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The Alliance of Intellectuals and the State
Modern professional intellectuals in general, and especially those employed in tax-funded schools, are begotten to the state apparatus because it is the source of their income. Even in so-called private universities, the curricula are still determined by the state through various directives so that change and innovation are sacrificed. Your professors might not explicitly advocate left-statism, but indoctrination is never overt. Modern sociology for example, promotes a class division in society by slicing and dicing it into many warring factions. For them, there is always one class exploiting the other. Men are exploiting women, whites exploiting blacks, rich exploiting poor, Christians exploiting Muslims. In doing this they serve to perpetuate the class division that they sought to erase. A foremost Filipino historian once wrote that historians are, by default, marxists with a small ‘m’. Without a philosophy grounded in reality and knowledge in sound (Austrian) economics, historians tend to draw interpretations out of the air because they do not have the proper methodology to identify real cause-effect relationships. I am not saying their facts are wrong, but only the interpretation. In a free market, competition in the provision of education will promote change and improvement, intellectuals will have to keep up to new ideas lest their human capital go down, and hence their wages. In a free market, wages of intellectuals are determined just like wages for computer engineers and construction workers, on the basis of merit. In a statist school system, career success of intellectuals depends on how close you are to the state. Survival means you have to accept statist premises. Since justifying government depredations into our everyday life is easier than open debate and intellectual change, intellectuals naturally ally with the state.
Calculation Problem Applied to Tax-funded Education
Even if the government were filled with angels, government would still create shortages and dismal quality of services. The problem with government is not intellectual, it is not psychological, it is not the character of government officials, the problem with government is economic calculation.
Government can put children into classrooms, arrange a curricula, hire teachers, build school structures, fix number of hours for schooling, make students answers tests and read textbooks. All those the government can do. What the government cannot do is educate. Let me explain. First of all, today’s school curricula and teaching methods are decided on by the arbitrary whims of the bureaucrat. No matter how intelligent and experienced the bureaucrat is, he does not have an objective basis for his decision making. He can never know what tens of millions of unique Filipinos really want and need. How can tens of millions of Filipinos’ valuations be aggregated and be made useful? Only through the price mechanism. Price is the objective expression of countless peoples’ subjective valuations. The only way to make sure school curricula and teaching methods correspond to what skills Filipinos really need is through the market process itself. Free market education is superior to government education because free market education systems are coordinated by the price mechanism. This is opposed to education wherein FEW bureaucrats decide. The difference is between the knowledge of millions of education consumers and the knowledge of few pompous bureaucrats.
Showing posts with label Intellectuals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Intellectuals. Show all posts
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Friday, April 30, 2010
My Experience with State Indoctrination
Last semester I took a sociology class as part of the core curriculum of the university. I tried to be as open minded as possible. The topics covered throughout the semester included sexuality, poverty, social change, technology, consumerism and education. Notable theorists include Foucault, Marx, Comte, Hegel, Nietzsche and Neo-marxists such as Marcuse.
Prior to taking the class, I thought about questions outside of the sphere of economics to be answered. Such as why are Asians more sexually repressed than Westerners and why do we buy crappy products nowadays. Some of these questions were answered, some were not. My suspicion of the course grew the more topics we covered.
We started talking about culture and then about how people don't care about far away tragedies especially if people of a different culture and race are affected. Innocent enough. The sociological analysis on poverty was pretty useless. Poverty fulfills a function in society like assuring the existence of a rich class and doing the grunt work. I thought to myself 'What a useless and misleading statement!' Its like saying 'If there is no evil then there is no good.' But the readings were glossed with big words and long sentences to hide from common sense.
Next was the discussion on Marx which affirmed by presumption that the teacher was Marxist! When I commented about how socialism cannot work, she gave me a condescending look. Now I only had to find out if the course itself was Marxist. I lost a lot of respect for the course after the sexuality discussion. The argument was that we are sexually repressed because the bourgeois want us to be productive. If we are not repressed, they say, then we would not come to work and have sex all day. Sexual repression is an effect of Capitalism. OK, so what about alcohol, cigarette smoking, television, video games, sports. Man can waste his time on so many activities that are less strenuous than sex. The argument that Capitalism causes sexual repression is patently absurd! But this was just the tip of the iceberg.
Subsequent discussions involved theories that violate all common sense and delivered with ambiguous words. Theories like structuration theory which states that 'man is a structure that expresses participation in larger structures by acting his person' or that rationality is really irrational because people are like robots in a capitalist economy and science only validates knowledge that pass the test of rationality and therefore man's creativity is undermined. A very telling theory is one trying to explain the failure of the proletarians to achieve their historical goal of bringing down capitalism. It proves that these so called intellectuals are merely apologists for the state that try to make excuses for the failure of their system.
Modern sociology is just an orgy of pseudo-intellectual blabber, Marxist assumptions and force-packaged concepts. It is just a jungle of floating abstraction supported by vague definitions. Modern sociologists do not see social phenomena for what they really are in the concrete. Instead they look at it from a Marxist standpoint, assuming someone is being exploited in society and it is their job to fix it. For example, a sociologist sees employment as a conflict between the employer and the employee, with the employee being exploited by the rich employer. The non-propagandistic view is that the employee has voluntarily agreed to trade his services for money. The employee values the money more than the corresponding effort that he gives and the employer values the services more than the wage to be paid. Elementary economic theory teaches us that this inequality of valuations makes it possible for both parties to benefit. The political blinds of the sociologists prevent them from seeing this.
The field of sociology is nothing more than a byproduct of the state. The state, which primarily sustains itself by manipulating public opinion, monopolizes the intellectuals to legitimize itself and justify its failures. Same applies to Keynesian economists as well. Intellectuals are indispensable to the state as they justify otherwise unacceptable policies like invading other countries and nationalizing firms by trying to connect it to the 'common good' or 'public welfare'. The result is an ugly perversion of the original science that kills a person's ability to use common sense and intimidates him enough to submit to the alleged wisdom of the statists.
Prior to taking the class, I thought about questions outside of the sphere of economics to be answered. Such as why are Asians more sexually repressed than Westerners and why do we buy crappy products nowadays. Some of these questions were answered, some were not. My suspicion of the course grew the more topics we covered.
We started talking about culture and then about how people don't care about far away tragedies especially if people of a different culture and race are affected. Innocent enough. The sociological analysis on poverty was pretty useless. Poverty fulfills a function in society like assuring the existence of a rich class and doing the grunt work. I thought to myself 'What a useless and misleading statement!' Its like saying 'If there is no evil then there is no good.' But the readings were glossed with big words and long sentences to hide from common sense.
Next was the discussion on Marx which affirmed by presumption that the teacher was Marxist! When I commented about how socialism cannot work, she gave me a condescending look. Now I only had to find out if the course itself was Marxist. I lost a lot of respect for the course after the sexuality discussion. The argument was that we are sexually repressed because the bourgeois want us to be productive. If we are not repressed, they say, then we would not come to work and have sex all day. Sexual repression is an effect of Capitalism. OK, so what about alcohol, cigarette smoking, television, video games, sports. Man can waste his time on so many activities that are less strenuous than sex. The argument that Capitalism causes sexual repression is patently absurd! But this was just the tip of the iceberg.
Subsequent discussions involved theories that violate all common sense and delivered with ambiguous words. Theories like structuration theory which states that 'man is a structure that expresses participation in larger structures by acting his person' or that rationality is really irrational because people are like robots in a capitalist economy and science only validates knowledge that pass the test of rationality and therefore man's creativity is undermined. A very telling theory is one trying to explain the failure of the proletarians to achieve their historical goal of bringing down capitalism. It proves that these so called intellectuals are merely apologists for the state that try to make excuses for the failure of their system.
Modern sociology is just an orgy of pseudo-intellectual blabber, Marxist assumptions and force-packaged concepts. It is just a jungle of floating abstraction supported by vague definitions. Modern sociologists do not see social phenomena for what they really are in the concrete. Instead they look at it from a Marxist standpoint, assuming someone is being exploited in society and it is their job to fix it. For example, a sociologist sees employment as a conflict between the employer and the employee, with the employee being exploited by the rich employer. The non-propagandistic view is that the employee has voluntarily agreed to trade his services for money. The employee values the money more than the corresponding effort that he gives and the employer values the services more than the wage to be paid. Elementary economic theory teaches us that this inequality of valuations makes it possible for both parties to benefit. The political blinds of the sociologists prevent them from seeing this.
The field of sociology is nothing more than a byproduct of the state. The state, which primarily sustains itself by manipulating public opinion, monopolizes the intellectuals to legitimize itself and justify its failures. Same applies to Keynesian economists as well. Intellectuals are indispensable to the state as they justify otherwise unacceptable policies like invading other countries and nationalizing firms by trying to connect it to the 'common good' or 'public welfare'. The result is an ugly perversion of the original science that kills a person's ability to use common sense and intimidates him enough to submit to the alleged wisdom of the statists.
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