"In the stampede to affirm Black Lives Matter, people who even now still consider themselves sober technocrats eagerly demonized police, sanctified rioters, and denounced such bedrock civic principles as equality under the law."
When the NPR totebag set say "Defund The Police(R)!" what they mean is "Take money from the undeserving (blue collar meathead cops, most of whom lack Serious Academic Credentials and who are famously unwoke to boot) and give to the deserving (white collar social workers with appropriate degrees who can be counted on to uphold the latest and most censorious standards of political correctness)".
1. I'm not even sure "for their own good" plays into it. Woke is like Puritanism, in that there is no salvation for those not part of the Elect.
2. To be fair, much of the luster of that particular slogan wore off, the moment Biden said something about "fund the police" and besides, no reason to scare the normies.
Now that Biden is on his way out, expect a revival, as long "defund the police" can be used as a stick with which to beat Team R.
Similarly, expect Team D to suddenly pretend to care about human rights again, only to drop them like a hot turd, once a democrat is back in the Oval Office.
There's that C.S. Lewis quote about the worst kind of tyranny coming not from robber barons but from people who genuinely believe they're doing the right thing -- in my experience, even a lot of people who are plainly malevolent tend to have done enough mental contortionism to cast themselves as the virtuous enlightened good guys in their own personal narratives. These days, with it being so easy to curate one's information diet exclusively to content that flatters one's presumptions, a lot of people have simply never been exposed to anything else and don't have a mental category for paradox or nuance. It will be absurd and entertaining to see the progressive establishment intone highmindedly about separation of powers and such for the next number of years after four years of the most lawless and abusive presidency since Woodrow Wilson.
Hoffer not only nailed the psychological/emotional basis of social movements, he also had a great bullshit detector and a keen eye that pierced right through charlatans.
He saw through the New Left gurus immediately and dissected their dishonest prose and the poorly concealed misanthropy of their supposed radical liberationism:
"Professor Marcuse has lived among us for more than 30 years and now, in old age, his disenchantment with this country is spilling over into book after book. He is offended by the intrusion of the vulgar, by the failure of egalitarian America to keep common people in their place. He is frightened by “the degree to which the population is allowed to break the peace where there is still peace and silence, to be ugly and uglify things, to ooze familiarity and to offend against good form.” The vulgar invade “the small reserved sphere of existence” and compel exquisite Marcusian souls to partake of them and their and smells.
To a shabby would‐be aristocrat like Professor Marcuse there is something fundamentally wrong with a society in which the master and the worker, the typist and the boss’s laughter do not live totally disparate lives. Everything good in America seems to him a sham and a fraud."
Free-range thinkers are always superior than those raised inside the cossetted fantasy world of academia. I think the main difference is being free from the neurotic status anxiety that cripples the upscale and institutionalized—in my experience these types prioritize social signalling over veracity and integrity.
2020-21 was the most dramatic illustration of Hoffer's theses in my lifetime, I think, at least in the western world. It's concerning that so many people just want to turn the page and forget about those wretched times, because that Madness is still lurking just beneath the surface.
Both parties have gone insane, just on different issues.
Democrats believe in open borders that destroy working class wages, and increase housing costs when we can’t house our own citizens.
They believe that people can change their biological sex, an impossibility that destroys the rights of women to privacy and safety in their restrooms, locker rooms and prisons . They allow men in women’s sports which eliminates fair competition.
They encourage the mutilation and sterilization of children who would likely grow up to be gay in pursuit of the unattainable and obscenely call it “gender affirming care”.
They encourage homelessness and crime by refusing to say no to destructive behavior of the mentally ill (who deserve custodial care), the drug addicted and, of course, the criminal class.
They discriminate against whites, Asians and men in a futile attempt to compensate for past discrimination against others.
They have recently been led by a vacuous, word salad spouting, not that smart woman and a dementia ridden old man who refused to stand up against the insane left wing of his party.
Republicans deny the climate change that threatens humanity.
They denounce the vaccines that reduce deaths from disease.
They bow to religious fruitcakes who believe that a single cell ( . ) is a 👶 which can destroy a woman's future.
They support an ignorant, bullying sociopath who is increasingly showing signs of dementia soon to be a second time president.
What makes Hoffer frustrating to ideologues and so enduringly relevant is that he doesn't let anybody off the hook or limit pathologies to any one side or tribe -- the unseemly psychology he details describes all humans, even the more saintly among us. Any sort of wise, constructive governance must grapple with and take into account the dynamics that Hoffer discusses.
A ton of good, if society holds it to high standards! The Ivies still have a ton of good smart people passing through, but need to be taken off their pedestals and held to account so as to prevent so many of the weeds from choking off the flowers.
It seems the Faustian mind can no longer ride on the wings of the divine. Mischievous nymphs and annoying egregores seem all they can matriculate. But, I admit, it does seem like we should get more out of them. What to do? Pray for an asteroid or wait for Wotan to arise from his slumber under the mountain? Exciting times! Glad you wrote
"restless boredom, a critical mass of comfort and free time"
That names it. I don't think humans are capable of existing free of transcendent meaning, even in comfort and affluence. Luckily, and strangely, nuclear capability stops the worse totalitarians from starting more world wars. Now we have to address the ennui of the present day without violence. Can it be done? We shall see.
Glad to see dockworker Hoffer mentioned. He did not, in the two books of his I read, adduce any evidentiary basis for his claims. He was not scholarly, but he was literate in a way many working men of the time were -- but they just didn't write books or, if they did, find publishers for them. College graduates today generally are not truly literate -- the generation of Hoffer would say they are functionally literate at best, but I see them as being illiterate, when compared with the truly literate men of my father's generation of the 1930s. The college system, which is widespread, allied with government bureaucrats who feed off of the system of compelled taxation, has been the greatest destroyer of education because its ease of access degrades the purpose: an intended and laborious search for knowledge (not information).
I disagree with you about the lack of evidence in "The True Believer". Hoffer cited many examples in his study of mass movements: Communism, Zionism, Christianity, Islam, the Reformation, the Puritans, Japanese fascism. He cited individuals, too: Luther, Lenin, Goebbels, Oliver Cromwell, Mussolini, Mohammed. I agree with you about colleges today, though, and a good example of what you say about them is the grade inflation.
The writing of his I recall did not quote passages and cite sources in support of his argument as a scholar must. This makes his discussion less effective for serious readers who demand evidence -- and why he was ridiculed or held at bay by college academics of the time -- but more amenable to everyday readers of the 1950s, who generally could read at that level with a high school diploma. He may not have been capable of writing in a scholarly way, but it was of no matter to him or his publisher, because his readers did not care about such things.
My edition of The True Believer, from Perennial Classics division of Harper Collins, lists 133 footnotes in the appendix. What impresses me most about his citations is first, their span of history from ancients like Epictetus, Homer and the Old and New Testament, to later authors like Pascal, Machiavelli, Alexis de Toqueville, Montaigne, Thoreau and Francis Bacon, to moderns like H.G. Wells, J.B.S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell, Henri Bergson, Ortega y Gasset, Arthur Koestler, Charles Beard and Arnold Toynbee. Second, he also uses direct sources from people who participated in mass movements Hoffer studied, including Hitler, Trotsky, Josef Goebbels, and Napoleon. He not only cites the comments of Luther but also the Pope who condemned Luther for heresy, Leo XIII. This is a bibliography of breadth, depth and duration.
I do not recall which of his books I read, but please tell me if you see in what you have quotes and cites, as opposed to a reading list (which very likely he read).
There are quite a few quotes in The True Believer, albeit usually a line or two rather than the lengthy passages one might expect from a more traditional academic, and a bunch of citations. It's not an academic book as usually understood, but it's very erudite and draws upon a broad variety of sources.
Yes, he was certainly a reader. When I was a child, I knew many American working men -- by which I mean, men who were in their 40s and 50s in the 1950s and 60s who worked with their hands for a living -- who read extensively, who listened to the opera, desire for themselves a kind of sophistication, etc., even if they'd make sure to go with their buddies to a gin joint or a bowling alley.
But this shouldn't be surprising, for in the 19th century, the Workingman's Associations and Self-Improvement Societies across the country offered extensive teaching in what would now be called advanced coursework (such is the illiteracy of the graduate student) to factory hands and the like. Of course, they also offered practical, vocational training as well. Self-improvement is an American tradition. Was. It may live on in Self-help topics, but that is more to deliver to oneself a kind of narcissistic supply than striving for practical betterment.
What should surprise, but which happened, to the chagrin of people like me (and I think you, as well), is what came afterwards. Because all of these markets, these private initiatives, the government schools destroyed, supported by federal and state redistribution of wealth compelled from their citizens, beginning in the 1960s when they metastasized and began dragging down literacy standards, beginning with the removal of tracking. I doubt if there are now even 10% of the literate working men as there were 75 years ago -- for even the level of literacy of current graduate students is exceptionally poor. But who would know, except anecdotally. I find them here and there -- my HVAC man used to teach history and loves the Civil War, etc. Perhaps there is -- one can hope -- many of them.
There are some footnotes in The True Believer, but Hoffer was more interested in describing the larger lay of the land than getting bogged down in a ton of precise details. Agreed on the decline of literacy -- the extent to which the march of audio and visual media have gradually degraded human knowledge and attention spans is underappreciated by generations with no sense of the before times. My Dad was big on hoarding magazines he'd get for free from the library so I grew up thumbing through old issues of Time, Newsweek, The New Republic, etc. and the amount of literacy and cultural fluency taken for granted for a broad audience in the 80s and 90s today seems unbelievably erudite and highbrow. Now even many journalists and academics resort to Star Wars and comic book movies for parallels to current events, instead of history or literature, with no sense that the dumbing down of discourse also reduces the scope of what policy can accomplish.
Your article misses the point that we once had cognitive academics and twice exceptional academics. The twice exceptional have been pushed out because they are gifted in somatic and cognitive. They see patterns in life and realize them cogntively. But society doesn't want that. All it wants is regurgitation of older works. It wants iteration. It wants CONTROL.
The cognitive academics are the small picture academics and the 2e academics are the big picture. Without the big picture we lose the value of real change and get bogged down in the details and proving we should not change.
I am sure I will be told I am incorrect. But as a 2e academic I have rewritten our entire psychology and intelligencr framework, outside academia. Aith no educational institutional support or guidance.Because my big picture intelligence is the last kind they want.
Our entire system pushes out genius which is the whole picture seers.
This is why systems collapse. You can't make everything 2d. It freezes us in time not recognizing the big Picture and our destruction of it. I see this all over right now. Everyone is arguing about what they see, right now. But no one has any solutions. Telling the masses what is causing what they felt decades later makes academia loose credibility. It makes academia look stupid. And they are. They are focused in things like the smell of politics.
I see academic saying I tried to change the situation form the inside but I failed. 25 years ago I saw it was impossible to change it and didn't take the route. Why do you think I should listen to you now so much later. You failed your role in society. Which was to make change for good
I have a solution to fix our societyand it won't include the vast majority of the academics. Their time is over. It will include the somatic and 2e.
Its not a good time be an academic or highly cognitive person. After decades of selfishness and self righteousness they are being replaced by AI. No one is sorry for them. It's gonna be scary.
The test of a theory is how well it predicts what has not yet been observed. Hoffer's theory of mass movements passes that test. First, he says, a dissident intellectual discredits the existing power structure. If enough bored, frustrated people take up his idea they convert it into a cause. Hoffer calls these the fanatics. If the cause is sufficiently popular to gain political power, practical men of action turn it into a new power structure. Hoffer wrote in 1950 but subsequent mass movements illustrated and confirmed his theory. Dissident intellectuals like Ralph Nader, Rachel Carson and Betty Friedan discredited power structures in their day. Frustrated, bored people converted their ideas into the consumer movement, the environmental movement, and modern feminism. And so we got the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the EPA in our government and Women's Studies departments in our ineffective, wildly overpriced colleges. Abroad, look at Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement and the Brexit. Hoffer got it right.
Nicely done. Not to belabor the obvious, but perhaps it should be said that the vast majority of academic work is professional. You suggest this when talking about getting into the academy. That is, texts are written for reasons of institutional and social advancement. Academic texts are not naive, not simple representations of the world as perceived by the authors. They are written with ulterior motives. Such incentives for, and intentions of, academic writers tend to the writing. I think this is even more important than lack of experience. Even if one is experienced, the professional text still has to be professional, push the right buttons, impress the gatekeepers. Showing the reader (from whom one wants some form of recognition) to be inexperienced, merely bookish, is probably not a good strategy! Keep up the good work.
That's a good point, and comforting in a way. Far better for academics to be cynically/self-interestedly masquerading as having wacky beliefs than for them to earnestly buy into unreasonable ideologies. But because of the exhausting nature of maintaining cognitive dissonance, I do think a lot of the fiercer social justice crusaders have genuinely glugged on their own kool-aid, whereas a lot of others will opportunistically shoehorn some fashionable gobbledygook into their work as window dressing.
"In the stampede to affirm Black Lives Matter, people who even now still consider themselves sober technocrats eagerly demonized police, sanctified rioters, and denounced such bedrock civic principles as equality under the law."
When the NPR totebag set say "Defund The Police(R)!" what they mean is "Take money from the undeserving (blue collar meathead cops, most of whom lack Serious Academic Credentials and who are famously unwoke to boot) and give to the deserving (white collar social workers with appropriate degrees who can be counted on to uphold the latest and most censorious standards of political correctness)".
Punishing those on the wrong side of history is for their own good!
1. I'm not even sure "for their own good" plays into it. Woke is like Puritanism, in that there is no salvation for those not part of the Elect.
2. To be fair, much of the luster of that particular slogan wore off, the moment Biden said something about "fund the police" and besides, no reason to scare the normies.
Now that Biden is on his way out, expect a revival, as long "defund the police" can be used as a stick with which to beat Team R.
Similarly, expect Team D to suddenly pretend to care about human rights again, only to drop them like a hot turd, once a democrat is back in the Oval Office.
There's that C.S. Lewis quote about the worst kind of tyranny coming not from robber barons but from people who genuinely believe they're doing the right thing -- in my experience, even a lot of people who are plainly malevolent tend to have done enough mental contortionism to cast themselves as the virtuous enlightened good guys in their own personal narratives. These days, with it being so easy to curate one's information diet exclusively to content that flatters one's presumptions, a lot of people have simply never been exposed to anything else and don't have a mental category for paradox or nuance. It will be absurd and entertaining to see the progressive establishment intone highmindedly about separation of powers and such for the next number of years after four years of the most lawless and abusive presidency since Woodrow Wilson.
1. Celine;s Third Law readeth thusly: "An honest politician is a national calamity".
2. I have long maintained that, in literature, a convincing villain thinks that he is the hero.
A really convincing villain sort of has a point.
N b. Autocorrect will be the death of me.
Hoffer not only nailed the psychological/emotional basis of social movements, he also had a great bullshit detector and a keen eye that pierced right through charlatans.
He saw through the New Left gurus immediately and dissected their dishonest prose and the poorly concealed misanthropy of their supposed radical liberationism:
"Professor Marcuse has lived among us for more than 30 years and now, in old age, his disenchantment with this country is spilling over into book after book. He is offended by the intrusion of the vulgar, by the failure of egalitarian America to keep common people in their place. He is frightened by “the degree to which the population is allowed to break the peace where there is still peace and silence, to be ugly and uglify things, to ooze familiarity and to offend against good form.” The vulgar invade “the small reserved sphere of existence” and compel exquisite Marcusian souls to partake of them and their and smells.
To a shabby would‐be aristocrat like Professor Marcuse there is something fundamentally wrong with a society in which the master and the worker, the typist and the boss’s laughter do not live totally disparate lives. Everything good in America seems to him a sham and a fraud."
Free-range thinkers are always superior than those raised inside the cossetted fantasy world of academia. I think the main difference is being free from the neurotic status anxiety that cripples the upscale and institutionalized—in my experience these types prioritize social signalling over veracity and integrity.
Thanks!
I love that book. I felt it hard during the Madness of 2020.
2020-21 was the most dramatic illustration of Hoffer's theses in my lifetime, I think, at least in the western world. It's concerning that so many people just want to turn the page and forget about those wretched times, because that Madness is still lurking just beneath the surface.
Both parties have gone insane, just on different issues.
Democrats believe in open borders that destroy working class wages, and increase housing costs when we can’t house our own citizens.
They believe that people can change their biological sex, an impossibility that destroys the rights of women to privacy and safety in their restrooms, locker rooms and prisons . They allow men in women’s sports which eliminates fair competition.
They encourage the mutilation and sterilization of children who would likely grow up to be gay in pursuit of the unattainable and obscenely call it “gender affirming care”.
They encourage homelessness and crime by refusing to say no to destructive behavior of the mentally ill (who deserve custodial care), the drug addicted and, of course, the criminal class.
They discriminate against whites, Asians and men in a futile attempt to compensate for past discrimination against others.
They have recently been led by a vacuous, word salad spouting, not that smart woman and a dementia ridden old man who refused to stand up against the insane left wing of his party.
Republicans deny the climate change that threatens humanity.
They denounce the vaccines that reduce deaths from disease.
They bow to religious fruitcakes who believe that a single cell ( . ) is a 👶 which can destroy a woman's future.
They support an ignorant, bullying sociopath who is increasingly showing signs of dementia soon to be a second time president.
A pox on both their houses.
What makes Hoffer frustrating to ideologues and so enduringly relevant is that he doesn't let anybody off the hook or limit pathologies to any one side or tribe -- the unseemly psychology he details describes all humans, even the more saintly among us. Any sort of wise, constructive governance must grapple with and take into account the dynamics that Hoffer discusses.
What good can come from Harvard?
A ton of good, if society holds it to high standards! The Ivies still have a ton of good smart people passing through, but need to be taken off their pedestals and held to account so as to prevent so many of the weeds from choking off the flowers.
It seems the Faustian mind can no longer ride on the wings of the divine. Mischievous nymphs and annoying egregores seem all they can matriculate. But, I admit, it does seem like we should get more out of them. What to do? Pray for an asteroid or wait for Wotan to arise from his slumber under the mountain? Exciting times! Glad you wrote
"restless boredom, a critical mass of comfort and free time"
That names it. I don't think humans are capable of existing free of transcendent meaning, even in comfort and affluence. Luckily, and strangely, nuclear capability stops the worse totalitarians from starting more world wars. Now we have to address the ennui of the present day without violence. Can it be done? We shall see.
Glad to see dockworker Hoffer mentioned. He did not, in the two books of his I read, adduce any evidentiary basis for his claims. He was not scholarly, but he was literate in a way many working men of the time were -- but they just didn't write books or, if they did, find publishers for them. College graduates today generally are not truly literate -- the generation of Hoffer would say they are functionally literate at best, but I see them as being illiterate, when compared with the truly literate men of my father's generation of the 1930s. The college system, which is widespread, allied with government bureaucrats who feed off of the system of compelled taxation, has been the greatest destroyer of education because its ease of access degrades the purpose: an intended and laborious search for knowledge (not information).
I disagree with you about the lack of evidence in "The True Believer". Hoffer cited many examples in his study of mass movements: Communism, Zionism, Christianity, Islam, the Reformation, the Puritans, Japanese fascism. He cited individuals, too: Luther, Lenin, Goebbels, Oliver Cromwell, Mussolini, Mohammed. I agree with you about colleges today, though, and a good example of what you say about them is the grade inflation.
The writing of his I recall did not quote passages and cite sources in support of his argument as a scholar must. This makes his discussion less effective for serious readers who demand evidence -- and why he was ridiculed or held at bay by college academics of the time -- but more amenable to everyday readers of the 1950s, who generally could read at that level with a high school diploma. He may not have been capable of writing in a scholarly way, but it was of no matter to him or his publisher, because his readers did not care about such things.
My edition of The True Believer, from Perennial Classics division of Harper Collins, lists 133 footnotes in the appendix. What impresses me most about his citations is first, their span of history from ancients like Epictetus, Homer and the Old and New Testament, to later authors like Pascal, Machiavelli, Alexis de Toqueville, Montaigne, Thoreau and Francis Bacon, to moderns like H.G. Wells, J.B.S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell, Henri Bergson, Ortega y Gasset, Arthur Koestler, Charles Beard and Arnold Toynbee. Second, he also uses direct sources from people who participated in mass movements Hoffer studied, including Hitler, Trotsky, Josef Goebbels, and Napoleon. He not only cites the comments of Luther but also the Pope who condemned Luther for heresy, Leo XIII. This is a bibliography of breadth, depth and duration.
I do not recall which of his books I read, but please tell me if you see in what you have quotes and cites, as opposed to a reading list (which very likely he read).
There are quite a few quotes in The True Believer, albeit usually a line or two rather than the lengthy passages one might expect from a more traditional academic, and a bunch of citations. It's not an academic book as usually understood, but it's very erudite and draws upon a broad variety of sources.
Yes, he was certainly a reader. When I was a child, I knew many American working men -- by which I mean, men who were in their 40s and 50s in the 1950s and 60s who worked with their hands for a living -- who read extensively, who listened to the opera, desire for themselves a kind of sophistication, etc., even if they'd make sure to go with their buddies to a gin joint or a bowling alley.
But this shouldn't be surprising, for in the 19th century, the Workingman's Associations and Self-Improvement Societies across the country offered extensive teaching in what would now be called advanced coursework (such is the illiteracy of the graduate student) to factory hands and the like. Of course, they also offered practical, vocational training as well. Self-improvement is an American tradition. Was. It may live on in Self-help topics, but that is more to deliver to oneself a kind of narcissistic supply than striving for practical betterment.
What should surprise, but which happened, to the chagrin of people like me (and I think you, as well), is what came afterwards. Because all of these markets, these private initiatives, the government schools destroyed, supported by federal and state redistribution of wealth compelled from their citizens, beginning in the 1960s when they metastasized and began dragging down literacy standards, beginning with the removal of tracking. I doubt if there are now even 10% of the literate working men as there were 75 years ago -- for even the level of literacy of current graduate students is exceptionally poor. But who would know, except anecdotally. I find them here and there -- my HVAC man used to teach history and loves the Civil War, etc. Perhaps there is -- one can hope -- many of them.
There are some footnotes in The True Believer, but Hoffer was more interested in describing the larger lay of the land than getting bogged down in a ton of precise details. Agreed on the decline of literacy -- the extent to which the march of audio and visual media have gradually degraded human knowledge and attention spans is underappreciated by generations with no sense of the before times. My Dad was big on hoarding magazines he'd get for free from the library so I grew up thumbing through old issues of Time, Newsweek, The New Republic, etc. and the amount of literacy and cultural fluency taken for granted for a broad audience in the 80s and 90s today seems unbelievably erudite and highbrow. Now even many journalists and academics resort to Star Wars and comic book movies for parallels to current events, instead of history or literature, with no sense that the dumbing down of discourse also reduces the scope of what policy can accomplish.
Excellent
Your article misses the point that we once had cognitive academics and twice exceptional academics. The twice exceptional have been pushed out because they are gifted in somatic and cognitive. They see patterns in life and realize them cogntively. But society doesn't want that. All it wants is regurgitation of older works. It wants iteration. It wants CONTROL.
The cognitive academics are the small picture academics and the 2e academics are the big picture. Without the big picture we lose the value of real change and get bogged down in the details and proving we should not change.
I am sure I will be told I am incorrect. But as a 2e academic I have rewritten our entire psychology and intelligencr framework, outside academia. Aith no educational institutional support or guidance.Because my big picture intelligence is the last kind they want.
Our entire system pushes out genius which is the whole picture seers.
This is why systems collapse. You can't make everything 2d. It freezes us in time not recognizing the big Picture and our destruction of it. I see this all over right now. Everyone is arguing about what they see, right now. But no one has any solutions. Telling the masses what is causing what they felt decades later makes academia loose credibility. It makes academia look stupid. And they are. They are focused in things like the smell of politics.
I see academic saying I tried to change the situation form the inside but I failed. 25 years ago I saw it was impossible to change it and didn't take the route. Why do you think I should listen to you now so much later. You failed your role in society. Which was to make change for good
I have a solution to fix our societyand it won't include the vast majority of the academics. Their time is over. It will include the somatic and 2e.
Its not a good time be an academic or highly cognitive person. After decades of selfishness and self righteousness they are being replaced by AI. No one is sorry for them. It's gonna be scary.
The test of a theory is how well it predicts what has not yet been observed. Hoffer's theory of mass movements passes that test. First, he says, a dissident intellectual discredits the existing power structure. If enough bored, frustrated people take up his idea they convert it into a cause. Hoffer calls these the fanatics. If the cause is sufficiently popular to gain political power, practical men of action turn it into a new power structure. Hoffer wrote in 1950 but subsequent mass movements illustrated and confirmed his theory. Dissident intellectuals like Ralph Nader, Rachel Carson and Betty Friedan discredited power structures in their day. Frustrated, bored people converted their ideas into the consumer movement, the environmental movement, and modern feminism. And so we got the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the EPA in our government and Women's Studies departments in our ineffective, wildly overpriced colleges. Abroad, look at Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement and the Brexit. Hoffer got it right.
Can't count on much nuance or introspection from a braying mob.
Nicely done. Not to belabor the obvious, but perhaps it should be said that the vast majority of academic work is professional. You suggest this when talking about getting into the academy. That is, texts are written for reasons of institutional and social advancement. Academic texts are not naive, not simple representations of the world as perceived by the authors. They are written with ulterior motives. Such incentives for, and intentions of, academic writers tend to the writing. I think this is even more important than lack of experience. Even if one is experienced, the professional text still has to be professional, push the right buttons, impress the gatekeepers. Showing the reader (from whom one wants some form of recognition) to be inexperienced, merely bookish, is probably not a good strategy! Keep up the good work.
That's a good point, and comforting in a way. Far better for academics to be cynically/self-interestedly masquerading as having wacky beliefs than for them to earnestly buy into unreasonable ideologies. But because of the exhausting nature of maintaining cognitive dissonance, I do think a lot of the fiercer social justice crusaders have genuinely glugged on their own kool-aid, whereas a lot of others will opportunistically shoehorn some fashionable gobbledygook into their work as window dressing.
Pleased to appear in Washington Examiner? They should be pleased to have you!
Thanks, John -- I like to think it's a win-win!