Gallier2 left this link.
It’s an in depth read. Excerpts below
The dysfunction of the West is far deeper than just the situation around the Ukraine project. It’s absolutely everywhere. The West can’t do diplomacy in general, it can’t run its cities or countries except into the ground, its high-tech projects fail almost as a rule, its infrastructure is crumbling, its economies are crumbling, and all public policies seem to have a civilizational suicide as a final goal. The West’s control mechanisms over the rest of the world are also crumbling, including the dollar, sanctions, color revolutions, military interventions and threats. Nothing seems to work and everything the West does seems to make things worse.
I suggest that the cause of this unfolding disaster is a serious structural problem in the West – which Russia seems to have largely avoided. This structural problem is a necessary condition for the current western system and has been purposely created to bring it about and maintain it. This problem is the subject of this article – as well as the “mechanism” behind it. This is unfortunately a long article, but the subject matter demands it.
Human capital and its properties
The current ideologically-based power structure of the West outright requires that certain types of people be in positions of influence and certain types of people be sidelined. This applies to all steps of the social ladder; from kindergarten teachers to university teachers and corporate executives, and all the way up to the leaders of society itself. This has been progressing steadily for the last five decades or so, and has resulted in a major structural problem for the West. That problem is the obvious and massive degradation and misallocation of human capital in the West.
Competence can be described as specific or general. This distinction is extremely important and must be understood by anyone who attempts to manage human capital on a small or large scale.
Specific competence is the ability to do a certain type of work. This can be carpentry, coding, chemistry, medicine, piloting an airliner, and so on and so forth. Some of these types of jobs may require a lot of competence, training and intelligence, but what they have in common is that their scope is limited and clearly defined. They exist within clear boundaries, separate from the complexities and vagueness of the world in general. Each type of work requires certain abilities innate in the person, as well as varying degrees of training. People, of course, differ a lot in their level of specific competence within each field.
General or high-level competence is the ability to do work that is beyond clearly defined boundaries. The subject matter of those types of work exists in a complex “variable universe” and can be exceedingly vague and confusing. It requires the ability to be adaptive and be able to transfer skills between different types of work. This also applies to expertise in one field being applied to a completely different field – such as applying psychology to economics or astrophysics to climate science.
The western purging of competence
Modern western society is from a governance standpoint ideologically motivated and ideologically controlled. It is being pushed in a very clearly defined ideological direction, led by the European Union and the current US administration. This ideology is not the subject matter of this article, but it can be seen everywhere by any rational and independent-thinking person. For the uninformed-curious a good place to start is the website of the EU’s policy-making body; the World Economic Forum.
In order to achieve these ideological goals for the West, two things must happen: a) The right people must be put into power at all levels of society and b) any disruptive elements must be eliminated or suppressed. Since all ideological goals tend to be more or less in conflict with reality, there is no group more disruptive to them than the one who operates objectively and independently. People like that simply cannot be allowed into positions of power, and if they must be, they must be kept quiet and/or forced to toe the line.
The objective/rational/general competence group, whether it is 1.5% or 8% of the population, therefore becomes a problem rather than a resource. This is exactly the situation in the West today.
Many people have noticed that meritocracy has been systematically abandoned in the West and the relationship between competence and reward severed in giant swaths of the economy – and almost completely in government. What few people seem to realize is that this is a necessity for the West’s ideological goals to be reached. High-level competence cannot be promoted because it is a threat. It cannot therefore be rewarded.
Digression
Saw an article recently that applies to this issue of specific competence and high level competence. Particularly as it applies to the universities.
To advance Canada’s economy, universities must stop valuing specialization over range
Long story short, universities have been home to Academia where hyper-specialists, or “moles,” tend to thrive. Moles are animals that burrow deep in one specific hole for most of their lives.
But universities have tended to ignore the opposite of moles: the “mutts,” animals of mixed background, who sniff around a wide swath of territory and accumulate working knowledge in many disparate fields. Mutts imagine the universe as vast and ever evolving, requiring a wide angle view rather than one-track expertise.
When universities insist on graduating and promoting moles to the exclusion of and at the expense of other more diverse thinkers and practitioners- society suffers.
“We continue to face an acute talent shortage in the multidisciplinary industries where we have the highest demand for workers: information technology and health care. And it’s not just about coders and doctors; AI, for example, demands interdisciplinary talents, including linguistics, ethics, math and computer science.
Meanwhile, the Information and Communications Technology Council has forecast that, by 2025, Canada will need 129,000 skilled workers in digital health and biotechnology, with training in data analysis, biostatistics, machine learning and information visualization.”
This narrowly focused education results in people who can only think in the box. And that’s it. They can’t think outside of it because nothing exists beyond the box.
Back to the article, first link, left by Gallier2– Open
The reconfiguring of western education
As previously noted, two things must happen for the ideological goals to become reality: The right people must be promoted and the wrong people must be suppressed. This process of elevation/suppression has become the main goal of the western education system – all the way from kindergarten up to university. If we look at what the education system has been doing, this becomes extremely obvious. Here are a few examples:
Evaluation of competence is being systematically degraded to avoid comparison between the competent and the incompetent.
Universities are increasingly basing admittance on other criteria than competence, including quotas based on non-competence variables.
Almost every academic subject is being turned from the objective to the subjective to assist the irrational-incompetent student.
This even applies to hard subjects such as mathematics – where nowadays 2+2 doesn’t necessarily equal 4.
Almost every subject has been made easier than before to help the incompetent students
and even critical fields such as medicine are now graduating people who are utterly incompetent and clueless – on a large scale.
Disciplines which may be a threat to the irrationality of the Ideology have been massively subverted and corrupted
. This applies to several fields, but particularly to psychology and history, which in their proper forms would be a massive threat to western ideological goals. Psychology has been twisted into an almost unrecognizable abomination, and history is mostly just lies these days.
Fake disciplines have been invented from the ground up for the purpose of training the ideologically pure without the need for competence or intelligence or any connection to reality
. These disciplines can be found in lists of “most useless university degrees” all over the internet, but that is a misunderstanding. Those degrees are not useless at all – they elevate the ideologically pure in society by awarding them university “certification.” This certification justifies giving them important positions in society.
Western society, in general, has abandoned rationality and replaced it with subjectivism (formally designated as “post-modernism”). The purpose of that is not just to train and advance the ideologically pure, but to use subjectivism as an oppression tool against the 1.5/8 group and the rational part of the population outside of it
.The best way to suppress a rational person is to subject him to an existence of total and constant irrationality. It is essentially gaslighting on a civilizational scale
, directed at the dangerous rational group.
Hopefully, I’ve included enough of the article to interest you in reading the rest
2 replies on “Wokeness as a symptom of a profound degradation of Western society”
https://jonahintheheartofnineveh.blogspot.com/2023/08/why-are-canadas-forests-burning.html
Having just watched the conversation above between Reiner Fuellmich and Peter MacIsaac where the urgent need for a return to meritocracy is discussed, I was very interested to read the rest of the article. Thanks, Gallier2 and Penny.
Hey M.R.
Hope you enjoyed the piece- It was detailed and thoughtful
I’m going to check out the link you left tomorrow, unfortunately, today has been another busy day