Frequently here, in reaction to a sudden cultural lurch to the left, I read people expressing the thought that "wow, this has to be the last straw before people realize our society is going insane". Whether it's trannies, women making themselves ugly and being praised for it, people saying obesity is healthy, it seems like a common thought that at some point, people will realize "enough is enough" and put the breaks on the whole thing.
I don't think that is likely to happen, and in fact the history of the United States shows that things basically only move in one direction: further and further left.
This piece from Unqualified Reservations helps explain and define this process. The blog itself is where the term "The Cathedral" came from, shorthand for the consensus that exists between our media, education system, and government that helps push us from a place where in the 1990s DOMA was considered perfectly fine, and today it is considered practically primitive.
He argues that basically that there is an alliance of government, education and the media that serves to control public opinion, and effectively does. Government money flows to public universities, and their regulations shape how those universities develop. Universities produce knowledge and the experts that shape our public opinion. The press disseminates the knowledge generated by universities, and shapes our public opinions. And then we vote for people who follow those same dictates.
Anyway, let's get into this post:
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot...ified.html
The post is itself quite long, but made sense to me in the way it pieced together lots of stray ideas. We've all thought that SJWs seem like old Church Ladies, and that liberals seem like devotees to a religious faith. We've all noticed that schools and the media are always pushing us to the left, even if you vote for Republicans. This helps put that in a bit more historical context, showing that this isn't new, this is indeed a continuation of processes long in the making.
I don't think that is likely to happen, and in fact the history of the United States shows that things basically only move in one direction: further and further left.
This piece from Unqualified Reservations helps explain and define this process. The blog itself is where the term "The Cathedral" came from, shorthand for the consensus that exists between our media, education system, and government that helps push us from a place where in the 1990s DOMA was considered perfectly fine, and today it is considered practically primitive.
He argues that basically that there is an alliance of government, education and the media that serves to control public opinion, and effectively does. Government money flows to public universities, and their regulations shape how those universities develop. Universities produce knowledge and the experts that shape our public opinion. The press disseminates the knowledge generated by universities, and shapes our public opinions. And then we vote for people who follow those same dictates.
Anyway, let's get into this post:
Quote:Quote:
in post-1945 America, the source of all new ideas is the university. Ideas check out of the university, but they hardly ever check in. Thence, they flow outward to the other arms of the educational system as a whole: the mainstream media and the public schools. Eventually they become our old friend, "public opinion." This process is slow, happening on a generational scale...
Thus whatever coordinates the university system coordinates the state, through the transmission device of "public opinion." Naturally, since this is 100% effective, the state does not have to wait for the transmission to complete. It can act in advance of a complete response...
This relationship, whose widespread practice in the United States dates to 1933, is known as public policy. Essentially, for everything your government does, there is a university department full of professors who can, and do, tell it what to do. Civil servants and Congressional staffers follow the technical lead of the universities. The residual democratic branch of Washington, the White House, can sometimes push back feebly, but only with great difficulty.
(What's neat is that because of our armies' great success in the early 1940s, the governments of other countries respond to American public policy as well. The synchronization is international. Some of America's little friends overseas, such as Britain, have universities in the second rank. But there is only one global postwar academic system, the American one, and all top-tier universities are in the United States. The con by which policies devised by this system are passed off as global, transcending mere nationality, is sometimes called transnationalism. But I digress.)
The triangle of professors, bureaucrats, and public opinion is stable, because the professors teach as well as advise. Of course, there is a time lag. The system experiences some strain. But it will stay together, so long as the polarity does not randomly reverse - ie, because Cthulhu decides to suddenly swim right rather than left...
The leftward direction is, itself, the principle of organization. In a two-party democratic system, with Whigs and Tories, Democrats and Republicans, etc, the intelligentsia is always Whig. Their party is simply the party of those who want to get ahead. It is the party of celebrities, the ultra-rich, the great and good, the flexible of conscience. Tories are always misfits, losers, or just plain stupid - sometimes all three.
And the left is the party of the educational organs, at whose head is the press and universities. This is our 20th-century version of the established church. Here at UR, we sometimes call it the Cathedral - although it is essential to note that, unlike an ordinary organization, it has no central administrator. No, this will not make it easier to deal with.
This strange chiral asymmetry implies some fundamental difference between right and left. What is that difference? What does it even mean to be left rather than right? How can an entire system of independent thinkers and institutions, without any central coordinating agency, recognize that everyone should go left rather than right?
First, we need to define left and right. In my opinion, obviously a controversial one, the explanation for this mysterious asymmetric dimension is easy: it is political entropy. Right represents peace, order and security; left represents war, anarchy and crime...
One of the key reasons that intellectuals are fascinated by disorder, in my opinion, is the fact that disorder is an extreme case of complexity And as you make the structure of authority in an organization more complex, more informal, or both - as you fragment it, eliminating hierarchical execution structures under which one individual decides and is responsible for the result, and replacing them with highly fragmented, highly consensual, and highly process-oriented structures in which ten, twenty or a hundred people can truthfully claim to have contributed to the outcome, you increase the amount of power, status, patronage, and employment produced.
Of course, you also make the organization less efficient and effective, and you make working in it a lot less fun for everyone - you have gone from startup to Dilbert. This is Brezhnevian sclerosis, the fatal disease of organizations in a highly regulated environment. All work is guided by some systematic process, in which each rule was contributed by someone whose importance was a function of how many rules he added. In the future, we will all work for the government. Individually, this is the last thing your average intellectual wants to do, but it is the direction in which his collective acts are pushing us.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot...ified.html
The post is itself quite long, but made sense to me in the way it pieced together lots of stray ideas. We've all thought that SJWs seem like old Church Ladies, and that liberals seem like devotees to a religious faith. We've all noticed that schools and the media are always pushing us to the left, even if you vote for Republicans. This helps put that in a bit more historical context, showing that this isn't new, this is indeed a continuation of processes long in the making.