Marxism, Intelligence, And The Thing with Freddie DeBoer

is marxism dead all around the world or is it dead in america i think it's dead dead i mean i you know um there are some um die hard uh old school marxist political groups around the world but even the ones that the sort of the ones that had a real uh uh physical presence in their various uh places have sort of retrenched so like the tamil tigers or shining paths in south america um they i mean they're just even the guerrilla paramilitary elements of them have largely fallen off [Music] welcome to another episode of conversations with coleman my guest today is freddy deboer freddy is an independent writer on substack in addition to having been published in the new york times the washington post the guardian and many other places his book the cult of smart was named one of the 10 best books of 2020 by new york magazine freddie and i begin by discussing karl marx the legacy of marxism and the so-called labor theory of value freddy sees a lot more value in marxism than i do so we disagree somewhat on that we move on to discuss intelligence and the broken system of american higher education a lot of that conversation is directly relevant to president biden's recent student loan forgiveness executive order although we recorded this right before that news broke and finally freddie and i talk about wokeness and social justice ideology so without further ado freddie deboer [Music] so i have uh been reading your substance sporadically over the past year or so people have sent me one article here and there and preparing for this podcast i put together the thread of all your all the different articles i've read and um and but nevertheless i don't know very much about your background and how you came to be uh a sub stack writer that has a an angle a kind of unique angle that we'll get into but before we get to um your your recent writing on sub stack and your book the cult of smart i'm curious about your background like where where are you from how did you get into writing and um sort of how how did you end up uh occupying this sub sub stack space sure so uh i intended just about zero of what has happened uh in my uh adult life i would never have made the plan be the way that things went but you know they've worked out pretty well i guess um i am from connecticut originally uh from middletown connecticut the home of wesley university i grew up on wesleyan university's campus my whole extended family is a big bunch of lefties my paternal grandfather was actually blacklisted for his communist and anti-war uh beliefs when he was a professor of education in the university of illinois system there were these state mccarthyite bills called the broils bills and he was specifically named target of those bills his wife my maternal grandmother was a civil rights and liberal civil liberties activist back when it was considered normal to be both a civil rights and civil liberties activist she won a lifetime achievement award from the illinois aclu my mother's parents were old school fdr democrats et cetera and so i grew up in a very lefty household and that was my milieu um and i consider everything that i believe now to be an extension of regular lefty politics um i'm frequently referred to as like a contrarian or similar but i don't actually think that um the things that i believe now are at all out of keeping with the leftist tradition when i was at wesleyan these were the days in which um what we now call identity politics were really exploding onto college campuses so um uh this was the time of the protest of free nelson mandela this was the time of disinvestment from south africa this was when veganism was really exploding as a political force um and uh i knew that activists student activists that i saw around me were very passionate i also knew that a lot of their engagement was shallow and counterproductive i myself became a student activist and did an awful lot of anti-iraq war activism when i was of college age and that experience also was an experience of sort of looking around and knowing that people were right fundamentally on the merits that the war was a sham um but the actual movement was a disaster that uh it was riven within fighting it was filled with purity tests it was uh uh constantly getting bogged down in interpersonal politics um and so i became a writer uh in the late 2000 uh late 2000's late aughts just to sort of express what felt to me like natural frustrations as an old school leftist with the identity the direction that um uh that the sort of left of center politics had taken and since i started everything that was happening in the universities has metastasized and has spread throughout left institutions and to me that you know if i had to sum it all up with one thing it's just crucially that um the left is fundamentally a collectivist uh movement that uh the left politics fundamentally have to involve uh putting the mass ahead of the individual and you can't actually do that when you are constantly dividing the world up into smaller and smaller uh niches of inc of identity and that these identity explosion where there's more and more categories in which people can be placed is inevitable to feel sort of a market need and it's going to make solidarity possible so you know 20 years ago during the 90s or 2000s when you were getting dismayed with the uh war protests and with other activist groups would you have described yourself as a marxist back then because i've heard you described that way yeah i mean look i am a marxist um but i i say that with the caveat that um being a marxist is to align yourself with a dead movement right like um i there's a time in my life when i would have called myself a communist but a communist you need to be a movement to be such a thing as a communist right and there is none um it is a it is a dead language that i'm trying to speak right i am um venerating the dead when i um uh continue to identify as a marxist i think that um marxism uh is a descriptive philosophical program that um accurately reflects a great deal of things about how the modern world works um it has attached to it a set of uh policy prescriptions uh that uh most marxist movements have been unable to implement for various reasons but yeah i i still fundamentally believe that the marxist belief in the labor theory of value is correct i believe that is that uh history is uh fundamentally driven by class conflict and i i believe that um there can't be liberation within the system from wage slavery is that's an endemic to the system is that is is necessarily part of the system um at the time uh it was a big tent kind of thing i mean i think it's important to say that uh younger people may not realize the degree to which the term socialist has been rehabilitated in the last i don't know uh 10 years 12 years thanks to the bernie sanders movement and to a lot of the movement around that it's become a lot more socially acceptable to call yourself a socialist than it once was um when i first started writing in like 2008 socialism was a dead uh issue in american political life um the you know leftover center was dominated by guys like john chait or as for klein or matt iglesias who are sort of you know technocratic liberals um who would refer to socialism sneeringly so you know um i mostly just identify as a socialist now because the marxist label sort of adds more complication that is very rarely relevant to real date real uh everyday concerns because of well marxism is dead that's interesting um so is marxism dead all around the world or is it dead in america i think it's dead dead i mean i you know um there are some um die hard uh old school marxist political groups around the world but even the ones that the sort of the ones that had a real uh physical presence in their various uh places have sort of retrenched so uh like the tamil tigers or shining paths in south america um they i mean they're just even the guerrilla para military elements of them have largely fallen off and um you can look at a country like china where um there are both billionaires and homeless people and where they're some of the most enthusiastic practitioners of a certain variety of of capitalism you can find anywhere i just don't know that it makes sense to sort of ascribe the label to them i mean i don't really think that it means much of anything so to the extent that marxism continues to exist in many places um it is as i said sort of a set of symbols that's just totally removed from what the core uh philosophical beliefs of marxism were in the first place i think in the one thing i've noticed is in the early 20th century marxism was so especially before the cold war really began marxism was almost synonymous with having an interest in ideas which is to say like almost anyone like vaguely on the left who was interested in ideas and writing was some kind of a marxist and you know a half of those marxist and ended up not being marxist in the second half of their career but you know if you were a historian or an economist or just a social critic at all that was almost synonymous with marxism in those days yeah and i mean i you know one of my perpetual frustrations is um the only people who know less about marxism than marxism critics are some of its supporters um i find that the default level of education about marxism for the average like twitter account with the hammer and sickle in the bio is close to zero i mean i think it's important to say um marxism is not to begin to make one misconception um anti-enlightenment so a marxism was it's part of the enlightenment meant to be you know certainly debate with it was the culmination of the enlightenment that it was the the the enlightenment sort of brought to its full flower in a way that would uh uh actually institute the the sort of uh liberal and democratic uh goals of the enlightenment um marxism is not anti-liberal so like a lot of people you know use the online use the insult liberal to for example go after anyone who says there should be a rule-bound order so like by rule by unbound order i just mean i'm someone who thinks that my enemies should have the exact same right to speak right um and i am an old-school civil libertarian in that sense um there's nothing in marxism that cuts against that inauthentic marxism there have certainly been later flavors of marxism like londonism or stalinism or maoism that have cut against those things but in actual orthodox marxism um the the founders of marxism marx and engels were passionate civil libertarians so i say like a rule-bound order the idea that we all have equal rights under the law um that is not in any sense anti-marxist and yet there's people online who love to sort of say oh you're a liberal if you'll let a fascist speak right but marxism is not anti-liberal marxism is a rule-bound order also and so part of the difficulty why i often steer conversations away from marxism is just that um we're working with so many folk definitions of what marxism is where there is um sort of equal misunderstanding on both the sides of people who profess marxism and those who decry it um that um it just doesn't seem to me to be time well spent especially given how sort of minimally influential marxism is on day-to-day events yeah i hear that i mean i don't want to spend too much more time on it but since we've talked about it this much i've said this on the podcast before my mother was a marxist and she uh she was getting a phd at cuny when i was like five years old so she taught me the names marks durkheim and many other people i knew those names when i was five years old i didn't know she was trying to teach me marxism but you know as a as an adult i i guess i've developed two problems with marxism that as i understand it and i'm curious to just to get your quick responses to them before we move on and these are problems that are no doubt listeners to this podcast are going to be thinking you know as i hear you profess some version of marxism one is that you know if you open an econ textbook today mainstream economics contains you know all very little trace that karl marx the economist ever existed in terms of you know what page in the econ textbook at econ 101 freshman year is going to have you know marx discovered this thing that has turned out to be true 150 years later and empirically verified you know that's pretty much not there and then and again i'm not an economist but but i think that much i think many most economists would probably agree with that and then second it seems like wherever it's been tried whenever the natural experiments have been done such as you know the difference between taiwan and and china before china became more capitalist uh the difference between east and west germany um you know there have been various other natural experiments and they they seem rather conclusive in that when marxism is tried it tends to fail relative to similar cultures where uh where it's not tried so though what what are your general responses to those two critiques so the first thing i would bring up is the labor theory of value and say that this is not a marxist event invention the labor theory of value for those uh who are not aware who are listening um come on capitalism depends upon an exchange of of currency and commodities that are in some sense equivalent right um obviously different markets will yield different prices for the same goods but um depending on conditions but at some degree to some degree there has to be um some sense that you have an equivalent exchange between a commodity and uh at its price right um the labor theory of value says okay how can we figure out then how it is that people create new values so if i have a factory in the factory cost x dollars to make the workers cost x or y dollars to um to employ and the raw materials cause that cost z dollars um to buy we then have to produce something that makes a profit right we have to produce something that is uh greater than x plus y plus c right somewhere some value is being created the labor field your values the belief that this stems from um uh labor and this is very often associated with marxism but it is not necessarily marxist so adam smith who was someone who was an economist who was often quoted by free marketers was someone who did a ton of work on the labor theory of value many or most economists will say that the labor theory of value doesn't hold them i'm not smart enough economically to say if they're correct or not um marx himself said that the only his only contribution to economics really was what's called the decline the tendency of the rate of profit to decline which means that mark said that like look over time eventually firms are going to eliminate all the efficiencies that they can find in their supply chain and eventually you're always going to find that you uh have eliminated everything you can eliminate and you've gotten down to producing the thing the most efficiently that you can but labor value always seems to increase labor profits have to increase over time um and because of that the uh inevitably the rate of power of uh profit for large firms will decline i mean he said that that's his big um his big you know defined by himself uh sort of contribution to mankind again that's not something that most economists would agree with um i think that the broader thing that i would say is um first of all uh it is a misconception again mostly a misconception that's engendered by people who claim to be marxists marxism has nothing to do with equality i tell have to tell this p to people all the time the idea that equality is the goal of um marxism is not correct so marxism is about an end to exploitation so again we mentioned the labor theory of value if the labor theory of value is correct it means that workers are producing value that they then don't capture right it is the bosses the ownership of the person who owns the factory who captures the profit and this is exploitation marxism wants to end that relationship it does not promise equality and in fact um we can imagine both marx and engels independently of each other said that true equality is impossible that the idea is uh true human equality on all possible variables never happen any difference between two people can be expressed as inequality and therefore as long as there's any human difference and i certainly hope there's human difference then there's going to be inequality um and so uh jordan peterson is an example of someone who's constantly going after marxism because he thinks that the goal of mar of marxism is to create uh equality but equality is not going to be found in a sort of post-marxist revolutionary world because individual people are still going to have their uh ability to do different things that will have different values in the community what a marxist revolution promises is only that they're not going to be exploited for their labor power anymore so um i would say this i think that perhaps the overly clever place that i've arrived at over years is that um when marxists say that marxism uh has never really been attempted they're correct when marxists marxism critics say that that is a [ __ ] excuse they're also correct meaning that um it is simultaneously true that um none of the major attempts to institute marxist principles have met even the most basic sort of definition of what it would be to be marxist and so it seems analytically unsound to therefore condemn marxism but at the other hand uh people are correct to say that well there's been um you know uh a decent number of countries that have attempted some sort of marxist revolution and they have all tended to fail in the same predictable ways and so that kind of undermines that critique um for me personally a marxist revolution is not in the offing i think that there's a lot to learn in the marxist history about how capitalism operates but um i don't do the sort of thing where i'll you know write a blog post where i apply marxist critique to the idea of student loan forgiveness or whatever because i just don't think that those critiques have much value under present condition can i just briefly just give what i have always taken to be the problem with the labor theory of value yeah and um which is that it it basically assumes that you know we know what basically it assumes is set a fixed set of firms businesses in the world producing widgets or you know software whatever product it is and um you know the the population demanding those products is not their demands are not constantly changing right so that in that scenario where the job of the economy was to just make a million widgets a year for the people it would actually hold true that the only people adding value to the parts that make up a widget are the people in the factory making the widgets whatever those are but the the way the economy actually works is that every day and every second demand is changing and there are you know people are require people are constantly having to guess what the demand is going to be tomorrow one hour from now a year from now 10 years from now in order to provide the upfront cash that every business um needs to start before it even starts turning you know a profit and so the value added by the owners you know the the venture capital uh people the investors what what what used to be called the speculators probably in back in the day um and today still is is to basically play this guessing game and allow people to build the widget factory for widgets that aren't going to be built and might not be needed at all and and without that an economy doesn't work my name is coleman hughes and i'm the host of the podcast conversations with coleman a platform where i have honest unfiltered conversations with the world's brightest minds on the most pressing issues of our time the ability to think freely is what moves society forward that's why for all fans of the show i've created the unfiltered community the unfiltered community is a space for open honest conversations about difficult social and political issues in the unfiltered community you'll also gain access to unaired episodes of conversations with coleman exclusive q a's with me and other bonus content join me and thousands of others as we challenge convention question everything and seek the truth with an open mind let's change the world one conversation at a time join the community today at www.colemanhughes.org unfiltered right yeah yeah i think another thing is like what do you do with me like a person like me in a traditional marxist analysis meaning am i a boss or in my labor right i run my own shop i derive my income primarily um from my from my newsletter i also uh i'm a ghostwriter and i have a new book under contract with simon schuster etc um in each of those cases you could make the claim that i am laboring for someone who owns the means of production i mean substack owns the um the servers i'm my stuff is uh posted on but in the long run the bigger analysis um i mean i am capturing um the great majority of the value created by my newsletter right and it was impossible for marx or ingles or anyone to be able to look forward to a world in which this distributed network that is the internet would create so many opportunities for people to be in effect independent contractors or sort of bosses in labor at the same time so um and i know people look there's there's some um there's some really bright marxists working today so there's a guy named robert brenner who he wrote a book called economics of global turbulence which was published in 2006 and it is to me it's like the text that best predicted the financial crisis of 2008. um so there are people still doing this work but um mostly um i read it in the same sense that i read about like you know the classics right um it's trying to find draw lessons for modernity but not necessarily assuming that they apply in day-to-day life now yeah so um another interesting aspect of your brand of marxism and this this will get us on to other topics is that i i think many people have noticed a tendency for marxists to deny the reality of and maybe this is an inaccurate reading of you can clarify this but to deny the reality of differences in ability natural differences in ability between people and but the conceit of your book that you published i think two years ago right the cult of smart is that the left in order to um actually meet its own criteria for justice needs to acknowledge the reality that some people are born more talented more intelligent um some people have caught we we have strengths and weaknesses naturally cognitively physically in in every way and that we have to recognize that so uh what what was your inspiration for uh writing that book and how did that gel with your intellectual past so um i was in grad school and i had joined a field that i really didn't believe in anymore i thought that the field was fundamentally about teaching the teaching of writing and it really wasn't it had developed a whole bizarre and esoteric sort of theoretical view on what writing was and it wasn't concerned with what happens in classrooms um and so i was kind of despondent because i was in a phd program um and my you know feeling like my work was not wanted so i really started to do a lot of education policy research a lot of education research methods etc etc i also was teaching all the time and um it was becoming just more and more clear that with every group of students i got even you know the i was teaching i thought at the university of rhode island and then purdue university and even though um you know those are public universities they're a little less selective they still i'm still getting a screened out set of students in other words the selection process for those universities has screened out the lowest performing students um it was still clear even without like a random sample that some kids showed up to college on day one having you know a much stronger grasp of the basic underlying skills that they needed and then a whole a lot of students not only were poorly prepared for for college they did not want to be there there's a um conversation i mentioned in the book that um really uh sat with me for a long time which is that i was talking to a kid it was a classic case of a kid who rarely came to class was always behind on his work um you know he didn't uh he clearly just did not want to be there and i talked to him and i you know i got around to saying like look man like um college is voluntary right you don't have to be here there's other things you can do and he said um what am i going to do like join my dad in the fishing industry right um which he said is like a ironically because you know rhode island's fishing industry has been contracting for forever right it was you know to him like he was saying that an indication of it being like a dying industry right not a growth industry and um so many of the students that i knew um were in college purely because they felt they had no other choice and so you have this skill mismatch between the kind of skills that college wants to inculcate in people and the skills that people come in with but also you have a lack of want to because people feel they have no other choice and i would contrast that to an earlier period of american life which is um you have the kind of fabled factory at the edge of town for decades in america you know sort of from let's say the end of uh world war one to uh 1980-ish say when it starts to get dismantled is you know bruce springsteen has sung 100 songs about this right there were industry there's manufacturing um that allowed somebody to get a job where there was the possibility of owning a home owning a car putting a couple kids through school that didn't require a college degree and that was another path there was another way out certain places like detroit were built on this promise right they were built on the existence of this kind of job often those jobs were unionized and what happened was we closed the factories now so um over time those jobs um dramatically declined again mostly starting in the 80s and continuing on for a couple decades after that and they declined uncontroversially because of automation so that's the uncontroversial reason is because we got better at um making machines that could do the roles that humans once did so you know people sometimes say we used to make things in this country the united states is still a manufacturing powerhouse but we employ a small fraction of the number of people we used to employ right because automation was so effective that we were didn't need those jobs and then the more controversial thing is the role of offshoring so pushing jobs to mexico uh to china to bangladesh et cetera um obviously i'm not in a position to adjudicate how true that is but that is certainly what some people say and so you have this whole way of life this um uh this vision of being able to go to the factory at the edge of town get that job and it might not be glamorous or it might not be an opportunity to ever be a superstar but it provided that these jobs provided living wages for families and this is how we created the american expectation of the house with the white picket fence and the car in the garage and the 2.5 kids and whatever right um and so one of the things that just became eminently clear to me was that you know there was always these doomsday statistics about college i mean globally you know throughout the system we're still seeing only about half the people who start uh graduate on time um there's all kinds of reports about students not learning anything while they're there this is the crushing student that that people are graduating with um it became clear to me that like the the ultimate culprit of all this stuff was that um we were asking to fit square pegs into round holes because there's all different kinds of ways to be useful in the economy and as a human being but there's not a lot of ways to be particularly useful if you're all forcing everyone into that college pipeline i mean the system if you look listen to what the policy makers are saying what's coming out of the think tanks and foundations etc their vision for success is always like taking a under underprivileged kid and we're going to train them up to be you know smart at math and send them to stanford so he can then be a google engineer right but that's just not a mass path that's just not a path that's actually ever going to be able to support everyone moving forward um and i thought that the first step to fixing this is to stop treating smart as like the lodestone of human value so i tell a story in the book i was at a cookout when i was in grad school and there's a lot of grad students who are international students and there was a guy i knew from china and his wife and his two kids were there and the wife was bragging about her older son and talking about how he's tops in math and how he's in a robot robotics club and how he you know he always solves everything you know really well academically and then her younger son ran by making like funny noises with his mouth and she said that one is maybe not so smart um and i could see and i kind of went like i kind of like you know i got this like uh uh i clenched up a little bit and i could see other people other american people around me sort of clenching up too because that's just not a thing you say about your kid but when i thought about it later on that day it's like you know if she had said that he wasn't a good athlete i wouldn't have cared right if she had said that um he wasn't uh going to be a great visual artist fine and she said he didn't have an ear for music fine none of that would have phased me at all right but it's with smart and with smart alone that we treat it as this totalizing system right like the the sole criterion of human value and it's that that i was trying to attack with my book yeah so that that is something i have thought about a lot and i've i'm not really sure i've gotten the chance to talk about it with someone who is in this realm because so you and i are both writers we're both you know writers that are one degree of separation away from you know probably 50 different people that we both know just from like being plugged into this niche little world that we're in um in the broader scheme of humanity and but in this world intelligence is uh it is central right in in this particular profession if you are um if you're a wordsmith if you're an analyzer of social issues if you work at all with numbers and understanding statistics you know intelligence makes intelligence is of great benefit but you know and so as a result i think people in our world sometimes take it for granted that intelligence is the most important thing um and just in general you know people who have been to college are likely to tell you to go to college is that because it's the right decision for you or is it because they and everyone they know went to college right right and you know so my i come from a slightly different perspective in that out of high school i my uh my life was that i was a professional musician and i did not initially go to a four-year college i went to a music conservatory for six years for six months or so ended up dropping out and then getting a liberal arts degree uh but still i never even when i was at columbia i um i never you know to to this day almost every one of my close friends is still a musician so who who didn't go to a traditional college who either went to a conservatory of some kind or didn't go to college at all and that because that happened to me my passion i view it as pretty normal to be into something that is not academics and i think there are plenty of people for college is not for them um but we do have this kind of worship of college as the end goal of you know of of the first 18 years of life right it is the measure of whether you've succeeded as a teenager and as a young adult and i think that's that's not something that exists everywhere in the world and it's something we should definitely reconsider yeah and i would also say and this is another major plank of the book that i think is important is um college the college wage advantage depends a great deal on the scarcity of the college degree if we were support to succeed in getting everybody a degree the college wage advantage would disappear i mean i'm not just making this up i'm not just saying reasoning this out from first principles so there's a paper to the national national bureau of economic research really uh fantastic uh document wish i could remember who wrote it but um it looked at the college wage premium i want to say from 1890 to 2005. okay so the entirety of the 20th century plus on either side so you know the college wage premium when we say that it's just you know the amount that the average college graduate is making relative to the average person who didn't go to college um and they found that to a remarkable degree and that's their worst remarkable degree um the college wage premium is simply a function of the number of jobs that require a college degree and the number of people with uh with those degrees the degree holders in other words when there are more jobs for people with college degrees then the value goes up when there's more people with degrees to fill those jobs the value goes down couldn't be simpler right supply and demand it's it's it's uh sort of the most basic and essential economic law um but if we think about that right then it makes the whole sort of everyone should go to college policy assumption kind of crazy right because it means that um we're simply pushing more and more and more people into the pipeline that means that there's more and more and more people graduating from college who are then going to compete with each other on the labor market okay so i i write sometimes about the idea of a um a practical college major and one of the points i make is that what is practical is actually not like intuitively easy to figure out um a good example is business so is a business degree a practical major to many people it sounds like the ultimate practical nature hey it's business right you're gonna go work at a business this is a useful skill here's the issue though um business majors do all right when we look at the big picture numbers but they only do all right and a lot of people would assume they'd do better than all right but a big part of the reason why they only do all right is we're graduating 350 000 of them a year right so if you are a business major coming up on the job market you are in a sea of other business majors who have the same degree right so you are necessarily going to have headwinds in terms of finding a job because there's such a supply of people who look just like you to an employer there's a good illustration of this from a decade or so ago was in pharmacy which is um that uh there was a sense that pharmacy was a good job but it is a good job with good pay and that it was a a good part in a storm economically that the pharmacists were tended to be recession proof positions and that is an enviable you know um job that sort of carries with it some white collar respectability etc um well what ended up happening was that in the span of a decade and there's a great uh new uh republic article about this in the span of about a decade um literally over a hundred new schools of pharmacy were opened in the united states just dozens and dozens of schools of pharmacy were open united states um and what ended up happening to those graduates well of course the the sort of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow got harder to attain because all those new schools and all those new graduates meant they had more people to compete against on the labor market now i'm not saying somebody coming out onto the labor market as a young pharmacist was suddenly in bad shape compared to the national picture i'm sure that it did fine overall but the very act of trying to dramatically scale up the number of people getting that degree inherently made it more of a dicey prospect so one of the things i tell people all the time is you know um you have to be careful about your intuitive sense about what's a good um major to get so like a classic story was um there was a time when everyone was saying become a petrochemical engineer right and then the oil market uh was submarined a while back uh and the price of crude went down a tremendous deal and so all of a sudden it didn't seem like that could have a job anymore right so obviously number one you want to make yourself nimble and you want to make yourself someone who is marketable in various different degrees but what does what happens when you're telling everybody to go to college and everybody needs that credential and you find that uh oops now i'm on the market everybody already my age seems to already have a degree right um i have so much competition well what do you do well you get another degree and that's how we see the insane explosion in master's degrees um over the past decade or decade and a half i encourage everyone listening to do a google image search for master's degrees over time and it's just this if it was a stock it would have made people super rich right it's like uh then there's just been an explosion in because people feel okay the college credential is no longer sufficient to make me stand out in the market now i need to go get another credential and if we keep it keep doing the same thing that we're doing it's going to be another new credential and another new credential yeah i remember reading brian kaplan's book the case against education i assume you're aware that book i remember reading that while i was halfway through my degree at columbia like not doing my homework to read that book and it had the effect of uh it had that great combination of an argument that just seems obvious once you hear it but you've never heard before and and the argument was basically you know college is talked about you know uh the way college is sold to you is you are who you are at 18 and you need four years of this intense training to make you a more productive worker right like at the end of the f at this four years you're gonna be different and better to an employer just like you would be after you know four years of practicing a skill you'd be you'd be a much better chess player after four years you'd be a much player much better basketball player at the end of four years of college you will be four years better to an employer and that's why you you'll get the higher salary you know of course that when you actually think about it that makes very little sense because for example if you go to college for three years and just don't finish your fourth year an employer doesn't view you as three-fourths as as good as someone who got the full degree they think to themselves why couldn't this person finish was something wrong with them right um when your professor emails you five minutes before class saying sorry no class today my kid got sick nobody says wait a minute you you are cheating me out of something that's gonna make me more money everyone celebrates and goes home right you don't feel you should feel like you got stolen from when a class is too easy or when you don't you know the teacher decides to cancel the pop quiz but instead you feel like you have uh gotten some of your time back and the the the end result is basically the realization that college is a four-year stamping mechanism it's it's not mostly it is not giving you new skills you didn't have that you're gonna need in on the job most learning on the job occurs on the job mostly it's proof that you're the kind of person and you were on day one of college that can go to class show up at 9 00 a.m for four years do the long haul turn things in on time and that the the knowledge that you're that kind of person is really the premium that employers are paying for that's exactly right i mean look um i think it's important to say um again forget my memory i can't remember the name of the supreme court case but there was a supreme court case that effectively outlawed certain kinds of intelligence testing as being prerequisites for getting a job um and so one of the things that that college for everyone did is that it allowed them to sort of get tested sort of through the back door because of course there are entrance examinations to colleges and a huge portion of what employers find valuable about colleges is simply that it is a screening mechanism that they don't have to pay for right i mean if you think about it at the very least i mean there's some some schools that you can sleep your way through the entire time most colleges at least require you to like be someone who can independently set their schedule who can show up on time fairly regularly for things who can practice time management um who can delay gratification that's what so many of the employers are selecting for i promise if you go and get a nice job at geico or something right um you're probably you're probably not applying much even if you have a business degree right you're probably not applying a lot of the business theory that you learned in college to your work at geico what you're doing is is your your your resume and your college diploma say to them this is someone who is not going to be absent the first week of that we're working this is someone i can trust to be there when the meeting starts this is someone who can um be reliable right the other thing is and this is harder to sort of express is um there's this credential creep where people say hey our jobs are serious jobs and we want them to be taken seriously so even though i can't think of any particular reason why a college degree would be necessary to work this job we're going to make it a ba be a requirement because i want people to know that my business is serious we hire serious people and we're we're a grown-up place for grown-ups i think that a big part of college uh requirements for for the workplace is just that people have a sort of status anxiety that they think to themselves if i'm a boss and i'm hiring a bunch of people without college degrees that says something about the sort of intellectual integrity of my enterprise and so you just have this mushrooming effect where more and more people going now we should be clear again like only about 40 of american adults have has a degree still um because a lot of people are self-selecting out of the pool um unfortunately we have ever declining standards at the high school so one thing that i would let your readers know is that you know we have seen a dramatic drop in high school dropouts over the past decade several decades particularly among people of color um the trouble is that there's not like a lot of underlying educational data that would indicate why that would have been the case right like in other words you would think if a lot more people are graduating than used to uh that we would see like in the sat data or the state standardized test data um you would think that we would see improvements that would demonstrate that you know students actually know more and that therefore the this drop in dropouts is is justified but unfortunately there really isn't any underlying data and so the the general assumption is that um there was tons of policy pressure on from above to raise the graduation rate and uh the people felt that pressure and they just shepherded a lot of people through the doors who actually didn't do the work necessary to graduate from high school there's this thing called campbell's law um which is just essentially it says that um the more pressure that gets applied to a pretty to a particular quantitative indicator like grad high school graduation rate the more corrupted the meaning of that indicator becomes because people cheat the indicator and unfortunately that's what's happened with high school graduation yeah i mean i can personally attest that there was a lot of great inflation at columbia university more than i would have expected going into it and it was it was far more difficult to fail a class than i would have predicted um and i'm not sure people who went to college you know sick 50 years ago don't tend to say those kinds of things rust outfit wrote a book called privilege which is about his experience as a harvard undergraduate and he points out something that's pretty fairly well known in the higher ed world which is that um you know the i for their stats to look the best the ivs it's in their best interest for it to be very hard to get in but also very hard to fail out right that um uh you want a really low uh acceptance rate and because these schools generally speaking are not increasing their enrollment caps they're not increasing the number of students who can attend even though the number of high schoolers keeps raising their uh enrollment rates keep dropping um you wanna you wanna look very exclusive when people come in but you don't want a lot of people failing out and so yeah it's notoriously easy to um pass uh in a lot of programs and a lot of elite schools of course through schools where that's not true i mean caltech um for example is not an easy school to uh to graduate from but um there's you know there's all kinds of just terrible incentives throughout the whole the whole system that i talk about about a lot of my reading should be in my writing and um you know uh one of the things that i always ask people to remember when we think about colleges is none of this was sort of planned in the sense that um all of our assumptions about the college being the backbone of our middle class economy and also about college being engines of social justice are things that were grafted on to college after the fact right um from the beginning of the elite colleges up until the middle of last century um if you were to talk to a yale dean in 1930 about the idea of college the purpose of college being to sort of be the backbone of the american labor economy he would have thought you were nuts if you had asked that yale dean about the purpose of uh yale being to you know create social justice he would have looked at you like you were nuts because it was just understood that the purpose of elite education the purpose of higher education was to take people who were already elite and craft leaders of men out of them right it was the idea was to perpetuate an elite that was capable of ruling because the people who were gonna rule were the kennedys and the bushes etc etc these dynastic aristocratic american families and so now we have these two major roles that people would probably think of as the purpose of college getting kids into jobs and creating social justice when neither of those things were the original intent of higher education in america at all and so it's i mean it's not really surprising that the institutions do such a bad job at those things when you consider that like they just sort of took up those causes when it became um socially convenient for them to do so yeah i mean that this i love the way you put that i mean it's it's so obvious when you go back in your mind to the mid-20th century this was a time when they were still keeping jews out of the ivy league because you know through clever mechanisms like essay requirements because you know even if they couldn't ask you are you jewish they can read between the lines of an essay of where you're from and what your life is like because there were too many there were too many jewish kids that didn't come from the elite that who you know whose fathers were you know cab drivers or or you know small-scale you know merchants which had just moved here that were testing into the ivy leagues and and breaking class ranks into the white anglo-saxon protestant elite and had to be quote had to be kept out because of that and that's that didn't seem like at all contradictory at the time to the purpose of a college degree in fact it was instrumental to it um and the vestiges of of that original purpose are now things like legacy admissions uh you know where you it is it is actually you know the most classic example of an unearned privilege is to get into a harvard a yale a columbia simply because your mother fathers your professor or or because your older sister or brother went there it is uh like it would be in the dictionary next to unearned privilege to to describe to someone who had never heard the concept and yet these are the hotbeds the incubators of an ideology which is uh mono maniacally obsessed with dismantling privilege and so you see like the clearest example of of an institution which is upholding privilege with out of one side of its mouth but then you know university presidents signing off on the most radical kind of language suggesting that privilege has to be dismantled and saying things that frankly the rest of society looks on like what are what do these words even mean and you have it all within the same institution and it's it's a walking contradiction yeah i mean and i would hear what i would probably talk about holistic emissions which is i think a very interesting thing you brought up the fact that and it's you know it's it's funny you can um uh there's a a wonderful book by jerome carabell called the chosen which is this um amazing uh history of the admissions processes at elite colleges over the 20th century and you know he you know has access to all this documentation and they weren't being particularly shy about the fact that they were in a conspiracy to exclude jews right like the the the uh the the ivy leagues in particular um they were just they would just say it to each other right you know how are we gonna keep jews up um so in the debates about college admissions that i often take part in um i'm um more of a numbers guy i i'm a dogged defender of the s.a.t um and i think that um we should weigh things quantitatively to a strong degree although i think there's plenty of room to talk about also talk about essays etc um there is a the diametrically opposed to that is the concept of holistic admissions and the holistic emissions is you know what people say forget about numbers let's look at soft factors and we'll look at um [Music] uh sort of the character of the person and their personalities and you know those sort of things um the first thing to say is like that's what the ivy league did when they began their conspiracy to exclude jews so it's important to say that the specific mechanism uh one of the specific mechanisms through which jewish students were excluded from elite universities was through a switch to a more holistic system because the jewish students looked great on paper they had great numbers and so well what do you want to do if you want to get rid of jewish students you discount their numbers and you give more weight to theirs quote-unquote character right and that's what a lot of people want to do now under the theory that it will let in more minority students that will have more black and hispanic graduates um and also now more male students now that there's such women have opened up such a uh dramatic edge in college my thing is just like if we you know the people who advocate holistic emissions tend to be the people who uh talk a lot about systemic racism and things like that if you believe that systemic racism exists why do you want to give more wiggle room in your process right like if the whole point of holistic admissions is so that people have you know the admissions officials have more opportunity to make you know choices based on intuition and based on fuzzy factors and you know not meth wouldn't it then therefore be most likely that it would cut against the people who suffer from uh systemic racism right um look at like the things that colleges like in in uh uh in a student's um [Music] uh application when it comes to the soft stuff um so they like things like going to guatemala to build houses in the summer well who has the wherewithal to do that poor students are rich ones they like students who have taught themselves farsi well what students have the ability to pay for tutors and classes and rosetta stone etc rich ones are poor ones this is a thing that a lot of people don't know but many colleges when it comes to sports they'd rather you be pretty good at a rare sport than really good at a common one so obviously excluding things like you know big time basketball and football programs at a lot of schools particularly like academically elite schools they'll take a pretty good fencer over a great cross-country run because a fencer is more holistically well what kind of students play the rarer sports is it the poor black ones or is it the rich white ones right to me like we've already seen the holistic admissions uh experiment tried it resulted in or was the mechanism to achieve anti-semitic ends and um i see no reason to think that being holistic is going to uh prevent racism i think it opens the door for more yeah i mean the there the other aspect of this is holistic assessments um and there there's been i don't know to what extent it's been implemented yet but i know in san francisco there was or rather san diego i think last year there was a push for teachers to be able to assess their students instead of on a normal sort of average of all your grades on tests and quizzes and so forth to subjectively assess their students holistically right and i mean this just brought out the exact same point in my mind which is so on the one hand the same people who are telling me we need to spend you know 21 23 million dollars in new york city to re-educate public school teachers right to give them anti-bias trainings this is money that was allocated over the course of four or five years in new york city by richard carranza so we need to spend 23 million dollars making new york city public school teachers less racist these are the same kinds of people that would would advocate for those same teachers to be able to sort of gut check themselves for what a student's grade should be and uh at minimum there is a tension between those two two viewpoints or like either you are trusting teachers to be totally race blind and significantly objective in their assessments of kids of different race or um or you you're simply accepting that there's going to be a lot of racist uh assessments here and and so there's a tension between those two viewpoints that is that is rarely i think recognized by by folks who support those kinds of policies you know i think it is remarkable the degree to which the perception on rigor has changed in what we might call anti-racist circles because you know now um the sort of perception is is that in rigor in the traditionalist sense the quantitative sense the sense of um being the having the least wiggle room and being the most prescriptive about uh what the right and wrong answers are um now that is sort of seen as being contrary to anti-racist attitudes um but you know when i was in my early twenties um the the one of the constant um accusations of racism of systemic racism that was made was that the lack of rigor with which students were being held to in largely minority schools that had terrible uh numbers that the lack of rigor was itself racist right that in other words that at the systemic racism lay in not holding black students and hispanic students to the same standards because to do because to fail to do so was not to prepare them for the real world um you know i never know quite how seriously to take these policy documents that emerge that talk about things like not necessarily marking a student wrong if it gets a math question wrong right that um you know if a student puts two plus two equals five then um you should you know use that as a teachable opportunity we don't mark them wrong or whatever on the one hand i don't wanna feed into crt panic and i think that um those things probably are are pretty fairly far removed excuse me from the actual pedagogical experience right now on the other hand there's a lot of people who really believe that stuff and it is prominent in education um this course you know i still read a lot of education journals um and in education as a academic field um you know the sort of anti-racist ibrahim kennedy kind of approach is sort of just assumed into the furniture i mean it's just part of the background deal there are a lot of people who are sort of um uh who sort of make stabs against the idea of that kind of rigor as being a uh a tool of white supremacy or whatever to which i would just say like look um the fact that two plus two equals four and not five is what makes your cell phone work and is the reason why the plane you're flying in doesn't fall out of the sky right and um i think that there are a lot of places where there's low hanging fruit in terms of reforms we can make to our system to make them friendlier to children of color but the idea that in general we should judge people less harshly it just really seems to be like making it easier for them on kids to make it harder on them as adults right because at some point sooner or later you're going to have a stakeholder who needs you to be able to actually do the stuff that you need to be able to do right i mean i i i talked about this with ian rowe recently who runs a network of charter schools in the south bronx or did for many years and uh you know one point it brought out in me is just my memory of my own experience as a kid you know public school was very very easy for me through fifth grade and then suddenly i went to a much more rigorous private school and you know at first i struggled because the the gap in rigor was just vast right it was like my i at public school might i would do my homework in 10 minutes get every answer right get a perfect score on every test and then go play soccer and basketball and game and pokemon like the rest of the night the moment i got to somewhere which is had a totally different level i had no idea how to work hard right it was it was shocking and very unpleasant for for a certain amount of time and eventually through that pain and the requirement and the lack of forgiveness of imperfection i got way better and my i i don't think i ever would have realized actually how smart i could be and how much i could excel at academic subjects if the fire had not been lit under me to excel or fail this test because i think you know some people are extremely naturally hard-working like you find some people that they're just born into wealth and still they want to work 18 hours a day and not sleep the vast majority of us are not like that we work we work we respond to incentives we respond to carrots and sticks and often we actually don't know how good we could get at a skill unless there is a penalty for failing right this is where the phrase tough love come from and i think a lot of people can remember a key teacher they had in their past that looked at them and said i know you can do much better and i'm not going to accept less from you and then by the end of the year you just realize that you're way better than you thought you could ever be and way better than you would have been had you had a more forgiving teacher yeah for me as a leftist and the reason i wrote the book um is trying to wrestle with the question of what to do with the people who genuinely are not academically talented um and uh you know i mean it was so like like you know the book was sort of dismissed out of hand by a lot of left-leaning people because they don't want to believe in the idea that some people are academically talented and some aren't right they don't want to believe in the idea of a talent spectrum but um to me i just look at like um it's mostly a problem with men there's plenty of women who have this problem too but we have this this this whole sort of cohort of men who you know in the british system they they call it the meats which stands for not in education employment or training who don't want to go to college if they do go they go for a few semesters and fail out who have no marketable skills there's a sort of backdoor welfare program in america which is the disability system so a lot of these guys will get bogus um uh diagnoses of like whiplash right like soft tissue back injuries that are very difficult to tell if they're objectively real or not and they'll sort of live off of uh that money which is not a lot and they live you know really um itinerant and unhappy lives a lot of them have suffering from opiate addiction whatever we just we have this whole category of person where look some some number of them would wind up in that circumstance no matter what i imagine but i do think that you know once upon a time uh these guys would have been able to be valuable members of communities if they had a employment prospect a way to be a useful society and to earn a wage doing that you know the thing that i always point out is just that like um it's always contingent what is a valuable skill and what is not right a lot of people who were really good at being travel agents suddenly found that the internet had just taken the job out from underneath them they didn't get worse at the job of being a travel agent it's just that the internet came and made all their skills redundant right um once upon a time being a big strong burly guy who could lift the biggest rock was very economically advantaged right because you had a skill set that many people didn't you could you were ugh and you could pick the biggest rock up you know um oh now if you are born with the same genetics as that guy was um you don't have a marketable skill and you might be one of these guys who's living on disability and um at the core of all that though you know there has to be a an acknowledgement that not everybody is a budding computer scientist right you know um you would expect from the way that a lot of people talk that stem is like our fastest growing sector of our economy it's not true at all the fastest growing sector of the economy is the service sector okay by some metrics the fastest growing job the single fastest growing job in the american economy is called home health aid which is basically just when someone is old and firm and needs someone to open cabinets and help them um up and down the stairs or uh help them when they use the bathroom et cetera um that's the fastest growing uh job in america because we have a graying population the boomers are going to be needing that um if soon if they are already um the average pay for those jobs is less than ten dollars an hour right and so i think one of the things i'm always trying to do is to sort of de-romanticize the workplace of today end of tomorrow to get people to understand that like it's wonderful when you can find people and push them into coding boot camps so they learn to code and they become you know successful computer science types but we need broad-based employment opportunities where people who have perhaps minimal academic skills can still participate in the economy in a way that they can pay their rent and right now that doesn't really exist and uh and that's sort of the was the purpose of the book is to sort of say like there's this hole here but the policy conversation is so aspirational that everybody just wants to talk about everybody getting a job at google um and the people on the left don't want to talk about academic talent because they find it eugenic or whatever and the people on the right don't want to talk about talent because they want to maintain the idea that anyone who works hard can succeed and it's all about your willingness to work and so uh i found the book put me in a pretty lonely position yeah but it's a it's a position i totally understand and respect and i think agree with and i think a lot of people would um i've been i've talked to some people from europe and places like germany who say that there in certain countries at least there is a robust culture of you know getting a degree in a craft or a trade that is non-academic like being a plumber or a carpenter or or something like that which is a skilled profession but requires a kind of i mean that like there are a lot of people that are just great with their hands but no good at writing an essay and that's a that's a sort of intelligence it's a it's a competence that i don't have it's like the person whose car breaks down and they can just fix everything and everything comes to them quickly in that domain um and there's a you know it's considered you know pretty high status or like normalized to just be a guy and go to high school and then do that and have that career in a way that it's not in america germany specifically has a a tracking system now this is soft tracking so tracking is not that you know in the sense of putting students on different tracks um in terms of uh individual classes like higher level lower level math there's also tracking systems in terms of like where you think employment's going to go um in my high school uh when in the 90s there's a program called voeg vocational agriculture um which you know was for people who were going to go into into farming or into like uh body shops and you know doing car repair and stuff like that i can definitely say that there was a stigma for the volag kids when i was in high school um in germany they have a two-tiered racking system um where i think the kids get put on one either at like sort of 12 or 13 years old some around that age range now this is soft tracking the sense that the parent gets to choose so they're not saying oh you need to go on this track and we'll never let you on the other one but there is a more conventional academic track that might ultimately send you to a liberal arts college in the same way that an american goes to libraries college but there's also a track that's more for people who are interested in the trades interested in manufacturing um there is uh from what i've heard uh not a great deal of stigma associated with that that it's seen as a very noble and path and a lot of people take it it is worth saying that you know germany has the advantage of um more powerful labor unions and a very mature manufacturing thing so you can get off of that that trade track in school and go into a job for bmw or something and you can enjoy um you know a livable income and healthcare and et cetera et cetera um which uh is not necessarily something we can say in the united states one of the things i'm always talking to people about this is just like um you can't reform college only at the college end right because college is problems or economic problems that stem both from both before and after college um and you know in order to make these things work we have to have a policy response that yes looks at before kids are sent to college but also at a policy response that sort of addresses things from from the top from above but um again like uh you know the the rhetoric always rises up to meet the moment so one of the things that i demonstrate in my book is that every um president at least since reagan has identified college as like the key to um our economic future but you think about it right they're starting to say that at precisely the time when the old factory system is being dismantled and that way of life i was talking about has died off is dying off and so in a sense you know that people call that the fortist economy right after after ford for the company which is that you know income inequality was low but growth was really high and there was powerful trade unions etc um it's just really hard to get policy people not to want to talk about the brightest students and the students who are gonna take you know take that leap and become the next superstars and to get them to really focus in on the median student right on the on the kid who's not exceptional because of course you know the point of policy has to be to care for the for all of us the median among us [Music] okay let's shift gears a little bit and and talk about uh well part of what we're going to talk about is what to call it you have a a um a great article on sub stack called please just [ __ ] tell me what term i'm allowed to use for the sweeping social and political changes you demand so this reminds me of a i'm forgetting who wrote this years ago and where they wrote it but i think the article was called the thing and the the point of it was there is this thing that has happened not just in higher education but in corporate america in the media outside of fox news in um the art world where you know in 2010 you know nobody is talking about you know probably most people have never heard the term white privilege systemic racism um i mean there's a whole laundry list of of words on this score um you know no one's almost no one's heard of the concept that words are violence the concept of a safe space trigger warning which are already i think somewhat out of use but by this point but then suddenly something happens around 2013-14 and all of these domains of american life are quite literally speaking a language that most typical americans on the left and right have never heard before and and this is also a measurable trend like you can see on google trends mentions of all of these formerly arcane strange phrases literally climb exponenti exponentially right around the same year and yet as as you point out in this article first of all some people will deny that anything has gone on at all others will say and often the same people later will say well no something is happening and it's a very good thing um and and others will take an in-between route yet yes it's happening but it's just it's pretty small beings compared to other issues um and and as you point out there's this there's this problem of what to call it it's like any word you use can seem pejorative and can be denied by the very people that subscribe to all the beliefs so talk a little bit about why you wrote this post yeah i mean in the most basic sense i really do just want people to give me a term because i'm so sick to death of having to write paragraphs long hemming and hawing about you know what to regard this you know what to call this phenomenon i um i have always used the term social justice politics because it just seems simple and neutral but if they came up with a term that they like i'll use it i have no interest in you know deliberately insulting someone by not using the term that they want but the problem was is that like you know when i was a kid politically correct was a term that became uh popular and then sort of unspeakable you can't say politically correct because that's insulting identity politics is a term that people find insulting and woke is a term that people find insulting and critical race theories determine people if i find itself things like okay but what is it right what should i call it yeah i find very tiresome people who act as though nothing has happened in the last decade to the political and social norms of the american elite ideas that gestated in uh the elite university humanities departments women's studies departments philosophy english sociology etc migrated from those spaces and uh in the matter of a decade or so effectively colonized the great majority of america's sort of public intellectual space right um they're dominant in academia they are dominant in media that is not um explicitly conservative media it's dominant in the think tank and foundation space um it has found its way into many governmental departments and functions um corporate uh entities love to at least borrow its ideas and phraseology for their own purposes etc somebody someday should write a book about how tumblr played a role in that because i find it very interesting i mean i think you can make a strong case that um the drift was from academia to tumblr to twitter to elite life but anyway no i i agree with that assessment by the way as i it's also something i've talked about on the podcast here but but now with you is that i was on when i was 15 or 16 which um would have been like 2012 2013 i was i was on tumblr because girls in high school i liked were on tumblr um and right and that's where i first encountered 10 or 15 different concepts that four years later would would be the center of the culture wars so i i encountered them on tumblr before i encountered them anywhere else right and it's just like look um when uh you have bank of america handing out pens at pride marches pride parades i don't if if the if the claim is simply that that is you know a shallow thing that they do that they don't really believe in okay but we should still recognize that they're they're doing it when um meryl lynch talks about intersectionality and overlapping oppressions i have no doubt that it's some intern is getting strong-armed into doing it for the marketing value but so what it still demonstrates that there is a set of ideas that were came out seemingly out of nowhere and it just very easily colonized an immense amount of american intellectual life um to the extent that things underlie this i mean i would say the first thing that always has to be identified as safety ism that if if woken is you know whatever you want to call it identity politics of 2022 social justice politics safety ism i think is is the the foundation which is that um everyone's purpose at any moment should be to prevent uh danger to anyone else with danger being defined extremely broadly and explicitly including danger in terms of your ideas and language and that in any conflict when one person claims that someone else's ideas or language threatens them in some way then we must always defer to the person making that claim um i think that's the core or at least a big part of the core of what we're talking about it is the privileging of the person who is saying i am threatened by this rather than some objective sense of what is or is not threatening it's also a profoundly individualist sort of philosophy that is as i said at the beginning stands in tension with the collectivism that's usually been found on the left in the sense that um traditional leftist organizing principles emphasize we're all the same the social justice movements messaging uh is all about how we are not the same right in other words um eugene debs and the socialists of the 19 teens and 1920s were saying hey workers of the world unite we're all the same come together so we can win now it's i am not like you because i i am black hispanic asian indigenous et cetera i am not like you because i am gay straight poly uh asexual etc i am not like you because i am trans non-binary et cetera um now as i've written a lot about um you have this mushrooming number of diagnoses that people are having for clean disabilities so i am not like you because of my ptsd because of my ocd because of my uh dissociative identity disorder or whatever so you have uh an obsession with safety you also have an obsession with demarcating how you are unlike everybody else which has certain obvious uh problems when it comes to organizing um and i think that you have essentially uh an obsession with symbols and the immaterial the ephemeral um because the people who act this way number one tend to be people who are at least financially comfortable right in other words the people who adopt this vocabulary tend to be people who um do not have immediate need in terms of like a roof over their head and food to eat so their political issue issues are going to be all about symbols because they just don't have real material problems and it's also going to be symbolic because these tend to be people who are writers academics right they tend to be in fields that are like communications uh more linguistics they're people who whose lives are lived in symbol and in words and so their political obsessions are symbolic and words and so you know the the example that i've used many times and gotten in trouble with for many times is you know the number of black people getting oscars at the academy awards right where um i want a diverse academy award uh slate as much as anyone else but that is of concern to maybe a few dozen black people total whereas uh you know 700 black men are murdered every year in chicago and yet one is an obsession on social media and the other is unspeakable on social media right so those are the things that i would say sort of are to me the big things safety ism um the insistence on in fixation on difference and the obsession with the symbolic yeah um a lot to say about that the one immediate concern and an aspect of it that i don't talk about often is this obsession with language this preoccupation uh with language right like it's very important to people that you use the word latinx to describe hispanic people because your choice to say that word is seen as an indication of how much you value trans and gender non-binary hispanic people right it's seen as a proxy for that and it's very important for people even though you know the polls will show 95 some something like that 95 percent of hispanic people do not prefer that term um you know you're the way you show your you're a good person and that you're a person who cares about people struggling with gender dysphoria and and trans people in general is by using this admittedly ridiculous word and i say i say it's ridiculous uh you know i suppose it's subjective what word is ridiculous but when when over 90 of the people you're referring to you know most of them have never heard of it much less enjoy it i think uh i think i'm within my grounds to say that it's it's viewed as ridiculous but and what's more the attitude towards language is deeply alienating i think it's it's not how the average democrat or republican voter approaches life to care about language this much right what what normal people care about is what you are trying to say what are you trying to communicate the fixation on language is uh it's one of the biggest disconnects i think between the college educated and the non-college educated you know the fixation on what words you're using and did you know that they're not called gypsies anymore they're called roma right like that whole species of conversation is something that you know most normal people simply do not spend like zero percent of their waking hours caring about or concerned about and it is central to the mental lives of a lot of us who go to college or or you know this is like it it's the stuff that friendships are made and broken over it's the stuff that um you know alliances are built on and uh and and so i think it is it's a pragmatic consideration for democrats who want to get elected uh to be you know closer to the attitude of of the average voter than than of the you know average coastal elite like myself but it's important to say the technological change has its hands all over this because one of the things the internet did was it took conversation from being an audio uh medium to being a written medium right in other words the fixation on language that you're talking about can only really be prosecuted to the degree that it is when your words are there permanently in black right if if if i definitely believe that social media has exacerbated all of these problems and part of it is is if i have a conversation with someone and presumably they're not recording me um i can make myself clear to them if i'm not making myself appear to them their body language and their facial expressions etc will let me know that i need to reformulate i'll express myself a little more clearly they'll get the gist of what i'm saying and we'll depart they'll know the message but they'll never remember the exact wording when the commons becomes twitter right when everything moves to a text-based space everything is there indelible in black and white and everyone can interpret it in the least sympathetic way that they possibly want to and uh there's no escaping your past right everything is always there for good anything on the internet is there permanent and so um the medium came along at just the right time or just the wrong time when these politics were were starting to be waged because you could look at something like the infamous justine sacco tweet uh about her trip to africa um which was intended to be a sort of like dark uh isn't racism bad kind of a tweet but was instead chosen to be interpreted as a very racist tweet um you know that that this sort of the medium becomes the message uh and um like the indelibility the permanency of uh text and the ability to misinterpret it without the person being able to weigh in i think are deeply uh at play in here yeah it's a great point i mean that's something i've just noticed from non-political arguments you know i have with a friend over text like if if someone texts me something that hurts a little bit i feel as if they're saying it over and over and over again right like repeating it 20 times because i can read it 20 times if it's you know like like you can you can read a breakup text like 50 times if you want to drive yourself insane but if you had had the conversation in person you know it would you wouldn't necessarily remember the phrasing of it forever it wouldn't be it wouldn't carry the weight of of that it seems to carry when you can look at it over and over again and that's true of just text versus speech in general and that's why you should all probably leave more leave more voice memos with your friends it's a i think it's a great good that's a good idea it's a very good idea i like when people do that with me um that's a good note to end on this has been a really great conversation i appreciate it but before i let you go can you just point people to your sub stack um i can recommend it it's it's uh you're prolific on it and uh you you always have interesting things to say so can you point people in that direction yeah it's just freddydabor.substance.com that's d-e-b-o-e-r that's right all right thanks freddie if you appreciate the work i do the best ways to support me are to subscribe directly through my website colemanhughes.org and to subscribe to my youtube channel so you'll never miss my new content as always thanks for your support [Music] you

Channel: Coleman Hughes

Views: 10,653

Keywords: politics, news, politicalupdates, policies, currentaffairs, americanpolitics, thisisamerica, political, whiteamerica, society, highsociety, bluecollar, modernsociety, contemporary, culture music, blackmusic, blackhistory, hiphop, intellectualproperty, debate, intellect thoughts, opinion, voice, public intellectual, intellect, dialogue, discourse, interview, motivational, speech, answers, Coleman Hughes, arthouse, arttiktok, talkshow, talks, Freddie DeBoer

Id: a9c56xZ-WQU

Length: 96min 27sec (5787 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 09 2022