Our Fake, Fake, Fake World

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Social revolutions begin.  In search of meaningful lives, people will reject the fake authorities that control them.  One of the first things to go will be today’s fake academic institutions because they no longer serve any purpose.  Consider how far the state of Western education has fallen.  During the time of our Founding Fathers, education was seen as the silver bullet against social inequality.  It was widely understood that providing Americans with the foundations of civilizational knowledge equipped them with the tools to build better lives.  Benjamin Franklin started the first lending library in the colonies.  Thomas Jefferson established the University of Virginia on a farm once owned by James Monroe, and both James Madison and the Marquis de Lafayette were present for the school’s inaugural banquet.  Their dedication toward creating an educated and self-sufficient society stood in stark contrast to the European colleges that catered to an entrenched aristocracy.  The men who changed the course of human history with the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights understood that the promotion of learning across all social classes simultaneously promotes individual liberty over government tyranny.  Destroying a ruling class’s monopoly on knowledge destroys its monopoly on power.

Note that knowledge is the key here — not the mere obtainment of some fancy degree.  Neither Abraham Lincoln nor Thomas Edison had much in the way of formal education, but both were highly educated men who profoundly shaped this country.  Mark Twain’s humorous wit is not less remarkable because he never attended high school, nor is the prose of John Steinbeck or William Faulkner less incisive because neither finished college.  Degrees mean nothing if the knowledge that they represent is fake.  

Yet what does a conferred degree mean today?  Does it mean that a student has proven mastery in the arts and sciences, or does it mean that he has been deemed a politically correct cog for a world suffering from groupthink?  Do universities still reward genius, hard work, and merit, or are they factories for producing intellectual mediocrity?  The thing about a real education is that nobody can give it to you; it has to be pursued and earned.  As colleges transitioned toward treating degrees like one of FDR’s government-bestowed rights, they stopped producing genuine thinkers.  Fake educations and fake degrees have instead produced a society ill-equipped to fight for individual liberty against the threats of resurgent government tyranny.  Fake experts maintain authority only when citizens lack the intellectual discernment to object.  It’s as if the government’s funding of fake intellectuals has been part of the “progressive” plan all along.  

So social revolution will begin in the schools — or away from the schools, that is.  Interest in homeschooling will continue to grow.  Young minds that bristle at the rigid and dogmatic worldviews currently being inculcated inside overpriced colleges will discover that there are better ways to learn.  Real thinkers will rebel against intellectual prisons that prioritize “woke” nonsense over the rich record of Western scholarship.  Parents will refuse to subject their children to the racist and sexualized curricula of Marxist indoctrination camps disguised as classrooms.  Degrees that are earned without rigor will be understood as expensive fakes.  Then one day, some entrepreneur will decide that it is more important to hire people who can actually keep planes from falling out of the sky than to staff up with politically correct fools who know only how to protest against hydrocarbon energy and for Hamas terrorists.  Because academic institutions have betrayed their purpose, employer-administered entrance exams and other merit-based tests might even replace the usefulness of college degrees.  The government’s stranglehold over thinking people is already crumbling.

Vladimir Lenin ominously boasted, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”  John D. Rockefeller selfishly insisted, “I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.”  These sentiments have destroyed American genius and resiliency for the last century, and the harm that they have caused cannot be undone overnight.  A nation taught not to think for itself is a nation that knows no other course of action than to obey.

However, when government artifice and manipulation become so outlandish that everything appears fake, traditional control mechanisms fall apart.  Long-slumbering populations awaken from their State-induced hypnotic trance much like a hungry bear does from hibernation — shaky at first but ferocious in short order.  Just as Central European countries trapped behind the Iron Curtain rebelled against the fake premises of Soviet communism, freedom-minded peoples of the West are already rebelling against the fake premises of the World Economic Forum’s “climate change” communism and “build back better” buffoonery.  They will not eat the bugs or censor their own speech.  They are not willing to let Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, and other fake experts control their lives with CBDCs and digital IDs.  They are not willing to live in a national security surveillance State that provides their children with fake futures.