By Steven Yates
November 16, 2024
Puncturing the mythology of credentialism.
A recent article in the U.K’s left wing newspaper The Guardian caught my eye when its author, Peter Hyman, put his finger on something important.
Many American conservatives, he said, didn’t vote for Trump because they thought he was a savior. They voted for Trump they despise his most visible enemy: the organized left. They see leftists as both dishonest and power-hungry, and think you’d have to be blind to miss it.
Another article on the same site actually put it that way, calling it a “simple, inescapable message” that many people despise the left.
I probably have to count myself in that category, however uncomfortable I am saying so.
I don’t despise leftists as individuals. If they talk respectfully to me, I’ll talk respectfully to them. But as a group?
A major reason we despise leftists as a group: their air of moral superiority (epistemic superiority as well) wrapped in arrogance and virtue-signaling, all alongside an almost-unbelievable lack of self-awareness.
The resounding Trump victory has motivated at least some self-awareness, and may shatter other delusions, given time. Hence Hyman’s article. And Harris’s. We’re seeing more than a few leftists groping towards something like an examination of their assumptions.
Hyman quoted Tucker Carlson who provided a clear statement of what probably motivated a lot of Trump voters:
“They tell you, the people who can actually change a tire, who pay your taxes and work 40 hours a week, that you are somehow immoral. We have a message for them: you are not better than us, you are not smarter than us.”
Despite using the smug word “swagger” to describe Carlson’s demeanor, what Hyman says next is worthy of comment:
“To dismiss this as the politics of grievance is to dismiss what it feels like to be disrespected, to feel ‘a stranger in your own land.’ To feel as though the college-educated are looking down at the non-college-educated.”
Hyman thus puts his finger on the meat of what I want to discuss here: this presumption that only “the non-college-educated” support Trump. Only the deluded, those confused by “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” (two of leftists’ favorite words).
I have three advanced degrees, and I voted for Trump.
I know many other exceptions to the simple-minded dichotomy between the credentialed who fancy themselves “too smart,” versus the non-credentialed who are presumed too stupid to direct their own lives.
It’s the same dichotomy I’ve been hammering: Those Who Push People Around versus Those Who Want To Be Left Alone.
My training motivated me to dig deeper.
For some of us, it’s our awareness of what I call the narrative war — between those who (for example) believe the 2020 election was stolen versus those who call this the Big Lie, or who supported Covid lockdowns and then the mRNA shots as necessary and safe versus those of us who saw only the biggest grab for power ever!
But the issue goes beyond even that.
What does it now mean to be “educated” in America? To be credentialed, that is?
Not as much as you might think!
Higher education in America is rife with pseudo-scholarship, perverse incentives, narratives held for other than intellectual reasons, and overall corruption. How do I know this? Because I was there. For over 15 years total. I saw it directly. It impacted my life personally and professionally.
What I saw, heard, and read, as far back as around 1990, were radical feminists who claimed science is sexist and misogynist because nearly all its founders and most of its practitioners are men. Radical feminists were already discounting biology, to the extent it told us that sex is determined chromosomally. They fixated on gender as a “social construct,” and therefore fluid. Radical feminist “legal theorists,” moreover, described heterosexual sex in ways making it ultimately indistinguishable from rape. They expressed this in ways allowing themselves to squirm out of responsibility if called out for having said something so stupid and divisive.
Example: a woman named Catharine MacKinnon, among the worst of the offenders but hardly alone. These people have a lot of clout in academia!
The question I tried to raise: would they even have become professors and authors of books at university presses without affirmative action, which was controversial even then (with Supreme Court decisions of the 1980s trying to roll it back).
Also of note were the critical race theorists who also got their start in the illustrious 1990s. These people held that Western knowledge and know-how had a “Eurocentric” bias because of the prevalence of white Anglo-European males. They “explained” Western success as built on the backs of racism, sexism, and colonialism, not on philosophical and political-economic ingenuity and the real world applicability of physics and chemistry (underwritten by a still-fundamentally Christian worldview).
These were the people who distinguished systematic from systemic racism, the latter the idea that racism is built into the structure of Western institutions going back to the introduction of slavery in the 1600s (hence their 1619 Project).
They weren’t all that open about their Marxism … or that the only “solution” to the “problem” would be to revolutionize the system but replace Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat with a dictatorship of the woke, i.e., replacing classical Marxism with identity politics. After all, the real proletarians were too white, too male, too straight, and too Christian.
Well before abandoning American academia in 2012, I’d involved myself in conservative causes. I met numerous people whom my colleagues in academia dismissed as “uneducated,” i.e., some either never finished college or never went.
Such people were chefs, electricians, plumbers, farmers, auto mechanics, truck drivers, store owners or managers, restaurant owners or managers, real estate agents, network administrators, or had entered some other occupation Western society needed.
None of these require an academic credential. Just know-how, obtainable with an apprenticeship.
These are the people Tucker referred to who can “change a tire.” They’re not intellectuals but are skilled with their hands.
Unlike a lot of the “educated” they are competent in the art of living.
And they’re better off when allowed to use their skills unencumbered by bureaucratic busybodies and pseudo-intellectuals lecturing them about their racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc., ad nauseam.
The worldview of the “educated” often comes down to: we know best. We’re the experts. Trust us. Not that we’re giving you a choice.
It’s time to puncture this mythology. Assuming that hasn’t happened already.
There is an abundance of know-how knowledge existing outside the confines of credentialism. If anything, credentialism just gets in the way. Again, trust me, I’ve been there. The ancient Greeks distinguished techne (know-how) from episteme (knowing that). The “uncredentialed” have the former in spades. I submit that their instincts on the latter are better than they get credit for — if only because if you look closely at what the “experts” say about such matters as the origin of life, or of civilization, they fail to make a compelling case for their dominant paradigms and narratives.
The “experts” often just assume that God either doesn’t exist, that no one can know one way or another, or that the issue doesn’t matter.
The farmer can look at his crops, instinctively grasp the complexity of the systems he’s immersed in and with which he has daily contact, and experience the works of God.
That’s just one example, of course.
I’ve spoken in the past about the collapse of all the dominant narratives as having brought us into the age of Donald Trump — also Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, and many other figures dubbed “populist” or “far right” by the “experts.”
By collapse I mean loss of credibility among a larger enough segment of the public to support taking over political parties (like Trump did with the GOP), create its own media ecosphere, and eventually — hopefully — to establish its own educational institutions outside corrupted, Ivy League dominated academia.
What narratives have collapsed? These:
Diversity is our strength. Does anyone still believe that?
Globalization will make us all prosperous. Given how financialization has created an economic ecosystem of haves versus have-nots, with the have-nots worse and worse off in a system based on mass consumption and debt, the idea is preposterous! If Covid taught us anything, moreover, it is the fragility of global supply lines and the reasonableness of a return to localism.
The centralized liberal state will make us all free. Free from what? If you think technocrats care about your freedom, I don’t know what to say to you.
Markets know best. Sometimes they do, but unguided by a worldview that grounds the intrinsic value of a human life and fails to acknowledge everybody’s need for validation, no they don’t. Many corporations have prospered on mild addictions (Big Food), moreover, or on constant upgrades which force consumers to buy their products when the old ones won’t handle the upgrades (Big Tech).
You can believe in The Science. Anyone who says that doesn’t know what science is. The Science gave us Tony Fauci, he and his Chinese colleagues’ lunatic gain-of-function research enhancing the capacity of viruses to infect humans, lockdowns when one of their products got loose or was released, masking, and the mRNA shots the full consequences of which we don’t know because it may years for them to play out.
The Science also motivates schoolteachers to terrorize children about “man-made climate change” and directs resources down “green energy” economic sinkholes.
We have to overcome our legacy of racism, sexism, colonialism, etc. We need to forget about race/ethnicity and just be people, all of us seeking the best use of our God-given talents. Normal people don’t obsess about race. Normal white people aren’t trying to figure out ways of “hating,” or “discriminating against” black people. Given their turn toward Trump in this election following nine years of corporate mass media “experts” branding the man a racist, I think at least some blacks (especially black men) have figured this out, as have Hispanic men.
There are doubtless other collapsed narratives, but those are the ones I think of first.
Jeff Thomas, who writes for Doug Casey’s International Man website, discovered this gem:
“If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar.
This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti-Mask. Vax vs. Anti-vax. Rich vs. poor. Man vs. woman. Cop vs. citizen. [Etc.] The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar… and why?” —Shera Starr
I’d not heard of Shera Starr, but I couldn’t agree more!
© 2024 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
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Steven Yates’s Substack publication is called Navigating the New Normal. Subscribe and receive content not available on NewsWithViews.com.
Steven Yates is a (recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself.
In 2012 he moved to Chile. He married a Chilean national in 2014. Among his discoveries in South America: the problems of the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere. The problems are problems of Western civilization as a whole.
As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!
He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.
Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.
His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.
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