Everything was going fine. I was hanging out in the coffee shop–the one in the basement of Swift Hall has since renamed itself “Grounds of Being”, which of course is a name I like. I was talking with folks in the halls.
Then I remembered my terrible secret. I don’t belong there. I am a CONSERVATIVE. All the smiling faces would soon turn to snarls. People would ask that I be expelled. If I did get my degree, no one would want to hire me. All the same people I had been having pleasant conversations with, about the weather, professors, their courses of study.
It really is a sort of madness that has fallen over the Academy, writ large. It was described well by Allan Bloom 35 years ago. Moral virtue is no longer taught, and the Great Synchronizing Signal and Official Religion has become politics. And the politics is not fixed: it more or less demands something like: “we expect you to agree immediately with whatever we come up with next week. You don’t get any mulligans or misses. One failure and you are OUT, permanently and irrevocably.”
How did this happen? Again, Bloom traces it reasonably well. It was ideas that did this, ideas which consumed themselves, leaving nothing left in the fire but mimetic imitation, rote conformity, childishness. You pick up the ball and play with it because that is what the other children are doing. This in people with average IQ’s of 140 plus, but emotional IQ’s much, much lower than that, particularly when it comes to self knowledge.
Think about this: the Left has found itself more or less cheering the deaths of 100,000 Americans and the deaths by starvation of perhaps over 100 million people. All in the hopes of destroying a man whose main crime has been telling the truth in a time when they can’t and won’t do it.
In Minneapolis, ground zero to their ministrations, desperate ordinary people are being forced to build barricades and form militias to defend themselves, as if this were Somalia and not America. Crime is rampant. Children are terrified. And all according to plan. They are getting what they wanted: no police.
It is all a sadistic trance, a madness without justification.
I don’t regret my decision. It was the right decision. That will not change. But I would like to see the world come back to sanity in my lifetime, where someone like me–perhaps a grand child–could go in peace to a place with lots of smart people and expect honest, measured, compassionate wisdom.