Intellectual Violence

Some days, the jokes write themselves.

Behold: A pamphlet for California schoolteachers:

A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction
Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction

It includes this bit of wisdom:

While there is some value in students being able to complete work independently, when this is the only or most common avenue for learning or practicing, it reinforces individualism and the notion that I’m the only one. This does not give value to collectivism and community understanding, and fosters conditions for competition and individual success, which perpetuates the idea that if a student is failing it is because they are not trying hard enough or that they don’t care.

Behold, the magic word: "Collectivism."

The most destructive political concept in all of human history. The philosophy that gave us...

• Soviet Socialism (body count: 62M-127M)

• Chinese Communism (body count: 35M-103M)

• National Socialism (body count: 69M-94M)

That pamphlet not only points teachers toward an ideology of death and misery, it does so by invoking the most feared accusation in Western society:

Behold: "White Supremacy."

A couple Best-and-Brightest proffered a list of characteristics that can help the earnest do-gooder detect white supremacy wherever it festers:

• Perfectionism

• Sense of Urgency

• Quantity Over Quality

• Worship of the Written Word

• Paternalism

• Either/Or Thinking

• Power Hoarding

• Fear of Open Conflict

• Individualism

• Only One Right Way

• Progress is Bigger, More

• Objectivity

• Right to Comfort

While fault can be found in some of these, the overall message that such thinking or behavior is "white supremacist" is not only insulting, it's profoundly disturbing. It implies that minority students cannot be expected to perform at the same level as white students, it is an astoundingly condescending "soft bigotry of low expectations," and it dehumanizes the students the education system is supposed to teach, motivate, and empower.

It also flies in the face not only of my own individual-based philosophy (and anyone who calls it racist or white-supremacist is an ignorant piece of [redacted] who doesn't have the guts to argue the merits of his or her views), but of the most successful political philosophy ever devised.

The obsessive desire to reinvigorate and rehabilitate socialism in the West, despite a perfect track record of failure and destruction, makes for endless blog-fodder and endless mockery of the intellectual class, but the motivations that class feels cannot simply be "we are smarter, therefore we must manage the dummies."

Another piece of the puzzle came to light thanks to the brilliant Eric Hoffer,

[T]heir innermost desire is for an end to the "free for all." They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society.

Take note of the phrase "ruthless testing." That is a brilliantly succinct observation of the nature of free markets. While the word "ruthless" may be considered negative by some, it is best understood as a neutral "unrelenting."

Therein lies a truth about academics and intellectuals.

In the real, free market world, people must produce something of value in exchange for compensation. This might be as simple as digging a hole or raking leaves, or it might be developing and implementing an idea that improves people's lives. What you do is worth only as much as someone else is willing to pay for it.

In academic circles, this proximate and perpetual assessment of your "work product" is diminished, sometimes to irrelevance. A flood of Other People's Money via both government and the higher education scam combine with mechanisms like echo-chamber peer review and tenure to inure many Best-and-Brightest from actually having to produce ideas that work.

This, in turn, enables laziness and absolves mediocrity.

Laziness is widely regarded as a bad character trait. A "sin," if you will, and an affront to human potential. But, even laziness, properly channeled, can be advantageous.

I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it. -- Bill Gates

Laziness, when subject to the "ruthless testing" of a free market, births efficiency. Even ditch diggers will try to figure the easiest way to do their jobs, and if one of them comes up with a better shovel idea, everyone benefits.

On the other hand, laziness that's insulated from reality is toxic. When the only competition is for eyeballs, the impetus to come up with "look at me" exceptionalism is great, no matter how idiotic that exceptionalism is. When the price to pay for a stupid idea is zero, the person coming up with that stupid idea gets so wrapped up in his ego that others' failure to heed and worship that idea is their fault and their stupidity, not his.

This, I've concluded, is another big part of the reason for this resurgence of collectivist thought. It has always been intellectually appealing to a class of people who believe they should be in charge but who don't have the stones to seek that control in a free and competitive society. If they can manage to get enough people to believe in their vision, they can gain the power to implement their ideas without having them "ruthlessly tested."

How do they get people to believe? By promising them liberation from the free market in which they're expected to perform. By telling them that to believe anything else is racist. By informing them that success is a Bad Thing, and a tool of oppressors. By grinding into them the idea that individualism is evil, and that their only usefulness to society is by conforming to the specified behavior of their identity groups.

Since even those insulated academic circles are subject to market forces, the rhetoric keeps ratcheting up. This is in part how math, the purest form of rational thought, became "white supremacist." Someone was trying to one-up everyone else.

Another "part" is the endless excuse-making for the failures of the education monopoly that progressives have controlled for over half a century. Because black children are underperforming, the "outcome" yardstick of systemic racism informs us that the underperformance must be racist in nature. That east and south Asian students outperform white students is an inconvenient fact that's best not mentioned, of course.

What's at the core of all this? The refusal to accept personal responsibility. This fuels disdain for liberty, and motivates people toward either "victim" or "champion" mentalities. The victims blame everyone else for not having all that they want, and the champions blame everyone else for not bending the knee to their "better" way of doing things.

Because those who are blamed refuse to accept the blame, both the champions and the victims turn to the last refuge of the incompetent: Violence - of an intellectual sort. As in name-calling and casual accusations of whatever bigotry can be shoe-horned into the moment.

The woke believe that words can be violence. They believe this because they intend words to be violence.

We know better.