A new friend of mine at school talks with me a lot about politics and science, and we have very similar views. He is very much more interested in economics than I, so he knows of many interesting people. One of which he told me about tonight named Eric Hoffer. I found an Eric Hoffer quote with which I cannot agree more…

“A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.”

I contradict myself in the feelings I get when I think about things like this. Part of me wants to get into a leadership position and tell people about this horrible truth that is happening the the academic world, but to do so would be, in a way, becoming what I attempt to warn against.

My experience in the academic world has revealed me to many things. I am around so many people who are incredibly intelligent, but at the same time, so crushed and manipulated by the lead feet of academia.

The kind of people I encounter are passionate, able to adapt quickly to change, and have a lot of will to cooperate in a drive to right the situations in the world that have gone wrong. The danger in this is that too many of us in this fantasy world get caught up in what we can do. Why has the idea of letting people decide for themselves left this school of thought?

Tonight was Speech Night at IUPUI, where 7 chosen speakers got to deliver a persuasive speech to all the introductory speech students, and I could not help but do cringe at how power hungry most of these people are. This tone of voice is dangerous. Luckily, the girl who ended up winning was an exception to this group I talk about. She was the only one who gave a speech directed at taking individual action, not applying yourself to group mentality and calling on the government to resolve the issue. For this, I congratulate her. It shows that when you speak at the individual level, it can be more powerful then any flock-of-birds mentality, no matter how shiny the results of the latter may appear.

This said, I ask for anyone who is in college right now to be careful in the progressive stream of thought you’ve been placed in, for if we continue without questioning it, we will become blinded by the control academia tries to persuade us that we deserve. Why should we think we know what’s best for the rest of society if we have repeatedly shown to be self-serving when we take reign?

That said, I dissent! And I hope you do, too!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 1:53 am and is filed under Philosophy, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.