Brain Rot

The Oxford dictionary has declared “brain rot” to be the word of the year. We will not nitpick that the term contains two words, but clearly the American mind, and especially the minds of American college students are rotting. 

When large numbers of college students in our most elite institutions find Luigi Mangione to be a hero, you know that something has rotted their brains. 

When they are not joining groups like Queers for Palestine or Feminists for Honor Killings American university students are lining up to extol the consummate virtue of an assassin,

One suspects that they consider Mangione to be a revolutionary hero, a man who has taken action against the patriarchy and against capitalism. That defines the fiction that they are all inhabiting. 

It’s one thing to see that the American university system at the highest level is an indoctrination mill that advances radical leftist thought. It is quite another to see that those who imbibe this swill will feel obliged to idolize someone who acts on the theories.

After all, believing the correct orthodox beliefs will never be sufficient. Students and young adults who want to move to the next level must take actions that demonstrate the depth of their conviction, or at least must idolize those who do. 

The reason, Joel Kotkin explains, lies with the American university system. Clearly, he is not the first to indict academia for having gone to the intellectual dark side, for having given up on teaching and for having chosen to force feed leftist ideology.

In the great clash of civilizations we are risking failure, because the academy has become a fifth column that has worked long and hard to undermine the bases for American greatness. That means, not just patriotic pride but the use of empirical thinking to establish truth. 

Too many of us believe that our greatness lies in the fact that we engage in free and open debate. But they fail to notice that such deliberative debate requires an empirical reference to establish truth value. And that it requires a pragmatic consideration for what does and does not work.

In place of empirical science students are being force-fed ideology, to the point where they resemble those medieval clerics who were taken before inquisitions to suss out heresies. They have embraced theory, to the point where they refuse to believe that it can be refuted by fact.

If students are judged in terms of what they believe as dogmatic truth they are not being prepared to work in the real world and to respect the verdict of objective reality and the marketplace.

Kotkin writes:

Ideologically homogenous universities have become something akin to indoctrination camps, where traditional Western values are trashed while woke ideology is promoted. Not surprisingly, the graduates of today’s universities are inclined to maintain rigid positions on various issues, confident of their own superior intelligence and perspicuity while being intolerant of other views. They also tend to be not particularly proud to be American. The kind of support professors gave to the war effort in the Second World War would be hard to imagine today.

When it was merely about the humanities and even the social sciences, no one paid much attention. But now the woke mindset is being extended to the sciences, where empirical verification has been thrown aside in favor of identity politics.

Yet as the progressive educrats have seized control, many of the disciplines they dominate, like English and history, have experienced severe decline. More recently, the woke mindset has even spread into the sciences. Now we see science departments emphasising ‘social justice’ over empiricism, and placing race, gender or other considerations ahead of merit. In 2020, the medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles gave control of admissions to a DEI administrator. Since admitting students based on race, the failure rate in exams has increased tenfold.

If I were to try to explain this in a simple concept, the educrats and the ideologues are working to detach you from reality. This is obvious in the case of transgenderism, which defies reality but which you are forced to believe is a higher truth.

Without reality to put the brakes on your schemes and dreams, you will find yourself, not just promoting bad policy, but refusing to change it when they are shown to fail. Without a real reference there is no failure. There is only messaging.

Consider the case of two detectives, coming on two crime scenes. The first has a theory. He believes it unquestionably. He will set about collecting evidence that proves his theory correct, discarding evidence that refutes it. 

He believes the theory, takes it as dogma, because it provides him with membership in a local cult of true believers. Solving a crime is a second thought.

The second detective begins his enquiry by collecting evidence. He begins by noting anything that is out of place, that does not quite seem to fit. The more he collects evidence the sooner he will see a hypothesis forming. Then, he will test the hypothesis against all the evidence collected and against all future evidence. 

His empirical approach is designed to approach the truth of what happened and even of whodunit. Such is the approach that has currently been banished from too many universities, to the point where someone who lives out the terms of the ideologically driven narrative, by killing an insurance executive, is lionized as a hero.

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