12:13.680 It's not even funny.

00:12:15.200 They have huge amounts, a huge pool of people to go to these elite schools from international populations, et cetera.

00:12:24.760 It is much more difficult to get in.

00:12:27.380 It's much more detrimental to your life to go.

00:12:30.280 I think it probably still does probably make sense to go to Yale or Stanford or one of those top flight places.

00:12:38.540 It's worth the $150,000, $200,000 in debt because you are going to make that back through your connections, et cetera.

00:12:47.860 But for a lot of people not going to Yale, not actually learning anything, and not really having those elite connections, it is absolutely decimating.

00:12:58.340 I 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.

00:13:16.900 But 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.

00:13:32.980 There 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.

00:13:40.400 And it was basically, he basically would have, the natural thing to do was just to fail the entire class because they were so bad.

00:13:47.780 And he was told by his dean, well, obviously you can't do that.

00:13:50.300 Otherwise, the college will close down.

00:13:52.520 So, 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.

00:14:04.400 So, um, um, they're there to pass their courses and get their credits and that's all they care about.

00:14:08.600 They don't care about anything else.

00:14:09.900 They don't, and, and he couldn't, he was basically teaching them base, the basics of how to write an essay.

00:14:14.840 Yeah.

00:14:15.380 Like a five paragraph essay with the topic.

00:14:17.480 And that should have been taught.

00:14:18.320 That should have been taught at school.

00:14:20.360 Yeah, exactly.

00:14:21.400 And, 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,

00:14:34.160 perhaps 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.

00:14:43.400 Well, I think we're also reaching this point where we're kind of hitting a brick wall in terms of division of labor.

00:14:52.180 And let, let me, you know, let me back up a little bit.

00:14:55.820 There, there is a kind of reactionary, it's, it's very often left-wing, but you, you sometimes will hear this from conservative populists.

00:15:03.120 There'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.

00:15:14.620 You're going to put all of these workers out of work.

00:15:17.080 They've got families, et cetera.

00:15:18.940 And 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.

00:15:33.120 And the whole society will be better once we bring in these new technologies.

00:15:40.000 And I think to a large degree, that has been a correct analysis of what's happening.

00:15:47.480 The division of labor is kind of good for all.

00:15:49.860 But 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.

00:16:10.580 We don't do that kind of work here in postmodern America anymore.

00:16:14.540 So 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.

00:16:21.680 They're running up against a brick wall of their own innate intelligence and skill level.

00:16:26.820 And 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.

00:16:40.340 We 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.

00:16:55.240 And there just are not enough jobs for that.

00:16:58.760 And they can't do it anyway.

00:17:00.340 No, it's what Peter, it's two points.

00:17:01.820 I think they're salient.

00:17:02.440 First of all, that's what Peter Turkin has argued in his, in his, in his, his books on this subject.

00:17:07.820 That's what we have. That's why you have a period of polarization.

00:17:10.900 We'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.

00:17:22.600 And so therefore there's this, there's this optimism and therefore you get this idea of everybody should be educated or whatever.

00:17:27.820 Everybody should do a law degree.

00:17:29.140 You get far too many people that have the, have the qualification and you therefore get intra elite competition.

00:17:34.540 You get ruthless fighting within the elites.

00:17:37.460 And 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.

00:17:44.660 They're going to write back and say, we had so many well-qualified candidates, all this nonsense, which has been going on for years.

00:17:50.360 It shouldn't, it shouldn't be like that.

00:17:51.520 It 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.

00:18:03.700 That would be the sensible thing to do.

00:18:05.520 And 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.

00:18:13.780 This is therefore how many theology students there will be a year.

00:18:18.420 That's it.

00:18:19.580 And so you, you never, you never get this problem.

00:18:22.280 Now you do because they've liberalized things, but you, you, so that's the first thing.

00:18:26.980 You always get this intra, intra elite competition.

00:18:29.720 The second thing that's more salient is in a society, you have a society of declining IQ, which we definitely have.

00:18:37.940 But also you have a society where the declining IQ is in a sense being cloaked by the fact that we are continuing to develop.

00:18:46.140 So we're, we're continuing even though much more slowly than we, than we used to, a slower speed because IQ is lower.

00:18:51.440 So there's fewer macro innovations and micro innovations, but they're still happening.

00:18:55.320 We're still, we're still developing.

00:18:56.540 And so that means the society becomes ever more specialized and, and, and ever more efficient and ever less requiring of low skilled jobs.

00:19:06.960 So 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.

00:19:15.320 The 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,

00:19:26.440 the 85, the only portion that's breeding above replacement fertility is the IQ of 85 and the, the people on the dole.

00:19:32.660 And those people are intellectually capable of being, you know, farm laborers and real simple stuff.

00:19:40.060 Yeah.

00:19:40.880 And that's who's, that's who's growing.

00:19:43.180 And 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.

00:19:52.880 Same 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.

00:20:00.920 And so they sustain them with bread and circuses and, and you, and you, and you, and that's what we're doing.

00:20:07.260 That's what's going to have to have, we, we, we, we already have bread and circuses. 0.99

00:20:11.000 It's called welfare.

00:20:12.380 Um, oh, and, and, and, and the health service and the, the, the fact that the fast majority.

00:20:17.720 Yeah.

00:20:17.920 And I, I think UBI is, is a part of this.

00:20:20.960 Um, 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.

00:20:36.260 Uh, 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.

00:20:50.540 Or go to the lab and experiment.

00:20:53.320 I mean, that's nonsense.

00:20:54.500 What, 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.

00:21:03.560 And I, I think it's actually, it's very interesting.

00:21:06.340 I mean, this is a little bit off topic, but it's, it's related.

00:21:09.480 So 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.

00:21:17.680 Um, McDonald's coffee is not bad to be honest, but anyway.

00:21:20.540 They 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.

00:21:29.320 That's remarkable.

00:21:30.020 When I actually went to a convenience store, uh, just the other day, they are offering $15 an hour minimum wage at this convenience.

00:21:38.980 So this is what the left is Bernie Sanders, you know, uh, you know, we, we need $15 an hour minimum wage right now.

00:21:46.080 This is our greatest, uh, are you doing, are you doing Bernie Sanders or are you doing the Dracula character from the Flintstones special?

00:21:54.240 I'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.

00:22:02.660 Now I have this, you know, reddened swollen throat.

00:22:06.540 So 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.

00:22:15.860 They're still help, help wanted.

00:22:17.060 Um, 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.

00:22:28.840 There was also a sign we're going to be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays from here on out.

00:22:33.240 We cannot find the staff and what's happening.

00:22:37.380 I mean, this is a real thing.

00:22:38.900 What's happening is people are getting unemployment.

00:22:40.960 They've gotten used to a certain thing during Corona virus and they're not really willing to work.

00:22:46.820 Now this happened during the black death. 0.95

00:22:49.760 There was a, you know, not just a decimation, almost halving of the population.

00:22:55.580 This was instrumental in creating the middle class.

00:22:59.360 Um, 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.

00:23:07.940 Um, I think something like that is happening now, but I, I think it's a very different thing.

00:23:13.760 There's two parallels I can think of.

00:23:16.140 While 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%. 0.97

00:23:28.420 And so, um, they could just charge what they liked and they did.

00:23:32.800 Right.

00:23:33.520 And, and, and, and, and then of course you've got very substantial social movement as the cleverer people.

00:23:38.340 You've literally got people that have been born in serfs as unfree, becoming magistrates, things like this huge social change.

00:23:46.200 Um, 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.

00:23:56.400 There were hardly any shepherds there.

00:23:58.340 There were fewer shepherds and things that were needed and were needed.

00:24:01.420 And so those shepherds could charge whatever fees they wanted.

00:24:05.160 And they did.

00:24:06.480 And you have people going, for goodness sake, this shepherd of mine, he pays for dancing classes in the local town.

00:24:12.280 He has, he has, he has brass bedposts. 0.93

00:24:15.180 I mean, this is ridiculous.

00:24:15.980 Um, 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. 0.98

00:24:26.960 There just weren't enough plumbers.

00:24:28.620 And so, um, they could charge whatever they liked.

00:24:31.240 And 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.

00:24:39.560 And you have somebody who is a plumber or something like that with his own business who can earn considerably more.

00:24:44.120 Um, 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.

00:24:54.380 So I can see something like that taking place.

00:24:58.940 I 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.

00:25:08.740 I 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.

00:25:26.460 Um, so they're here and something has to be done with them.

00:25:30.600 The 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.

00:25:44.520 And so, so many people are sucked into that idea, oh, I've got to get a degree.

00:25:49.120 And 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.

00:25:56.660 So 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.

00:26:10.000 That's not how they see themselves.

00:26:11.180 And, and, and often those people will perhaps will be difficult to indoctrinate with the broader societal culture anyway.

00:26:17.680 And 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.

00:26:26.680 And, but there's just not enough of them.

00:26:28.460 And 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.

00:26:40.480 Which is, which is, which is bringing about this labor shortage.

00:26:46.060 Yeah.

00:26:46.260 Oh, I don't disagree with anything you're saying.

00:26:48.660 I'm just, I'm just saying that those, that mass of underclass is still out there. 1.00

00:26:55.100 They, they, this mass of people didn't die in the latest black death and they're, they're going to have to be dealt with in some way. 1.00

00:27:04.140 A mass of people with IQs around 80 who cannot become iOS app coders to say the least.

00:27:12.600 Well, they can't become anything.

00:27:13.400 I mean, I know.

00:27:14.380 Yeah.

00:27:14.560 If 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.

00:27:26.540 And so the idea when they say, oh, immigrants are taking, taking our jobs.

00:27:30.840 No, they're not in the sense.

00:27:32.380 They're not in some cases they are.

00:27:33.760 Yes.

00:27:34.040 But not in a lot of these instances because you just wouldn't be intellectually capable of doing a job like that.

00:27:39.120 And 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.

00:27:45.580 So you'd have working class.

00:27:47.460 That was, that was him.

00:27:48.340 That was, we were working class.

00:27:49.540 And then you had rough.

00:27:51.160 And these were the kind of people that would do, you know, poaching, wartime spivs, you know, dodgy people.

00:27:58.740 And those people are probably now about a fifth of society.

00:28:04.740 Right.

00:28:05.140 And, 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.

00:28:16.260 Right.

00:28:17.020 Well, 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.

00:28:30.520 Um, I'm known as a rough type.

00:28:32.480 Some people don't know this about me because I have a intellectual podcast.

00:28:38.300 I didn't, I, I have to say you've, you've kept that secret very successfully.

00:28:41.580 I 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.

00:28:53.340 And what, what would eventually presumably happen is that, um, well, there just won't be the money to sustain this underclass.

00:28:59.720 That's, that's what will happen.

00:29:00.740 And 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.

00:29:10.720 Um, 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. 0.51

00:29:23.380 Um, it's absolutely enormous.

00:29:25.620 Yeah, I saw that video.

00:29:27.060 Huge rise.

00:29:27.960 It's very concerning.

00:29:29.260 Incredible.

00:29:29.780 And, 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.

00:29:45.920 Um, and, um, eventually the bread and circuses will run out.

00:29:51.940 Right.

00:29:52.900 Um, let's finish off this discussion with a more philosophical topic and that is what is the role of the university?

00:30:03.460 And, you know, let, let, let me think about it this way.

00:30:08.240 So in Aryan society, there are those who fight, those who work, those who pray. 0.89

00:30:16.800 Um, this is not too different from a platonic conception of a golden class, a silver and a bronze class.

00:30:26.120 So that's slightly different.

00:30:27.420 Uh, but it's, it's a tripartite society and each part is indispensable, though obviously serves a different function.

00:30:35.800 It's the most basic division of labor.

00:30:37.660 There are those people, guardians who, you know, engage in sword play, ride chariots or badasses will protect you, maybe conquer new land, et cetera.

00:30:48.180 Uh, there are those who do the things that need to be done.

00:30:50.840 The people who make the shoes, who farm the land, et cetera.

00:30:55.380 Also indispensable.

00:30:57.420 Um, then there is this other thing that some might consider indispensable, but is actually not.

00:31:03.060 And that is those who pray, those who kind of bring society together and congeal it with a religious like system or something.

00:31:12.700 Now I would remind everyone that the origins of the university systems do come from the monastery, at least the most recent origins.

00:31:23.060 We could go back to the academies in, uh, the Greco-Roman world or the, uh, the Greek world.

00:31:30.120 Um, but, and those were secular institutions, although obviously Plato was a deeply kind of religious like thinker.

00:31:37.980 Um, but, uh, the Lyceum, but, uh, which gives us the French word for school, but they, they do have a religious component.

00:31:49.340 Those people in the academy are there to pray in a way. 0.57

00:31:53.480 Uh, 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.

00:32:11.560 Um, 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.

00:32:24.120 They are not on the vanguard.

00:32:25.760 The academy has never been on the vanguard.

00:32:28.080 The academy is about maintaining paradigms and those people who break paradigms are actually very rare.

00:32:35.160 I 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.

00:32:49.600 So that is the, that, that is what the academy is there for.

00:32:54.580 It is to rationalize power.

00:32:56.760 And I, I guess that's kind of a, and, and congeal the society and serve the state.

00:33:02.760 Um, and I guess that's a kind of maybe cynical sounding view of it, but that is my view of it.

00:33:10.720 Um, so I, I think when we, when we ask, you know, what do we want from education going forward?

00:33:17.820 I, 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.

00:33:28.900 There's never been free thought.

00:33:30.400 Oh no, I, I, I, I'd slightly nuanced this.

00:33:33.100 I'd say, I'd say two things.

00:33:34.220 I'd say, I'd say, I'd say firstly that let's go back even further.

00:33:37.520 Um, when a tribe reaches a certain level of complexity, you get clear sexual divisions of labor.

00:33:44.060 Uh, 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.

00:33:56.840 And then they come back and, and they are men.

00:33:59.520 And that, that, that, that's really the kind of start of the, of the education system, this rite of passage.

00:34:05.980 And 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.

00:34:17.540 Eventually, because the upper class are the warriors of the society and so on.

00:34:21.520 So the upper class go to school, which is a rite of passage.

00:34:24.580 And what these universities were was really an extension of that, of that rite of passage.

00:34:29.620 And the idea was to, you go there at 14, for example, in the 1500s, you go to Oxford, Cambridge about 14 years old.

00:34:35.620 And, and the idea was to inculcated, was to aid that they would, they would learn the ways of the society.

00:34:40.480 So in 16th century England, Oxford and Cambridge, you'd learn things like dancing and etiquette and whatever.

00:34:45.720 You'd learn some useful knowledge about law and stuff like that, that you might need to run your, run your lands and so on.

00:34:53.040 And you'd learn about theology and that sort of thing.

00:34:56.140 And relatively few people actually got a degree.

00:34:58.460 Normally they only actually sat the degree if they were going to become priests or relatively senior, vicars, the relatively senior clergy.

00:35:06.460 But, 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.

00:35:14.620 But 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.

00:35:27.980 And thus push the boundaries.

00:35:29.880 And so you did get that with the medieval scholastics, that, that is what they were doing.

00:35:33.800 And 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.

00:35:54.800 Then the universities, of course, become looked up to, and they had more status because of this association with sort of brilliance and genius.

00:36:02.320 And so then I think you get a cycle where once that happens and it has more status, then it attracts status seekers.

00:36:08.900 The status seekers put conformity and, and in displaying their, signaling their conformity to the, the ideas of the society above the truth.

00:36:19.780 Um, 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.

00:36:30.360 And that seems to me to be the sort of priestly cycle of universities.

00:36:34.580 And we're definitely in a priestly phase.

00:36:36.820 Yeah.

00:36:37.140 We're pretty much peak priesthood here, I think.

00:36:39.320 Right.

00:36:39.520 But I would say that we are in, in, in, in a weird way at this peak of the university system, the status.

00:36:48.780 This is not falling away.

00:36:50.860 I 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.

00:37:02.260 Yeah, but that's, that's just because of this bubble that has, that has.

00:37:04.840 I agree, but yeah, I totally agree.

00:37:07.780 But what I'm saying is that it's, the status keeps going up.

00:37:12.240 I'm not sure that's the case because they're, they're seriously questioning.

00:37:15.220 People are seriously questioning, even in mainstream newspapers now, what the hell is happening at the universities.

00:37:20.720 Yeah.

00:37:20.960 And 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.

00:37:34.060 And 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.

00:37:40.960 And you're going through, I mean, if you look about this, the cycle of Oxford University is an example of this.

00:37:46.880 So Oxford University has this period where it's an intellectual hothouse.

00:37:51.100 It then goes into decline from the 1500s onwards and it becomes perceived as it's just completely run and governed by the church.

00:37:57.680 It's a way of upholding the church and it's considered just a sort of finishing school for the English upper class.

00:38:02.660 It doesn't have much prestige, really.

00:38:05.180 It'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.

00:38:13.020 And 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.

00:38:21.600 And 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.

00:38:32.260 And 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.

00:38:42.060 And, and, and, and then managed to outdo them.

00:38:44.880 And in doing so, again, created a brief period of time where the emphasis is on truth and whatever.

00:38:52.160 And, and, and a, that was good because it attracts clever people back to the university and who had previously gone elsewhere.

00:38:59.100 And, 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.

00:39:07.860 For the, for the group that these clever people were generating, these are these fascinating scientific ideas.

00:39:12.760 And by about the fifties, I think you, the, it, you know, it's, it's, it midwitter sizes and it attracts status seekers.

00:39:19.160 And, and, and then it just, the cycle just is now back where it was.

00:39:24.560 Right.

00:39:25.160 And, and, and people.

00:39:26.460 And it's interesting.

00:39:27.660 Oh, go ahead.

00:39:28.180 Finish your thought.

00:39:29.500 Sorry.

00:39:29.800 Yeah.

00:39:29.900 That's all I was going to say.

00:39:30.920 Okay.

00:39:31.200 Yeah.

00:39:31.700 I mean, it's, it's interesting for, for, for people like us who are,

00:39:37.860 you know, some would say on the fringe, but we, you know, the alternative to this system.

00:39:44.700 I mean, we are both actively trying to educate people.

00:39:50.000 I went through a two month long course with many people where we closely read some very classic text.

00:39:59.560 And we read them again closely.

00:40:01.560 And we also read them highly critically.

00:40:03.700 Um, it's, it's interesting, you know, what to ask, like, what function is that serving?

00:40:10.160 It really is serving truth.

00:40:12.060 And we are, we are attempting to get truth and to expand ourselves to have greater human flourishing.

00:40:19.140 We aren't able to serve that function of either justifying the society religiously, the priestly element of the academy.

00:40:26.060 Or, uh, serving a function.

00:40:29.320 I mean, we're, we're simply not serving a function of like creating great ideas for industry or something.

00:40:33.800 We're not trying to do that either.

00:40:35.440 Um, 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.

00:40:55.660 Um, because again, it's not serving that truth function, the, the current university system.

00:41:02.300 The other thing it's, you know, education is wasted on the young.

00:41:06.200 I mean, I think Plato is wrong about most things.

00:41:09.400 He 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.

00:41:23.460 They literally will have like water parks at these universities.

00:41:27.180 Everything's taken care of.

00:41:28.580 He goes to all these keg parties and gets drunk.

00:41:31.280 He's chasing girls.

00:41:32.320 Why are you even, even thinking about that?

00:41:36.720 He's going to gain something from reading, you know, Wordsworth or Plato or, or philosophy of any kind.

00:41:44.300 I 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.

00:42:02.280 We 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.

00:42:16.740 And it's just, what a misallocation of resources. 0.98

00:42:21.740 What a silly thing to do.

00:42:22.800 You 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. 0.77

00:42:35.740 Oh, I'm, I'm important.

00:42:37.140 I'm part of the elite.

00:42:38.220 I should get involved in politics.

00:42:39.780 I should, I should, I should write things.

00:42:42.720 I should this, that, and the other.

00:42:44.120 And 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.

00:42:54.980 But they do have the degree.

00:42:56.220 So the degree gives them this confidence way beyond their intellectual ability.

00:42:59.740 To 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.

00:43:10.740 And 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.

00:43:17.240 That is the situation.

00:43:18.840 And that's, that's an, that's a crazy situation to be in.

00:43:22.240 And, 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.

00:43:30.140 You can't, this is an elite thing.

00:43:32.060 And, uh, and also I think about, about payment.

00:43:34.000 I, I take, I personally take the view that you don't have, we have free schooling.

00:43:37.980 So I do, I do, I think that universities should be free.

00:43:41.520 It shouldn't, there shouldn't be no tuition fees, but it should be free for, let's say, the top five or 10% of the society.

00:43:46.720 And that's it.

00:43:47.460 Nobody else.

00:43:48.820 Um, and nobody else should be allowed to go.

00:43:50.420 Because it's not, I think in some ways people need to be protected from education.

00:43:56.080 Education can be actually very harmful.

00:43:58.400 And 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.

00:44:10.560 I'm actually even talking about the classics.

00:44:13.280 I think there's a, a somewhat Pollyannish view that you're going to read Hamlet and become a better person.

00:44:20.880 You're actually going to read Hamlet, maybe be depressed.

00:44:24.200 And 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.

00:44:36.300 If you're, if you actually examine many of these things, it might actually shatter your soul.

00:44:42.600 So 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.

00:44:57.840 There was a British comedy called Yes Minister and a successor called Yes Prime Minister.

00:45:03.680 I don't know if you've seen it.

00:45:04.660 And 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.

00:45:11.700 And 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. 0.92

00:45:20.060 And, and, and, and, and, no, they have the right to be ignorant. 0.56

00:45:24.240 Exactly.

00:45:24.640 And this just sort of sums up the attitude that, you know, they have the right, they have the right not to know.

00:45:32.900 Right.

00:45:33.340 Well, 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.

00:45:47.540 It actually, it's not, not just a right, but you could say a blessing.

00:45:50.280 You could say it's a duty.

00:45:51.540 We, we, we, we deliberately keep children ignorant for that reason, don't we? 0.51

00:45:54.640 Exactly.

00:45:55.580 Do you think I'm going to tell my child that Santa Claus doesn't exist? 1.00

00:45:59.080 Are you insane? 0.95

00:46:00.460 I'm not some sadist in the name of the truth or something. 1.00

00:46:04.780 No.

00:46:05.380 Like, he doesn't exist though.

00:46:06.640 I've seen him.

00:46:07.580 But yeah, so it's, it's a very, very similar thing.

00:46:11.520 So 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.

00:46:19.740 Do they have the right to be ignorant of that?

00:46:22.680 Right.

00:46:23.100 Well, that I'm, I'm afraid that 90% of the American public, sadly for our bank accounts are not purchasing this book.

00:46:31.080 So I don't, I think we, it's kind of a moot point in a way.

00:46:35.640 Well, and also we are, we are avidly attempting to shatter the psyches of the current elite.

00:46:42.520 We want them to be unhappy, to throw themselves off bridges and gnash.

00:46:47.940 Well, 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.

00:46:56.460 I was speaking metaphorically, of course.

00:47:01.820 Anyway, I apologize for my voice.

00:47:05.300 Hopefully I'm understandable, but Ed, very good discussion.

00:47:11.440 And let's just put a bookmark, bookmark in it right there.

00:47:15.540 And I will talk to you soon, my friend.

00:47:17.940 Okay, bye bye, bye bye.

00:47:47.940 Bye bye.

00:47:50.140 Bye bye.

00:48:02.460 Bye bye.

00:48:02.480 Bye bye.

00:48:02.640 Bye bye.

00:48:02.720 Bye bye.

00:48:03.660 Bye bye.

00:48:04.820 Bye bye.

00:48:05.820 Bye bye.

00:48:09.880 Bye bye.

00:48:11.580 Bye bye.

00:48:12.380 Bye bye.

00:48:12.700 Bye bye.

00:48:16.180 Thank you.

RadixJournal - June 07, 2021

Against Education

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