High Culture? WTF? Part Three

X

At the end of Part Two we said that the University is vital to the existence and persistence of the Corporation, and the interest of the Corporation in the University is obvious. How is it obvious?

Just look at the Board of Trustees, whether of public or private universities and colleges (if there are any of those still left). The simple facts are that the corporations of the United States own the universities and that the University is primarily an instrument of the Corporation. The legal aspects are not in question here.

We don’t have to concern ourselves with legal fictions. By own is meant that the University exists primarily to provide the Corporation with replacement parts for worn-out or otherwise discarded personnel and with additional parts for expansion (for anyone who considers the use of language here to be dehumanizing, please keep in mind that it is simply intended to reflect the way the Corporation actually thinks about people).

To be sure, the University also produces replacement and expansion parts for the Government (though the Government is pretty much an ancillary to the Corporation) and for the University itself as well as for primary and secondary education.

Replacement and expansion parts form the bulk of University products, or deposits, and most of that bulk goes to the Corporation. Second, even in the past the University produced very few products, deposits, or simply - graduates - characterized by what is perhaps best called wisdom. Of course, we've mentioned the word wisdom before in this entry, but have yet to define it. So, before continuing, let's answer the question:

What do we mean by individuals characterized by wisdom?

Such individuals have sufficient detachment to recognize when a social institution is malfunctioning and sufficient insight to deal with that malfunction with some effectiveness.

Possibly because of personality attributes which, again, even in the past the University did no more than to foster and develop, such individuals demonstrated an unusual interest in problems.

Especially, of course, problem-solving as it relates to the malfunctioning of social institutions. This is important. Why?

Because, the usual response to malfunction, whether of the individual or institution, is defensiveness, or guilt, neither of which is of the slightest value in dealing with the problem.

From this perspective, the elite’s attempt to induce collective shame and guilt on an entire race - whites - through Critical Race Theory is symptomatic of the fact that, though they’re hungry for power, their incompetent at social management, to say nothing of petty and malevolent. Is there a more hate-filled people on earth?

This explains the need to scapegoat so as to conceal their incompetence, pettiness and malevolence. This pattern can be easily observed in families that scapegoat. Since the family is the most basic bio-social unit it’s the primary social institution.

If the family is the seed, the culture is the tree. Hence, the growing interest in Family Systems and Scapegoating Families.

In any event, the most important ingredients of wisdom are sustained problem exposure and solution postponement, which prevent premature termination of data gathering.

These, together with detachment, require not only superior intelligence but also two other attributes: the ability of the individual to put themselves under severe intellectual pressure and the ability to postpone gratification, that is, specifically, to tolerate intellectual tension, psychological disorientation and emotional disturbance.

XI

The University has been facing a number of severe difficulties for decades now and these difficulties have had an adverse effect on the Corporation that today is no longer possible to ignore.

First, the immense productivity of the Corporation has been such that it has absorbed and trivialized all of the damage it’s done.

Even back in the 19th century John Ruskin coined the useful term illth for such damage - as opposed to the term wealth. It’s the increasingly powerful conviction of ever larger segments of society that the production of illth is greater than the production of wealth and that they’re being deprived of the ability to enjoy and benefit from the productivity, perhaps irretrievably. The result, of course, is a devastating cultural incoherence.

And now we’re back to why talk about cultural values as a system is so misleading. Because, as we said toward the end of Part One, the values of any society or culture or individual have originated at different times and in response to different situations. Adding that, as situations change, a perceived coherence can metamorphose into the perception of an incoherence (something that happens in all kinds of ways in all kinds of relationships all of the time). The point is, such a metamorphosis produces in the perceiver a sense of cultural crisis. The perception of a social incoherence by a sufficient number of individuals means that the society is in a condition of cultural crisis. And that’s the condition we’re in today.

Hence the disturbances within the University across the board.

The production of replacements means that the University is simply maintaining a socially destructive force, the Corporation, as well as the Government, insofar as the Government has become an ancillary of the Corporation. As for the production of those with the attributes of wisdom, there is much to be said.

In the past they were produced to deal with the malfunction of institutions within a social coherence. But even then not nearly enough were being produced and this was a concern at the time.

Today? Not only are they not being produced, but the University is actively engaged in prohibiting the development of the attributes of wisdom and at a time of great social incoherence!

This is why many believe the elite are literally insane. A belief justified by the elite's obsession with menticide, a systematic effort to destroy the values and beliefs, not just of a single individual, but of an entire civilization - Western Civilization.

But, we’re not insane. Why? Because we know we’re imperfect, not perfect, and that life, which we are here to serve, not have it

serve us, is dynamic, not static. Which is why we see a dedication to reality through continuous learning, change and growth, as the most reasonable response to these two facts. So, it would appear that to deal with the problems of our culture crisis at all adequately, more people are needed who are characterized by a greater detachment than ever before, and by a greater capacity for problem exposure and solution postponement.*

*The alternative is to have civilization destroyed by a mob of crazy dumbshits who have inherited something they don’t understand, which is what is happening now. Obviously. Just look around.

By the late 60’s and early 70’s the University was faced with a problem of the utmost severity that it’s ignored ever since. In fact, it has ignored this problem so well it's no longer even aware of it as a fact, let alone sees it as a problem in need of a solution.

And what problem is that? The attributes of wisdom are the attributes of the aristocracy and the haute bourgeoisie, that is, the new aristocracy of the industrial revolution that replaced the old pre-industrial or argriculturally based aristocracy. Social Management - including above all the manipulation of the principal instruments of social management, Rhetoric and Explanation - requires detachment, not defensiveness and guilt, and requires postponement of gratification together with problem exposure and solution postponement. To put it bluntly, the tradition of the University is an aristocratic tradition.

It was designed to refine, intellectualize, and cultivate individuals who arrived at the University with the values of the attributes of wisdom already instilled in them by the culture.

Meaning, it was designed to select and cull from the potentially wise provided in various ways by the socially managing class.

By the way, and before continuing, it's important to point out that this is not to say that the values of any one group are better than those of another. That is not and can not be the case. The point is to direct attention to the values themselves and to test them for their relevance and usefulness to us in terms of adaptation.

In fact, I'm a very apt illustation of this state of affairs. Though hardly a member of the aristocracy (just about no one is today) I'm more than willing to use whatever values that may have come from them if those values prove to be relevant and useful. Just as any good musician, songwriter, or arranger will use whatever they might find of value in different forms of music to help them improve their ability as musicians, songwriters and arrangers.

Note: Today the absurdly pretentious and socially insecure hostile elite, along with their useful idiots and paid proxies, now all use the University as a source of prestige while actively working to destroy what made it prestigious in the first place! That’s why I refer to them all as a mob crazy dumbshits.

XII

The fantastic growth and immense success of the Corporation during the 19th and 20th centuries required the University to produce replacement parts as well as the wise and needed far more of the wise than could be produced, since the field of candidates for selection and culling was too limited.

The University, in short - compelled by the Corporation - had to start mass education. But the tradition of university education was hopelessly maladapted for such an enterprise. The values of the middle classes and of the working classes were and remain exactly the opposite of those of wisdom. They are the values, not of detachment, but of attachment - or commitment, defensiveness and guilt - reduction to the minimum of problem exposure, and of immediate problem solution (as in activism and social media).

The reason is simple. For the attributes of wisdom, a considerable degree of disposable income is necessary, because only disposable income makes it possible to achieve that degree of psychic insulation and social protection necessary for both the application and the production of the attributes of wisdom.

People here in Argentina used to ask me Porque estas aca? Why are you here? My short answer was that I came here in search of a quiet place to read a good book. In other words, I was in search of the social protection and psychic insulation I would need to learn the attributes of wisdom, in as much as that was possible for me, and to apply them in my effort to transcend not only my family, society, and culture, but also the personality that had been formed in response to them. In short, I came here to become who I am by attempting to shape a healthier and more meaningful life.

But because my last name is Rothwell and not Rockerfeller, I didn't have the disposable income. So, I did what I could. Given the circumstances, challenges and obstacles, I think I did alright.

XIII

By the second half of the 20th century the University was faced with an impossible task. With the already ragged remnants of an aristocratic educational tradition, they were attempting to educate individuals to whom the values of such an education were entirely alien. The situation was compounded by the fact that, as the University - under the compelling demands of the Corporation - had expanded, they had to expand their faculties, and they could do so only by recruiting them from the middle class and to a lesser degree the working class. Vast numbers of such faculty members, in spite of undergraduate and graduate education, never learned or even understood the attributes of wisdom, which are the values of High Culture so necessary for competent social management, particularly during a culture cris!

Instead of becoming themselves cultured and aristocratically educated they merely learned various pedagogical and professional technologies that had nothing to do with wisdom.

But they did worse, far worse. You can see where this is going.

Like a child-people in a petulant fit motivated by radical ingratitude and a class-based hatred and insecurity they actually set about aggressively attacking the very culture that made their success possible in the first place, while flaunting their participation in what they saw as one of that culture’s status symbols, the University itself. But, and this is really the main point of it all, at no point did they offer any reasonable or workable solution to the problems they couldn’t shut up about.

To this day they have yet to understand that an addiction to self-righteous complaining on the one hand - and competent problem-solving and effective social management on the other - don’t go together. In any event, if you're still wondering why I refer to the hostile elite, as well as their useful idiots and paid proxies, as a crazy mob of virtue-signalling dumbshits, this is the reason.

They will never produce anything of lasting value - ever! All they have to offer is, as we've previously stated, menticide. But not even that is done competently, of course. Which is why they have to demonize dissent, pathologize opposition and abolish our freedoms and rights, which now inculdes the right to self-defense.

To repeat, all of us, myself included, come from the social classes under discussion right now, since the aristocracy began to disappear during the 19th century and were gone by the end of WWI and the haute bourgeoisie soon after. It's just us folks.

But, as we said here in our entry on CRT When anyone from the middle or lower cultural levels encounters a higher cultural level, they have three strategies at their disposal.

1. They can accept it and participate.

2. They can accept it, but choose not to participate.

3. They can reject it and insist it be destroyed.

Some of us chose the first option. Good for us. Others I have known and remain in close and friendly contact with over the years, both here and in the US, chose number 2. But the hostile elite, their useful idiots and paid proxies in the public chose 3.

Not surprisingly, they're the ones causing us all so much trouble.

XIV

It was never recognized that the problem of the University wasn’t the cultivation of students already prepared for such cultivation (of the attributes of wisdom), but, rather, massive acculturation.

In short, the problem wasn’t about cultivation, it was about acculturation. By the 1970’s the University student was in a situation precisely analogous to a Peace Corps volunteer, popular at that time, for work among the peasants of Peru; they had to be given lengthy and intense training in the language, the culture, the history, of the whole way of life of the people they were supposed to live with. But, of course, that didn’t happen.

Before continuing, let's pause and consider this. These students (and faculty) had to learn about their own culture. How else were they going to know themselves and solve their own problems, to say nothing of solving the problems of those from other cultures, if they didn't even know their own culture? A question well-put is half answered. But that question answers itself.

Hence their extraordinary lack of self-awareness and corresponding and irritating touchiness. Not to mention an unwillingness to face unpleasant facts, especially about themselves. Instead, both students and faculty in a cult-like act of mass madness surrendered to the great temptation of academic life - moral pomposity. And it was and remains this dangerous, even lethal, addiction to virtue signalling and lack of self-awareness that made it impossible for them to see that, though hungry for power, they were incompetent at social management.

During this time it became obvious to some, but by no means all, that the University was faced with a monumental task. They had to retrain their faculties. Those faculty members who were imbued with the values of aristocratic education were relatively helpless before their students. They could only complain about their students' middle-class values, since they didn’t recognize that their task was - in the traditional university - not education, but acculturation. As for those teachers who had never learned such values, but had only learned technologies, they had to be trained in such values pretty much from scratch. And this kind of university teacher was becoming increasingly predominant - especially in the humanities. Even back then, the fact that anyone wrote a publishable scholarly article meant no more than that they had learned an intellectual technology, and such technologies do not operate at a very high intellectual or cultural level. And what was true then is even truer now, by a lot (for more on this see the CRT entry on Cultural Impoverishment).

It was realized by the late 60's and early 70's that one kind of faculty member needed to be trained to perceive the acculturational problem, while the other needed to be trained in both the aristocratic values and the acculturational problem.

This retraining of faculties was essential not merely to the survival of the University as other than a technological institution but also to solving the problems of the Corporation.

Not only did the Corporation have to deal with the profound suspicion of American society that the Corporation was as destructive as it was constructive; not only did it have to surmount the crisis of cultural incoherence (that not only has not gone away but only gotten worse) in order for its potentialities as an extraordinary new event in human history to be realized; in addition, as its role became increasingly important, the attributes of wisdom needed to be in operation - not merely at the upper executive level, or at the lower executive level, but even at the management level, at which, until that time, the values of the middle class were sufficient for successful operation.

By the early 70's the Corporation was taking over the primary tasks of social management from the Nation-State and their Governments. As a social institution it was transcending the Government. For example, it was perfectly obvious then that the European Common Market existed to facilitate the operations of the Corporation and the Corporation’s transcendence of the Nation-State and its territories. But as some leaders in business and education saw at the time, this process was being hampered and possibly irretrievably damaged by the cultural crisis and the failure of the University to provide the kind of personnel without which the Corporation could or can scarcely continue to exist.

XV

We must not imagine for a moment that biological theory assures us that human beings are going to be a successful species; there is reason to believe that we have not yet even been evolutionarily tested, and we may very well fail that test. From this point of view, the Corporation is usefully seen as an adapational mechanism that may or may not have survival value. Certainly, even by the 70’s the survival value of the Nation-State as an adapational mechanism was seriously in question. Today?

What keeps a species going at one stage in its history may very well destroy it at another stage, and the destructive capacities of the Corporation, Government and University today are obvious.

Not surprisingly, during this time members of corporations themselves responded to the cultural crisis by losing confidence in the corporation itself - and not just the corporation - particularly in the responsibilities of social management.

And that was in the early 1970's. 50 years ago folks! An answer to the question, Why don't young people know about this? is because those who knew about it were powerless to do anything about it because the powerful didn't care. They still don't.

But we do. So, to understand this problem of our social institutions it’s necessary to examine two aspects of the problem:

1. the Corporation as an institution, and

2. the reasons for the cultural stagnation of the University (upon which the Corporation, Government, and University itself, must depend for their lifeblood).

So, to that in Part IV, we shall turn.

Until then!