Have you heard the famous story about Thatcher visiting Oxford in the late 80s. Supposedly she asked a young woman what she was studying. “Norse literature,” the woman replied. To which Thatcher said, “What a luxury.” Is not the central promise of free market capitalism a little luxury?

I was thinking about this in light of the general move by government to turn universities into technical training centers. It occurred to me that this whole scheme is deeply anti-market. This pleased me given the right’s obsession with hypocrisy. Had I located a piece of deep seated hypocrisy within their ranks?

Allow me to explain. Let us consider the student as an ‘instrumentally rational’ consumer who seeks to ‘maximise utility’ (my attempt at producing a maximally vulgar definition of mankind). Surely it would be deeply anti-market to try to engineer a particular choice of subject. Is this not exactly what we see with the drive to disproportionately fund ‘STEM’ subjects (every government initiative must be accompanied by an ugly acronym)? If the market were functioning then surely technical graduates would be more employable and therefore technical courses more attractive to students and would have no trouble recruiting. Why then does the government see fit to control how university funding is directed to encourage ‘commercially useful’ subjects. Perhaps STEM graduates are preferable to governments because they lack the skills required to criticise governments?

Those of an extreme persuasion talk of the dismantling of the university. I’m inclined to agree. Ironically I believe the engineering of subject choice would worry Hayek himself. I stumbled across the following in The Road to Serfdom:

“The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted to no council and senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.”
– Adam Smith.

Yes, that is Adam Smith I just quoted. The other deep hypocrisy is that while Thatcher had a scientific education, Osborne has none. What did you study Osborne? PPE. What a luxury. I find it fitting that a man who once bragged to a school child that he was good at maths because he ‘had an A level’ in it, is now lecturing the finest minds in all subjects about the importance of ‘Science’. I take ‘Science’ here to mean the subjection of the individual to industrial and economic strategy. The more quaint definition ‘the study of the natural world’ is of course regressive.

I recommend you reread CP Snow’s famous Two Cultures lecture and then move on to FR Leavis’ hilarious and ill mannered reposte (both available here). Leavis described Snow as a portent. I fear that what he portended is now with us.

The government is attempting an engineering of the market in degrees which is an attack on what Kant called ‘the public use of reason’. It is strangely Stalinist in its subjection of the individual to a ‘long term economic plan’ and it must be fought by anyone who believes an education should teach ‘the best which has been thought and said’. Perhaps the two cultures we are presented with are not the scientific and the literary but rather ‘the public use of of reason’ and ‘the public use of coercion’.

If I permit my most extreme mode to reveal itself, I am reminded of Socrates standing trial for corrupting the young. He defended himself by comparison to horse races which were popular at the time ‘you think they make you happy, but I make you actually happy’. The modern academic is similarly on trial. Of course employment is an important metric for any university but if you place intellectual rigour beneath employability you will end up with an uneducated population which might not be such a sane long term economic plan.

The invisible hand should be allowed to operate. Allow the student to choose her subject based on purely selfish motivations of her own choosing and without design she will become a truly useful member of society who can contribute to the public use of reason. The decision we are faced with is whether or not to agree with Chomsky’s bleak statement, ‘most education is just training in stupidity and conformity’.

I described the marketisation as a hypocrisy because it denies the existence of two markets. The market for buying graduates and the market for ‘buying’ degrees. All this so called marketisation is is a government colluding with the buyers of graduates to crush the free market in choosing what subject you want to study. How far are we from government control of degree prices to encourage useful and vocational subjects?

Finally, let me finish with a plea to prospective students: study what you want. Did Newton create a new world out of a desire to be useful? Did Einstein give us the deeply useless General Relativity so that we might more efficiently manufacture cheap consumable goods? Did Babbage give us the ‘innovation’ required to revolutionise the world economy out of a desire to ‘foster innovation and skills’? Education is a moment of civility in a lifetime of vulgarity, let us not sit by as our great universities are turned into state subsidized industrial research facilities. That it is the right that attempts this is a historical curiosity. That it is the left that finds itself protecting the individuals power to choose is a responsibility that cannot be shirked.

Your vulgar servant,

Every sentence in this article should be appended with ‘, man’.

“Most schooling is training in stupidity and conformity”

Have you heard about the horse who could count? His friend would say to him ‘three plus five’ and then tap on the horse until the horse neighed. The horse learnt to neigh at the right number of taps every time. Eventually it was revealed as a scam, the horse could only perform the trick with his ‘best friend’ and it became apparent that the friend was giving some subtle clue at the right number that made the horse neigh. The reason I bring this up is that the friend didn’t actually realise he was doing this. This is the method by which I claim the infant absorbs The Ontology!

The evidence! Oh evidence, my old friend. I love evidence. It is so great. Consider the following evidence: ‘my sons were so much more male that my daughters, it just goes to show’. Leaving aside the principal conclusion that the speaker is obviously a male, lets consider the evidence! I have instituted a rule in my house that I paint all males blue. You will see that males are disproportionately blue. Therefore males are naturally blue. Ergo, we must paint all boys blue (e.g. Iggle Piggle). Obviously the true structure of the symbolic order is quite different because while we have the power to not paint children we lack the language to express un-he-ing. The language has settled in to a very fine set of self consistent grammars and that. The social construct is far harder to destroy than mere biology.

An experiment among Chinese women given infants of both sexes, but told the incorrect sex 50% of the time and unanimously overfed the ones they were told were male regardless of actual sex giving the reason ‘he was more hungry’. Call me it please.

How to escape the inherent structures within language in a means that can be expressed with language?

Being the filthy recipient of a very fine indoctrination I believe education to be highest form of emancipation. The contradiction of a thorough education can be summed up ‘a well educated child should have within them the capacity to overthrow the education’. How can this be instilled without first brutally enforcing obedience. And from that obedience how can disobedience spring? Each stage of education tends to end with an examination which should furnish you with a piece of paper with one of two messages, either ‘fuck off and be a slave idiot’ or ‘congratulations, you are an obedient slave and may remain’. Eventually this process is complete and one group remains who have been wholly failed by the education system: professors. These poor saps are so obedient that they are now given the task of actually doing something in the realm of the mental, by which time they have been so mutilated of all creativity and free thought that they must be retained at state expense like lobotomised giraffes in fancy petting zoo. Unlike people on the dole these intellectuals provide no social use and, because they cost more to shut up than those who were first thrown out of education, they are a huge drain on the country. They are the embarrassing uncle of British public life. The difference between a benefit street type and a public intellectual is that the latter can write an annoying five page essay justifying their pocket money.

The most obedient people are the engineers. Trained to apply current scientific understanding to useful projects these strange automata are celebrated by the governments of the world as STEM graduates. The ultimate in unthinking slaves. We need these slaves for such crucial activities as getting across rivers, increasing economic productivity and furnishing us with the requirements of a happy life. That last sentence was genuinely sarcastic.

If there is one thing worse than the STEM graduate it is the Arts and Humanities graduate. These are the slaves who know they are slaves. They engage in such useful activities as bringing the social order to task, helping organisations to get their message across and expressing the impotent rage of the slaves. Again, genuinely.

Comedy, as the means for amusing the slave population forms the uttermost conservative medium. The crown of the symbolic order – the pleasure gravity that settles the lines and connections down over the landscape. Ha Ha jobs crap but I’m above it. Ha ha sexually repressed but above it cos laugh at it. Ha ha misery but me separate from it. Ha ha problem of evil. Ha ha every slave can have their own slave in the form of a family. Unha unha. No, unbut seriously.

Still, the crucial thing is to make sure everyone leaves some sort of slave finishing school. Otherwise, how can they play a useful and fulfilling role in their team? The team is full of twats.

It takes a very rigorous and tough training to write with such clarity of purpose as this. Have I deviated from the central thrust of argument once? What is the central thrust of argument? I feel like I’m going to start talking about Jesus again. His own passivity was his act of violence. Simply by absorbing his education consistently he overthrew the whole social order. He allowed humanity to pass from total belief in God to total unbelief in god. The first atheist showed the way to overthrow the ontology. To free yourself from the shackles. To absorb the education and let it dismantle itself. To finish the whole thing and find yourself educated. The ladder pushed over. The contradiction complete.

All the best,