Really? If an author writes bad books, he won’t be read. If a criticizer will praise bad books, he will be fired. If students know that this university (Or this professor) prepare bad authors and bad criticizers, they will avoid it/him and this translates into money very quickly. A great painter is one who sells his works for big money, whereas a bad won’t sell anything at all. An actor-teacher who cannot teach an actor to be good (so the actor earns money) will be avoided over long.

And it is easier to impress people with your paintings(good ones, that is) than to get a credit if you are an outsider.

Depends on the level. Higher ups in science / engineering do tend to be very political, btu still brook much more back talk from lower down their organizations than the sales organizations I’ve seen. The worst group-think I’ve seen is product design and marketing of complex technical products, not becuase the results are not measurable, but because the delayed feedback from the market for long-term projects means that the idiot that screwed the project up is no longer in that job, and can’t be punished.

I to agree that powerful evidence exist but Leftist strive mightily to create the general impression that it does not. They either just ignore the question or seek to create a plausible explanation for why they really weren’t to blame.

As I have pointed out before, Leftist models of the Vietnam war have proven nearly completely broken in hindsight yet they advance the same models for the conflict in Iraq. They can do so because they have created a the appearance of a vast consensus that the Leftist policies implemented at the end of the conflict created an acceptable outcome worthy of emulation. If all the supposed experts tell the same story how is a lay person to know that something is wrong?

For example, even today, most scholarly works about Vietnam spend the vast majority of their time dissecting the war prior to the Tet offensive. Very, very few examine the history of Indochina following the fall of Saigon at all. Most Leftist I converse with know next to nothing about that era or anything about the nature of the North Vietnamese regime. I believe that such careful mis-education results from a studied unwillingness of Leftist to engage in any sort of self-examination or self-critique.

Their dominance of media and academia mean that only those who go far out of their way can learn to pierce the Leftist veil of illusion.

If there is anything that can be said about the horror that was the 20th century, it is that the entire period was a world wide labratory experiment in the various theories of political philosophy and social sciences.

I would submit that there was, and is, a great deal of feedback available for anyone who wishes to see it, or has the courage to look at it.

Humanity tested several versions of collectivism, some ancient monarchical/religious autocracies, and a number of variations on the representative democratic theme. And, in a grisly comment on such experimentation, there is even a quantifiable scale for the results—the number of graves per socio/political theory.

Now, it may be the case that any number of academic leftists and internatinal ANSWER types manage to go through life pretending this lab work didn’t actually happen, or that the results were somehow not a collection of bones which would dwarf the famed “mountain of skulls” supposedly constructed by Tamerlane to demonstrate his fearsome nature, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t relentlessly point out that the evidence is very clear, and compelling, and entirely unambiguous—the more collectivism, the more graves.

It’s almost scientific.

I think your comparison within the field of business is accurate but I was concerned about the difference between fields of endeavor.

People in business can easily buck the group consensus by simply making money. The founder of Fedex famously got an F on his thesis wherein he outlined the business plan for Fedex. By contrast, how would a PHd candidate in the liberal arts prove that their thesis on the gender implications of Dumas’ works was right when the professor say otherwise?

I think the lag time between the assertion of prediction and the definitive testing of that prediction also governs how easy it is to dissent within a field. Sales people get feedback very rapidly, engineers get it slower and HR people (in my experience) never get it. Likewise, scientist get feedback very quickly has they knock down hypothesis with experiments but humanist never get feedback.

Engineering people tend to be somewhat less outspoken, partly by personality but partly because the activity is not quite as crisply measurable as sales. Indeed, engineering managers tend to be fairly political animals.

Staff functions such as HR and “strategic planning” tend to be pretty quick to fall in line with the correct opinion *du jour*, although there are plenty of individual exceptions.