This is a great article, thank you! It definitely fleshes out so much of the WHY of my thinking, especially since 2020, but really since Obama hit the scene out of nowhere. "But he TALKS so well, doesn't he?" Obama institutionalized this crap. Not that it hadn't started, certainly, but we went from experience and accomplishment as criteria to... well, this. My dad told me once, when I was stuck writing a huge paper on a very dull subject in college, "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit." This is where we are as a nation - or, really, the entire West. And it IS baffling.
Really interesting, Chris. I also did research in Worcester at the AAS. It's a true treasure house, though what you found in those militia records sounds just as fascinating.
Yes, our ability to write, reason, speak, and do does seem to be in decline. Education, the decline of the same, is part of it, since education is more like training today, with the emphasis on STEM and making money.
Who needs lessons in writing, rhetoric, debate, speech, civics, etc.? Just use AI to write something for you. That seems to be where we're headed: allowing the "experts," even AI, to do our writing and thinking for us.
For a very long time, our country has been declining intellectually--perhaps not in certain branches of technology and science, but in most other areas. Even though standardized tests, entry exams, and even military selections have all been severely dumbed down., students have been increasingly unable to pass even the dumbed-down tests on dumbed-down material. At some point in recent decades, we seem to have passed a tipping point, and now our culture is in a mad race to the bottom. I don't know how it can be stopped. But I can't stop myself from trying anyway, however little it may matter.
I worked in the skilled trades for decades, after having been a schoolteacher, and with a master's degree in education.
It should come as no surprise that the skilled tradesmen are the smart ones. Reality doesn't give a damn how they want things to be. The tradesmen must very deliberately analyze the reality and find a way to manipulate that reality into what they want it to be. Construction is not for sissies.
Which is why I say, manipulating people is easy. Manipulating reality is tough.
The problem is we're dealing with people who think that if there is consensus (even if manufactured through censorship) what they're saying cannot, by definition, be a lie. However...
"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie."
"their speech acts don’t connect to the real, anymore."
This is actually a core tenant of postmodernism, that reality is unknowable. Instead our words create a shared delusion which we take to be "real" even though it isn't. Western universities have been run by postmodernists for decades, so the entire ruling class had imbibed this philosophy even if they don't realize it. So have you and I; Nietzsche and Foucault pervade the air we breathe.
This won't be fixed. It will eventually lead to our collapse, since systems of unreality always lose eventually, but that may still be decades away. We're going to put Adam Smith's dictum, "there's a lot of ruin in a nation", to the test.
BTW: Where can we get a copy of your dissertation, Chris? It wounds like a fascinating read.
Restating this after a day of driving: When people didn't just talk for a living, their talk was more likely to be meaningful and serious. The emergence of talking for a living, of the "going to a meeting" professions, has degraded and emptied discourse. It's not inevitable, and a bunch of people who talk for a living are interesting people. But the trend overall is steadily downward.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
John 1:1.
Great article. Our culture is playing with fire, or at least those who have not mastered their own inner tyrants, are playing with fire.
My mind went off on a weird tangent while reading this.
I spent my summers at a YMCA summer camp in the Sierra Nevadas. I was voluntold by my stepdad to be part of the kitchen crew in 1985 for three weeks of my glorious summer. HIGH CRIMES AND MISDOMEANDERS!
I ended up staying an additional 6 weeks and the next three years all summer long. To this day it was one the most important, impactful experiences of my life. Occasionally the fat bastard was correct, even if he didn't know it.
One year, someone in my girlfriend's cabin brought an Ouija Board. Grew up in a Baptist church--not the shaking snakes kind--but not the most reserved, intellectual discussion of God/Satan, Heaven/Hell. I had absorbed a literal shit-ton (doctrinal term) of 'hell & damnation' lessons by my 16th year. I knew these boards were, if not evil, certainly not Divine. I had been warned about them.
But, my girlfriend was asking me to join them...
So, I'm the only guy in this cabin of 12/13 year old girls and my girlfriend. It is rather fun. Who likes who. Is so and so going to date so and so. Kids stuff. Everyone was laughing and have a good old time. I was beginning to relax.
The opportunity finally comes to me to begin to ask questions.
So I ask some rather benign questions, but then for a display of proof I asked it what my father's (he had passed when I was 4) middle name was. It was Arden. No one knew that, and in fact I have never met anyone with this name, nor read the name in any story or anything . Rare name. No one outside of my family knew this, I doubt my fat step dad even knew.
This young girl who was running the board begins to spell: A...R...D...E...N
As I type this I am still unnerved. Here is the bedeviling part:
All of a sudden I knew there was something very real going on, and I could maybe maybe get some answers to things I maybe shouldn't.
Did I run out of there terrified? No. I was so torn. I stayed around for the rest of the evening, but the damn game seemed to call to me for the rest of the week. I wanted to go back. I wanted to know. I wanted the power.
There are things/phenomena that is real that remains outside of our ability to detect or measure. Coincidences. 'I was just thinking about you..' when someone calls.
Speech is powerful. Thought is powerful.
These people are literally changing reality with their language. How we think about things. Doublethink and Newspeak. It is terrifying in its effect. In its nearly universal acceptance. Why does propaganda work if we hear it 100 times? I don't know, but maybe we do not have the mental fortitude to maintain constant vigilance required to avoid the language games from changing how we think about something.
They know what they are doing, but they do not know, nor understand from where the power emerges. Their Hubris will be their end, but the victims along the way will reach millions.
I think that this all makes sense. Great history lesson btw. Thank you.
Farmers live in the real world. They are Uber-practical. They work hard seven days a week. They have to know how to do a large variety of things- among them, take care of animals, get food from said animals, raise crops, run machinery, fix machinery, understand meteorology and its impact on their livelihood, deal with pests, understand markets, understand how to manage a business, time management, and if they aren’t a giant corporate entity, they need to do it themselves.
Madison, WI where I did my general surgery residency, is basically an island of Commies surrounded by an ocean of farmers. The farmers were great patients because they understood the cycle of life. They are realists.
Couple the detachment of the urban managerial type from toil, soil, biology, and nature with the decline and fall of American education, and you get to where we are now. Everything is performative.Deviation from the accepted narrative is verboten. Being emotional is good. Being rational and skeptical is bad. Yes, it’s all stupid. But it works on many people who are intellectually lazy and want instant simple answers to complicated problems. It’s terrifying. Some try to characterize this as a “feminine” way of doing things, and I understand the argument , but I think this is unfair to honest, intelligent women. Not all women are hysterical and sneaky. Not all men are strong and brave.
I’d rather be judged by a dozen farmers than a dozen administrative mandarins or petty bureaucrats all day long. Common sense and a sense of fair play used to be universally valued, as did truthfulness. Now we live in an empire of lies and denial of reality. Trust is hard to come by. This sickness will burn out. Just try not to get roasted in the coming conflagration.
I was just talking about this to a good friend of mine. It makes me sad when I read first person accounts from just 60 years ago, people as a whole were more erudite and eloquent, with a general intelligence we sorely lack today. I think that is by design though if you see what passes as an education today. And our culture doesn’t reward intelligence, it rewards outrageous behaviors and depraved materialism.
Go read this: California Sixth Grade Reader https://a.co/d/eKy78FM and compare and contrast to the drivel taught today. How many college students, let alone sixth graders, could understand and absorb that book today?
What you describe with accuser/defender is how the legal system worked in Scandinavia until the 16th century, roughly (and very over-simplified; parts of the old system were already gone by then and some parts survived into the early 20th century):
Elected, not selected, members of the community of a class called odalmän meaning they owned the land they used or their own business (a farrier f.e.) and were not indebted to anyone made up what passed for a court of law, and the elders of the community as well as the priest sat in at the Ting, since any and all disagreements and accusations were to be made public.
The same went for business-deals, promises of marriage, settling of inheritances and so on - public, at the Ting. In later times, after church on Sunday.
The downside of the system was for anyone not endowed with a family of that or a higher class; the landless, the day-labourers and so on.
The above is a layman's off-the-cuff summary of over 500 years of judicial (d)evolution, so any historian could drive a tank through the holes in it.
As for insomnia, my father - being career military for life - sometimes quipped "That's why the King invented push-ups". I don't know, persnally. I've always found mulled wine or hot mead to do the trick, if judiciously applied.
“Mouth slop” is as good of a euphemism as it gets. That’s all I have to say because you put it all very succinctly.
This is a great article, thank you! It definitely fleshes out so much of the WHY of my thinking, especially since 2020, but really since Obama hit the scene out of nowhere. "But he TALKS so well, doesn't he?" Obama institutionalized this crap. Not that it hadn't started, certainly, but we went from experience and accomplishment as criteria to... well, this. My dad told me once, when I was stuck writing a huge paper on a very dull subject in college, "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit." This is where we are as a nation - or, really, the entire West. And it IS baffling.
Really interesting, Chris. I also did research in Worcester at the AAS. It's a true treasure house, though what you found in those militia records sounds just as fascinating.
Yes, our ability to write, reason, speak, and do does seem to be in decline. Education, the decline of the same, is part of it, since education is more like training today, with the emphasis on STEM and making money.
Who needs lessons in writing, rhetoric, debate, speech, civics, etc.? Just use AI to write something for you. That seems to be where we're headed: allowing the "experts," even AI, to do our writing and thinking for us.
It doesn't bode well ...
Thanks for an interesting article.
For a very long time, our country has been declining intellectually--perhaps not in certain branches of technology and science, but in most other areas. Even though standardized tests, entry exams, and even military selections have all been severely dumbed down., students have been increasingly unable to pass even the dumbed-down tests on dumbed-down material. At some point in recent decades, we seem to have passed a tipping point, and now our culture is in a mad race to the bottom. I don't know how it can be stopped. But I can't stop myself from trying anyway, however little it may matter.
I worked in the skilled trades for decades, after having been a schoolteacher, and with a master's degree in education.
It should come as no surprise that the skilled tradesmen are the smart ones. Reality doesn't give a damn how they want things to be. The tradesmen must very deliberately analyze the reality and find a way to manipulate that reality into what they want it to be. Construction is not for sissies.
Which is why I say, manipulating people is easy. Manipulating reality is tough.
The problem is we're dealing with people who think that if there is consensus (even if manufactured through censorship) what they're saying cannot, by definition, be a lie. However...
"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie."
"their speech acts don’t connect to the real, anymore."
This is actually a core tenant of postmodernism, that reality is unknowable. Instead our words create a shared delusion which we take to be "real" even though it isn't. Western universities have been run by postmodernists for decades, so the entire ruling class had imbibed this philosophy even if they don't realize it. So have you and I; Nietzsche and Foucault pervade the air we breathe.
This won't be fixed. It will eventually lead to our collapse, since systems of unreality always lose eventually, but that may still be decades away. We're going to put Adam Smith's dictum, "there's a lot of ruin in a nation", to the test.
BTW: Where can we get a copy of your dissertation, Chris? It wounds like a fascinating read.
Restating this after a day of driving: When people didn't just talk for a living, their talk was more likely to be meaningful and serious. The emergence of talking for a living, of the "going to a meeting" professions, has degraded and emptied discourse. It's not inevitable, and a bunch of people who talk for a living are interesting people. But the trend overall is steadily downward.
Mouth slop is copy pasta is word salad. Recursive NPC PMC cognitive dissonance loop.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
John 1:1.
Great article. Our culture is playing with fire, or at least those who have not mastered their own inner tyrants, are playing with fire.
My mind went off on a weird tangent while reading this.
I spent my summers at a YMCA summer camp in the Sierra Nevadas. I was voluntold by my stepdad to be part of the kitchen crew in 1985 for three weeks of my glorious summer. HIGH CRIMES AND MISDOMEANDERS!
I ended up staying an additional 6 weeks and the next three years all summer long. To this day it was one the most important, impactful experiences of my life. Occasionally the fat bastard was correct, even if he didn't know it.
One year, someone in my girlfriend's cabin brought an Ouija Board. Grew up in a Baptist church--not the shaking snakes kind--but not the most reserved, intellectual discussion of God/Satan, Heaven/Hell. I had absorbed a literal shit-ton (doctrinal term) of 'hell & damnation' lessons by my 16th year. I knew these boards were, if not evil, certainly not Divine. I had been warned about them.
But, my girlfriend was asking me to join them...
So, I'm the only guy in this cabin of 12/13 year old girls and my girlfriend. It is rather fun. Who likes who. Is so and so going to date so and so. Kids stuff. Everyone was laughing and have a good old time. I was beginning to relax.
The opportunity finally comes to me to begin to ask questions.
So I ask some rather benign questions, but then for a display of proof I asked it what my father's (he had passed when I was 4) middle name was. It was Arden. No one knew that, and in fact I have never met anyone with this name, nor read the name in any story or anything . Rare name. No one outside of my family knew this, I doubt my fat step dad even knew.
This young girl who was running the board begins to spell: A...R...D...E...N
As I type this I am still unnerved. Here is the bedeviling part:
All of a sudden I knew there was something very real going on, and I could maybe maybe get some answers to things I maybe shouldn't.
Did I run out of there terrified? No. I was so torn. I stayed around for the rest of the evening, but the damn game seemed to call to me for the rest of the week. I wanted to go back. I wanted to know. I wanted the power.
There are things/phenomena that is real that remains outside of our ability to detect or measure. Coincidences. 'I was just thinking about you..' when someone calls.
Speech is powerful. Thought is powerful.
These people are literally changing reality with their language. How we think about things. Doublethink and Newspeak. It is terrifying in its effect. In its nearly universal acceptance. Why does propaganda work if we hear it 100 times? I don't know, but maybe we do not have the mental fortitude to maintain constant vigilance required to avoid the language games from changing how we think about something.
They know what they are doing, but they do not know, nor understand from where the power emerges. Their Hubris will be their end, but the victims along the way will reach millions.
bsn
I think that this all makes sense. Great history lesson btw. Thank you.
Farmers live in the real world. They are Uber-practical. They work hard seven days a week. They have to know how to do a large variety of things- among them, take care of animals, get food from said animals, raise crops, run machinery, fix machinery, understand meteorology and its impact on their livelihood, deal with pests, understand markets, understand how to manage a business, time management, and if they aren’t a giant corporate entity, they need to do it themselves.
Madison, WI where I did my general surgery residency, is basically an island of Commies surrounded by an ocean of farmers. The farmers were great patients because they understood the cycle of life. They are realists.
Couple the detachment of the urban managerial type from toil, soil, biology, and nature with the decline and fall of American education, and you get to where we are now. Everything is performative.Deviation from the accepted narrative is verboten. Being emotional is good. Being rational and skeptical is bad. Yes, it’s all stupid. But it works on many people who are intellectually lazy and want instant simple answers to complicated problems. It’s terrifying. Some try to characterize this as a “feminine” way of doing things, and I understand the argument , but I think this is unfair to honest, intelligent women. Not all women are hysterical and sneaky. Not all men are strong and brave.
I’d rather be judged by a dozen farmers than a dozen administrative mandarins or petty bureaucrats all day long. Common sense and a sense of fair play used to be universally valued, as did truthfulness. Now we live in an empire of lies and denial of reality. Trust is hard to come by. This sickness will burn out. Just try not to get roasted in the coming conflagration.
Thanks Chris, how I long to have been born in those harder, simpler times, when work meant working and talk was just that.
I was just talking about this to a good friend of mine. It makes me sad when I read first person accounts from just 60 years ago, people as a whole were more erudite and eloquent, with a general intelligence we sorely lack today. I think that is by design though if you see what passes as an education today. And our culture doesn’t reward intelligence, it rewards outrageous behaviors and depraved materialism.
Go read this: California Sixth Grade Reader https://a.co/d/eKy78FM and compare and contrast to the drivel taught today. How many college students, let alone sixth graders, could understand and absorb that book today?
Tell me how this ends? Badly! Very badly.
What you describe with accuser/defender is how the legal system worked in Scandinavia until the 16th century, roughly (and very over-simplified; parts of the old system were already gone by then and some parts survived into the early 20th century):
Elected, not selected, members of the community of a class called odalmän meaning they owned the land they used or their own business (a farrier f.e.) and were not indebted to anyone made up what passed for a court of law, and the elders of the community as well as the priest sat in at the Ting, since any and all disagreements and accusations were to be made public.
The same went for business-deals, promises of marriage, settling of inheritances and so on - public, at the Ting. In later times, after church on Sunday.
The downside of the system was for anyone not endowed with a family of that or a higher class; the landless, the day-labourers and so on.
The above is a layman's off-the-cuff summary of over 500 years of judicial (d)evolution, so any historian could drive a tank through the holes in it.
As for insomnia, my father - being career military for life - sometimes quipped "That's why the King invented push-ups". I don't know, persnally. I've always found mulled wine or hot mead to do the trick, if judiciously applied.