Morning on the River of No Return, Salmon River, ID

For those unfamiliar with me, I’m a graduate of multiple elite universities (Case Institute of Technology, Duke University) who elected to be a professor at a land grant institution (Washington State University – main campus in Pullman) for my career. I’ve also done sabbatical overseas, and lectured around the world, on every continent save Antarctica. I’m still open for invites there, FWIW.

To put it succinctly, I’ve kinda seen it all. But the academy that I joined out of high school, in 1979, has changed very dramatically in the past 45 years. Many of the causes of the Left (being anti-war, for example) have now been embraced by those same Lefties. Suffice it to say I’m stunned that the Left is now the pro-War party.

Along the way I’ve developed a theory I call Structural Memetics, which explains how information flows are created in content and complexity through the different topologies of social networks, as well as the psychosocial development of their agents. That’s a mouthful. And while I’d argue that it’s all not that hard, others tell me differently.

So it’s with great excitement that I find someone who gives examples in a way that precisely line up with my work, but in a way that is more accessible. That’s why I recently wrote a piece on Rob Henderson’s book, Troubled, and in particular his concept of luxury beliefs. What is a luxury belief? It’s a belief that elites have, and champion, that they don’t follow, but use to virtue signal to each other that they are elite. These beliefs often hurt the poor, whom the elites profess they want to save. A great example is “Defund the police.”

Rob is primarily working on the individual level in examples in his book. Which is fine — but the overall concept of luxury beliefs can also apply to institutional strategies, or entire societal edifices. Academia (which Rob discusses in the context of individuals and classes) falls into the same pattern. One can look at contemporary Wokism and its destructive fascination with infinite fractal categorization as a great example of aggregated luxury beliefs (intersectionality, etc. — everything but people forming their own opinions of others) as a primary cancer on both the individual and institutional psychosocial development process. No one has embraced this nearly as much as the entire academic enterprise. The universities that have pushed back against this can be literally counted on one hand.

People going to elite schools, for the most part, do not have to worry about their material circumstance, and usually have their employment futures secured. They are elite, and have been granted a lifetime of elite coding and signaling that they also share with high level employers. When they interview, they know how to shine. One more etiquette dinner will neither make nor break their lifetime trajectory. I taught at Duke as a professor for my last year before I moved to WSU. I remember a conversation I had with one very nice, and competent young man. I asked him what he was going to do after finishing school, and if he was worried about finding a job. “My father is on the board of a Fortune 100 company,” he replied. Even though this was 37 or so years ago, it simply wasn’t on the top of his mind. Woke had not yet been borne into existence, but the one thing I did notice with all my rich students (at the time, Enzo Ferrari’s granddaughter went to school there, and you can guess what she drove — it wasn’t a Volkswagen) was they were intellectually curious and most were also hardworking. They did not take well to drill — they were truly better than the average bear — and greatly appreciated creative educational planning and exercises. Telling them they were not going to get a job if they didn’t listen to me was obviously going to fall on deaf ears.

This is not true at all with my current crop of land grant students. In part because of the diligence of myself and the faculty in my college, our numbers of First Generation students + Underrepresented Minorities (some confounded benchmark) now is 34% of our engineering class. I’m proud of this number — it took some serious perseverance, and largely happened before Woke, or the current fascination with DEI even became a thing.

Yet they are being bombarded, through the copying and mimesis process that our larger institution follows with regards to beliefs in elite schools, with the same luxury beliefs that the virtue-signaling elite schools ostensibly embody. There are many examples of this — I can recall a recent trip to our student rec center where all the signal boards were largely dominated by announcements for the LBGTQIA+ community, including reading sessions for “queering the literature” (whatever that means.) Kids come to land grant institutions to learn stuff to get a leg up in the job market. It’s our professed purpose. Those other elite schools can do what they want — but the anchor departments of land grant institutions are Mechanical Arts and the Ag College. It’s not a value judgement against the other stuff. It’s just our fundamental charter. How is “queering the literature” going to help them make a buck? Or even provide any social meaning that isn’t inherently relationally disruptive that might give employers pause?

One of the most destructive parts I’ve seen transmitted to our land grant institutions, that we can ill afford, is the corrosive belief that hierarchy doesn’t matter. Elites, and children of elites, are smart enough to dodge this nonsense, while giving lip service to it. But poor students simply have no reference for it. And we, as faculty, at some level are supposed to cater to it. It all looks warm and fuzzy on the surface — shouldn’t we treat students fairly and equitably? But as I tell my students — once you get past basic human rights, you are not my equal. It’s a toxic message that you’re getting, that you’d best ignore. Any professor that tells students “I’ll learn more from you than you’ll learn from me,” is one best ignored, or better, transferred out of their class. Students are literally PAYING me money because I’m supposed to know more, and I’m supposed to teach them.

What these beliefs really do is set up the university as a low responsibility environment, and not very different from a dysfunctional family where narcissistic inversion — the children taking care of the parents — is never far from the surface. And worse, when the student hits the job market — especially the ones from dysfunctional families — they have no functional codes for finding a mentor that can actually help them learn. No one learns everything they need to know in college. Especially in engineering, you learn how to be an engineer the first three years on the job. But one can also see that elites, through luxury beliefs, are sabotaging the non-elites, who might actually believe that garbage. Already behind because of family dynamics, they fall further behind in identifying functional adults to help them, as well as the protocols for interaction.

I recently had a situation where I had two former students who came to me because they were underemployed. Both these students would be in a DEI-protected status group. Both would NEVER be considered a DEI hire – they were in the top quartile of students I’ve taught, or better. They were a male and female, and both, I thought, would have been placed in a prestigious company after graduation. Yet both had ended up getting scooped up by our employment vacuum scourge in mechanical engineering — mechanical contractors associated with the building trades, looking for hires to train as air conditioning inspectors — instead of getting hired by Meta, Blue Origin, or one of the myriad high profile and high prestige companies that support my clinic program.

My analysis will not be popular, but I think two things were likely in play. These students’ records supported getting an initial interview — they very likely got by the AI screening. But they were not armed with the right behavioral codes to “close the deal.” My personal intervention and recommendation would likely help, of course, in the future. But a lot of my students get jobs, often at these prestige companies, with no help from me at all. At some level, in the abbreviated interview process that hiring occurs (especially for new hires) they committed some sin of omission — no moment where the hiring manager sitting across from them profoundly thought “I want this person on my team!” And so they were edged out of another opportunity.

And the whole DEI enterprise is also profoundly harmful for their prospects. Even though there are incentive systems in place to hire underrepresented minorities, the reality many managers face is that if they do hire someone, and that person doesn’t work out, it will be almost impossible to fire them without some level of social stigmatization. What that translates into is that lowering the bar through DEI actually RAISES the bar both racially and in a class sense. Elites from underrepresented minorities, who already can deliver messages in the social codes of the day, can indeed quickly get hired. But those without that same coding — which is primarily a class consideration — are inherently sidelined, and underemployed.

Are these simply the times we live in? I actually think Peter Turchin, in his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, is spot on with his analysis that societal tumult dramatically increases when elites overproduce themselves. He notes in the book that polygamous societies undergo these changes at about twice the rate of monogamous societies (I can’t remember the interval, and just listened to the book) and it seems to jibe. Further, because there are not enough interstices for elites to plug into, as well as enough material wealth to distinguish themselves with, they start producing software instead of hardware. These beliefs, dependent on the competitive pressure, become more and more fractal, situational, and imposed from the outside as time goes on — a perfect explanation of wokism.

One of the unanswered questions I had when listening to Turchin’s book was how elites “cull the herd,” so there are not so many elites around. Elite overproduction has to end with some level of competitive elimination. Absent war and direct human extermination, what we’re witnessing with elite/land grant competition instead is high level memetic psychopathic gaslighting, with the emergent goal being that same process of elimination. Henderson writes in his book, Troubled, about how students at Yale would protest investment banking one day, while the next lining up to interview for the elite, high paying jobs at institutions like Goldman Sachs the next. Classic “stated vs. elected preference” bullshit. And since institutions can assume the same memetic character, they function in the same role of mimesis/mirroring of these institutions that profoundly handicap them from moving up precisely when the elite institutions are weakest. Instead of recognizing the lack of grounding and overt falsehoods regarding success the elites are propagating, and overt gaslighting happening on an institutional level, they end up as Tail End Charlies, taking the flak, and getting picked off as the formation passes overhead.

Henderson brings this up as well — the professed elite belief in “luck” as a driver in success. I myself have a very financially successful son, who is one of the blockchain pioneers. As one of the youngest founders of a Unicorn — a start-up hitting a $1B valuation, even I will tell people that luck was involved.

And it was. But my son also had the extreme advantage of me as his father, who drove constant problem-solving throughout his life. And he was exposed to the latest trends in tech through me. He learned self-education early on in his career, and basically taught himself the entire field of cryptography (which he has lectured at Stanford on in a graduate class.) And he worked hard as well. Luck indeed.

There is more to all of this, of course. But I’m going to ask readers to comment on this piece along the lines of “what statement do you hear from a given young person that immediately seals the deal for hiring them?” What is being omitted that you DON’T hear, that then causes you to down-sort a given individual?