Instruction for propaganda purposes. Indoctrination for the professors who aren’t on the same page yet about veterans, conservatives, Republicans, etc. Also, a reason to feel good and justified for fearing such people and thinking they’re all crazy.

Loxodonta on April 7, 2009 at 10:13 PM

Tenure is a constant state of rising anxiety caused by the failure of the world outside the university to conform to your theories. Most academics are people who would look at a map, realize they are lost, and begin dynamiting the surrounding terrain until it looked more like the map.

Liberals frequently mistake their ability to construct elaborate theories about everything with “intelligence,” and spend a great deal of time patting themselves on the back over their superior brainpower. Actual intelligence requires adaptability and rational self-criticism, which are wholly absent from the leftist mindset – they know everything there is to know about everything, and their positions are never “wrong,” although the Party will occasionally issue official corrections of the approved positions, causing the previous positions to vanish completely. Academia is like this in spades – look at all the “scientists” who smoothly shifted from concerns about a new Ice Age to global warming, then suddenly announced the officially approved academic concern is now “climate change.”

Liberalism is endlessly attractive to the academic because it flatters their intellectual vanity. The worship of Big Government requires the belief that a small group of special people is more qualified to run every aspect of life than the benighted masses. Liberalism invites the academic to consider himself part of that small, special group. It leads to the embarrassing idol worship that characterizes all liberals, from dimwit blog trolls to lifetime tenured professors and Hollywood millionaires. Since the liberal is so special, so morally and intellectually superior to the herd, it is necessary for the leaders of liberalism to be absolute supermen – only a demigod could claim authority over the epic heroes of the faculty room. That’s one of the reasons why they magnify their leaders to such an absurd degree, turning them into objects worthy of veneration. A sad old fraud like John Kerry became Captain America, the greatest soldier who ever lived; Barack Obama is a Lightworker, evolved both mentally and physically beyond lesser men; Michele Obama is so stunning she can rock entire continents to their heels, and is surely Senate material as soon as she wants a seat; Hillary Clinton was the smartest woman in history until Michele Obama came along; Ted Kennedy is a “liberal lion,” and indulging him in the negligent homicide of a young woman was a small price to pay for his magnificence; and so on. It is a phenomenon visible in every leftist government, as you can see from the ridiculous stories Kim Jong Il circulates about himself, or the way liberals worship a rancid old thug like Fidel Castro and never fail to mention how “brilliant” he is.

The reverse is true, which is why you get insulting nonsense like this video. The opponents of liberalism are sub-human, psychotic, emotionally damaged… Note how the liberal never spends much effort trying to persuade his opponents of the rightness of his position. The enemies of the Party are not reasonable people who can be convinced, but rather mental defectives who must be denigrated and insulted at every opportunity. Some of this is tactical, as you can see from the now-infamous writings of Saul Alinsky, but a lot of it is emotional, and nearly involuntary. Of course an energetic female critic of the Party’s leaders must be a witless chillbilly sex toy. Of course soldiers are either innocent victims of Chimpy McHitlerburton, or dangerous human time bombs just looking for an excuse to flip out and strangle someone. Of course religious people are all degenerate inbreds who can’t think their way out of paper bags. De-humanizing these people spares the liberal the effort of engaging them, or questioning his own wonderful specialness. The more resistance they see to their theories among the general populace, the more insular and bitter the academics become, and the more desperately they worship the ideal of the strongman absolute ruler who can force the benighted masses to accept the wisdom of socialist theory.

There is only one thing that will break the intellectual rigidity, arrogance, and hidebound conformity of academia: competition. It is the thing they fear most, and they will do anything to prevent it from being introduced into education. As the Dan Aykroyd character said in Ghostbusters, “I’ve worked in the private sector. You don’t know what it’s like out there. Those people expect results!“

Doctor Zero on April 7, 2009 at 11:09 PM