Movie Poster for ‘Giant’ — starring three true icons of the Silver Screen
One of the more interesting and pleasant surprises I’ve had in the past couple of months was finally viewing the movie ‘Giant’, on a flight home from Costa Rica. I’m a huge Robert Earl Keen fan, and the movie is mentioned in Lyle Lovett’s and his song, ‘The Front Porch Song”, about rural Texas.
“This old porch is a Palace walk-in on a main street in Texas It ain’t never seen or heard the days of G’s and R’s and X’s With that ’62 poster that’s almost faded down And a screen without a picture since Giant came to town, oh no I love them junior mints and them red hots too, yes I do, oh yeah”
Songs like this are coded regional language — a Palace walk-in is a movie theatre with seats (as opposed to a drive-in) that even ChatGPT struggles with a bit. If you’re from that part of the world, Easter Eggs abound.
The movie, released in 1956, was an epic drama, in the style of ‘Gone with the Wind‘, as well as the age. It deals with large themes, but only moderate pacing. For those interested, you can read about the top level in the Wikipedia piece. It was also one of the first pieces to deal with racism in Texas against Hispanics.
But in the context of this blog, what it really did was trace the memetic timeline of Elite development in the U.S. The main character, Bick (Rock Hudson), owner of the Reata Ranch (some half million acres) on the high plains of Texas, and modeled on the historic King Ranch, travels east to buy a stallion from a rich, agricultural family in Virginia. In the process, he returns with a bride, Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor), and thus the story begins. In the middle, Bick’s sister is killed by same stallion, who then leaves an inholding in the Reata Ranch to Jett (James Dean) who then turns into an oil man, and builds his own fortune. In the process, he proposes marriage to one of the daughters of Bick and Leslie.
What cannot be seen in the movie, at the time portrayed, is how after Jett persuades Bick to drill for oil, they all pack up and move to Kennebunkport, Maine, and merge into the East Coast elites, who along with families like the Rockefeller’s and the Roosevelts (even another 5 generations back) form the Neo-con side of the Republican party.
One of the big questions for me is how long does it take for a group of elites to become totally insulated (if not isolated) from the concerns of ordinary people. James Kunstler writes in his books about the modulating effects of dealing with the problems of household live-in help that helped, historically, bridge that empathy gap. But as generations wind on, locating your servants off-site and out of mind doesn’t provide the grounding validity that others might not quite see the world the way you do. And if you throw jet travel into the mix, one can draw a pretty clear line between the Reata Ranch and the WEF. One thing that is almost never discussed is how, after a certain evolution of both energy business and technical acumen, you almost have to be born into it (like farming) to stand a chance in the modern world. No Horatio Alger story is going to emerge and end up running a series of large oil platforms drilling for oil in the North Sea, or off the coast of Louisiana. We’re not talking Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage inventing the Apple Computer. So I’m totally spitballing five generations to create an insurmountable empathy gap between the Elites and the Poors. Condos at Big Sky, and membership in the Yellowstone Club will do that to you.
But there WILL be some of those truly ground-level innovations that will remain possible to create a Counter-elite caste. And that is where the Zuckerbergs, Bezos and Andreesens of the world come in. Everyone knows the story of Facebook, and more than a few know the story of Netscape. Thus a counter-elite is born, that has little connection to the endless wars of the East Coast elites. There is some fallacious thinking in that somehow this generation of counter-elites is more grounded to reality than the literal seven generations that left the high plains of Texas behind. Helicopters and meetings with Presidents, as well as security details will do that to you.
And wild cards pop up. Elon Musk is First Generation-and-a-Half when it comes to wealth. And he wants to go to Mars. The various blended elites (like Bill Gates – people forget that Bill’s dad was a member of the elite caste before Microsoft) or wishy-washy counter-elites (Mark Zuckerberg) may waffle around on Communitarian causes. But every now and then, someone shows up that isn’t interested in any of that. And is willing to push all his chips into the middle of the table. Every round. When it comes to SpaceX, it’s let-it-ride. Indeed.
What does it mean for the majority of us that are non-elite? Or actually poor? It seems like the current counter-elites understand the death of others’, as well as their own children. As opposed to the old oil/energy elites. But Peter Turchin has done some number counting (as well as Michael Lind) and show that no one really cares about the poor. If they benefit from large macro-social technology advances or trends, it’s only going to be incidental. Elon’s the closest to a large scale system architect. But the old institutions, which includes academia in whole cloth, can’t process any new thinking or motivation. Elon MUST be all about money (and it is true that rockets do cost money) but they can’t comprehend anything higher than the sky above their heads.
And so our current war between Elites and Counter-Elites is born. For sure, this piece is incomplete, and demands more thinking. But the current cycle started on the High Plains of Texas, with the elimination of the Comanche Indians, and follows through to the present day. As William Faulkner said, “the past isn’t even past.” And Giant is just the meditative piece for a summer night, to frame those thoughts.
This is a hard post for me to write. Why? Because I am an inveterate fan of the age group I teach — 18-24 year olds. I’ve spent my entire career advocating for them, and threw down with our idiot Provost (you can find out who she is if you’re really interested — do note she showed the max salary one could earn with an anthropology degree) but my efforts did not succeed in any meaningful lifting of COVID restrictions during the pandemic.
As we ethereally float through the subsequent years from 2023, when I would consider the pandemic officially “over” (whatever that means) it becomes increasingly obvious that young folks, in critical developmental stages, took major damage to their psychosocial development. The fact that it’s not discussed, other than with the occasional “tsk, tsk” is a societal failure. You cannot fix what you don’t acknowledge, and you can’t acknowledge what one’s flaccid institutional philosophy won’t even recognize. It makes you wonder what all the human development people are doing. So this is my take. Make of it what you will.
For the record, I run a large engineering design program, that fulfills the capstone (last class) requirement for a moderately large undergraduate university mechanical engineering program. My program is profoundly different from most programs, though, in that I seek out sponsored work from corporate elements, with real deliverables. The money allows my students to participate in a real trial run in being a practicing engineer, as well as practice basic business travel skills. Because I’m located in Pullman, WA (the functional ends of the Earth) almost all the clients for the program are somewhere across the state, and occasionally across the nation or the planet. Most kids drive back to the west side of Washington to visit their sponsors, but some get on planes. Almost all stay in hotels (it’s often the first time where they’re completely responsible for reservations, etc.) and they must deal with their client as a real customer. All of this is intentional.
Young people’s brains are relatively soft at 22, but they are on a trajectory to adulthood that for most will occur around 26 years. It’s my job to make sure they are on the right trajectory. Most of my students are young men, though I have a modest percentage of young women as well. There are developmental differences between the two sexes, but it’s not significant in the context of my class. What the students are really working forward to is establishing an independent professional identity as an engineer. The real work, and the real deliverables, buttress this path. Students simply cannot argue with me that the work is somehow irrelevant, or “jumping through hoops.” Someone they might want to work for has given the work to me, and paid for it. And my sponsors are not allowed to exclusively mentor the students. The clients are supposed to act like customers (they have a script.) I’ve educated somewhere north of 3800 students, with over 550 projects. As a friend of mine once said “Chuck — no one has turned more design cycles than you.” I think that’s a bit much, but not by much.
During the pandemic, we carried on as best we could. When students were sent home in March 2020, our remote work practice game was already strong — we live in Pullman, after all, and all the work was completed on time. My clients were amazed, but I was not surprised. And we held up through the isolation of Fall 2020. Projects were still on Zoom, but I had demanded one of our best classrooms for it (it looks like the War Room in Dr. Strangelove) and we did OK. In Spring 2021, I forcefully lobbied for face-to-face classes (many students were already in Pullman, since they had rental agreements) but allowed kids to decide if they wanted to Zoom in or sit in the classroom. About half did. But their faces were masked.
People cannot understand how absolutely destructive masking is in the educational process until you have to teach a roomful of masked kids, that have to collaborate together. A big part of my class is getting kids to form high-performance teams, as well as get to know others in the class. Our situation at WSU is not particularly unique. The students after they graduate will go over to the Puget Sound area and work with each other. It’s a small world. But if you don’t have an opportunity to get to know your alumni peer group, it hurts. On top of that, it also makes it impossible for me to remember individuals in my class. Masks destroy individual identity — that’s the point. And this matters as far as placement goes. Lots of alums count on me for recommendations, and I can’t give them if I don’t know the students.
The downstream result, though, is that instead of having 50 friends, the students mostly ended up with one or two. If there was a pattern, it seemed that students never exceeded a peer group of over four. No cross-group relationships really formed up. So any kind of scaling management of friends at appropriate distances also did not develop.
We were all back in person in Fall 2021, but still masked. The students held up pretty well until November. And then there was kind of a cascading collapse of spirit. Students stopped looking for jobs, we had an increase in predatory hiring from low level companies, and initiative fell through the floor. Spring 2022 was the weirdest vibe (everyone was still in masks for most of the semester) I’ve ever experienced. No one could seem to connect with anyone outside the 3-4 person affinity groups. We all shipped product — one thing that has been interesting is that students’ ability to design things (somewhat a function of individual creativity) did not decline.
But the social scaffolding started falling away. Knowing how to act took a hit. The construction of their social framework, both internally and externally, was not sufficient. And to this day, they still suffer.
But what does that really mean? For a more structured view of deficiencies, we have to go back to our canonical Knowledge Structures. From my experience, students start developing Tribal knowledge around 4 (think birthday parties, Christmas and Santa Claus) and then lean into Authority-driven codes around 6. These continue to be embellished and expand as students get older. Legal behavioral coding (rule following) starts in earnest around 10, and by the time they’re about 20 they learn to trust their own judgment, and focus on goal-based behavior. During their entire youth/young adulthood, though, they continue developing all these modes and structures.
This leads to important social coding development — which directly influences how they will get jobs. People interviewing engineering students are looking for mature actors. Engineering is not like most jobs where decisions are inconsequential. Bad decisions can kill people. And while every engineering firm has a process of check and cross-check on major decisions, most importantly you want your young engineer to recognize they might NOT know something, and backtrack and find a more experienced engineer to help them.
But now, we come to a rub. Students are underdeveloped because of the pandemic in the primary understandings of both authority-driven and legalistic hierarchy. They can sullenly submit to Authority. But they don’t know why, and the false obedience they’ve been beat into them in grade school and high school turns into a liability. They’ve never been conditioned to understand the higher rationality of turning to your elders for knowledge. Older people, already severed from contact for 3+ years, are not viewed as a resource at all.
And young women suffer more than any. All the academy does is teach that men in general, and certainly older men in specific, are predators to be avoided at best. This is deeply problematic in engineering, because most of the people ANYONE deals with are older men. The dynamic became even more exacerbated during the pandemic – a distorted social compounding of alienation. And writing about it is taboo.
In the absence of any formal development, students will compensate, mostly through cultural borrowing. And in the modern university, that cultural borrowing is the ethos of the Longhouse. Everyone’s a victim, or potential victim. Always be nice, regardless of the circumstance. Empathy is sympathy. And who can really empathize when you can’t see someone’s face? You can’t read people. So at best you can struggle through indoctrination of codes about people’s ethnicities.
The lack of ability to follow simple rules really emerged during the pandemic, and continues through to this day. I had a situation this last semester where students from another section were barging into my classroom during lecture. My classroom is somewhat unique in that it has some lab construction space as well as a large set of tables. I also keep that classroom unlocked at all hours so students can congregate.
I finally got tired of the lecture time intrusions. I asked the students why they were in my classroom. “We want to work on our projects.” I said “No — now get out.” But instead of all of them leaving, three scurried out quickly. A large young man and a young woman proceed across the classroom to fetch some of their items, in obvious defiance of my mandate. The young man stood there and glowered at me. I sit on a couch at the front where I lecture from. I didn’t move. At the same time, I was rolling my eyes and thinking “what kind of gangsta shit is this??”
The students were admonished by my co-instructor later. But none came back to apologize for their behavior. Instead, a couple decided to play games with lecture time. And more than a few hung outside the door like feral raccoons, unsure of what to do. Insane. These are college seniors.
Now I’m an old dog — or as I like to refer to myself, an Old Bull Elephant. Most of my students are young men, and it’s the job of the Old Bull Elephant to civilize the younger bulls. It’s simply not a job for the faint of heart, and at 62, it’s about time for me to retire. So I decided to ask the Young Bull Elephants in my own section about what they thought about me throwing the other students out who had come in. They had very mixed, averse feelings. Most were along the lines of “they were just getting their stuff” or some such icks. I took it as an opportunity to explain to them that showing up in a restricted space at work, without permission, is generally a firing offense. You’ll be expected of a safety violation, or potentially industrial espionage. Not a good look. I asked one of the young women in the class, whom I’d had a good relationship with. Her comment? “It was more disruptive to do what you did.” It was obvious where her affinities lay. As well as her understanding of hierarchy and boundaries.
But what I did learn with the dialogue with the students was simple. They were four years behind. They couldn’t understand appropriate boundaries. They really couldn’t understand my position of authority. And they also couldn’t see why you might need rules or protocols to navigate a work environment. The ensemble of all these things turns into what I call social coding – that mix of communicated signals about how things work in an environment so a.) work gets done, and b.) conflict is minimized.
Even with my own sons (26 and 24) I see pandemic deficits. Their social circles are notoriously small. The younger son, a computer science major, went to college during the entire COVID cycle, and to say they were betrayed by the professoriate is an understatement. Most of his professors went back to countries of origin, to deliver lectures online, and often just published online. Billed as convenience for students, the reality is that both sides, students and faculty, played into a near-total collapse of expectations. It’s no surprise that both my sons are professionally successful, but are in a process of rebuilding socially. In the context of my kids, it’s with a large 3rd generation Mexican family who works with the younger boy. When you don’t have the scaffolding, the smart bet is build from the bottom up. I’m grateful. But it’s still a tremendous loss for them of that time.
I happened across a video some may find offensive (you’ve been warned) that completely captures the meta-problem. In the video, a young woman is being asked, in front of her boyfriend, what’s the most guys she ever slept with in one night. She said ‘ten’. He became extremely unhappy, and broke up with her on camera.
Learning lessons the hard way
Her rationalization is self-centered. In her morality, she had not been unfaithful during their relationship, so any actions she had decided to take before simply were irrelevant — to the point where she would disclose this on-camera. There were no real rules save those created in her brain, and the only thing that mattered was the “now”. She doesn’t seem to exhibit any particular neurodivergence or condition. Instead, it is a meta-constructed behavior of the age. And while it might be interesting to speculate on her state of mind, it’s more helpful to understand this, instead of the “kindness matters” solipsistic frame of mind, as a reversion to a more Tribal/Magical mindset of unregulated sex. It is indicative of where we are as a society, and not just in the context of some moral vacuum. As long as you’re nice, you can do what you want. And in true post-modern form, everyone else has to eat the sandwich.
People do ask me how, going forward, they should guide their own children. I tell them all the same thing — socialization is THE most important part of adolescence and post-adolescence. It used to be implicit (if sometimes mocked.) But now it has to become explicit.
And if you’re looking for guidance out of the contemporary academy, I’ve got some bad news. We’re chock-a-block full of neurodivergent individuals, and outright disruptors. They will produce no meaningful research to show that these things are important, and will only grudgingly come to any level of acceptance that we were enormous part of the problem during the pandemic. Trust me — I’m not going to receive any academic award for writing this piece.
But we have to recover. More socialization. More work ethic. More understanding of boundaries. And more fun. It’s the way forward. Because life is short. And our elaborate, complex society offers little time for this generation to start on the trajectory to create their own families.
We already robbed them of four years for our elite paranoia.
Friends are where you find them –Ginger and Mike, Costa Rica
One of the biggest problems I’ve seen, in my long career as a university profession, is the total ungrounding in time and space that happens in university decision making. One of the most prized possessions inside any given department is space inside buildings, and this is only modestly divided rationally. Seniority matters, and as such, if you’ve occupied a given space for a really long time, it really is your kingdom — regardless if your kingdom is coming apart, or came apart years ago. As a professor, you literally get to hold onto this until you retire or die. A further extension of this is the constant construction cycle that also happens on university campuses. Find me a campus where a new building is not being built, and I’ll show you a campus on the edge of collapse.
To be fair, universities must be modernized regularly, and lots have been around for over 100 years. But a lot of this is memetic construction of mindset that the entire social system feeds into. “Pharaohs need pyramids” is what I’ve told every person puzzled by the phenomenon. It’s deeply baked into the incentive structure as well. You’re not going to become a provost (head of many deans) from being a dean if you haven’t supervised a large-scale construction project.
And when it comes to making timely decisions, or having any sense of rationality in that decision making, good luck with that. You’d think in a fast-paced field like engineering, we’d be constantly updating our course curriculum. Not so fast. Even if we wanted to revise our curriculum in engineering, there are myriad committees that are university-wide that exist to review and approve various changes. Certainly, some review is warranted. Though every University president alive lies through their teeth about this, the university actually sells reliability — not innovation. But there are days when we fall increasingly behind, and for those of us attempting to stop the plane from crashing, it feels like we’re out on the wing of the B-29 with a wrench, desperately cranking away to fix an engine, and hoping we can hang on and not get blown into the propellor.
I’ve been attempting to put into words what this affects — to name something is to at least start to tame it. I came up with the term “Decision Tempo”. How long do we take to make a decision of particular scale? There is no official formula for any of it. Inside an academic department issues are topically assigned to various committees, who are supposed to ruminate on them and then bring them back to a faculty meeting for a vote. Faculty meetings are the butt of every joke in academia for reasons. They allow nit-pickers to, well, nit-pick. From a memetic perspective, what this means in a Legalistic v-Meme organization, where status matters, individuals can argue endless exceptions to generalized rules, to fix smaller and smaller problems, in the pursuit of completeness. What’s more interesting is that history in most of these decisions is only contained in an oral tradition – a true Tribal/Mythical v-Meme flex. We’ve cycled back, even in my department, which is modestly functional, to various overall curriculum changes multiple times. As now one of the two most senior faculty, I’m often the only person that can even remember where we were 20 years ago.
With Decision Tempo, the term, I can at least start the conversation with younger faculty about what theirs might be. Swimming in a static world without time, there isn’t even any consideration of how long most decisions take. There are tons of decision-making frameworks (of course) and if you can’t come up with your own, you can always use Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT). Google it.
If there’s a larger lesson, the first step of transitioning out of emergent, v-Meme, unconscious strategies is to name and make conscious something you’re attempting to optimize. As with Decision Tempo, you’ll find others have thought about it. Then you’re at least part way towards changing the memetic structure of our organization. Because once you confront Decision Tempo, you can then have a discussion on how you view trying new things, and the cost of failure. Which is THEN the root cause of innovation. As discussed in this article on SpaceX and the Boeing Starliner.
Punta Marenco, Costa Rica — Corcovado National Park
I haven’t really written much about the Trump administration since the election. Most of it, quite frankly, because of the derangement of the Left, and unfortunately, in particular, my age cohort (I’m 62.) Upon being told that I voted for Donald Trump, I’ve dealt with long-time friends basically disowning me. And even though I live the life of an oddly functional hermit, I still find it disturbing.
There is an axis of civilization that runs N/S through society, with independently generated, empathy-driven relationships on the north end, and with externally defined, belief-based, and title-driven relationships on the south end. One of the reasons that you make so many friends when you’re young is your neuroplasticity is high, and you have few ingratiated experiences leaving isolated biased tags in your hippocampus, causing you to have limbic withdrawal for nonspecific reasons. As people age, though, most folks do not continue to proceed upward along the path of wisdom, acceptance of metacognition, and a more conscious, questioning and data-driven perspective toward life’s circumstances. Instead, biases become even more rigid, and if you’re not in an environment where you’re encouraged to keep a flexible perspective, mental decline is inevitable.
And so it’s happened with my friend cohort. I have yet to be asked by almost anyone exactly “why” I voted for Trump, among anyone that I’ve known over 10 years. I have my reasons. The Democrats kept a man with a pudding brain in office for four years, and offered up a combo cipher/alcoholic as the replacement, in a midnight coup that turned out to be disastrous for their political fortunes. I voted for the counter-elites I describe in this piece.
But worse were the narratives that the Ds rallied behind. Almost all of these, outside of the typical bland “we’re going to fix the economy” non-specifics, were what I call Collapse Narratives. What is a Collapse Narrative? It’s a governing story that can be detected by a series of factors:
No absolute metrics of any particular policy issue. Everything is relative, and explained in relative terms.
Expectation of the national interest to forfeit any larger sense of self-survival.
Demonization if one protests the myth, instead of consideration of personal interest of any constituency.
Boundary collapse across the psycho-social landscape of a society.
It’s not hard to dissect any of the policies of the Democratic Party along these four lines. Take open-border immigration, and the flood of illegal immigrants into our country. While there were vague discussions of immigration (we need more LEGAL immigration, whatever that meant!) there were never any numbers discussed (#1). Additionally arguments were constantly generated along the lines of allowing more people in, regardless of national origin, because relative to the general population, suspicious figures were floated saying “any immigrants are just better people than the people already here.” Things like the fact that more people add a quantum to your chance of being murdered, raped, or robbed simply didn’t matter. If they weren’t here, your numbers wouldn’t go up.
And subsequent to that is the current war over deportation of various gang members and criminals that are already here. Look folks — if you entered the country illegally, then you are a criminal by definition. But there is quite a gradient even among that crew. The recent procedural doubling down on Juan Abrego Garcia, a domestic violence perpetrator and likely gang member, shows that the Democrats aren’t really interested in having a functional country. All the various cries about “due process” are largely irrelevant, as “due process” as a term means, a la Humpty Dumpty, whatever we want it to mean.
The Democratic goal is derailment of society, building on the efforts already started by the non-functional Biden regime. What is especially laughable is that currently, in our legal system, what is known as “prosecutorial justice” — where a perp strikes a deal with the prosecutor — dominates some 97% of all criminal justice. That means “due process” means someone accusing you, with a modest basis, and then you figure out how you’re going to give in to avoid time in the Big House. It only involves an investigation by police, with the prosecutor’s assent. And that’s for citizens — which is NOT required in immigration law. “Due process” is another Collapse Narrative.
That leads us to #2, which then gets back to some needed sense of cultural homogeneity. Countries can be diverse — but you get to the point where societies have no assimilative power whatsoever. That is inevitably going to lead to conflict among parties, in unexpected ways. I was raised as a Catholic, with a Muslim background (my father was Iranian, but an avowed atheist) — but I have no desire to live in a predominantly Muslim country. Islam has lots of problems that I’m directly familiar with, that I haven’t written about because it would distort a lot of the other information I’m transmitting on this blog. And I can tell you there are reasons that various Islamic countries are societal backwaters.
To even voice these types of observations — that there is a scale we can measure cultures on regarding being better or worse for human flourishing — can rapidly lead to demonization (#3) of the writer. Post-modernism has led us to the point where we see LGBTQ people protesting FOR Palestine as some kind of Promised Land. I can guarantee the idiocy of this level of affinity of self-interest is appalling. I view the current Israeli/Palestinian War as a profound tragedy, for both sides, which is also why I haven’t written about it. But it’s also true that the same constituency screaming against Israel would be rounded up and exterminated by those same people they’re ostensibly attempting to save. It’s just a fact.
I also view the outcome as historically predictable. You fly a bunch of males organized by a neo-medieval government in motorized parawings into a country, who then kill, rape and kidnap 1400 or some odd women and men, you’re asking for total war. The only parallel I can come up with is Arthur “Bomber” Harris in World War II, head of RAF bomber command. Given the job of stopping the Nazis, he was paramount in making a Nazi surrender irrelevant. He did this by functionally leveling literally every German city of a particular size, by fire-bombing them. I absolutely do not condone genocide — but patterns of history repeat themselves.
And getting back to the point — it’s a profound Collapse Narrative when you advocate for people who, given the chance would kill and enslave you.
Finally, looking at #4, boundary collapse is written all over the various Collapse Narratives the Left ascribes to. Men in women’s sports, or bathrooms — talk about a historic removal of sex boundaries. The war in Ukraine — we have nothing to gain by continuing the war, other than loss of national treasure as part of a perverse globalist enterprise. Yet I have many acquaintances that would demonize me if they knew my views. That’s a crazy Collapse Narrative — that our friendship is more worthless to them than a particular In-group view, on a conflict with no geographic resonance, that has absolutely no bearing on our actual relationship.
Organisms, including nations, collapse if they cannot maintain homeostasis and intact boundaries. Every organism alive exists with some combination of flux of nutrients and influences from the outside world, along with the ability to modulate those same inputs. A human being is itself only a modestly 3 dimensional prospect, with a mouth, fractal structures called alveoli in one’s lungs, and an alimentary system for absorbing food. Too much stuff comes in over the boundaries and a person dies. Collapse Narratives demand exceeding those boundary limitations, both biological and psychic.
What’s even worse is that we have an entire elite class championing obvious Collapse Narratives as virtuous. None of the dominant myths used to signal virtue by our elites have any practical benefit to the majority of the population. And they’re directly fraudulent. When Trump’s immigration crackdown commenced, all the major news outlets binged on the notion that vegetables would rot in the fields, and a famine would ensue across the land. Yet every day, going to the grocery store, there was nothing but the usual fresh vegetables available for sale.
On the issue of Trump’s tariffs — an attempted re-balancing of trade, at least with the intention of moving us back from the heavy financialization of our work sector to more manufacturing, the elite class screamed bloody murder. I’d like to think that at least a little of this screaming was rational — tariffs and global trade are an evolutionary system, and interconnections are many, and hidden. But it turned into more screaming that an international order that had benefitted elites was actually what was at stake. The isolation of the professional class from the needs of the working class had been thorough before 2020, and certainly exacerbated by COVID. Populism had been mapped to Nazism in the press. And the resistance toward this was another example of a Collapse Narrative.
One of the most pervasive of the Collapse Narratives has been the very real societal war around mainstreaming transgenderism — especially in youth. California and other Blue states have been famous for going so far to hide childrens’ depression and gender dysphoria away from parents with legitimate guardianship rights. Destroying families is directly advocating for collapse. Families are far from perfect as support mechanisms for individuals. But I can tell you, as someone who only has my immediate children and wife, they’re far better than nothing.
And then there is the issue of men in women’s sports. Democrats, even in the face or realizing how divisive this issue is to the public, constant dissemble on it. “It’s only a few kids,” is the classic riposte. If it’s only a few kids, then why die on that hill? The more I dig into this, the more obvious it becomes that there is a ton of psychopathy behind many of the transgender champions, as well as the champions of the champions. Giving in would mean giving away a powerful tool of disruption of society. And so another Collapse Narrative is born.
Societies are oriented, North/South, along a line that maps to the v-Memes I talk extensively about on this blog. The north end of societies are predicated on cultures that support individual choice, and develop people who are actually capable of handling those individual choices in a responsible, connected fashion. Down at the bottom are non-differentiated Tribal societies, where everyone inside the dominant group are “the people”, and everyone outside is worse than disposable.
You cannot have the current complexity of society without a well-scaffolded stack, because without that, your society has no hope in hell of generating the complex web of information such a society needs to exist. And that stack is based on data-driven, trust based relationships. You have to have scaffolded trust not just for moral values. You actually need it or you can’t support the number of transactions, information and otherwise, to make it happen. Transaction velocity matters, and translates to sophistication of products, as well as diversity and quantity of goods on the shelf.
And the core of that is development of the individual, as what my friend Daniel Goertz calls the “dividual” — the person in context of themselves, and the society.
Collapse Narratives are crafted by psychopaths to undermine that concept — through an advocacy of self- and societally destructive myths that break down an individual and their boundaries and turn them into an organic soup, not unlike what happens to a caterpillar in a chrysalis. But it’s highly unlikely, after the mass killing that actual collapse will entail, that much of a butterfly will pop out.
Every now and then, a stunning example of empathetic insight happens across my feed. And yes — often, it is funny. People wonder about place-taking/rational empathy — these two videos are amazing.
They’re AI-generated, but quite obviously, the script was not. I think. If so, we should expect the machines to take over while we’re buckled over in laughter.
Episode 1
Episode 2
For more v-Memey goodness on Rational Empathy, go here. And here.
Birds Eye View — being on an abandoned tropical island
One of the questions I ponder quite a bit is this: “What, exactly, is AI good for?” I’ve written quite a bit about how it works (e.g. this post and others) and how AI could be very good for things that are already known. But as I’ve said in the past, AI is NOT good for things that are not known. It doesn’t do anything other than low level knowledge synthesis.
What that means in the information/memetic space is that if anyone expects AI to figure out novel strategies or new designs, you’re going to be waiting for a long time. Most breakthrough innovations come from new combos of dissimilar information from different fields, or completely new, and unpredictable discoveries. This is embodied in the concept of knowledge structure evolution. An AI, locked in the meme space inside a computer, cannot really comprehend anything new — yet.
But what AI can do is decomplexify, or rather reconstitute information that’s coded for sophistication.
AI is perfect for reading large documents and pulling out the relevant knowledge fragments. That’s pattern matching. And AI can do this in spades. Two of my students just constructed an agent that will take a complicated piece of academic work, and create summaries and how-to lists of the important information. This is a breakthrough in and of itself in the academic space. Literally no one reads tedious academic work — it’s one of the reasons I started this blog. I was explaining this exactly to an outside consultant who has turned into an asset by helping my design program. “Darin — when I say that if we write this paper, ten people will read it, I am not using the number ‘ten’ metaphorically. I mean only ten people will read it.” If you want to actually disseminate an idea, you have to use a different format. This blog is closing in on 400K hits from around the world, and I consider this blog esoteric. Had I spent that time writing papers, maybe 60 people would have read my ideas.
While AI still sucks at more complex analogies, though, it is great at following homogeneous bread crumbs. Pointers in information that point to other, connected information is exactly what it does best. This is exactly what DOGE, Elon Musk’s brainchild is doing when it parses large budgets. It can hunt through 5000 page budget documents with ease. So you literally can deconstruct the old saw “we’ll know what’s in it when we pass it.”
But even better, inside networks of information that is largely homogeneous, it is really good at following the money. The Democrats and Republicans have been, for the last 15 years (or more) been constructing flows of money out of the federal government, which has at least some rules about how that money might be spent, to a variety of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that are far less constrained. Humans have historically (formerly journalists) been the ones to do this work. But it’s extremely tedious, and the biggest problems humans have is to know where to look once they actually find the pointer. This almost inevitably involves information requests, and while the information may be hiding in plain sight, the investigators can’t know this. So they end up relying on hostile information stewards at the organizations they’re investigating — even if the information is a public record.
Two individuals who have cracked this code are Mike Benz (@mikebenzcyber) and @DataRepublican ‘s work on what Mike calls The Blob. Here’s a linkage piece if you want to follow the Byzantine bread crumbs on how USAID was diverting large sums of money into Congress-Critter’s spouses’ pockets, through sinecures. I’ve been fortunate enough to talk to Mike on his frequent X Spaces, but haven’t connected with @DataRepublican yet.
I haven’t asked Mike yet how much exactly is his savvy vs. the AI usage, but I guarantee that figuring out these pathways would be almost impossible without AI.
The key to understanding this concept is understanding on the top level data homogeneity. That’s something people can grab onto. But how do we win if data is functionally the same, but in different formats? Or in different databases? This level of differentiation makes the task of following the breadcrumbs almost impossible for humans in a timely fashion. But it ‘s something an AI will make short work on. If you want to ask an AI how a penguin might be like a submarine, or what to do to make the penguin swim faster, well, good luck. If a human hasn’t answered that question somewhere on the web, you’ll likely get back garbage.
But monetary flows? That’s a different story. And that is exactly what is happening now. Which is why the institutional class is in stitches over DOGE and Trump.
Stay tuned. Elon said this a while ago — the distorted media landscape we’ve inherited is not only what is explicitly printed. It’s what has been left out. And that’s more than you can imagine. But AI can find it.
One of the most vexatious arguments, to me at least, is this whole idea that “smart people should run the world.” As a certified Smart Person, I can tell you that the last thing you want is for smart people to COMPLETELY run the world. I do think smart people come in handy — we can do particular things very well, and some things that no one else can do that’s not a smart person. But having not just fallen off the turnip truck yesterday, I’ve known plenty of people that wouldn’t score so highly on something like an IQ test that have saved my bacon.
What’s worse, from an epistemological perspective, we have a very poor idea of what “smart” even means. Smart can often mean self-delusional, and that kind of BS leads to all sorts of sadness and death. I really do like this video by Gurwinder (the full credits are on the Youtube clip.) Gurwinder’s a pretty smart guy himself, and on the way to becoming wise.
The short version is that smart, or rather High IQ people can be very good at self-delusion, in that their brains can create false, self-justifying scenarios that they themselves can believe. And then because they often have more intellectual/memetic tools at their disposal, they can be very good at amplifying these beliefs. In status-driven hierarchies, they can rise to the top.
But then, if you actually study some of the concepts on this blog, you see how this can become very self-limiting. Why? That old concept of Grounding Validity. It’s not enough to have things that are complicated and sophisticated. Sooner or later, you’ve gotta ground your ideas (or at least try) in some kind of reality. Touch grass, as it were. Or else you’ll envision planets like Dune, and have spaceflight-sending psychopaths. Which is fine for entertainment. But hardly any way to build a rocket company. My favorite example of this kind of nonsense is Black Panther’s Wakanda. Here we have an advanced, technological society that’s basically hidden, that settles leadership through hand-to-hand combat. Give me a break. Conway’s Law just says “no”.
Back to IQ. My mother, socially dysfunctional as she was, drug me down to some testing center when I was 15, and put me through the various tests. My IQ came back — 164. She was already at her personal limits attempting to figure out how to deal with her home situation, and she had no real idea what to do with me. I obviously wasn’t autistic (though I have been called meta-autistic — one of my favorite compliments!) and had already passed through the typical calculus gauntlet at 13. So the following year, they packed me off to Case Western Reserve to engineering school. There were other bona-fide, award-winning mathematical geniuses at the school, but they were actually autistic, and I didn’t fall in with them. Instead, I practiced drinking a lot of beer quickly (I was a perennial beer chug contender) and worked on getting out of school, which I was going to have to compensate my parents for, as quickly as possible.
There’s a whole lot of academic “blah blah”, as well as a stint in the steel mill, in between there and here. Recently, I re-tested my IQ with one of those informal tests. It made my head hurt, but did remind me what goes on in an IQ test. My retested IQ at 60? About 115. Certainly, my friends and acquaintances will support the notion I’ve gotten much stupider. But maybe not that much.
What IQ DOES test is some version of pattern-matching ability. It is intrinsically algorithmic, which means that kids raised up in a stricter legalistic environment are far more likely to get a higher score than kids raised more loosey-goosy. People in the Survival v-Meme don’t stand a chance, and kids raised in neo-Tribal societies are gonna struggle as well. It’s no surprise that Asian-American kids do the best, at least to me. White kids come in second, on average, though if you understand that demographics are some form of Gaussian-distributed, once people are in a stable version of modern society, there’s going to be convergence. I don’t even want to get close to the question of “IQ as a genetic inheritance,” other than to say that if you’ve got smart parents, you’re gonna get a leg up on whatever processor architecture compared to the rest of the population. Both my own sons are wicked smart, though I say with no humility that at least some of this comes from their mother. And yes — they had some IQ advantage coming genetically from us. But a lot of their smarts come from them be raised in environments where grounded problem-solving was the norm. See below for that environment. Needless to say, you gotta think for yourself when you’re in a tight spot.
Conor at 12, dropping in.He wanted it — bad.
What IQ means cannot be decontextualized outside canonical knowledge structures. And young people’s affinity for future learning also cannot be separated from the dominant culture they come from, as well the developmental stage most young people are in at any given time. IQ testing comes along right when kids, in advanced, legalistic cultures, are passing through the gate of evolved algorithmic thinking. And so it’s no surprise that kids that likely have genetic affinity, along with reinforcing culture, and developmental tracking are going to do better on IQ and other tests, like the SAT. Of course.
And if there’s any understanding of how that plays out, it’s that the kids, relative to others in their age cohort, are going to be more SOPHISTICATED thinkers than others in their cohort. But now societal trade-offs come into play. You’re also going to be pre-biasing the educational system, especially for professions that have complicated hierarchical social structures, like medicine, or even programming, for kids that at this point in time are optimal. Certain types of neurodivergent kids are going to win this competition every time.
But down the road, they may NOT be the kinds of people who you really want that have the ability to cross-fertilize with others. Who are more evolved and empathetic thinkers. Who may indeed be the kinds of people who can integrate disruptive paradigms into innovative strategies that move society forward. Let’s review quickly Evolution vs. Sophistication with this graphic:
What this means is that you are selecting young people for tracking into institutions (like universities) where the be-all and end-all actually IS status. And you’re not leaving the door open for those that might be superior not so much in ANALYSIS – but actual SYNTHESIS. Because successful designers require agency, and the ability to make choices, which inherently is a very different set of neurogenic pathways. And THOSE people have to be able to listen to others, and synthesize their viewpoints into a larger, aggregate understanding. There are decisions being made when one solely considers IQ that inherently can close off those future paths to career success.
Long-term, from a societal perspective, this ain’t so hot. Without some understanding of how disruptive innovation works, which often involves folks taking a Hail Mary moonshot, in a different field, you’re only going to end up with incremental innovation inside a particular type of legalistic/algorithmic knowledge structure. That is, of course, what is happening inside academia. I got tenure with (I think) ten papers. Now, all our young faculty better have about 20, or they don’t stand a chance. So the system is, from an incremental Darwinian perspective, selecting for rule-following neurodivergence and IQ. But this will not produce the people who will necessarily invent more profound ways of teaching the current crop of young people, which is going to require more understanding of others, in a different cultural milieu, and a different set of tools that they may have facility with, that the teachers do not (e.g. ‘digital natives’.) Which is especially problematic in engineering, with the huge turnover in relevant knowledge happening constantly.
Further, the people you want inventing ways of measuring these higher cognitive skills — academics! — also end up being v-Meme limited in how they even assess heuristic decision making ability, because these abilities are poorly evolved in their own context! One ends up with obvious complexity ceilings among the teachers. And that is problematic.
How? Over the years, we’ve had various “critical thinking” projects at my university. These are well-meaning. But it doesn’t take long (usually after the pioneers of said programs have moved away) to only reward and call things “critical thinking” that agree with the professors’ viewpoints. In the Woke World of the modern academy, this has been disastrous in stifling debate, as well as producing ideologues. And because the subject matter is often about societal interpretation, it attracts more than its fair share of psychopaths, interested in only power and control.
The path to answers I’ve followed, at least from an engineering perspective, is to open my classroom up. Lots of contact with the outside world of engineers, which means LOTS of validity grounding, for both the students AND myself. I’ve been very successful with this — there ARE answers.
But this does not get at the heart of people wanting testing protocols for K-12. And therein lies the rub. And because education is, inherently, at the lower levels, a status-sorting game, the interest in actually creating more enlightened young people is just oh so boring. I’m not the first to say that the system is functioning exactly as it’s been created to function.
The problem is that the asteroid of complexity in many fields, as well as how to run a multi-ethnic society, is approaching. We’ve done a pretty shitty job of creating a society where people can find meaning, as well as developing pathways for others to find it, as well as make sure the trains run on time and the grocery stores are full of food. The problem with NOT doing this is that you end up lots of elites working to find ways to tear it down, because that’s in their non-self-aware elitist interests during periods of Elite Overproduction.
Educators might consider what might happen to our shared future when it finally hits.
Summary
There’s a lot in this post. Summarizing:
We test for legalistic/algorithmic abilities and sort kids based on these at THE critical juncture in their lives — at 18 — with things like IQ tests and SAT tests.
Some cultures have a profound leg up because their kids are raised in orderly societies.
We don’t test at all for agency and empathy, nor do we particularly focus on raising young people to be independent. Yet these two things are critical for evolving our society as life conditions change.
Academia has little to no interest in persistently systemically confronting this failure.
We have no accepted epistemology for even looking at this problem in knowledge and decision making ability.
Without some enlightened sense of awareness, we’ll eventually converge on societal stasis and promotion of neurodivergence, which will not play out well in the long run.
It’s been a crazy couple of weeks since Trump’s inauguration, and the Elites that historically have run the government have been set back on their heels by Elon’s DOGE. There are a couple of important dynamics to observe that I wanted to nail down before I forgot about them. Or scrambled in my head.
We’re watching Peter Turchin’s classic scenario of Elite Overproduction play out in real time. What do I think is happening? I think we’re seeing the final fading of the social influence of the old Elites, embodied by the crowds in the Hamptons, against the rising influence of Silicon Valley. That’s not anything close to a novel observation, of course.
But what does it mean from a memetic perspective? Old money, from old fortunes (America’s manufacturing base, as well as oil and other natural resources) has been around long enough that we’re 3-4 generations at a minimum down from the original founders. What THAT means is that the grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even further back have been bubbled up inside their rich cocoons their entire lives, and have lost any contact with reality. The help has known its place for a while, generationally, and in a world with already too many elites, there are no open slots in the Musical Chairs game. We’re seeing luxury beliefs aplenty, as this cohort slowly runs out of money, and makes the case Rob Henderson, in Troubled, made with clarity. More esoteric coding, more insane stated beliefs that don’t match what they do. But they make everything that their lessers do obvious, so the Elite Wannabes can clearly identify who wants in the game.
But it’s No Can Do. The end goal of making people do ridiculous things, like chop off their children’s genitalia, is to make them easier to identify for exclusion. You’re not in the club. And even if you’ve been President, you’re not gonna get in the Club.
And then in rolls Trump with Turchin’s Counter-Elites, determined to take on the elites. Nothing is a larger affront to the Elites than to have others with money expose them for the frauds they are. Money was supposed to buy protection from exposure. And it just isn’t working.
Worse, people like Elon Musk are showing what elites actually spend money on, when given the reins of power. Turns out it’s playing some weird role-playing LARP in other parts of the world, like funding transgender movements in Bangladesh to disrupt the government there. The list of projects funded by agencies like USAID is so absurd, it beggars belief. My favorite had to be donating money to Peru for LGBTQ comics for Peruvian youth. I hypothesize that the reason for the Peruvian angle is it’s likely to include lessons for kids on how to give blow jobs in Quechuan, the native language of many of the Indians in Peru. How can you even make that kind of shit up?
For the most part, the elites have doubled down on the insanity — the war in Ukraine must continue, or Putin will roll tanks through the Fulda Gap. Please. Putin’s tanks don’t roll. They are transported on the Russian rail system to the border. Good luck with that 1000 mile swath into the European homeland. They can’t hardly get 50 miles inside Ukraine. And then there’s the chronic transgender disruptive mischief. America used to sell hot women, Hollywood, and heterosexual sex as a cultural attractor. Now we’re selling castration services, because Biden’s primary cohort of political advisors were a bunch of 20-something troons with purple hair. The chaos oddly enough suited the Elite Old Guard, because they were primarily interested in the chaos serving the arrival of Klaus Schwab as our One World overlord. Bugs are on the menu.
But it made them easy to attack by the counter-elites. And certainly no one save those of us following Elon Musk for a while had any idea how his entry into politics would play. Here’s a note for the novices. Elon wants to GO TO MARS. He really wants to do it, and he realizes that it’s likely a civilizational play, and a once-in-an-eon window. Whether you think Elon has a beautiful mind or not, he can do the energetic calculus. And he’s not going to let a bunch of skiing psychopaths mess up his big view.
This insight is unfathomable to the Elites, who really have rotted on the vine, attempting to keep their endless ski resort vacation going. They’re certainly socially sophisticated. But they’re low- to anti-empathetically evolved. Which means all they can do is scream at Elon that he’s stupid (he’s obviously not) and scream at the rest of us for not going along with their endless longing for collapse to add excitement to their droll lives. None of this means that all the counter-elites are on the upward path for the rest of us. But at least, they’re forced to lip-sync the words. And Elon’s gotta make sure they don’t blow up the Earth before he gets to the Red Planet.
I actually also believe that the Silicon Valley elite, while not being particularly clever themselves, also want to keep the civilizational party rolling. Why? They’re just into hatching their own Next Generation of detuned elites, and they still maintain fantasies that their kids will be able to circulate in public. I fully understand that’s already probably not the case. But they’re maintaining the fantasy, and so have to deal with stepping in human excrement in the middle of San Francisco. As opposed to the old money, which is already living off-world in the Hamptons, or Martha’s Vineyard. That level of empathy the counter-elites have might be enough to get us through, from a complexity perspective. We’ll see.
No better example of the war between old-guard Elites and Counter-Elites could be evinced than the blood warfare in the Kennedy clan — in particular, the crazed attacks by Caroline Kennedy, against cousin Bobby. The conflict is multi-layered. First, you have the memetic implications of an institutionalist (Caroline was a perennial ambassador) and a dedicated personal agency-promoter like RFK Jr. But it goes down to the tribal level. RFK Jr., at least on the surface, is working to elevate the health of the Poors. Which was also a big concern of JFK. And look where that got him. On top of that, RFK Jr. is obviously on testosterone, so my guess is that this conflict goes down to the biological level. And hey — there’s also nothing worse than an apostate, which RFK Jr. most definitely is.
One useful mental model in dealing with all of this is the notion of implicit and explicit corruption. I’m not going to claim this dichotomy for my own, but I’ve certainly seen it afloat around the globe. China, for example, has explicit corruption. You build a skyscraper, and wrap it in that green plastic they’re fond of, and you pay the local officials their 5% of the cost. This is unseemly to us in the U.S., but is accepted because the pay differential between China’s new entrepreneurial elite and its Old Guard of military and party officials is so vast. $20K/year is just not enough to send your One Child to an elite overseas school. And bills have to be paid. Plus, that handle of explicit corruption allows the CCP to yank truly evolutionary actors off the screen when they want. Anyone seen AliBaba’s Jack Ma lately?
That’s very different than the U.S.’s elite manipulation of implicit corruption. Here, we pass a law to create pass-throughs to NGOs, staffed by the Elite’s kids, to play stupid games and win virtuous prizes. All of it is legal, if not exactly above-board. Witness the whole “we’ll have to pass the budget to see what’s in it” school of political gamesmanship. No one has been better in exposing this than Mike Benz, of the Foundation for Freedom Online. Mike is a one-man wrecking ball, directed toward Elites wanting to keep stuff secret but still legal. His Joe Rogan interviews (there are multiples) are all worth listening to. I had the privilege to talk with Mike on an X Spaces, and it was useful. Mike was a career guy in the State Department before going rogue. And what does he do? He follows the money. Which convinced me that maybe it wasn’t just all Agent Smith, when it comes to memetic alignment in the press. Maybe it’s also Cold Hard Cash.
Why do Benz’s various efforts at exposure matter so much? If you are a Peter Turchin fan (and I am) the Elites continue to run the show as long as the Wealth Pump — the set of societal dynamics that transfer money upward to the Elites — still functions. Elon and Trump and the whole kit and caboodle seem destined to shut the last vestige of that down. When you get past 2-3 generations away from the old money, the only way that set of Elites is gonna make money is by keeping the same parasitic scams running off the federal government. They no longer have the ability to innovate. It takes up too much time from hanging out in Aspen or Park City.
That’s an opening for the Counter-Elites to move in, if they can. And while many of the Counter-Elites are nihilistic as well, then there’s Elon. Dude wants to go to Mars. He’s a multi-path and solution thinker, that realizes there are multiple societal, technological, and governmental hands that have to be played to win. He’s got the money. And he’s serious.
The Elites, stuck at the level of development that they’re at, which is basically somewhere close to post-adolescent and watching their Black Rock fund returns, can’t do anything but project onto Elon their wants and desires, which is to look cool inside their circle, and get that 30% ROR on their portfolio, which supports the multiple ski house cotton candy bubble they live in. They can’t conceive of meaning greater than that — which is why they’re chronically projecting on Elon that his primary driver has to be money. And he’s gotta be a Nazi. Bad news, losers. Elon wants to GO TO MARS.
Look at the bright side, normies. The Trump/Elon/Vance/Kennedy shit show is going to eliminate that Elite Overproduction problem. And potentially without war. That’s something we all should be happy about. After the next couple rounds of NGO defunding, a lot of people are going to be learning to code. If they’re lucky.
One final note — the evolutionary axis of civilization runs N/S through development of agency in all people. You can always tell who’s on the downward vector by how they want to control you. Fun fact — memetically speaking, these people simply cannot produce the information a complex society needs. Hell, they can’t understand it themselves. And so we drift towards catastrophic collapse.
That doesn’t mean distributed decision making is painless, nor that it always gets it “right” (whatever that means.) But long-term, this should make us double down on evolving the agency in our young people. It’s the only long bet worth making.
One of the things we don’t discuss much, when deciding what courses students should take, is the selection of core university requirements that our students are subjected to. The quality of these courses varies wildly, primarily dependent on their age since inception.
What does that mean? Having spent so much time in the academy (37 years as a professor at WSU) I’ve had more than one chance to witness the cycles of course development. The short version is that new courses roughly follow the demographics of Rogers’ Theory of Innovation. The Pioneers and Early Adopters show up and invent the courses. But, not surprisingly, they move on, becoming bored over time with any repetition in teaching. Early Majority does OK, but it’s not too long until any course, created with the best of intentions, ends up being taught by Late Majority or Laggards, with all the problems you might imagine as far as creativity goes. The worst classes are in the required core, which the Liberal Arts faculty largely have shifted to the contingent workforce, which are literally slaves on the plantation.
I hate to criticize the slaves directly, because some of them are obviously paying for bad karma in a past life they had no control over. And there is nothing more saintly than doing a reasonable job teaching Freshman English Composition. Students aren’t taught really how to write in high school, and they show up needing their papers bled red upon. It’s really a historic problem that’s gotten worse, and is likely to continue to decline. I owe my ability (or at least the trajectory) to write on my first community college professor, who taught the science fiction literature class I took. He had both the grace and temerity to tell me frankly that I sucked. And I am forever in his debt for that. Because I did.
I have far less sympathy for the other courses (various history, sociology and psychology courses) students are forced to take. Many of these are “woke”, and my white male students in particular suffer. They supposedly exist to teach students critical thinking, but it’s of the Cool Hand Luke variety. If the students don’t get their mind right, they are treated harshly until they do. To be fair, I have not gone up to these classes, and sat through them. But the students complain. And the advice I give the students also hasn’t wavered much. Sit tight, it’ll be over soon. Kind of like a root canal.
But it’s deeply problematic, as more and more students show up ungrounded with any sense of engineering outside of assembling a Lego kit. Fair or not, becoming an engineer comes with a pretty heavy set of ethical obligations. Most students have no idea, for example, that they are getting a professional degree, and that they have to take their studies seriously or they could get someone killed.
Getting changes in the core curriculum is also not easy. Major changes have to go to the Faculty Senate, which I used to preside over. In tightening budget circles, I guarantee you that there will be fights over any change in core, because core provides the biggest buck for the bang of all the classes. The contingent slave class of graduate students and clinical professors are paid poorly, but tuition per credit hour is the same. You do the math. And the faculty in those departments wear their victim cards on their sleeves. Outside a handful of them, what they’re doing inside those classrooms is not for polite company.
If we wanted to improve our engineering students, we’d teach two history classes dedicated to the History of Technology. The use of mathematics inside the class itself would be primarily disallowed, with the goal of students understanding the larger narrative structure of the history of science and technology as being the takeaway. I was recently at the Technical University in Munich, and the Germans do a great job with this. The halls of the Metro stop are painted with murals discussing all the greats that contributed to the march of both science and technology. Even as an American, I was inspired by thinking I was walking the same grounds as the German pioneers of engine and aviation science. Our students literally know nothing –even about our space program.
I would also reinstitute the language requirement, with a twist. Most language classes at the university focus heavily on grammar. The result is that students emerge with no knowledge of anything. All classes would be required to focus on conversation, so that students could actually relationally expand outside their limited circle.
All of this would displace the toxic narrative of despair that has replaced any actually critical analysis of history, or useful liberal arts-based skills. As it is, the university system exists primarily to depress our students. It’s got to stop. And the place to start is in the narrative structure of the modern liberal arts, earnestly dedicated as it is to collapse of Western civilization.
P.S. Needless to say, I’d have little problem expanding great books and classics. I refer to the Iliad and Odyssey all the time in my classroom. These classes have to be well-taught to be useful, though. An eye toward providing a foundation of Western moral principles would be key — with the expectation that professors could count on those concepts themselves in later classes. FWIW — I have few students that have even heard of great books. But the few that have actually are affected by them.
One of the things I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about is the role of money in memetics. Various “below the hood” analyses will inevitably tell you to “follow the money.” And while I’ve always given some hat tip to the concept, the reality is I’ve spent my neurogenic horsepower actually pondering how it’s NOT the money. It’s actually alignment of values, or meta-values, given by the social organization that is producing the information.
But the recent USAID scandal, where large sums of federal money went to liberal media outlets like the New York Times, Politico, and even the BBC, have caused me to rethink my position. I started to drift away from the espoused positions of the aforementioned because there were more factually wrong pieces that I actually had experience with over the last five years beforehand. There’s no question that BEFORE 2019, the media was biased, it was liberal, and conservatives had some right to complain. But with the COVID pandemic, the disinformation/misinformation from journalistic outlets went into overdrive.
Some of that was undoubtedly attributable to Elite Risk Minimization — where elites inflict policies on the Poors to minimize any potential risk they might believe they’re going to encounter in their life. I’ve written about this here, and while it is usually negative for the Poors, it can be a mixed bag (including some benefits) for everyone. But the memetic polarization (for those that don’t know, polarization is the phenomenon where light is aligned from specific directions and wavelengths — it’s how your sunglasses work) increased to the point where it was painfully obvious that something else was going on, to manufacture consent among the media outlets.
And that thing was money. So much of the writing was so contrived, it violated the various differentiators of v-Meme sets. Something else was involved that was creating ungrounded propaganda.
I tell my engineering students regularly that “money is NOT the root of all evil.” Money is actually a tool for goal coherence. If you’re not minding the time, for example, that you’re burning on a project, you’re screwing up. Because time is money. And normie, Aspie, or psychopath — the buck stops here. If your company doesn’t make money, it won’t be in business long.
It could be that the root of the disinformation crisis in contemporary journalism arose when Craigslist became ascendant, and eliminated the warming, diffuse glow of money from classified ads. Do any young people even KNOW what a classified ad is? So the larger outlets may not have gone seeking, but they were discovered by forces like USAID, that could buy message coherence at bargain basement prices. This also had to affect the feeder networks, and in the end even broke the prestige awards that also status-fueled honest journalism. After Ed Yong’s Pulitzer, who can look at those awards as a north star ever again?
Here’s what I’ve figured out about how you can detect money in the information stream — when across multiple platforms, the reportage is very v-Meme limited (only one dominant meta-view, which is usually propping up Authoritarians/Experts that inevitably support institutions.) In a large society like ours, it is simply impossible to not have some contribution across the v-Meme spectra without monetary forcing.
So follow the money. And be suspicious when the funnel of ideas narrows into chronic repetition. You think they’re attempting to brainwash you because, well, they are.
P.S. I’ve become a huge Mike Benz fan. Highly recommend following him on X and throwing some shekels his way. I hope the Deep State doesn’t whack him. I was lucky enough to have about an hour-long conversation on an X Spaces format a couple of weeks ago.
It's About Empathy - Connection Ties Us Together 