Infantile Elites

The only argument that the administration was able to advance in support of its proposed measure yesterday was an appeal to emotion. We were asked to vote yes on the measure because several people had worked hard to prepare the text of the proposal. No other argument was advanced. Nobody even tried to claim that the measure was good for students or the university.

It is a strange argument because adult people should have emotional distance from the products of their labor. They should have an even larger distance from the others’ response to the products of their labor. It’s cruel to tell a 5-year-old that you don’t like her drawing of a Christmas tree. She is not at the stage of her development where she has a strong sense of self and can separate herself from something she created. She’ll think you are rejecting her if you reject her work.

An adult self, however, exists separately from its products. If your husband says, “honey, I don’t like this soup, is there anything else to eat?”, the child says, “mommy, I don’t want to talk right now, I prefer to listen to music,” and the publisher says, “unfortunately, we will not be accepting your book Neoliberal Love for publication,” it’s mildly disappointing but not crushing or deeply painful.

The administration wasn’t infantilising us with its appeal to “but we worked so hard, and you are hurting our feelings.” Children are immune to arguments based on this form of empathy. The administration was infantilising itself. It was asking us to take on an enormous amount of extra bureaucratic work out of… compassion for the administration.

We are seeing this in everything, including politics. It’s fashionable to say “vote for me because I have this identity that has suffered historic indignities.” We often respond by getting into an argument over whether the suffering the candidate claims is real. But that shouldn’t even be part of the discussion. Let’s say it’s real. So what? We are not your mommy.

It’s often said that people in power talk to us like we are kindergartners. I’m not seeing that, however. To the contrary, they are talking to us like they are kindergartners. We are supposed to be compassionate and kind to their poor results because we are supposed to see them as small and helpless. At a time when systems of power in politics, academia and everywhere else are consolidating to crush any form of dissent, the very people to whom increasingly more power accrues every day put on an act of being small, defenseless children.

This is how you know who has power these days. It is whoever can afford to take on this childish, highly emotional persona.