Republicans have decided to blame their plummeting relevance to the young on scary, evil professors. Scott Walker has started making some silly beatings about the need to burden professors with so much teaching that they have no time to think or learn. Obviously, there is nothing such professors can teach anybody but that’s precisely the point.
Remember what I told you about political parties that will try to hang on to power by offering $19.99 solutions to complex problems? This is one example.
The $19.99 parties are doomed, and this plan by the hapless Walker is really doomed but, in the meantime, the especially facile will feel relief. The easy, snappy solution has been found! The nation-state is crumbling because Daddy (professors are obviously representatives of the symbolic father) is not working hard enough. Let’s force Daddy to provide, and everything will be right again.
But adults don’t get a Daddy to provide for them. They get to grow up and provide for themselves. And Scott Walker can’t give you a Daddy provider, no matter how much you whine and beg.
We are facing an enormous global transformation, and populists like Walker and Syriza are just wasting our time with their empty promises to turn back the clock and undo globalization, the information revolution, the Internet, the digital technology, etc. Walker, Syriza and Putin are peddling a fantasy where all of these developments can be taken back but that fantasy is silly, childish, and escapist.
Clarissa's Blog 
It’s a common recourse. “I’m not getting what I think I need, so I need to start squeezing the teet a lot more.” An attempt to bypass thinking is symptomatic of this day and age. There’s no “Why didn’t I get what I expected?” There’s no “Why did I go to a site called Intellectual Shamanism and then get upset when I did not find New Age shamanism, which would have appealed to my emotional and ideological proclivities?” There’s just the bashing and demand that I shut things down. The weakness of intellectuals is that we often try to impart our knowledge. That makes consumer types think that this inclination is compulsive on our parts. It isn’t though. We can enjoy our knowledge without having to impart it. The assumptions of the low brow and middle brow types that people capable of higher thinking are nonetheless motivated by the same drives as they — that is a need to dominate and/or gain social recognition — is false.
Those who make false assumptions need to bear the consequences for those.
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“We can enjoy our knowledge without having to impart it.”
Actually I prefer to enjoy my knowledge by using it to imprint my will upon others, but maybe that’s because I’m one of those evil INTJs who works to control portions of the world …
“The weakness of intellectuals is that we often try to impart our knowledge.”
Be less Sherlock Holmes, be more Professor Moriarty, that’s what I say.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a new class full of minions to imprint. 🙂
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Oh, I just strategise, which is cold of me, but it is political ju jitsu. If someone is going in a certain direction, like toward ignorance, I give them a gentle push. Or I give them enough rope to hang themselves. I’m less an imprinter and more of a facilitator.
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“I just wield the electric cattleprod, I don’t make the minions march into it.”
🙂
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“Let’s force Daddy to provide, and everything will be right again.”
You just described why “bringing the jobs home” will never work — let’s force Big Corporate Dad to leave the keys in the T-Bird so we can “have fun fun fun ’til Daddy takes the T-Bird away” …
Nope, sorry, my insurance company says you lot live in a bad part of town, and that if I’m to continue coverage on my Maybach (which I bought after selling the T-Bird for scrap after your last encounter with it), I must keep it parked in a secured carpark in another much nicer neighbourhood. 🙂
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Why are you claiming the Walker is a populist? He is essentially trying to gut public higher education. If Walker’s plan goes through, only the very wealthy will be able to afford quality higher education in Wisconsin. That seems to be the opposite of populist? (I agree with everything else you say. This is simply tragic. The UW was an excellent system and it’s so incredibly sad to see it destroyed.)
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Walker is appealing to the basest instincts of the most stupid: “Mean rich professors don’t work enough! Let’s get them off their lazy asses and away from the scary research we are too stupid to understand! Boo!”
That’s what I call populism. Appealing to the vast popular masses. Of course, the final goal is to rip off these same popular masses, but who cares? As long as they are given a comforting spiel, they’ll be happy.
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The task of intellectuals today is to facilitate these goons to go their own way, to the point that they create such a gap between themselves and intellectuals that their criticisms, demands or desires are no longer taken seriously. The difficulty will be in how to create and reinforce this unbridgeable gap effectively.
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Yes, but that really was the point of my earlier Mike Huckabee video …
Actual voting people elected that clown.
We’d hope that we could occasionally get an Adlai Stevenson-like candidate that Americans would vote for, but sadly that seems increasingly unlikely …
Meanwhile the crowd says, “Enough with the bread, we just want circuses!”
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Don’t worry about that. I had made a couple of short videos that I was sweating were way too far in favor of giving any friendly feelings to the far right (since my own cultural origins are far right) and some troll turned up on cue to warn me off for being too far to the left.
Really, keep them coming.
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I still have trouble believing that Huckabee is a real person and not some clever postmodernist artist who has created him as an artistic project.
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When that video was made, he was the current Governor of Arkansas.
He existed — he even tried to run for the US Presidency, which was almost more hilarious if it weren’t for the fact that some people again tried to vote for him.
Remember that bit from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series where someone patiently explains that the lifeforms on one planet, who are not lizards, always vote in lizards because they’re afraid the wrong lizard will get in?
Precisely this. 🙂
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“The task of intellectuals today is to facilitate these goons to go their own way, to the point that they create such a gap between themselves and intellectuals that their criticisms, demands or desires are no longer taken seriously.”
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They tend to create the gaps themselves by proclaiming, as one troll did recently, that I am not making myself understood or to put it more eloquently “am I smoking drugs?” I’m not sure why this particular troll always drops by to try to sell me his illegal substances. There ought to be a law against it.
But, as Nietzsche said one does not wish to be understood by ‘just anybody”. In fact I am currently building huge chasms between the majority of readers and my work by proclaiming that it is just “nothing” and can justifiably be regarded as “just nothing”. I want to get rid of the busy bodies and the freaks.
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Which of course means you’re covertly developing the perfect “Somebody Else’s Problem” field, which you’ll be able to use to hide nearly anything …
“Yes, but small mice run the world … oh, hey, look, a centipede, wait, what was I thinking?”
That’s how it’ll work …
When you get it working, naturally you’ll need to clue the rest of us in on how it works so we too can become safely unnoticed. 🙂
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I actually have no idea what that means. A small mouse? Someone else’s problem? This is a way of thinking I can have nothing to do with. I would never go around ascribing names to people or events like “small mouse” or demanding that everybody take on their fair share of some abstract notion of “a problem”. That’s a very silly game to play.
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