Authority means less and less, reputation and integrity mean more and more. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:
how the rise of the reputation economy will destroy the university system as we know it
when i was a child my parents had a friend who had been a colonel in the army. he made an interesting claim:
give me a 25 year old, and i can turn him into a good soldier.
give me a 17 year old, and i can make him like it.
i wonder about the extent to which this adage reflects public schooling in the US.
it’s an old saw that “the smart, educated people become liberals because progressivism is somehow the “better” or “more intellectual” or “higher” position on the political spectrum.”
the leftward shift among the more and most educated and especially among the faculties at schools and universities is often trotted out as evidence to this end.
but what if the causality flows the other way?
what if this “blueshift” among the most credentialed who spend the most time in school is not illumination but indoctrination and capture?
what if they are just being inducted to this worldview from long years in institutions designed for just that purpose and then locked into durable allegiance by the elevation of “credentialed classes” into preferential guild-like structures around things like law, science, medicine, and academia where one must be granted and maintain some sort of accreditation to participate?
because there sure seems to be a lot of that going around.
