Social Matter

When many modern graduates receive their certificates of education, there tends to be a sense that they’ve actually learned very little. As people make their way through the ‘real world’ outside academia, it usually also becomes more apparent that what they learned in the classroom has little relation to the real world. Many academic theories, models, and methods are entirely self-referential. Even in the supposedly practical fields of technology and science, many academic disciplines are divorced from their industrial applications, making it so that any training in school will prove to have been useless at achieving its stated ends.

Much of what’s published on the internet — apart from the merely titillating — exists to at least try to provide some accurate information to people as a corrective against the enormous amounts of false, lossy, or noisy information which is on offer through more conventional mediums.

In Western universities, the humanities in particular have been taken over by left-wing political factions. Even courses which purport to teach the Western canon usually instead just teach semi-Communist dialectics about why Western Civilization is evil and deserves to be destroyed.

Although in many cases, the teaching takes, in others, something in the indoctrination process gets hitched up, and the people dissatisfied with those programs begin to look elsewhere for acculturation.

The fashionable thing to say nowadays is that the humanities are ‘useless,’ and that serious students should instead go on to learn ‘science, technology, and math’ so that they can go on to be good tax-paying citizens. This is only partially wrong — the West has forgotten the functional purpose of the humanities in terms of creating cohesion — both cultural and political — within a country’s elite class. The humanities aren’t actually useless subjects for stupid people which are graded easily on a curve. They’re necessary for creating a functional political economy with a coherent leadership class and a culture that can actually thrive.

Although today, it’s an either/or choice in many cases, in the past, much of the humanities instruction went on in the undergraduate years, which was followed by instruction in engineering, architecture, medicine, and other specialized fields. Further, it wasn’t seen as a universal middle class attainment, but a set of leadership training institutions from which the majority of even the youthful intellectual elite would be excluded.

The question isn’t either/or: it’s whether or not the country’s leadership in a variety of fields can even comprehend one another in order to avoid what’s typical for countries, which is for the leadership class to focus more on killing each other than administering a coherent political unit. Because our civilization is increasingly a technological one, that makes it even more important, not less, to develop and promote a coherent worldview for people who are also leaders in technical development.

Because people are often so dissatisfied with the instruction that they receive in over-funded schools, both public and private, they often turn to the internet for correctives. The complex that pollutes so much of our collective mental space with bad information tends to resent this competition, and dubs it somewhere between hate speech and heresy. But the demand for re-education remains insatiable, because when people try to apply invalid learning to the real world, they usually wind up failing, because their mental models of the world fail to map to reality.

Our writing here aims to be a corrective, starting where the misinformation is greatest and most damaging, and then spreading out from there. Bad information leads to bad decisions, and Western institutions charged with the guarding and promotion of truthful information generally focus on the opposite, even when the need for accuracy and relevance remains the same or becomes more urgent in the broader society.