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marcjf's avatar

Good and thought provoking essay.

Mea Culpa I did a business studies degree in a good University and then acquired the equivalent of a USA CPA qualification. I worked in professional services my entire career and did well, rising quickly and earning a good deal of money back in the day. My degree did not really prepare me for anything though it was hard work and is even harder today - I doubt I would even be allowed to commence the course these days. My accountancy qualification equipped me for very little except a narrow technical expertise. Over 5 to 10 years I learnt how to become an extremely effective manager and leader. I was never one to blindly accept the rules and status quo and this bloody mindedness and independence of thought allowed me to thrive. However now I am virtually unemployable and indeed have been told that my approach is downright dangerous in a modern woke work envirponment full of fragile and litigious people.

I went through recruitment processes and worked with many many young graduates in the period around the millenium. Whilst many were great, the majority were functionally illiterate and innumerate, and usually needed help to think. And this was nearly 20 years ago and the situation has only got worse.

Like many people who haunt these sites, I have many friends who you might say were or are part of the PMC and with whom I generally avoid discussing certain subjects. They genuinely believe that Brexit was a fix or a mistake, that masks and co-vid jabs were essential and it arose from bat soup, that Trump is a dangerous unstable racist who tried to launch a coup, that Biden is compus mentas and talk of his corruption is slander, that the 2020 US election was clean, that the Russian attack on Ukraine was unprovoked and that Ukraine are winning despite huge Russian casualties and atrocities. A few even take the view that discrimination against white men is fine and that you can indeed choose your own gender. Islam is obviously a religion of peace. One even told me recently that Farage deserved to lose his right to UK banking.

You cannot engage these people with facts, logic and analysis because they hold these views as self evident truths. They base their facts on what they are told by the MSM and if you present an alternative they look at you as if you have been on crack cocaine. Theirs is a world view that is a sense of self and of group identity. It is too hard to repent. Easier to enage in cognitive dissonence.

I do not think it is getting better. I think it is getting worse. The people who are now starting to run the world are younger than me and worse educated and more susceptible to indoctrination and the acceptance of misinformation and censorship. And we are not talking here of intrisically lazy or stupid people. These people work hard and are smart. They simply cannot see that they are killing the goose that layed the golden egg through misplaced ideology. It is a religion dressed up as science.

I'm paraphrasing Putin I think, but he said that the west is going through its own version of the collective madness that once was the communist ideology that so crippled the USSR. He said that Russia has learned its lesson and will not go back to the madness. Meanwhile the west plunges into its own Cultural Revolution. The rest of the world looks on with a mix of amusement, scorn and alarm.

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Roger Boyd's avatar

Excellent essay, thankyou.

I went to school in the 1960s and 1970s and have recently had to review Masters degree students' essays which would have been failed by my senior school English teacher. I also took an MBA in the 1990s at a prestigious US university which was on the level of a trade school rather than a university Masters, and the "fail" grade was a B. Things have only become worse since then.

I see much of this being driven by the ownership class's moving away from building value toward extracting value through financialization, grinding down unions, lower taxes on the rich, the construction of monopolies/oligopolies, and offshoring. No more would engineers head up great companies, but rather financial engineers , lawyers and messaging wizards. The results can be seen in companies as diverse as Boeing, Intel, Ford and Disney.

As the cost of higher education has accelerated upwards and the academy has become neoliberalized (lots of expensive pointless administrators and managers while the producers are underpaid and disrespected) the "customer" becomes King and revenue targets trump excellence. The elite of Europe may have kept the craziness out of their children's schools, but in North America even the elite schools have become invaded.

After Occupy Wall Street, it also seems that the elite decided to redirect attention toward identity politics etc. to save themselves, but ended up opening a complete can of worms that undermines the foundations upon which their wealth depends. Also, much of the post-modernist faux left garbage was very much supported by the US state and security services in an attempt to build a non-communist critical theory. Gabriel Rockhill has covered this well. Intellectual blowback on a monumental scale.

I agree that there will be no conversion of the PMC back to modernist competence, or an overthrow of the PMC. Rather, the West will continue to crumble in the face of the modernist competence of the rest of the world, much of which is in the process of throwing out the PMC and finding its own path.

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