Dec 29, 2021·edited Dec 29, 2021Liked by Nikita Petrov
McKenna is not only wrong, he's wrong in a self-serving kind of way. The 60s counterculture was not "suppressed," it split in two, with one faction selling out and becoming the "me" generation of the 70s and 80s, and the other colonizing academia. The fruits of both factions are now before us. And the "professionalization" of higher education is the inevitable result of the rent seeking of the academic class, both financial and ideological, that was ushered in by McKenna and his ilk. The only way academia can get normie parents and their kids to shell out the insane amounts of money it now requires to get a bachelor's degree -- amounts that McKenna could not even fathom when he received the benefits of a highly subsidized, high quality public education in the UC system in the 60s -- *and* to require those kids to sit through hours of highly ideological "education" in the humanities and social sciences to boot, is to promise them a return on investment in the form of both employability and social status. To clutch his pearls and exclaim that this was done at the expense of the lower middle class is the height of irony -- the entire point of an elite American education is to be able to look down on the lower middle class! And the obscurantist nature of that education -- the jargon and the doctrines and the isms -- is a very visible means of displaying that lofty status, even if your BA in postcolonial studies or gender studies or what have you only qualifies you to work low-level service jobs that don't even pay as well as a plumber or electrician or carpenter. The "police state" McKenna decries is really cancel culture, the policing by the educational/journalistic/artistic elite of the rest of us.
And his claim that studying Locke, Hume, Plato, etc. makes people "ungovernable" is laughable. As if the college students of the 1960s were the first people to ever read these authors. It is so, so, SO narcissistic.
Sorry for the rant, but whinging counterculture boomers are a trigger for me. We are living in the increasingly dysfunctional world they have created, after they inherited the most prosperous and liberal society the world has ever seen.
Technological advancement, the creep of Postmodern theory/philosophy out of its academic restraints and into the wider culture, and the built-in propensity for humans to find enemies where there are none based mostly on evolutionary biology are what created what we now see before us. Capitalism was always going to win, despite the decadent, self-centered tendencies that seem to have been born from the early 70s, so I don't think that can accurately be attributed to what you say it can. It was always inevitable that our society would find itself here eventually regardless of who the purveyors of what faction can be pointed to as ground zero. I do agree with you that the academics that popularized Foucault's and Derrida's teachings (among others) in elite US institutions can be blamed, but the rest is a byproduct of the other components seeing fruition and feeding one another surreptitiously. The rest of your analysis I think is spot on, and I confess to thinking almost the same things when I heard the clip.
McKenna is not only wrong, he's wrong in a self-serving kind of way. The 60s counterculture was not "suppressed," it split in two, with one faction selling out and becoming the "me" generation of the 70s and 80s, and the other colonizing academia. The fruits of both factions are now before us. And the "professionalization" of higher education is the inevitable result of the rent seeking of the academic class, both financial and ideological, that was ushered in by McKenna and his ilk. The only way academia can get normie parents and their kids to shell out the insane amounts of money it now requires to get a bachelor's degree -- amounts that McKenna could not even fathom when he received the benefits of a highly subsidized, high quality public education in the UC system in the 60s -- *and* to require those kids to sit through hours of highly ideological "education" in the humanities and social sciences to boot, is to promise them a return on investment in the form of both employability and social status. To clutch his pearls and exclaim that this was done at the expense of the lower middle class is the height of irony -- the entire point of an elite American education is to be able to look down on the lower middle class! And the obscurantist nature of that education -- the jargon and the doctrines and the isms -- is a very visible means of displaying that lofty status, even if your BA in postcolonial studies or gender studies or what have you only qualifies you to work low-level service jobs that don't even pay as well as a plumber or electrician or carpenter. The "police state" McKenna decries is really cancel culture, the policing by the educational/journalistic/artistic elite of the rest of us.
And his claim that studying Locke, Hume, Plato, etc. makes people "ungovernable" is laughable. As if the college students of the 1960s were the first people to ever read these authors. It is so, so, SO narcissistic.
Sorry for the rant, but whinging counterculture boomers are a trigger for me. We are living in the increasingly dysfunctional world they have created, after they inherited the most prosperous and liberal society the world has ever seen.
Technological advancement, the creep of Postmodern theory/philosophy out of its academic restraints and into the wider culture, and the built-in propensity for humans to find enemies where there are none based mostly on evolutionary biology are what created what we now see before us. Capitalism was always going to win, despite the decadent, self-centered tendencies that seem to have been born from the early 70s, so I don't think that can accurately be attributed to what you say it can. It was always inevitable that our society would find itself here eventually regardless of who the purveyors of what faction can be pointed to as ground zero. I do agree with you that the academics that popularized Foucault's and Derrida's teachings (among others) in elite US institutions can be blamed, but the rest is a byproduct of the other components seeing fruition and feeding one another surreptitiously. The rest of your analysis I think is spot on, and I confess to thinking almost the same things when I heard the clip.