The short answer, of course, is The Irreducibles and their relationship to Social Management. They’re always going to matter, if we want to survive. Our concern in this entry will focus on our social institutions. What happened to them?
Leaving that deadly question aside for the moment, it has to be admitted that, because they’re run by people, no social institution can ever function perfectly, or even very well, all of the time. But they should be functioning a lot better than they are now. So, why aren’t they? Obviously, there are many answers to that question.
But, to repeat, as this is a blog and not a book, we’ll jump right in and take a quick look at the relationship between business, education and government, particularly between business and education. To return to our question, Why aren’t our social institutions functioning as well as they should be? Bluntly, the reason is because our universities produce graduates who know nothing about the attributes of wisdom, let along how they might acquire them. What do we mean by wisdom?
Sufficient emotional detachment to recognize when a social institution is malfunctioning and sufficient intellectual insight to deal with that malfunction with some effectiveness.
The usual response to malfunction, whether of the individual or institution, is defensiveness and guilt, neither of which is of the slightest value in dealing with the problem (or any problem). The most important ingredients of wisdom are sustained problem exposure and solution postponement, which prevent premature termination of data-gathering. These, along with detachment and insight, require not only intelligence, but two other attributes:
1. the ability of the individual to put themselves under severe intellectual and emotional pressure.
2. the ability to postpone gratification, that is, to tolerate tension and internal disturbance.
Obviously, a student doesn’t become “wise” by simply attending a university. They posssess the potential to develop these attributes in varying degress before they get there. The job of the university is to continue to foster and develop them.
In short, the university is supposed to be a place where the individual student is trained to develop the attributes of wisdom. That way the young are better prepared to participate in and contribute to society.
The university is a place where one is supposed to learn How to think, not What to think. It's where students are supposed to be introduced to and inspired by thought-relations, not trained like circus animals to repeat thought-cliches. It's a place where students learn that thought itself is synonymous with method and that the best method is the problem-solving method associated with science (it's not calld the model of knowing for nothing).
Note: In terms of memory, or the retention and recollection of what is learned, the best method is a combination of the mechanical, the ingenious, and the judicious, not simply a shallow and narrow version of the mechanical (as is the case with thought-cliches that narcotize the student's mind).
In fact, the art of experimental thinking is the key to the control, direction, guidance and development of everything we do in life. Everything. It emancipates experience and makes for steady progress. Without the acquired skill of experimental thinking we're just winging it, or, tied ball and chain to routine. With experiemental thought we depersonalize to repersonalize.
It's the great paradox of theory and practice. Meaning, theory, in regard to anything we do, is enormously practical and extermely beneficial to both the individual and social-institutions the more impersonal their relationship with that theory is. A better way to acquire and develop the attributes of wisdom would be impossible to imagine. And it must take place in our universities, or they are simply betraying their mission. The fact that the hostile elite is betraying the mission of the university explains, in part, the creation of, and justification for, PRC International.
In any event, our teaching-learning institutions in general, and our universities in particular, are places where our young are supposed to learn the intellectual skills of rigorous thinking, consistent reasoning, and cautious judgment, and the sustained attention, intention and patience that go with those all important skills. Through the guidance and direction of competent, caring teachers, and through an effort of the will over the impressionable senses, students can learn the value of striking that difficult balance between self-reliance and cooperation.
For this reason the university is a place where young people are to begin learning how to question their own assumptions and to engage in self-criticism without allowing any anxiety to interfere with that self-examination (this should actually begin in high school having been introduced by competent teachers, not to mention parents at home, who model such behavior. That this rarely, if ever, happens explains our current culture crisis).
The university is a place where students are supposed to learn the value of continuous learning, change and growth, so they can question the values of the social institutions they belong to. Not so they can sit on a high horse and judge them. But, rather, so they can help improve the functioning of those institutions.
A university is a place where one is supposed to learn intelligent problem-solving, not mindless fault-finding. It’s supposed to be a place where the young learn intellectual humility, not moral self-righteousness. The list could go on, but I’d never finish.
So, I'll just add that the mission of the university must be the teaching and learning of the vital system of ideas that our culture lives by, not the deliberate attempt to vulguralize human knowledge and adapt it to the infant mind.
The fact that education has been replaced with indoctrination* has had, and continues to have, an adverse effect on our social institutions - all of them. Just look around.
*That indoctrination has replaced education can be seen in the fact that Critical Thinking has been replaced by what the pseudo-intellectual founders of The Frankfurt School pretentiously referred to as Critical Theory. A fancy term designed to conceal the heart of the matter, educational malpractice.
For this reason, the smugness of our elite is impossible to defend. In fact, one could say that what we are witnessing today is nothing less than The Pyrrhic Victory Of The Hostile Elite.
Simply because their rise to power has been in direct proportion to the collapse of the very social institutions their power controls.
As mentioned before, an important aspect of The Irreducibles has to do with Social Management. The principle instrument of social management is rhetoric, which consists of those verbal and non-verbal signs by which social management is carried out.
The word “corporation” itself is rhetoric, as is the word “government.” For example:
When we say that the United States has decided to do something, like implement their foreign, domestic, and economic policies of Invade the World, Invite the World, and In-Debt to the World, what has happened is that a few individuals (or maybe only one) have made a decision and have the power to effectuate it.
The same applies to any country. The term “government” is one of the instruments of institutional power and cultural control.
In short, Rhetoric is an instrument of Social Management.
Similarly, when it is said that Google has decided to do something, such as work within the United States for the exclusive benefit of the Chinese military, it’s an error to say that Google has decided anything, for the simple reason that Google doesn’t exist. That's not to say that it doesn't exist as a legal entity, because it certainly does. But legal entities themselves are part of the rhetoric by which society is manipulated.
As entities that act and cause, governments and corporations are fictions. As persistent patterns of interaction the members of which share a common socially managing rhetoric, they’re very real indeed, not fictional at all. The important point to keep in mind is, social management and its principle instrument, rhetoric, require emotional detachment, intellectual insight, postponement of gratification, problem exposure, and solution postponement.
In short, competent social management depends upon the attributes of wisdom. For this reason, the tradition of university education was designed to refine, intellectualize, and cultivate, individuals who arrive at the university with the values of the attributes of wisdom already instilled in them by the culture!
But, because the culture today does not value wisdom as defined above, at all, and hasn’t for ages, the values of those who both run and attend the universities today, ie; administration, faculty and students, are exactly the opposite of those of wisdom. Worse, they don’t even know it (see Dunning-Kruger Effect).
Their values are not that of detachment and insight, but of attachment – of conformity, defensiveness, and guilt – reduction to the minimum of problem exposure, and of immediate problem solution (see Stage One: Conformity). The primary cultural deposit expelled from the bowels of this Ship of Fools is an explanatory system operating intellectually on the level of gossip.
This problem obtains throughout our elite teaching-learning institutions and explains why so many in positions of authority, who should know better, actively demonize dissent, pathologize opposition, and openly call for violence against anyone who doesn't go a long to get along, whether or not it's in their best interest. As if any of that is going to help improve the functioning of our social-institutions. In short, universities today are filled with people who actually feel oppressed by the attributes of wisdom. And, of course, without even knowing it! One thing's certain. This insanity is not going to stop itself.
Maybe they should use their safe spaces to correct the very problems their hatred of reality has created. If they did that they’d only be fulfilling the original mission of the university, which already was a safe space where the young could develop the attributes of wisdom and thereby contribute positively and productively to society. But not anymore. The idea of the university being a place where the young learn to acquire the attributes of wisdom and put them to use for the benefit of themselves and society has been violently rejected, with predictable and depressing results. Again, just look around.
The Ivy League Is Now The Poison Ivy League.
How did this happen?
The fantastic growth and extraordinary changes of the 20th century increasingly required universities to produce replacement parts (for itself, government, and, of course, corporations) as well as the wise and required far more of the wise than could be produced, since the selection and culling was too limited.
Compelled, especially by the corporations, the universities in the 20th century had to start mass education, without realizing the obvious fact that the universities were hopelessly maladapted for such an enterprise. The institutional strain was too great.
Note: For a more detailed discussion see High Culture? WTF?
One important reason is that they were created before the population explosion, which can be considered as a kind of internal mass migration, introducing millions upon millions of people into a culture they did not create, understand, or value.
Note: Of course, this writer himself is a product of that population explosion, as are just about all of us today. In fact, my part in all of this was the inspiration behind starting this consultancy; or, the consultancy was one answer to the problems we all face today. The idea being that taking thoughtful action, while accepting the risks involved, is better than passive acceptance and mindless conformity.
With rare exceptions, the overall response to the civilization they inherited and the problems they faced were superficial in either the direction of sentimentality or cynicism, reactionary or reformatory, thereby leaving many problems unsolved and, thus, adding to them (for more see Ortega’s The Revolt Of The Masses and Phillip Rieff's The Triumph Of The Therapeutic, to name just two among many).
Note: It might seem odd that many of the host population of the USA, for example, who after 150 years have yet to acculturate themselves to the world they inherited are absolutely convinced (often on the basis of no sound empirical evidence at all) that those from other cultures can adopt with perfect adaptation the ideas and institutions of the host population's culture, until one considers what W.C. Fields once said of Hollywood actors, It's their ignorance that gives them confidence.
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