{"id":94677,"date":"2023-07-25T00:21:44","date_gmt":"2023-07-25T05:21:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=94677"},"modified":"2023-07-25T00:24:07","modified_gmt":"2023-07-25T05:24:07","slug":"94677","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=94677","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Our society\u2019s \u2018top brains\u2019 have gone mad \u2014 and dysfunctional politics is the result<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cSuppose we got it all wrong and the real crazies are the TV people in nice suits and $300 haircuts?\u201d
\nThat\u2019s an observation by Richard Fernandez on Twitter, and he has a good point.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of craziness in the air these days.
\nBut for the most part it seems to be flowing from the top down, not bubbling up from the bottom.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t farmers and factory workers who came up with the idiotic COVID responses \u2014 nor was it they who originated the more or less criminal idea of conducting \u201cgain of function\u201d research on making dangerous viruses more dangerous.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t shopkeepers and bus drivers who thought the way to deal with burgeoning urban crime was to get rid of police and release criminals without bail.<\/p>\n

It hasn\u2019t been landscapers and auto mechanics championing the notion that a child in the single-digit age range can make a lifetime choice about his or her genitalia or maintaining that even criticizing that idea is itself a species of \u201cviolence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ordinary Americans haven\u2019t been claiming the way to promote free speech is to censor people or the way to end racism is to classify everyone by race and consequently treat them differently.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the working class that wants to \u201csave the planet\u201d by blocking traffic, starting forest fires or banning pickup trucks or gas stoves (though private jets remain surprisingly free from criticism).<\/p>\n

All these crazy ideas and more are the product of our allegedly educated and intelligent overclass, the experts, policymakers and media types who in theory represent the thinking part, the brains, of our society. But there\u2019s something wrong with these people \u2014 the \u201cbrains\u201d of our society are basically crazy. Crazy is when you believe and do things that obviously don\u2019t make sense or fit with the facts.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to have an intellectual class.
\nExactly how important is open to question \u2014 in his recent book \u201cHow Innovation Works,\u201d Matt Ridley argues that most 19th- and 20th-century innovations actually came from tradespeople and industry, not academics doing abstract research \u2014 but important enough.
\nThe COVID lockdown scolds killed people \u2014 but they still have no shame<\/p>\n

There are dangers to an intelligentsia, though.
\nCommunism and Nazism started as intellectual movements; so did such fads as eugenics and lobotomies.
\nThe Tuskegee Experiment wasn\u2019t the product of racist Klansmen but of the curiosity of credentialed public-health experts.<\/p>\n

In a 1999 essay, Neal Stephenson wrote that \u201cduring this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s gotten worse.<\/p>\n

Ideas can be dangerous; playing with them can be like gain-of-function research with viruses \u2014 if they escape into the general environment, disaster can ensue.<\/p>\n

Guardrails like custom, religion and moral traditions made such disasters less likely, but we have spent basically my entire lifetime weakening those guardrails.
\nAt the same time, our ruling class has become less diverse and more prone to groupthink.<\/p>\n

A century ago, the people running our government, our economy, our academy and our media were varied.
\nNow they\u2019re all members of the same class, educated usually at the same elite institutions, incestuously intermarried and driven by class solidarity.<\/p>\n

As J.D. Tuccille recently wrote regarding the press\u2019 supine attitude toward government censorship, today\u2019s journalists \u201clove Big Brother\u201d: \u201cProminent reporters and powerful officials know each other, share attitudes, and trust each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

Agriculturalists know that in a monoculture, diseases spread rapidly because the entire crop is identical.
\nIn a social and intellectual monoculture, groupthink ensures that bad ideas spread the same way.
\nThis is especially so because our ruling class has substituted reputation for achievement.<\/p>\n

One can be a successful CEO if the company does badly, so long as it pursues the right political goals.
\nJournalists, bureaucrats and political operatives routinely fail upward because they play to their peers.
\nThe result is that any crazy idea can flourish if it\u2019s stylish. And it\u2019s gotten more dangerous, probably because social media allow so much self-herding behavior by elites.<\/p>\n

Dissent is instantly ostracized before it even has a chance to be considered.<\/p>\n

A decade ago, the crazy ideas I listed earlier would have been seen as beyond the pale of civilized political discussion. Now they\u2019re all endorsed by leading American institutions.
\nThat\u2019s the hallmark of dysfunctional politics, and dysfunctional politics is what we have.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our society\u2019s \u2018top brains\u2019 have gone mad \u2014 and dysfunctional politics is the result \u201cSuppose we got it all wrong and the real crazies are the TV people in nice suits and $300 haircuts?\u201d That\u2019s an observation by Richard Fernandez on Twitter, and he has a good point. There\u2019s a lot of craziness in the … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,14,9,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crap-for-brains","category-editorial-o-the-day","category-enemies-foreign-domestic","category-goobermint"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=94677"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94680,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94677\/revisions\/94680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=94677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=94677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=94677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}