Tyranny of the social
Social people act as gatekeepers to society, colluding against less social but more competent people
I know Americans are deeply dissatisfied with their schools. Schools have come to be a battlefield in culture wars. What are teachers going to teach? How many genders are there? How guilty should white people feel?
In Sweden, we are a bit past the stage of culture wars (I wrote more about that in my post After Woke). Children aren't forced to learn any particular ideology except the bland and broad mainstream Western ideology of toleration and liberalism. During my decade-or-so as a parent to school-aged children, I haven't seen many signs of crack-down on ideological dissent.
Instead, I'm perceiving a level of oppression that is finer, deeper-going and, from my point of view, far more worrying: thoroughly social but not very intelligent people are holding society in a straitjacket. And the laces are fastened bit by bit.
My oldest son's experience with the system is a case study. He is now 17. Since he is my first-born, I will call him Child 1.
Child 1’s clashes with the system started when he was 15 years old. He was tasked with writing about an “injustice” he cared about. He didn't care much about injustice, so he wrote about the problem that stupid people have more children than intelligent people. A teacher e-mailed us and asked if we weren't concerned over his depressed world view. We replied that he had recently watched the movie Idiocracy and had probably been inspired and that we were much more concerned about Greta Thunberg's levels of depression. Case closed. The essay passed and no one said anything more about it.
Being blunt and politically incorrect was one thing. That was OK. The real problems started when Child 1 developed more sophisticated lines of thinking. At age 16, Child 1 got an assignment called Risk. The students were asked to explain why people sometimes take big and even life-threatening risks. Child 1 explained that people take risks when they see potential utility higher than the risk. He also outlined the wastefulness of a totally risk-averse lifestyle; always prioritizing one's own safety is antisocial, he explained, because since society has invested a lot in bringing you up it would be antisocial to live a life totally fixated on one's personal safety.
A bluntly politically incorrect essay led to no worse consequences than an email to his parents. Writing an essay based on reasoning too sophisticated for his teacher to understand was a much more serious offense.
The first thing that happened was that Child 1 was placed in special education. He is mildly autistic, so the teachers assumed that it must be his autism that blocked him from guessing the right answer. (The right answer, the teacher told me, was something like: people take big risks because they are so much in love that they become irrational or they might try to impress their peers. There might also be a war going on and then people must take risks to escape that war). The special education had no effect. After months of costly special education in Swedish and English, Child 1 still didn't get how he was supposed to write.
Then the school took the radical step of calling me and Anders to a meeting and to actually show us the problematic essays. I read them and was genuinely impressed. For example, Child 1 was tasked with analyzing an essay about a teenage boy who saved another teenage boy from drowning. No one saw what happened and both boys kept quiet about it afterwards. Child 1 described the principle of reciprocal altruism to explain the boys’ behavior. I found it very clever. I told the school as nicely as I could that logical, rationalist reasoning is not a mental illness.
The teacher never understood what I meant. He found some excuse to let the essays barely pass, although they still seemed like gibberish to him.
Next time Child 1 got an essay failed was in a national test in English. A few weeks ago all Sweden's 17-18-year-Olds were tasked with writing an essay under the title Aspects of Fairness. The only rule was that it was supposed to be a newspaper style, newspaper length article under that headline.
Child 1 wrote an article according to the following lines:
Different people define the word fairness differently. Some think it means equality, some think it means meritocracy and some people think it means utilitarianism.
If people are feeling unfairly treated, for whatever reason, that risks making them unproductive or disruptive. For that reason, it is important to take people's sense of fairness seriously.
The term fairness is too vaguely defined to talk about in a logical manner. The word is used in order to arouse feelings rather than to actually reason about things. This lack of clarity is a problem, because it is important that people feel that they are being treated fairly. The best thing would be if people communicated their respective subjective ideas of fairness to each other. Then people would realize that their own ideas of fairness constitute just a small part of all ideas there are about fairness. Then they would hopefully see the complexity of the situation and realize that fairness can't be achieved when everybody one-sidedly seeks fairness just for themselves. Everybody needs to contribute to an environment where people with different perspectives feel fairly treated.
The essay was failed with the following motivation:
“Interesting beginning, but the end is not understandable to me. Several steps of explanation are lacking. Spot-on and rather advanced language.”1
In other words, the examinator didn't immediately understand the essay and she made few attempts to understand it. “Who is Thomas Pickety?” is one of her comments in the margins of the text. That is, she wouldn’t spend ten seconds googling who is Thomas Pickety. Instead she gave the essay a failing grade.
Blocked from life
It is all very mundane. A person reads a text. She doesn't understand it. She doesn't feel like making any additional effort to understand it, so she just says “nah, boring” and switches to another text somewhere else. I strongly suspect this is happening with my texts all the time. Thousands of people have encountered my texts at some point. Most of them have reacted as Child 1's examinator and noticed that they are incomprehensible or otherwise uninteresting.
The difference is that the people who find my lines of reasoning incomprehensible have no power to bar me from life. They can't call me mentally ill and send me into special education until I learn to write something more in their taste. But highschool students are treated exactly that way. If they fail to please the taste of their teachers, those teachers can block them from entering the world of adult people.
The teachers involved seem to genuinely think that they are acting out of care. Partially care for Child 1, but mostly care for society. In the meetings over Child 1's allegedly deficient essays, I was told that society needs all citizens to be able to “reason”. And in the world of teachers, that apparently means “capable of reasoning the way we understand”.
Back to the future
Child 1 will do fine in spite of his teachers’ failure to follow his lines of reasoning. There is a safety valve to the system, a SAT-equivalent test that allows smart kids with bad grades getting ahead in life. And as everybody knows, systems with safety valves can be almost unlimitedly corrupt before anyone protests.
Child 1 also has family members who tell him that in fact, he is not crazy. I'm a little worried about other aspie kids with brilliant lines of reasoning who are pathologized for their brilliance and not backed up by their families. How many teenagers are told that they are completely incomprehensible and sent to languish in special education with bad prospects for the future just because teachers do not understand logical reasoning?
I'm a little worried about that. But most of all, I'm worried about the levels of confidence the teachers are showing. When I went to the very same high school 22 years ago, teachers typically reasoned along the following lines:
“These kids are the next generation building society. We should equip them with some skills on the road, such as grammatical rules and linguistic conventions. But we should expect them to come up with their own, novel ideas. This is what is so exciting about the future - it is something that we do not yet understand.”
Actually, that was more or less what teachers said . There was a lot of talk about you-are-the-future. And no one got the idea to judge the message of an essay. We were asked to write things in order to have our writing ability assessed. Our reasoning ability wasn't graded.
Today, teachers act as if they think:
“Bullshitting around fluffy subjects is very important. It is so important that everyone must learn to bullshit roughly the same way, so everyone can understand each other’s bullshitting. Higher education and professional life is only for people who have learned to bullshit as expected. Teenagers need to be reformed until they learn to think like us.”
In the US, most fashionable bullshit seems to be along partisan lines. Not so in Sweden. Here, it is the art of bullshitting as such that is being celebrated.
Knock knock, I want to talk to the conspiracy!
How did we end up in such a state of petty lack of toleration? I think it is highly social people who have congregated too intensely with each other for too many years.
Highly social people are clearly over-represented in the teaching profession. Only they would volunteer to stand in front of 25 people and speak all day long. A couple of generations ago there were more reasons than that one to become a teacher: People chose to be teachers because that was what people with higher education did or because they were women or because it was the only realistic source of income for people who studied the humanities or social sciences. But as everybody knows, teacher is no longer a high-prestige occupation.
So, I think things ended up where they are in accordance with the following lines:
Highly social people self-selected to be teachers.
Society gave teachers the confidence to set school curriculums.
Teachers congregated around the choice of curriculum. They set up rules that favor highly social people like themselves.
People who are not highly social were not there to protest. They were doing their jobs manufacturing stuff and programming stuff.
Highly social people decided that only people who can reason in a way that makes sense to your average teacher should be allowed to enter society. That rule is a sheer absurdity to an analytically inclined mind. But since there were very few, if any, analytically inclined minds present when this rule was de-facto manufactured, it has now been institutionalized.
There is no conspiracy I can address. It is just the phenomenon of like-minded people taking over institutions and corrupting those institutions in the process. It reminds me of Helen Dale's essay on personality type and political opinions (People Unlike Me). It reminds me of my own essay on how socially capable people are increasingly exploiting technically capable people (Everybody wants a piece of Marc Andreessen). I assume we are just seeing the beginning of this mess. There will be more to come.
“Not understandable” was underlined in the handwritten original.
Per your great recommendation of Dr Joyce Benenson’s book “Warriors and Worriers: Survival of the Sexes,” women are generally more social and more socially conscious of the group think in which they find themselves. The female dominated profession of education, especially K-6 with something like 96% female, has taken this to a new level where the brightest are not challenged in a meaningful enrichment sense but in being antagonized for thinking outside of the box. And everything is being watered down, including college requirements. If you look into it, the lowest SAT scores by major are education majors so they are intimidated by the highest performers and are living out their fantasies of rescuing these kids from high expectations.
There are family friends whose child wrote a brilliant essay about the Japanese economic thought process leading to Pearl Harbor. It had nothing to do with excusing anything but simply sought an understanding of the economic necessities and how Japanese leadership realized they would be sunk if they didn’t change things dramatically and get the oil they needed. The female teacher could not process this as an objective, rather coldly analytical approach to mere economics. Instead, she gave what should have been an A or A+ paper a low grade as she inferred that the child somehow supported the Japanese war effort because they didn’t include details of Japanese atrocities! We are ruining future great researchers and historians because the midwits can’t process anything not on their standards checklist or they’ve never heard before.
This sort of herd spirit is everywhere. The more society pretends that everyone is their own unique little snowflake, the more like-minded people are, and the more intolerant to different thinking. It's at its worst in politics. For instance if you're right leaning, you *can't* question the perfection and efficacy of markets; OTOH if you're left leaning, you can't question immigration, or crime, or inequality.
Generally speaking you're expect to adhere to all of the beliefs of your in-group. If you're left-leaning, you're expected to believe completely stupid ideas such as the "blank slate theory", or that there are an undefined number of genders, and at the same time that straight white males are all oppressors by nature (while simultaneously believing that there's no such thing as "human nature", go figure) and a whole lot of similarly incoherent stories.
If you're a right-winger, you must believe ridiculous tales such as individuals are autonomous (that's totally inept; a person is basically nothing out of their society), that meritocracy is right (once again, it's bonkers : I have zero merit in being born rich, healthy, male and white in a rich country as opposed to poor, sick, female and enslaved in Somalia), or that letting markets working on their own will result in some optimum situation (while it will always and demonstrably devolve into terrible, oppressive monopoly and exploitation of a large majority by a tiny minority).
So everywhere I go, leftists call me a fascist, and right-wingers call me a communist. Because of course, no nuance is authorised; either you believe the whole set, or nothing at all.