Why Academia Hates the West

The Austrian economist Schumpeter [writing over 60 years ago] and others have argued that the very success of capitalism will be its downfall. It will, because of the creation of more and more colleges and universities, produce an expanding pool of disaffected intellectuals. Now there have always been disaffected intellectuals. some of whom were quite brilliant and made great contributions to the development of free societies. I would dread to think where we would be today without such people. But these people were not the product of a mass education system.

What Schumpeter and other observers meant is that as society became progressively wealthier the demand for ‘education’ would grow. It would be demanded as a right. As higher education became a mass system there would be a proliferation of what we call "Mickey Mouse" subjects in the humanities and social sciences to satisfy the increased demand. Examples would include almost any course with the word "studies" as a suffix.

Many of the maleducated graduates of these degraded subjects would have developed expectations that simply cannot not be met. Further, in the course of their studies they would have come under the influence of teachers and lecturers who would be imbued with the anti-capitalist ethic and a hatred of Western civilization, even if it meant allying themselves with Islamofascists.

Thus, when they graduate they find that their ideology and ‘education’ has made them superfluous to the cultural, intellectual and economic needs of the progressive economy that nurtured them. Having been made psychologically unfit for physical work, and painfully aware of their own intellectual inadequacies, they will become progressively alienated.

In short, they won’t feel needed. But what they mean by needed, however, is being put into positions in which they can exercise power and influence over others. The kind of positions that only a Soviet-style state could provide. It really is no accident that they strongly support interventionism and totalitarian states.

Having been denied what is theirs by right and so left feeling rejected an emotional vacuum has emerged. To them any society that does not need them (in the way they think they should be needed) is unjust. callous, materialistic, racist, etc. Schumpeter expressed it superbly in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

Gerard Jackson