Mamet Must Read

This. It's about David Mamet's experience of converting from a liberal to a conservative, and it captures that experience perfectly. That's it. That's what it's like. If you've done the same, you'll see yourself somewhere in it. If you haven't, you can find out what it is and what it's like.

And then there's this:

Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.

“If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we’re training ourselves not to see cause and effect,” he said. Wasn’t there, he went on, a “much more interesting .  .  . view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?”

I don't get very personal on this blog. I'm not interested in sharing with you my in-depth biography and personal psychology. But this was like a revelation. If I write that it was like a punch in the chest but in a good way, will that makes sense to you? Because that's what it was.

David Mamet sums up in that bit why I can't bring myself to go back to school. I think higher ed, outside of mathematics and hard sciences, has become largely a sham, a fraud.

I was talking to a dear friend the other day with plenty of graduate school credentials. She was complaining that most of the highly educated (read: highly credentialed) now seem to take it for granted that there is no objective reality, everything is a construct of personal experience. Academics aren't about seeking out truth anymore; they're about creating narratives that will further the academic's vision of what reality should be.

Once you decide that there is no truth to pursue, there is no point to academics. At that point, you've become so obsessed with admiring the leaves that you've chainsawed through the trunk to get it out of your way.

So what then? If you want an education outside of the hard sciences, what do you do?

Maybe you can find an exceptional institution truly dedicated to the pursuit of truth. I don't know the way to do that, but perhaps you do.

If not, you have to go out and pursue that education yourself. There are extensive resources for that now, and you don't have to be a rich guy to use interlibrary loan. Good luck.