Exeter

 

I subscribe to some online messages/emails from very smart Chris Rufo, and he sent me one on 2/17/24, entitled Exeter Under Ideology: Left-wing race and gender theory devour the once-prestigious boarding school. I will quote the entire content from his article and comment on that content.

 

No one can quibble the thoroughness of Rufo’s research as a cultural journalist and conservative wonk: in that email he included a PDF File of Phillips Exeter Academy Course Catalog.

 

How can such smart, educated people take a prestigious private academy and absolutely ruin it? It is not hard for things to degenerate to that point of academic disgrace and rot; indeed, I expect authority figures, driven by the wrong values, to be so dumb, mendacious, stupid, arrogant, cruel, and sadistically enjoying smashing the spirit and curiosity of the young for life.

 

If we start from my bleak axiom that people are born corrupt, I think I can build a simple argument which predicts the misbehavior of the intellectuals and teachers at Exeter, and in high schools and universities across the Western world. People are born evil more than good, irrational more than rational, hating themselves more than loving themselves, running in packs more than thinking independently. When and where the leaders of a country determine to take society off of the cliff, all the lemmings line up to jump.

 

People are born group-oriented and selfless, so they prefer to be popular and gain rank in social and other hierarchies more than to self-realize and make something of their lives. What likely occurred at Exeter, as often elsewhere too in educational hierarchies, even real smart, very educated people run in packs, are captured, and enslaved by three horrible, immoral, invisible chains:

 

1)    People are born evil or social, and they will voluntarily queue up to do and get in line with what their pack tells them to do, most of the time, no matter how the values and rationales of the group are immoral, fallacious, unjust, foolish and deny common sense. Their standard for behaving is to do what their pack orders them to do: that is their moral standard, and they can lie to their consciences, to justify (Dennis Prager notes that they sleep well at night afterwards.) doing whatever they need to do to come into compliance with group expectations, lest they be excommunicated from the pack, a fate worse than death for most people.

 

2)     If it was not bad enough that people are born social and selfless (the conditions favoring being evil), with the Evil Spirits ruling the world in part by controlling all hierarchies, class systems, having established national, social orders where living in herds keep people discontented and nonindividuating, the Evil Spirits have arranged to run all human societies based on altruist-collectivist ethics, though some peoples are a bit more egoistic in their ethical blends of egoism and altruism as their moral code. This immoral, selfless morality guarantees that bad ideas, unhealthy social patterns and popular, once entrenched, are officially practiced, are widely applied, and eventually destroy all that it touches—look at what woke/CRT/DEI social justice activism proponents have created at Exeter Academy.

 

3)         The administrators and teachers at Exeter, though smart and educated, run in packs. They   lived discontented lives all the time as do almost all nonindividuating humans (the great majority of people); now that the revolutionary Left in America (The worst examples of Progressive, fanatical practices and excesses are acted out by functionaries in schools and colleges.) has captured educational hierarchies, public and private, the neo-Marxist mass movement has offered home and comfort to millions and millions of educated, formerly frustrated but now elated, Americans, true-believing zealots.

 

Socialism is their holy cause, and their unity with it and each other is complete, pure, and unshakable. They will and have sacrificed their souls, their consciences, their free will, their love of justice and fairness, their love truth, their putative desire for each child to learn and grow as a person with open-ended fearless striving and curiosity to know what is up, how the world works, and how to be a good person.

 

Once a holy cause has a grip on the educated and educational, hierarchy functionaries, they will back the cruel, totalitarian, foolish, wasteful public policies promoted by their leaders, and they will convince themselves and each other easily that these wicked policies are humane, liberating, sensible, productive and are the common weal.

 

At this point, it will be no problem, for the consciences of the administrators and teachers at Exeter, to reshape a 16-year-old male student, to be reborn as a true-believing social justice activist, and that is now the aim of that previously prestigious institution.

 

Here is Rufo (R after this): “Left-wing radicalism has become the lexicon of the Ivy League, so it is only natural that its feed schools have adopted it as well—partly out of idealism, partly out of cynicism.”

 

My response: Leftist racialism is a holy cause, and the zealots pushing this ism are partly idealist and partly cynical, and in practice they can be ruthless, coercive, and sometimes even violent to command surrender and agreement from the student under them.

 

R: “The most prestigious of these is Phillips Exeter Academy. The school has graduated senators, diplomats, generals, and titans of industry. In the past, this meant assimilating the manners and mores of America’s elite Protestant culture.”

 

My response: What a fine culture to teach all the young, but add training in learning, thinking, developing, and growing as an individuators too.

 

R: “Today, it means drilling students in ideological concepts such as ‘white privilege,’ ‘white fragility,’ and ‘queer theory.’ The Exeter man is prepared to rule or, at a minimum, to conform to the culture of those that do.”

 

My response: If privileged, rich white male students at Exeter, traditionally taught to be good Protestants, altruistic-individualistic Christians, team-players and to excel as rulers in our democracy and free market system as its elite rulers in the next generation, how will the country survive when its elite prospects—or any American child for that matter—are brainwashed into being  pure, nonindividuating collectivists,  social justice comrades, and true-believer that hates whites, Christians and heterosexual males, and are willing to hand over the country to formerly oppressed groups who will set up gas chambers for whites, Jews, individualists, capitalists, Christians and heterosexuals, once the hard Marxist dictatorship desired by the Leftists is installed and operational?

 

A society of true believers is not a society of achieving, successful, creative individuals, but this is the kind of young adult that the teachers and administrators at Exeter are grooming.

 

R: “I have spoken with a recent graduate and obtained documents that show the shocking extent to which Exeter has assimilated fashionable left-wing ideologies of race and gender, which stand in stark contrast with the founding mission of the school and the common conception among many of its alumni. (Phillips Exeter Academy did not respond to a request for comment.)

 

The story begins with the 2020 death of George Floyd. Following the lead of Ivy League Presidents, Exeter Principal Bill Rawson published an open letter promising to ‘combat the pernicious legacy of systemic racism that Black people and other people of color face each and every day.’ To do this, Rawson continued, ‘will require a willingness, particularly on the part of the white members of our community, to be actively and effectively anti-racist.’”

 

My response: It is a popular myth that members of ruling elites are rugged individualists, independent-thinking, rational and self-interested—and meritoriously capable (They do possess these attributes.)—but their more powerful capacity for and practice of conformity and imitativeness to what rulers of other institutions are catering to, going along with the ideological, popular Progressive trend, overwhelms these school administrators and teachers to adopt with woke idealistic goals, to be perceived as relevant, current, cool, to be with-it, to be sensitive, modern and compassionate.

 

Elites anywhere at any time are groupist more than individualist, and selfless more than self-interested, so they conform more than dissent from bad social or public policy because being liked, cosseted, kept popular and ranked high by the in-crowd—there are great social, professional and monetary rewards doled out to conforming, well-educated academics and teachers, who were already motivated by being very crowd-pleasing and crowd-driven.

 

R: “’Black lives matter,’ Rawson pleaded. ‘Black voices matter’’

 

Since then, Exeter officials have established large-scale DEI initiatives designed to overhaul administrative and academic life in accordance with BLM-style ideology. Individuals are subordinated into racial groups, such as ‘BIPOC and ‘Latin X,’ and administrators work on ‘building anti-racism practices in academics, dormitory life, extracurricular activities, assessment and discipline, and college counseling. Polices include an informal affirmative action program for ‘Faculty of Color’ and formalized training in ‘anti-racism.’”

 

My response: Children need to be taught to maverize, to individual-live more than group-live, to individual-identify more than group-identify, to adopt egoist-altruist ethics over altruist-collectivist morality, to promote individual rights above group rights.

 

What was official Exeter policy for shaping the moral, educational and intellectual character of each student was to make each teenager a nonindividuator, to group-live more than individual-live, to group-identify more than individual-identify, to promote group rights (Some groups are naturally noble deserving preferred treatment, and other groups are naturally corrupt, tendentious oppressors, so they need an iron boot on the back of their necks permanently.) over individual rights, and to each the student altruist morality above egoist morality.

 

The administrators and teachers are true believers pushing their holy cause onto the children they teach and mold, and the entire society will collapse like what Stalin gave the USSR in 1938. It staggers one to realize that academics actually accept that their ideal society is a totalitarian nightmare that they cannot wait to introduce all Americans to.

 

R: “Meantime, the coursework had degraded serious subjects into pure ideology. English has become an ‘exploration of racial identity’; history focuses on ‘transgender identities’; economics examines ‘racialized and gendered’ forms of ‘income inequality.’ There are course with titles such as ‘Mathematics of Social Justice,’  ‘LBTQ+ History,’ and ‘The Intersection of Science, Health and Race in America.’ A course of Shakespeare examines the Bard’s work through the lens of ‘race, gender (and) sexuality,’ and promises a ‘queer reading of Twelfth Night.’

 

Victimology has become the language of America’s elite, and so, by inheritance, it has become the language of Phillips Exeter.”

 

My response: We need to rear up a generation of individuating supercitizens that are the liberated, enlightened antithesis of practitioners of the cult of Victimology. Supercitizens practice the Golden Rule of rational, moderate egoism: I victimize none and will suffer being victimized by no one.

 

R: “Not everyone is thrilled with this turn of events. Justin Rigg, son of Exeter graduate and noted Holocaust historian Bryan Rigg, graduated from Exeter last year and describes the school’s culture as monolithically left-wing. The faculty pushes the ideological line that ‘America is a fundamentally racist country’ and that ‘oppression can only stem from identity.’ Consequently, white students are treated as oppressors and minority students as oppressed, regardless of their background.”

 

My response: Yes, oppression can only come from identity—from group-identifying by elites oppressing and by the masses being oppressed. Victimizers and victims of all kinds are groupist, selfless and altruistic. Only individuals as self-interested individuating supercitizes that self-identify will be able to end or at least minimize the historical injustice of society divided into oppressors versus the oppressed. The society of oppressors and the oppressed is a a system of endless power struggles and warring in the name of asserting group right against another group or isolated individuals.

 

R: “It’s comical’, says Rigg. One minority student, the child of a billionaire, presents herself as oppressed, while a white scholarship student, who has experienced genuine hardship, is considered an oppressor. ‘The only oppression they accept is racialized or identity-based oppression,’ says Rigg. ‘All other forms of oppression are moot, null and void.’

 

On gender, students are expected to conform to the dictates of queer theory, state their pronouns at the beginning of each semester, and address their fellow students and faculty with neologisms such as ‘they/them’ and ‘ze/sim/zir.’ They face immense pressure to participate in the social rituals of gender. Riggs estimates that approximately 40 percent of female students in his class identified as ‘queer,’ ‘trans,’ or ‘nonbinary.’ The reason is not, he believes, because so many genuinely believed themselves to be transgender but that they were ‘pressured to conform to this ideology simply because (they) don’t want to be socially ostracized.’

 

The ideology is upheld through formal and informal controls. The Office of Multicultural Affairs serves as an ideological enforcer, and students are encouraged to report one another for violations of race and gender orthodoxy. Students, too, serve as informal enforcers.’ Whenever students seem someone or something they view as antithetical to their ideology, they are very quick to protest, coordinate, organize,’ Riggs explains. They drum up anonymous social media campaigns against transgressors or, if that fails, report them through official channels.”

 

My response: An elite preparatory school has become a totalitarian nightmare right out of Soviet Russia for Muscovite children in school in 1962.

 

R: “In sum, despite commitments to ‘diversity and inclusion,’ the environment at Exeter is intellectually repressive. ‘My father is a Holocaust historian and I’ve been raised with what I would consider to be a decent understanding of the history of totalitarianism in the twentieth century,’ Riggs says. ‘What the culture reminded me of at Exeter was similar, in that if we thought someone was committing ‘thoughtcrime,’ we certainly had the avenues and the encouragement to report on that individual.’

 

I also contacted several alumni who were angry about Exeter’s recent transformation but were reluctant to come forward, given long-standing family ties to the school and the risks of publicly criticizing elite institutions.”

 

My response: I know these rich, educated, powerful but silent critics of Exeter are afraid of being punish socially or at work for condemning Exeter’s ideological transformation, but God commands each of us, in our generation, to do our duty as moral individuals, to speak out against wicked public practices, no matter the price paid for taking a stand in public.

 

R: “Rigg, however, did not share these reservations. When I asked if he would like to remain anonymous for this story, he responded without hesitation: ‘I think it is cowardly to stand for something behind the guise of anonymity, so I will definitely put my name out there.’

 

If more people had adopted this fearless approach years ago, America’s elite institutions might not find themselves so deeply bound by ideology as they are today.”

 

My response: I repeat myself, but I remind readers that Leftism is a holy cause, and cannot be understood and successfully opposed, unless one knows how to fight against a holy cause and its advancers. It is significant that what Rufo refers to as ideology does need to be understood by conservative pundits like Dennis Prager and him, that Leftist ideology is radical, fanatical and revolutionary, and it is to be mightily opposed not just because it is authoritarian Marxism being sold the gullible public, but because socialism is one of any number of isms which can corrupted, reduced to a holy cause.

 

To mangle a cause   is to twist it out of shape, to mutilate it until it is a religiofied, holy cause to plague already beset humanity even more. We cannot prevent or thwart the damage that ideologies or holy causes do to humans, especially in the active phases of these mass movements, unless we recognize them as they are and train voters and kids to live as moderate, individuating supercitizens, the evolved citizen most able to withstand the appeal and threat of holy causes coming at the young in each new generation. Rescuing Exeter would be a start back from the brink.