The True Believers and Useful Idiots of the Academic Industrial Complex
Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words – even provocative or repugnant ones – are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech. —Douglas Murray
In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob. —James Madison
Above: Performative protests at New York’s Columbia University.
Late last year, I wrote a piece entitled When Cancer Infects Colleges: On Israel, Academia, and Groupthink in the wake of Hamas’ barbaric attack October 7 on Israel.
Given the Pro-Palestinian protests sweeping the nation’s college campuses, it is worth revisiting:
When Cancer Infects Colleges
Failing a full reread, an excerpt should suffice:
At best, these responses are to be cynically expected in light of the morbid state of higher education.
At worst, they are a staggering wake up call and show how deep the rot goes.
Put simply, the Academic Industrial Complex is in dire shape. If, as Erasmus wrote, the main hope of a nation lies in the proper education of its youth, we are rapidly hurtling towards hopelessness.
Much like cancer demands a decisive, exacting procedure to halt its metastasis, universities large and small must identify, root out, and destroy the tumor that has consumed its corridors. They must now put on their metaphorical gloves and wade directly into the filth and carnage of their own creation.
University leadership ought to act as the interlocutors of faith and reason that they purport to be by unequivocally identifying the contagious malady, disinfecting the wounds it has produced, removing the cancer in its entirety, and monitoring for any and all signs of its return.That such drivel and idiocy can be written and signed by the purported leaders of today and tomorrow speaks volumes. Namely, common sense and reality have exited the building campus, the call is coming from inside the house dorm, et al.
Good commentary I read on Twitter X builds upon my words: “[T]hese protesters are deeply unserious. It is not passion driving their activism, but rather the value that they hold for protest itself. It is coming of age theater for children who want to feel impactful in as low stakes an environment as possible.”
To these petulant children, I say:
In a word, these protests are no more than kayfabe, put on by those usual suspects seldom looked kindly on by history.
At best, the protestors are True Believers as defined by Eric Hoffer.
In his identically-titled book, the True Believer is someone who becomes deeply committed to a movement’s ideals because it offers the potential for escape from the dissatisfaction in his/her life. He writes, “Mass movements can rise and spread without God, but never without a belief in a devil.” Hatred of another group, he argued, is the most successful and comprehensive of all unifying agents.1
Sound familiar?
At worst, the protestors are Useful Idiots as (allegedly) coined by Vladimir Lenin.
Per the Oxford Dictionary of Euphemisms, “a Useful Idiot is a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause's goals, and who is cynically being used by the cause's leaders. The term was often used during the Cold War to describe non-communists regarded as susceptible to communist propaganda and psychological manipulation.”
Regardless of how you characterize these man-children, their gullibility and inability to think critically makes them susceptible to nefarious actors both now and in the future.
Indeed, whoever or whatever is orchestrating this nationwide collegiate unrest is following ISIS’ Recruitment Playbook to a T: promising disaffected young men and woman the mirage of friendship, camaraderie, and glory.
G.K. Chesterton wrote, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
I don’t know what the “anything” spurring and driving the madness we’re witnessing is, but I do know that it is far from good. We ought treat it as such.
You do not reason with misbehaving children, you put them in timeout.
It’s high time we do so.
As I wrote:
Let’s start by calling a spade a spade.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes:
The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.
Let’s call it as such to ensure society does not share the same fate as academia.