The Model Destroying the West

Why are so many academics politically radical and why do they want to destroy a system that enabled them to get where they are?

Gary Saul Morson a professor of Russian at Northwestern University who studied the Russian revolution has some surprising answers.

And Morson’s reply; you have it wrong, such people don’t consider they at the top.

They regard those at the top as the wealthy but think people with the ideas, like themselves, should be ……..at the top.

The reasoning is since they understand the theories, they morally superior so should be in charge, because there’s something fundamentally wrong with the world when ‘practical’ people are.

So what they take away from tertiary education is the ideology that supports it because the wrong people have the power, and they want it.

It’s all down to not seeing themselves as part of the establishment.

The interesting thing is the word intelligentsia, according to Prof. Morson, was coined in Revolutionary Russia, referring not just to educated people but those who supported revolutionary ideology.

The strange paradox in all this is intellectuals who crusade for the cause of the working class also hold the members of that class, their social inferiors, in contempt.

New academic doctrines are moving the world, or at least the West, from triumph to decline.

They dismiss science — the real kind — in favor of political agendas, in which theory trumps facts.

Few people are familiar with Critical Theory and its related doctrines, yet these ideas today drive government policies and shape public attitudes.

Capitalism is oppressive. Private property rights cause environmental destruction. Prosperity causes climate change.

The most serious threat to the West is not China or Russia but its visceral disgust with itself. A growing proportion of people — in universities, the media, politics and corporate structures — now reject the premises upon which their own thriving societies are built.

Critical Theory opposes everything that makes the West work.

Unlike traditional academic inquiry, which seeks to explain and understand with logic, analysis and the scientific method, these doctrines are less theories than programs.

Their purpose is to condemn cultural norms, tear down existing orders and transform society.

Critical Theory shouldn’t be confused with critical thinking as to think critically is to reason.

Critical Theory’s imperatives are ideological assertions not based on scientific data or deduction.

Critical Theory is not a singular school of thought but a scholarly umbrella that consists of multiple approaches and variations that defy easy encapsulation.

Like Critical Theory, they are activist and political. They lead with their conclusions.

Embedded within them is the central tenet of postmodernism, a philosophical movement of the mid- to late 20th century.

Postmodernism challenges the premises of Enlightenment reason, particularly the claim that observation and rationality can identify objective truth, whether moral or scientific.

If there is no truth, then no universal conclusions can be reached, and so all questions must be left to individuals.

Postmodernism embraces Critical Theory and vice versa. Progressives are apt to insist that truth is relative and subjective when they encounter facts that they do not like, but otherwise eagerly enforce “truths” that they prefer.

There is no truth.

The final conquest is now in progress inside science, technology, engineering and medical faculties. Generations of graduates, taught to believe in Critical Theory rather than how to think critically about it, now populate governments, corporate boards, human resource departments, courts, media outlets, teachers’ unions, school boards and classrooms.

Critical Theory is embedded in elementary school curricula.

Children carry the guilt and resentment of living in a society that they are taught is fundamentally unjust.

No coup is more effective than one committed by a people against itself.

Evidence of the ascendancy of these new doctrines is everywhere.

To reason, to rely on evidence, to seek consistency, and to insist that individuals have ownership of their own lives are features of an oppressive culture according to this philosophical dictate.

The ground began to shift long ago, and a kind of cultural apocalypse is well underway.