By the way, new video! Funny stories about my European travels. Nothing heavy at all.

Finally, I have a moment to write about the reasons why my university is being taken apart.

Our university system has two campuses, the original, older one, called C. and the newer,  called E. I work at the newer, the E.

C used to be known as a party school and it was popular because of that. It’s located in the middle of absolute nowhere and students liked that they could go there and be wild away from prying eyes. But that was the 1980s or 1990s, I don’t know, a long time ago. Students changed, the economy changed. Now students want jobs and economic prospects. C started collapsing while E, which is located 20 minutes from a large metropolitan area, began to thrive. Within our university system, over 60% of funding goes to the collapsing C. Things got so dire that a few years ago the thriving E had to dip into its strategic reserves to the tune of crazy millions of dollars to bail out C.

The administration of E saw that there was a massive opportunity to become more than a commuter school. E hired dozens of young scholars from the best schools in the country to raise its research profile. It worked. We reached all the markers for higher research rankings. We introduced new, exciting programs, like, just to give an example close to home, the ASL program that I started and that will fill 15+ sections next semester.

Of course, E started trying to re-negotiate the financing split. We argued that E should get at least half of the funding because that’s fair. We have more students, we do more research, we have a lot of exciting stuff going on.

But here’s the rub. In the area where C is located, there are no big entities providing jobs. C is the only reason that the area is kind of scraping by economically. You lose a lot of voters if you stop feeding C that requires more and more.

The Board of Trustees removed the E Chancellor who believed in helping E grow. Incidentally, he was the guy who saved E from forced vaccinations and made it possible for those of us tho wanted to teach in person all through COVID. He was removed and a new, utterly inexperienced Chancellor with a PhD in “Educational Leadership” was installed. If you are not in academia, you might not know that it’s enough to say the words “Educational Leadership” to a group of academics to have them explode with laughter. It’s not a real degree, it’s an embarrassment.

The new Chancellor is like Obama without charm or the gift of gab. A bureaucratic drone who’s aggressively incompetent but has a sky-high opinion if himself. Smug, self-righteous, and rude.

The new Chancellor started to dismantle E. The libraries were emptied. I’m sure many of you remember the photos I posted when it was happening. Admissions office and student recruitment programs were sabotaged and no longer work. I’ve been giving examples for the past couple of years and don’t want to repeat myself. Just yesterday we had an embarrassingly mishandled recruitment activity that makes me blush at how disrespectful it was to prospective students.

As expected, our enrollments dropped. We stopped hiring and filling empty tenure lines. Stopped offering tutoring to students. Stopped subscribing to anything. Stopped buying new equipment. If a piece of equipment dies of old age in a chemistry lab, we are told there’s no money to buy a new one, so suck it up. Now we are firing professors. None of this will send any students to C because they are too far away and there are great schools nearby. But nobody is left at E to ask for reallocation of resources. Plus, every reason to raise our research ranking will be gone, so that problem is solved.

Three years ago, a close friend of mine who is a professor in a STEM field and very mega MAGA told me that this was a conscious plan to bring down E and save C. I thought it was a conspiracy theory, for which I am now embarrassed. Next time we meet, I will apologize to my friend for my hubris of suspecting her of being a loon when in reality I was the hopelessly naive one.

The part of Illinois where E is located defied the Governor’s orders on lockdowns. It’s highly probable that this is an additional factor in Pritzker’s efforts to dismantle E and impoverish the region that votes solid red.

I love capitalism and I respect the free market. But only when it’s really free. A successful business should thrive without the government putting its finger on the scale and punishing it for political reasons. What we are seeing in this story isn’t old-school capitalism. It’s neoliberalism where the government plays on the side of failure and punishes success.

I am literally the only person on campus (aside from the top levels of the administration) who thinks tenured faculty will be fired.

I have forced myself to talk to many people. Not a single one of them takes seriously the administration’s very open promises to do this. They think the union will protect us. The Governor will protect us. The newspapers will protect us. It can’t happen because we are so good and indispensable. It just can’t happen, they say.

What I need to know, is this: am I a paranoiac or is everybody else in denial? I try to live according to the maxim that if everybody else around you looks like a lunatic, the only lunatic around is probably yourself. I have literally not found anybody who thinks about this as I do or really thinks about this, period.

Am I nuts? I hope I don’t need to explain that I very much want to be totally nuts in this situation. I’ll accept my complete nuttiness with gratitude and joy.

During COVID, I had Alex Berenson to keep me from thinking that I lost the plot and needed psychiatric care. On this issue, there’s no Berenson and I don’t know how to determine if everybody else is insane or if I am.

This is Yarvin writing about the revolution he himself brought into existence:

The best populist ideas seldom prevail—nor do the best populist candidates. Populism does not work. Its accuracy
rate is not zero, but nor is it quite at nuclear-safety levels. And it is not strong enough. It can win symbolic victories, but not take and hold power. It quickly tires out, gets hungry, goes home and grills. Its main effect is just to scare progressivism
and keep it in fighting shape, while arguably sometimes slowing it down. Or at least, damming it up to burst forth later.

Another fascinating thought in the book is how, without any authoritarian regime or dictatorship, we have an extraordinary uniformity of opinion across all Western and Western wannabe societies. Moreover, when we collectively change our minds, we do it extremely fast and in absolute unison. Overnight, we all turn the page and tacitly agree that the page on which we all were not an hour ago was shameful and terrible.

One example (mine, not Yarvin’s) is gay marriage. One day, Obama couldn’t get elected without condemning the idea. Then, in a dramatic reversal, he couldn’t get elected without passionately supporting it.

Yarvin asks, who presses the button that triggers this global turning of the page? Are we certain they know what they were doing? Are we completely confident that they should have that power?

In case people don’t know who Curtis Yarvin is, he’s the intellectual engineer of what became the Trump revolution. He created the philosophical underpinnings of a massive turn away from the reigning liberal consensus long before Trump came onto the political scene. If Trump never existed , there would be somebody else to play his role because the ground was prepared. Paradoxically, Yarvin is the most influential American thinker of the past 20 years whose name is completely unknown in the American mainstream even when the mainstream now inhabits the reality that his thought brought into existence.

Regardless with whether one “agrees” with Yarvin, if this is not a phenomenon deserving study and interest, I don’t know what is. We are kind of behind on paying attention in the US but I was in an indie bookstore in Spain last month and as I was randomly opening books by contemporary thinkers (including very Marxist and very centrist ones), I kept running across quotes from Yarvin. I’ll talk about a couple of these European thinkers in the nearest future but first I need to introduce Yarvin because otherwise it’s confusing what people are responding to.

The conference talk for my trip to Germany goes unwritten, today’s meeting remains unprepared, emails unanswered, bureaucratic forms unfilled, and I’m hidden in the backroom, reading Curtis Yarvin who finally appeared in book form:

There has never, in the history of any country on earth, certainly including England and America, been a regime which abandoned its role of managing the public mind. When it appears that the public mind is going unmanaged, look for any organ or power which is managing the public mind, but is not formally part of the state. Add this organ or power to your definition of “the regime.” Nothing has changed and nothing ever can. Sorry. Yes, I do realize that this is contrary
to our entire national myth. It’s really a bummer.

If you don’t agree that this is more useful and enjoyable than filling forms and preparing meetings, I’m not sure you are still fully alive.

Just one more quote so that everybody can share in the backroom fun:

What would past societies make of us? Whom would Lincoln or FDR, retrieved in our time machine, support in the 2024 election? We have no idea who these people were. So we cannot imagine their advice and we cannot benefit from it. We have no real history at all—not the story of what happened, just a story we tell ourselves. On the other hand both of these men were racists. Which candidate do racists support? Maybe both Lincoln and FDR would be Trump voters? Because white supremacy? Why would their trip in the time machine alter such a core belief? What would you show them from the present to convince them, without coercion, to change their minds?

There are several pages preceding this quote that detail racist statements by Lincoln and FDR and tell the story of FDR entrapping young soldiers in gay relationships to destroy their careers. I had no idea about this, and it looks like for FDR at least half of the fun was setting these rapey situations for his marks and then enjoy public descriptions of gay sex, using them to shame and persecute the young men.

The point of all this is to question our current understanding of the entire human history as one gigantic mistake deserving of nothing but contempt.

Choices are great. They can also become exhausting when you have to make them all the time. Choice oversaturation causes choice fatigue.

The relief a human brain experiences when choices are removed from at least one area of life is addictive. This is why so many people move away from search engines with their “your search term resulted in 2,980,623 results” to a simple, clean AI app with one single response to every question. With AI chatbots there’s nothing to choose from. A question produces an answer instead of a list of potential answers.

This is extremely dangerous because users can have their worldview bastardized and rewritten without even realizing it. But the respite from choice fatigue is so alluring that most people simply won’t care.

Back in July I self-mutilated to avoid going to a woke struggle session and remained bedridden for a month. Woke struggle sessions have increased in number and intensity since then, and I realized that self-mutilation is not the way. I have now come up with an alternative approach.

Stickers.

I make sticker collages in my notebook. An hour of peeling and pasting stickers, and I feel like I’m in a bubble that emits streams of light. I come into the woke seminars with a glow of a person in the midst of a religious experience.

This is what people call meditation, and it’s powerful stuff, indeed. Of course, stickers work for me and will have no effect on other people. The trick is to come up with your own calming experience.

The present does not believe in the wisdom of the past at all. The present knows what the past was: a long global nightmare of slavery, homophobia and bacterial infections. Wisdom? What wisdom? Everything they knew, we know, but we know so much more. DNA. MDMA. iPhones. H-bombs.
Need we say more? Science, anyone? This is the conventional view—the sociology of the present is verified by its quantum physics. It is worth remembering that the USSR and even the Third Reich were pretty solid at the hard sciences, leaving this not so great a case for our liberal democratic open society.

Curtis Yarvin, Gray Mirror

This is one of the women raising Musk’s children. She’s not their mom because these are purchased babies. It’s clear from the messages that her role in their lives is more limited than that of a nanny:

Lovely people, these are. Just lovely. Curiously, Zelensky, with whom Musk seems stranely obsessed, is raising two normal biological children with his legally wedded wife who is simultaneously their natural mother. This kind of thing still exists, it seems.