Subverting The University: That Sacred Place in the Midst of Society

There was no long march, just deeply impersonal imperatives.

The academy has fallen far from what it first was in those ancient days of Greece. I become somewhat of a normie when it comes to the idea of the university. As Joseph Pieper well put it, the academy, at least in theory, “means that in the midst of society there is expressly reserved an area of truth, a sheltered space for the autonomous study of reality, where it is possible, without restrictions, to examine, investigate, discuss, and express what is true about any thing – a space, then explicitly protected against all potential special interests and invading influences, where hidden agendas have no place, be they collective or private, political, economic, or ideological.” Yet, in our time such a refuge does not exist, and we are all subject to the consequences. The modern university exists solely to depress the human spirit by making it impossible to share publicly what one believes is the truth of all things.

Like Pieper, who wrote his essay in 1974, I lament the fact that the greatest danger to the nature of academia doesn’t come from the outside but from the inside. Countless students and professors who have committed the sin of arriving at the wrong conclusions have been made into examples by being fired or expelled. The leftist and liberal academics who are permitted to stay no longer produce anything of value. The value of peer review, if there ever was one, has all but disappeared because leftists will never challenge each other over matters of truth so long as their operating ideology is progressed.

I don’t need to convince you that the universities have become censoring cesspools of mediocrity, largely devoid of serious scholarship. You know this much and there exist countless other articles on this. I’m more interested in how the university was destroyed. I think “the long march through the institutions” may perhaps be a very insignificant part of it, however, I’m not very satisfied with this answer. It assumes that in our time sincere politics can exist and that these deeply unimpressive people were capable of consciously succeeding, assumptions which I don’t share. There are more methodical and impersonal forces to blame that play on the nature of the state and the broader society.

I’m heavily building off the work of Jacques Ellul who I think has provided us with the clearest understanding of modernity.

Politics

In the modern milieu, all values have become political; values that are said to not be political are not taken seriously. What I mean here is that everything is supposed to have some suggestion regarding the operation of the state. Modern man cannot conceive of a problem that is not the state’s to solve, nor can he envision external restrictions to the state. The state is to be an omnipresent force that solves all their problems. On the left, the state is to ensure social justice, every act of prejudice is a problem for the state to solve. On parts of the right, the state is to become a manifestation of the virtuous City of God.¹ Man now thinks that good can only be secured by the state, and so we can only imagine values through the state. The modern nation is said to only exist with the state and political affairs at the center of integration.

An innumerable number of causes have brought us to this point. The most obvious being the size of the state. The state practices authority in an increasing number of realms. It dictates hiring practices, transportation regulations, when you’re allowed to leave your house, what medicine you must take, and so on. Eventually, all things become centralized and the total organization of society lies within the state. Leftists often say something along the lines of “this isn’t a political issue, it’s my f*cking existence.” But every time this is said they lay claim to protections by the state. Whenever the powers of the state are invoked, the topic by definition becomes a matter of politics.

The second reason, as proposed by Jacques Ellul, is man’s increasing participation in political life. As a consequence of democratic life, all men are expected to participate in the construction of the behavior of the state. We are consistently told that it is a virtue to be informed about wars in distant land, about every scandal, and every policy proposition in order to cast a vote at the ballot box. But no man can possibly consume and parse through enough information to make informed decisions about all things. This creates tension within man but necessitates the production of propaganda to distill information and make it accessible to as many people as possible. In the past, political affairs concerned only princes and specialists; they were largely inconsequential to the average man. Revolutions were exclusively palace revolutions and occurred with most being unaware. Modern man is no longer accepted as being committed to society if he does not participate in political life. To create art or music is not enough; we demand from our artists and musicians their opinions on the current thing. And they are eager to provide them.

Even the conception of liberty is only understood in its relation to the power of the state. It is not enough for liberty to be the ability to escape the power of the state; man now sees it only as the de jure ability to participate in the power of the state. Even to be considered a human now means to be involved within the power of the state, women are said to not have been people until they were permitted to place a paper into a ballot box.

But what does this all have to do with the universities? In the modern university, there is no depoliticized concept of truth. It wasn’t quite accurate for me to claim that leftists never challenge each other; it isn’t quite because they are leftists that they don’t do so. These people are more appropriately titled technicians. They seek maximum efficiency in all their actions and bring the world to maximum efficiency. This includes participation in politics to bring forth new efficiencies. Where we see leftism, we are truly seeing methods to bring forth a morally dubious unity and efficiency.

Let’s take the study of human intelligence which has become an untouchable subject in the social sciences despite being a perfectly legitimate subject of study according to the little, but comprehensive, literature we have. Amy Wax, a successful academic even by academic standards, currently faces “sanctions” for daring to talk about this. To say that intelligence varies by group is a politically neutral fact, well supported by evidence. To study this observation closer is a politically neutral action. Neither one of these deeds innately seeks to change the behavior of the state. It merely seeks to know something about reality. But in our time politically neutral actions are not even comprehensible. All things are to be endowed with political value, operating within a complicated system of myths. The myth of racist America necessitates that if an observation is made regarding differences between two groups it must have been made to facilitate prejudice and discrimination. Of course, this isn’t true. Seeking to understand reality should be considered a good of its own. But unless the understanding can somehow facilitate a more technical system it cannot be permitted to be.

For as much the right speaks of true power, and the will to power, few of us, including me, are actually interested in power. We are much more interested in telling the truth, to elevate man as an individual distinct from his social milieu. Most of us are far more interested in endeavors like art than politics proper. When a right-wing, or even conservative, academic becomes the target of technicians we identify as leftoids, it is typically because he preferred to tell the truth, not because he practiced right-wing political action. The sin is that we dare not to be concerned with politics, and are more concerned with the truth as we genuinely see it.

“In our society anyone who keeps himself in reserve, fails to participate in elections, regards political debates and constitutional changes as superficial and without real impact on the true problems of man, who feels that the war in Algeria deeply affects him and his children, but fails to believe that declarations, motions, and votes change anything will be judged very severely by everybody. He is the true heretic of our day. And society excommunicates him as the medieval church excommunicated the sorcerer. […] Finally, the ultimate condemnation of our day and age is hurled at him: he must be a reactionary.”

Methods

And so the university is no longer focused on the observation and understanding of reality but merely becomes a vessel for the creation of propaganda and the development of methods whereby the technical system is advanced. The term “political science” demonstrates this well. For the longest period of history, politics was considered a philosophy, and the telos of the philosopher is to understand the world. Philosophers did not ever seek to change the world, it was well-accepted that philosophy can never change anything more than the individual. If a change in the world does occur through philosophy it is only because it had changed a considerable but nevertheless minuscule portion of the population. When politics became a science, it adopted the means of science which is directed to change reality. In the modern technical milieu when science discovers something about reality or enables new means, we never ask whether this change should be applied, it simply must be applied. It is considered an absurd notion to be able to do something and not do it. Now, political science, which seeks to employ the same methods as conventional science, can only be conceived as a means of changing state behavior.

Academics are very honest about this; nearly every political science journal article discusses the “implications” of their study. The most modern subsections of political science; the study of misinformation, radicalization, etc. are rather explicitly pursued to change and advise the behavior of the state. If they were truly pursued for understanding reality, they would have been conceived of a long time ago.

The quantitative shift should not be underestimated, when your ‘paradigm’ i.e. your epistemology, as Kuhn called it, changes, you essentially enter an entirely different world. Quantitative methods transform the world into an excel sheet for the same reason that businesses employ excel sheets; to facilitate efficiency.

We are constantly pestered by unimaginative midwits for SOURCE?! because they can only understand the world as rational, which is not to say rationalistic. A rationalistic argument, which isn’t political, simultaneously does not make sense to them and so threatens their efforts at unity.

“The more we orientate ourselves toward practical and technical education adapted to the modern world, the more the child is being prepared to enter the modern world, the more all true knowledge, all reflection, all opportunities of becoming conscious through anterior adaptation is kept from him.”

Tension

I’ve said much about efficiency, and some of you will surely wonder how the denial of reality enables efficiency. In the context of politics and society. by efficiency I mean the eradication of tension. Man is more stressed than he has ever been, he lives in an environment that evolved far quicker than he could adapt to, and so he is plagued with stress and anxiety. Techniques like Human Resources were created to adapt man to his new environment. The standard office job would have been considered an inhumane punishment by ancient man, and even now many have come to realize the effects it has had on them. To deal with this, man demands experts provide him with methods to ease our inner tensions; the cool office building with snack bar, “work-life-balance” philosophies, and countless seminars. The individual is constantly adjusting to himself.

The same problem exists with groups. Groups, where conflict and tension exist between individuals, are unhappy groups and they are less efficient at the fulfillment of functions. Just as human techniques help man adapt to himself, it also helps man adapt to a group, and so we are berated by anti-racism and allyship trainings. The goal is to establish happy and conflictless relationships between individuals. We live in a world of constant adjustment. Not just for the individual but for society as a whole.

The reality of liberal western states no longer reflects the ideology of the 18th century which inspired it, yet we are taught that it still does. When our observations cannot affirm our ideology it creates conflict. It is one thing to believe and expect that we have liberty; it is another to actually have it. Our ideology conflicts with the technical nature of modern society. These conflicts must be resolved to maintain the type of state in which we find ourselves in. We are told that the university is supposed to be “the marketplace of ideas”, but when students and professors are sanctioned for uncomfortable ideas, it is clearly not a marketplace but a cartel of ideas. In the technical milieu, authentic discussion may not exist, authentic discussion supposes that understanding reality supersedes the technical efficiency of society, which it so clearly doesn’t anymore. The principle aim is the individual's complete adjustment to his habitat. An individual which is not adapted is said to be a cause of disorder which is a modern sin.

But as Ellul says, “all this is a terrifying error”. Most would agree that the purpose of a university is to inform. Informing happens when one party communicates a difference, which is foreign, to another. Communication now exists without information because all communication is a means to ease tensions and increase efficiency. Disorder is necessary for the process of informing. When unity is achieved either in politics or in the university, life has ceased to exist.

Tension is good. Tension is the only means by which humans can achieve anything of value.

“Only societies in which tensions are very strong between groups, as in India, Greece, the European middle ages, France and England of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with their class struggles, can be inventive, evolutionary, and capable of assimilating new cultures and dealing with man’s ‘problem’ in all its dimensions.”

We praise it when very different groups cooperate but never bother to wonder what had to happen for this to be possible. All conviction and rigor had to be put aside, man had to cease being man, and everything became orientated to efficiency.

And so this is my normie take; universities must be places of tensions that do not destroy each other. I want leftoids at the university because it is fun to dunk on them. They do not want this because they are technical pawns and only believe in a societal telos that kills man’s own personal telos.

But this can only be achieved if the broader society can accept tension as a virtue. This is a conceivable possibility, but best left for another substack.

1. Integralists and others who think the church and state should be integrated are perhaps the most psyop’d of the right. When has something which has be integrated into the state ever changed the behavior of the state, the state always changes the behavior of that other institution. If you desired to increase the influence of the church, you would pursue the church as an apposing pole to the state.