Does receiving credentialed, certified formal education, up to and including receiving a doctorate degree, make one kinder, more loving, more virtuous and decent?
I would answer this question with a resounding no, and though I am sure I am right, I am still refining my reasons for so asserting, and beg the impatient or scoffing reader to grow ethically with me as we search for ultimate answers as to what it means to behave well, and how does one become good by doing good.
If having earned a PhD renders one vicious or immoral, why should we propose that our children be formally educated, especially with college degrees, to make more money and get ahead in the world?
Well, if the youngster wants a formal or technical education for reasons of personal happiness and to fulfill their ambitions, why not, but no one should be mistaken that being college-credentialed makes one a better person, or a happier person. Making more money is desirable but having a good heart and the right set of values, and a developed personal character virtue must accompany being formally educated so that she, the richer, more competent, more powerful, adult with advanced degrees, remains a benefit to herself, to others, to God and society in general.
I always go back to my intellectual grandfather, Eric Hoffer, as a touchstone of truth on almost any subject. I speculate that his intuitive, visceral distrust, fear of, loathing of and open opposition to intellectuals, though accurate and warranted, was a reservation that he held, one that he may not ever been able to clearly articulate, not having had the most current ethical information to explicitly lay out why the educated are more cruel, without empathy, common sense and a sense of proportionate decency that the average plumber or farmer would convey.
Dennis Prager is mining some of the same ore of distrust of the educated when he claims that the larger the institution, the smaller the individual, or that any religiously educated Jewish or Christian 10-year-old has five times the wisdom of any professor, a brilliant but foolish, clueless, arrogant, elitist, mean atheist and bureaucrat, a public employee.
Gandhi spoke that he worried about the hard-heartedness of the educated class in India. Brahmins, rich, educated and supreme, had no problem with a severe caste system perpetuated for hundreds or thousands of years, a most corrupt and hurtful, unjust social structure proclaiming that this evil system was justified because the ruling class were superior to the untouchables, even though people from all classes, all racial backgrounds, all gender-orientations, are, more or less, equal in worth, talent and ability.
Here are my reasons for asserting that formal education makes people more vicious. Let me hasten to quality this bold assertion (I am not against intellectual growth, but worry about its harming society when the educated are instantiated in the existent ruling class, and any ruling class itself is the terrible social fact, a cancer on the body of society.) that learning per se, learning to think, learning for a life time, endless intellectual growth and expressed curiosity, and robust independence of mind and thought are morally desirable, and indeed are morally necessary to grow ethically.
The Mother and Father, the Creators of the universe, are spiritually and ethically good, and they are quite rational, and thought or Form is the key ingredient of creative endeavor, so it is not becoming educated that is to be avoided.
First, Bernard Mandeville defined being vicious or immoral as being selfish. He was a psychological egoist. Like the late medieval European Christian thinkers of his day, he regarded being vicious as being self-interested, and they defined being virtuous as being motivated by aiding others first, and oneself second.
He may have been some form of ethical egoist in that he advised that private vices somehow led to public benefits, or collective virtue.
He was cynical and denied that education in reading, writing and arithmetic, or in developing the student’s moral character made any difference. People were always, naturally vicious and selfish, no matter how many airs they put on.
Zooming ahead to today, formal education does not promote virtuous character. It just puts the naturally vicious student turned adult in a position of having more rank and power to exploit, hurt, abuse, tyrannize and oppress those beneath him in the pecking order. And his most vicious trait, is his willingness to take abuse from above, thus allowing a bad order to continue.
I want the normative ethics promoted to be ethical egoism or rational egoism so that the naturally depraved student can learn to curb his aggression and selfishness so that all can have a chance in the world, not just him. He is not acting in his own self-interest when he subjugates or rules others; that collective system of inequity always sickens morally both the oppressor and oppressed.
Second, we are born immoral, vicious, sinful, depraved and mean. But I like Ayn Rand identify virtue with egoism, self-interest or selfishness, and identify viciousness with collectivism, altruism and other-interest.
If we want individuals as students or adults, educated formally or informally, to be virtuous, we must highlight that they are individuals first, pursuing their self-interest, and secondarily, but importantly, are to work to cooperate and live peacefully, tolerantly, roughly equally, with capitalist-fired prosperity, liberty and justice for all.
Third, we must understand that to love or to be virtuous is to live in accordance with the Golden Mean, whatever that implies. God and good are moderate and exist and matter in our lives. The Devil and evil exist, and cannot be exterminated or extricated from our lives or our natures, but their chaotic power and energy can be transformed into love and positive outlets. When one is extreme, adopting the opposite of any set of contraries too radically, one is embracing chaos, and will damage and destroy all that one touches in one’s life and in society. The formally educated end up being extreme somehow, and this is a key element in their wicked practices and ideology. They have radical social relationships—my group’s ideology is perfect, and your group’s is junk. I gladly, masochistically, accept being abused by sadists above me, while I gleefully, sadistically abuse, oppress and hurt those below me without mercy or hesitation. We all agree that this system of mutual slavery is helpful to all, to be preserved and perpetuated. All is lies. No truth penetrates this mist of envy, loss, meaninglessness and unhappiness.
Fourth, from Jordan Peterson I have learned that the ontological necessity for hierarchies to shape human lives and arrangements is something ever present.
I have elsewhere explained how I view hierarchies as useful and wholesome, and where they are a train wreck destroying all that they touch. The Progressive Left that destroys all that it touches, as Prager laments every day, these are elites and intellectuals that arrange hierarchical conditions and reinforce class stratification schemes with themselves running the lives of the masses down to type of house they live in, the gas stove that they cook on, how they store the guns in their house, or can they be allowed to drive cars any longer, or living in single-family dwellings, or should the Great Reset set up worldwide, one-government rule under a global elite of professors, bureaucrats, technocrats, billionaires, artists, ministers, politicians and celebrities.
The love of hierarchies that monopolize whole aspects of society, every creeping and crawling out into the private sphere until these now interwoven, interlocking behemoths control every aspect of the society and there are not areas of personal, private, free choice, living or activity left, so the Enviro-State is now this Leviathan, this octopus with tentacles everywhere. In this totalitarian hell-hole, part-federal, part-Academia, part-ecclesiastical, part corporation and part social media giants—the love of this hierarchy is where our professional educators, from kindergarten teachers up through professors at top universities, are but cogs in the machine.
Their individuality is vaporized. All is the collective, the hierarchy and the ideology that it favors—all members of the ruling elite are like Communist Party members of the CCP in Red China—there are not individualists and living dissenters in that group. They are purged.
When the formally educated are credentialed, they have sold out been broken and sold their souls to the hierarchy, its ideology and the party running it. The reward is that they have some power at some level of the hierarchy, so they can slap around and oppress those beneath, which they will gladly do and settle for, while accepting grudgingly the price paid. They are slapped around, paid less than and oppressed by those higher up, Still they have enough rank to be part of the ruling class and that is quite rewarding for they get to push around the masses forever, and that reward is enough for each member of the clerisy to keep an unjust social system in place for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Hoffer cynically accuses intellectuals of revolting only when they are not allowed to be part of the ruing class. They are never for social justice, but it serves their purpose of overthrowing or blackmailing the status quo, so that they are able to join the ruling class or overthrow the ruling class to be the new oppressors. The educated just know that they are smarter and better than the uneducated or informally educated or less educated masses, so it is their hereditary right and obligation to rule and run the lives of the little people. It is this sickening lust for the power to rule to command to demand obedience from, to lecture and teach others that hurts the educated. Their quick, easy, eager willingness to shed their individuality in favor of being collectivized shells of human beings as part of the ruling identity group, the oppressors with the power and law and might to win the unending battle with the oppressed and disenfranchised.
Remember, to be altruistic, group-oriented and group-living is to embrace Satan, selflessness and self-loathing. Once one hates oneself for what one has given up to belong to the ruling class, and one should hate oneself, one is so filled with ingratitude over one’s unearned position and privilege, that one is filled with resentment, desperation and pain. Then one will lash out at others and do anything to anyone, once one discovers that killing, hurting, torturing and waging war or genocide are means of feeling better for a little while, until that wears off and one must be even more cruel to feel temporary relief from self-revulsion. No wonder Eric Hoffer wanted the educated in America to be pampered but kept out of power. He knew how dangerous they were if empowered, and now we have the administrative state and deep state running almost every aspect of our society, and we are a sick country, losing our way our liberty, and headed for postmodern Marxist dystopia.
Fifth, where people live in hierarchies, they also to the degree that the hierarchies have grown huge, with many layers, and are mushrooming sideways to control and certify every aspect of life, there the large institution dictates the smallness of each individual citizen, who is now completely group-oriented. The tighter the clique, the more people set up a ladder of descending classes, and the more people divide into groups and the identity bias towards out-groups is racist and bigoted. When people are my party versus your group, hate increases, lies become a way of life, and whatever morality there is only exercised towards other insiders, and the mistreatment of outsiders can go as far as to genocide because the detested rivals are sub-humans or non-human monsters to blame for all of our problems. They deserve what they get and more.
Look at our universities with their CRT and DEI raciaist activism: educating youths is now secondary, spreading the ideology of social justice is all there is. Whites, males, Christians, heterosexuals, individuals and capitalists are the new groups to be oppressed or wiped out, and their former oppressed or allegedly oppressed groups now favored will be the new rulers. Is this not just a nice totalitarian nightmare future, the complete Obama transformation of America, the final descent into darkness for the least oppressive, least racist, least unjust, richest, lawful, peaceful and just and free country that the world has ever seen?
The collectivism and collectivization of the educated, ruling elite makes them hate themselves and all, and once they gain the upper hand and rule America, their rage will inevitably be visited on those they have power over, as surely as a drunken dad and brute comes home and beats his wife, the children and the dog.
The cruelty of the educated is what made Hoffer fight so hard to save America from their nasty clutches.
Sixth, to tie this all together, we must learn from Tolkien that power corrupts, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, none, not even noble-Christ-like Frodo could renounce the ring of power once he possessed it. God wants us figuratively to keep that ring of power out of the hands of any individual or elite.
We are born evil, which means we are born collectivist, herd creatures that want to run in packs, find our slot in the social hierarchy where we rule those below us and are ruled by those above us. Conflict, power struggle and warring are our natural state the paradox of power is that totalitarian centralization of power and authority does not make society just and lawful but totally unjust, lawless and negative anarchic wherever it is allowed to blossom.
How do we keep the educated or any ruling class from ruling the huddled masses, running in packs, group-living, nestled down in whatever echelon of the existing hierarchy that they obtain to?
The negative way to create good people and a good society is to keep power decentralized so that there is no centralized ring of power to tempt anyone to possess and hold over others. All must be vigilant and become expert at identifying and thwarting those that seek to centralize power and to create institutions and hierarchies to oppress others, including themselves in vicious altruistic social arrangements.
The positive way to keep power decentralized so the educated are a bit formally educated and certified but mostly self-educating over an illustrious lifetime as an anarchist-indivudator supercitizen in a capitalist, constitutional republic with few, deinstitutionalized, limited hierarchies, lean but powerful. If each supercitizen is a living angel, serving the Good Spirits, they will be powerful, and let no others grab their legitimate share of power nor will their personal conscience allow them to imprison or enslave others.
Once a people are as true-believing and group-oriented in a fanatical, radical stance as are the Leftists the postmodernist Marxist mass movement on the march to totally own, take over and remake all Americans and America, they may be unstoppable, but fight on I and my ilk must as is our patriotic and moral duty as commanded of us by the Good Spirits.
If this ruling elite of educated fools and haters goes global and allows Red China to take over the world with its AI Empire of drones, satellites, cameras, robot-police and chips implanted in peoples brains, then we will have the Orwellian future that we may or may not deserve, but it could happen by 2050.
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