The need to reform and refound the intellectual gymnasium
I am an Oxford graduate. There, I said it. That’s me in my college a few years back after a posh alumni event. It’s a shame that the degree I got isn’t worth its weight in toilet paper. But the fancy dinners are nice and I appreciate them.
Right now an Ivy League style credential is an embarrassment and a liability. These institutions have been thoroughly infiltrated and corrupted. My email inbox is filled with their woke ideology, associations with criminal enterprises, and ignorance of epic events. I don’t recommend any young person expose themselves to such an environment, except wearing the anthropological equivalent of a hazmat suit to study the horror.
At some point we are going to see a tectonic catastrophe overtake the academy. The authoritarian and collectivist intelligentsia is being outed as vacuous, incurious, and prideful. There may be many noble exceptions as individuals, but the enterprise as a whole faces a stunning collapse of legitimacy. Who would pay to be taught by a historian, professor of politics, or philosopher who didn’t anticipate and track the Great Awakening?
It took me three years to get an Oxford degree, and thirty more to get over it. Nonetheless, it shapes my life irrevocably to this day, as many friends come from that place and era. My cohort seems divided between those who got conventional success and don’t see what’s coming, and those who have had humbling setbacks in life and do. The latter paid the entry fee to the technocratic elite, but were turned away later as misfits for institutionalised psychopathy.
At least I am not alone in seeing that the foundations are broken and that the edifice is now unfit for human occupation. I have spent many hours chewing over the practical joke of having fought so hard to get in and get on, only to later realise we were being used as mental cannon fodder to legitimise nefarious activities of intelligence agencies and secret societies. If there’s one thing worse than being a useful idiot, it’s being a useless one!
I was one of the last years for which there was an entrance examination for Oxford. Reading mathematics doesn’t leave much wriggle room to introduce Marxist ideology into the entrance process. There is some genuine achievement in winning an intellectual cage fighting contest with the most motivated 17 year olds in your country, but that’s about it. Once I got there I realised that a monomaniacal focus on one narrow subject bored my polymath.
The rot encompasses all of the arts, humanities, and sciences. That is because the problem is deeper than any of these endeavours: it is spiritual in nature. The academy has become a temple to the ego, worshipping personal aggrandisement, worthless certifications, and social privilege. The self-righteous, self-important, and self-serving are an easy target for evil, since they believe themselves too clever to be deceived. Even writing an article like this is a battle with one’s own classist narcissism.
There is one public room in my college that I have never set foot in: the chapel. My disturbing childhood brush with organised religion means I get the creeps whenever I go near any kind of collective worship. It also struck me as strange that the spiritual was relegated to a game reserve where wilder souls could be tamed into conformity. Now in later life I am realising how all institutions are prone to capture into the service of power via spiritual subversion.
I have previously observed how the university was founded around the Divinity School, but later abandoned this for the Cult of Scientific Materialism. It may have taken several centuries for this to cause the catastrophic failure of the culture of academia, but the damage is now hard to ignore. I feel like an air crash investigator pre-positioned watching the fatally off course craft predictably hurtling towards the ground, ready to survey the final wreckage.
I have wised up over the years, and come to understand how atheists are making an extraordinary and absurd claim: that there are no higher-order systems to the reality that we observe. That’s like a computer process thread denying the existence of hypervisors, operating systems, and virtual machines. You cannot observe those matters directly at the level being considered, but you can intuit them (e.g. via timing effects). If nothing else this analogy demands a humility in considering the ineffable.
Modern science demands that all phenomena be observable to us, causative in the manner we demand, and bound to an invariance for our convenience. The observer (i.e. the scientist) is both pre-assumed to exist and then post-justified as a material phenomenon alone. The idea of divinity is literally relegated to a tourist attraction and museum exhibit. Theology is ghettoised into special colleges separated from the mainstream.
The consequence of denying the divine — an “all that there is that is consistent with self whether visible or not” — is the rise of a culture of separation and domination. The separation happens via extreme specialism, and the domination via higher credentials and more citations. Academics are humans who respond to incentives, and they are rewarded for making their idea “beat” rival ideas. This is critically different from the pursuit of truth, and ends with collectivist insanity where nobody can admit to everyone being wrong.
When you remove the divine from the academy, you create a “worship vacuum”. The worship still happens, just it becomes unconscious and unchallenged. The mind is elevated into the highest position, and the heart and soul are denigrated and denied. The sin of pride is sanctified, the solace of repentance is scolded. There is no promotion attached to withdrawing a paper from a journal and admitting to a mistake.
I am watching the Sussman trial — part of the Durham investigation — unfold in the US. Whether this is theatre or 100% real is immaterial, since what matters is that the whole of the political, media, and academic establishment is finally being held to account. Hillary Clinton has already been (implicitly) accused under oath of treason by her own campaign manager, yet the media is completely silent, since they are complicit. That alone is a massive story!
The misdeeds of the so-called elite include war crimes, so it could not be more serious. Some of us have seen this coming for years, and I have written about it extensively. The Q drops foreshadow specific people and events in this particular trial, years in advance. Yet the subject is an academic and intellectual no-go zone. For instance, the most basic investigation of whether the media construct “QAnon” relates to the actual Q drops or activities of the anons is absent. It’s pitifully feeble to watch.
I have looked at the Q source drops, and come to my own conclusions about establishment criminality (which have been extensively censored). Meanwhile I see former colleagues and associates come to vigorous opinions based solely on propaganda and groupthink. I may have gotten it wrong, as only time will tell, but at least I have looked at the data. There is an honour that cannot be taken away from me; even if others end up on the right side of history by accident, they cannot claim that virtue.
As it happens, they are manifestly on the wrong side of history. That the academy went along with the Covid power grab scam likely spells the end of it in its current form. A lot of the staff face serious health problems from the genocidal jab, and I hope there is a way of saving them from suffering. The exposure of systemic election fraud will discredit their elitist creed — “The Bidan Show” won’t go on forever. The collectivist psychosis is going to crack, and this is going to trigger the breakdown of the institution.
If there is one benefit I got from going to Oxford it is not being intimidated by those with a greater claim to understanding and legitimacy to speak. My many “deplorable” friends can see and smell the bullshit of the intellectuals, but lack the clarity and lucidity to describe its specific composition and texture. Having survived the “borstal for the troublingly gifted” I do feel qualified to pass comment on the failures and future of academia.
The challenge of the academy is to conserve its high regard for capability and competence while simultaneously reacquiring an awe for life and humility in the face of the divine. Conformism has to be replaced with courage, domineering with open debate, and false certainty with fallibility. The polymaths need as much nurture as the specialists, and the learning made more autodidactic and lifelong. University may be an episodic recharging of our understanding, not a once-off holiday break from reality.
The looming collapse of the academy has roots that go back centuries. It is not a specific failure of the current generation or present processes, but rather the accumulated effect of seeking to be right over seeking to be true. The spiritual degradation is not a one-off affair, but a gradual erosion of values, encouraged by dark powers who benefit from delusion. Yet it always requires the voluntary acquiescence of each generation of participants, and rejection of the heretics and dissidents of the era.
If Oxford colleges are to have a valid purpose in future — other than housing the orphans of pharmacide — then they must restore the spiritual as their figural purpose. The pursuit of truth any any cost is the quest: we cannot afford to have another failure of the kind we currently endure. There can be both saintliness and sinfulness in filling the mind with knowledge. Yet without the spiritual and the soulful it is a dangerous and even deadly pursuit.
There must be a moral revolution in academia in order to turn this around. Academics need skin in the game of the consequences of their work, the self-reinforcing nature of peer review needs reform, and funding needs to be disconnected from the corporate profit. That said, no process or institutional shift will solve the fundamental problem, which is spiritual in nature.
Until academia worships the right thing, nothing will improve, nor can it.
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