They select for characteristically WEIRD people and exacerbate those tendencies further. The consequences are more significant than might be immediately apparent.
My reflection would be on feed back loops. In a mechanical system, a feedback look provides information about what is happening in a system, that allows the operator to adjust inputs to control the system. We have feedback loops in our lives as well. We say or do something, people around us react, we then adjust our behavior based on that reaction.
When groups of people become isolated they filter out noise from outside. (Other groups, nature, etc) This becomes dangerous in society when these groups are in a position to influence the outside world, but the outside world has little influence on them. For instance, extremely wealthy people get surrounded by supplicants who tell them exactly what they want to hear. They never hear information that might moderate their behavior, and their every need is met resulting in them becoming Narcissistic and acting like demigods.
Closed systems are also dangerous in Universities. Students who do not share the beliefs of their professors will get poor grades. If they challenge strongly held beliefs, they will not advance in their careers, leading to Academics being blind to reality.
wow. It is a racist program, because it assumes that all of these people could not become doctors on the basis of competency. Personally, I firstly want a doctor who is competent, then empathetic, and open minded. None of these criteria are in any way connected to diversity.
True but isn't it interesting that the PMC have completely embraced this type of thinking for the medical school - from conservatives like Doug Ford to liberals to the NDP mayor of Toronto? There is consensus amongst the symbolic capitalist class that this totally fine.
Our society has become very tribal, and the tribal lines do not follow traditional Liberal Conservative lines. I am an Albertian, so I do not follow Doug Ford closely, but I notice that the Class Interests of the PMC are more important to people who might be considered Symbolic Capitalists than other considerations.
Well the pressure to conform is immense. They seem to speak with one voice. One example of this is the media. I have almost disconnected entirely from the MSM but companies that you would think are in competition with each other in the private sector - today they barely seem distinguishable from each other in message. Of course there are outliers but they are mostly not corporate news. The media in Canada, the United States as Tara has covered well have basically been a monolith for the last 10 years at least. There can be no digression from "the message". And any digressiion in message is seen as highly suspect by the PMC.
I've been thinking a lot lately about how we in the West have to twist ourselves into pretzels just to "fit in" over the course of a life. Today there are so many loyalty tests that a person wanting to enter into the PMC or symbolic capitlalist class - our education system is constantly filtering for those who have the "proper" attitudes towards all the identitarian causes that this class virtue signals about and the symbols they have created. And the more your identity is "unfavoured" by the elite the harder you have to work to convince others - ie. twist yourself into a pretzel. Some people disown their parents of parent, some people cover themselves in body art, some people take up incredible distortions of sexuality some people take up boutique causes in politics and base their entire personality on separating themselves from "normies".
I am reflecting on this because I have done this myself during periods of my life. Not judging. But it is incredible that in supposedly meritocratic Western societies, run by elites that are supposedly centred in "equality" such a system of filtering has become more and more prominent. For example the civil service in Canada has grown by 40% over the last 9 years. I doubt many of those hired by the three levels of government for good union jobs did not bow down before the symbols that the PMC has set up to filter for so-called "merit".
Great article and thanks Tara. I will be suggesting my local library buy this book if it hasn't already.
A piece not to be taken seriously. Who starts out with an acronym, builds a rational around the construct and presents it as academic value. I mean..."WEIRD"...really???
"Western, highly Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic" is forced into "WEIRD". Not exactly a postiive comment on North American thought and accomplishment. Rather, it is yet again tired, repetitive academic condemnation of who we are. Don't you dare to be WEIRD...WEIRD is bad.
Yes folks, seek to be NORMAL..."Nefarious, Oppressive, Rural, Mindless, Asian, Lazy". Yes, WEIRD is bad; Yes, NORMAL is good.
There is nothing here but academic dullness. It is corrupted and re-cycled, Bad-is-Good, Good-is-Bad Macbeth.
I live in WEIRD land and among the WEIRD people and consider my self a solid normie. I think the WEIRD people are dysfunctional and dangerous to society in general.
After reading this I come away with a conclusion that the industry of education - primarily higher learning - is the culprit. It has always been as academics have always been weird and WEIRD people. But when I graduated high school in 1978 about 13% of high school graduates went on to achieve a four year college degree. Fewer still achieved a Masters degree, and a select few a PHD. The high school graduation rate in 1978 was only 65%. In 2022 the high school graduation rate is 91.2% and the percentage of high school graduates that achieve a college degree is 38%.
I think the remedy for this WIERD sickness within the population is to establish a Civil Rights 2.0 movement that rejects any and all preference in admission, hiring and promotion other than two criteria: economic class and performance merit.
The effect of this will be to destroy all the high-status luxury beliefs and destructive virtue signaling that the WIERD people adopt to establish their self-anointed superiority, and to block normies from competing with them in social status.
There is already some movement in this direction. It started with Elon Musk firing all the toxic woke employees from Twitter. As a CEO I require all my hiring managers to test each job applicant for being woke and reject them because with their indoctrinated grievance mindset they are a threat to the productive work culture. I talk to my peers, both in for profit and non-profit business, and they are all doing the same. They have had it... the people they hired over the last decade or so have destroyed their ability to get any work done. And most of the employees that they are eliminating and refusing to hire are educated females.
I think the net impact of this trend is going to be crashed applications to colleges and universities with degree programs corrupted with the fake scholarship mind virus of Theory.
However, I think the key to the United States and Canada and other western industrialized countries is to re-focus progressive social justice efforts on class integration and nothing else. Kids from normie families where income and resources are less plentiful need some preference to effectively compete with the privileged kids from upper class WIERD families that tend to have more income and resources. The secondary benefit is a sort of forced integration of upper, middle and lower class kids... thus exposing all to each other and leveling the social field... normalizing the relationships and reducing class bias and divisions. However, this preference for class needs to end at education. Once the student launches into the working world, any preference other than merit should be persecuted as immoral and illegal... unconstitutional.
The general method to stop the WIERD people from attempting to isolate themselves from everyone else as a method to secure their upper class privilege is to reject their upper class privilege unless achieved by merit after getting a class-based hand-up in their education.
Note, the upper class will not like this. They don't want the competition.
Makes sense to me. When I was in Engineering, we all paid the same tuition. It was a reasonable amount, so both the rich and the poor could afford it. After that, what mattered was hard work and grades, which meant we got ahead on the basis of merit.
My reflection would be on feed back loops. In a mechanical system, a feedback look provides information about what is happening in a system, that allows the operator to adjust inputs to control the system. We have feedback loops in our lives as well. We say or do something, people around us react, we then adjust our behavior based on that reaction.
When groups of people become isolated they filter out noise from outside. (Other groups, nature, etc) This becomes dangerous in society when these groups are in a position to influence the outside world, but the outside world has little influence on them. For instance, extremely wealthy people get surrounded by supplicants who tell them exactly what they want to hear. They never hear information that might moderate their behavior, and their every need is met resulting in them becoming Narcissistic and acting like demigods.
Closed systems are also dangerous in Universities. Students who do not share the beliefs of their professors will get poor grades. If they challenge strongly held beliefs, they will not advance in their careers, leading to Academics being blind to reality.
Michael Shallenberger posted yesterday about this within the medical establishment https://substack.com/inbox/post/150140950
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jamie-sarkonak-tmus-diversity-doctor-program-a-new-low-for-canadian-academia?taid=67091a5743da8c0001008ac1&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
wow. It is a racist program, because it assumes that all of these people could not become doctors on the basis of competency. Personally, I firstly want a doctor who is competent, then empathetic, and open minded. None of these criteria are in any way connected to diversity.
True but isn't it interesting that the PMC have completely embraced this type of thinking for the medical school - from conservatives like Doug Ford to liberals to the NDP mayor of Toronto? There is consensus amongst the symbolic capitalist class that this totally fine.
Our society has become very tribal, and the tribal lines do not follow traditional Liberal Conservative lines. I am an Albertian, so I do not follow Doug Ford closely, but I notice that the Class Interests of the PMC are more important to people who might be considered Symbolic Capitalists than other considerations.
Well the pressure to conform is immense. They seem to speak with one voice. One example of this is the media. I have almost disconnected entirely from the MSM but companies that you would think are in competition with each other in the private sector - today they barely seem distinguishable from each other in message. Of course there are outliers but they are mostly not corporate news. The media in Canada, the United States as Tara has covered well have basically been a monolith for the last 10 years at least. There can be no digression from "the message". And any digressiion in message is seen as highly suspect by the PMC.
I've been thinking a lot lately about how we in the West have to twist ourselves into pretzels just to "fit in" over the course of a life. Today there are so many loyalty tests that a person wanting to enter into the PMC or symbolic capitlalist class - our education system is constantly filtering for those who have the "proper" attitudes towards all the identitarian causes that this class virtue signals about and the symbols they have created. And the more your identity is "unfavoured" by the elite the harder you have to work to convince others - ie. twist yourself into a pretzel. Some people disown their parents of parent, some people cover themselves in body art, some people take up incredible distortions of sexuality some people take up boutique causes in politics and base their entire personality on separating themselves from "normies".
I am reflecting on this because I have done this myself during periods of my life. Not judging. But it is incredible that in supposedly meritocratic Western societies, run by elites that are supposedly centred in "equality" such a system of filtering has become more and more prominent. For example the civil service in Canada has grown by 40% over the last 9 years. I doubt many of those hired by the three levels of government for good union jobs did not bow down before the symbols that the PMC has set up to filter for so-called "merit".
Great article and thanks Tara. I will be suggesting my local library buy this book if it hasn't already.
A piece not to be taken seriously. Who starts out with an acronym, builds a rational around the construct and presents it as academic value. I mean..."WEIRD"...really???
"Western, highly Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic" is forced into "WEIRD". Not exactly a postiive comment on North American thought and accomplishment. Rather, it is yet again tired, repetitive academic condemnation of who we are. Don't you dare to be WEIRD...WEIRD is bad.
Yes folks, seek to be NORMAL..."Nefarious, Oppressive, Rural, Mindless, Asian, Lazy". Yes, WEIRD is bad; Yes, NORMAL is good.
There is nothing here but academic dullness. It is corrupted and re-cycled, Bad-is-Good, Good-is-Bad Macbeth.
I live in WEIRD land and among the WEIRD people and consider my self a solid normie. I think the WEIRD people are dysfunctional and dangerous to society in general.
After reading this I come away with a conclusion that the industry of education - primarily higher learning - is the culprit. It has always been as academics have always been weird and WEIRD people. But when I graduated high school in 1978 about 13% of high school graduates went on to achieve a four year college degree. Fewer still achieved a Masters degree, and a select few a PHD. The high school graduation rate in 1978 was only 65%. In 2022 the high school graduation rate is 91.2% and the percentage of high school graduates that achieve a college degree is 38%.
I think the remedy for this WIERD sickness within the population is to establish a Civil Rights 2.0 movement that rejects any and all preference in admission, hiring and promotion other than two criteria: economic class and performance merit.
The effect of this will be to destroy all the high-status luxury beliefs and destructive virtue signaling that the WIERD people adopt to establish their self-anointed superiority, and to block normies from competing with them in social status.
There is already some movement in this direction. It started with Elon Musk firing all the toxic woke employees from Twitter. As a CEO I require all my hiring managers to test each job applicant for being woke and reject them because with their indoctrinated grievance mindset they are a threat to the productive work culture. I talk to my peers, both in for profit and non-profit business, and they are all doing the same. They have had it... the people they hired over the last decade or so have destroyed their ability to get any work done. And most of the employees that they are eliminating and refusing to hire are educated females.
I think the net impact of this trend is going to be crashed applications to colleges and universities with degree programs corrupted with the fake scholarship mind virus of Theory.
However, I think the key to the United States and Canada and other western industrialized countries is to re-focus progressive social justice efforts on class integration and nothing else. Kids from normie families where income and resources are less plentiful need some preference to effectively compete with the privileged kids from upper class WIERD families that tend to have more income and resources. The secondary benefit is a sort of forced integration of upper, middle and lower class kids... thus exposing all to each other and leveling the social field... normalizing the relationships and reducing class bias and divisions. However, this preference for class needs to end at education. Once the student launches into the working world, any preference other than merit should be persecuted as immoral and illegal... unconstitutional.
The general method to stop the WIERD people from attempting to isolate themselves from everyone else as a method to secure their upper class privilege is to reject their upper class privilege unless achieved by merit after getting a class-based hand-up in their education.
Note, the upper class will not like this. They don't want the competition.
Makes sense to me. When I was in Engineering, we all paid the same tuition. It was a reasonable amount, so both the rich and the poor could afford it. After that, what mattered was hard work and grades, which meant we got ahead on the basis of merit.