A Plague of Credentialed Terrorists?

The WSJ has an article titled The Alienated ‘Knowledge Class’ Could Turn Violent, subtitled: Societies that exile their intellectuals risk turning them into revolutionaries. It happened in the 1970s.

The author cites the Weather Underground  in the United States, the Red Army Faction in Germany, and  the Red Brigades in Italy, and notes that many members of these organizations were highly educated, middle- or upper-middle-class young people. These weren’t the oppressed proletariat of Marxist theory, but the disillusioned children of privilege and university lecture halls.  He goes on to assert that:

A similar dynamic could take root in the U.S. As the Trump administration downsizes public agencies, dismantles DEI programs and slashes academic research funding, it risks producing a new class of people who are highly educated but institutionally excluded. History suggests this group may become a source of unrest—and possibly violence.

He is certainly correct that highly educated people have played a leading part in many revolutionary and terrorist movements…he could also have cited the example of Russian revolutionaries between the mid-1800s and the early 1900s, and many of the terrorist leaders in today’s Middle East…not to mention the Khmer Rouge.   And yes, it’s the educated (or at least credentialed) people who don’t obtain the positions to which they aspire, and that they think they deserve, who are most likely to become involved in such movements.  Speaking of the causes of sedition in a kingdom, more than four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon said one such cause could arise when more are bred scholars, than preferments can take off. (extended quote)  A modern translation of the preceding might be when more people get PhDs than have any hope of getting tenure.

Eric Hoffer, in the late 1950s or early 1960s, speaking about the ‘underdeveloped countries’, as they were then called, said:

Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status…The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities. This army of scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated. They hanker for the scribe’s golden age, for a return to something like the scribe-dominated societies of ancient Egypt, China, and the Europe of the Middle Ages. There is little doubt that the present trend in the new and renovated countries toward social regimentation stems partly from the need to create adequate employment for a large number of scribes…Obviously, a high ratio between the supervisory and the productive force spells economic inefficiency. Yet where social stability is an overriding need the economic waste involved in providing suitable positions for the educated might be an element of social efficiency.

It has often been stated that a social order is likely to be stable so long as it gives scope to talent. Actually, it is the ability to give scope to the untalented that is most vital in maintaining social stability…For there is a tendency in the untalented to divert their energies from their own development into the management, manipulation, and probably frustration of others. They want to police, instruct, guide, and meddle. In an adequate society, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them. This requires, first, an abundance of opportunities for purposeful action and self-advancement. Secondly, a wide diffusion of technical and social skills so that people will be able to work and manage their affairs with a minimum of tutelage. The scribe mentality is best neutralized by canalizing energies into purposeful and useful pursuits, and by raising the cultural level of the whole population so as to blur the dividing line between the educated and the uneducated…We do not know enough to suit a social pattern to the realization of all the creative potentialities inherent in a population. But we do know that a scribe-dominated society is not optimal for the full unfolding of the creative mind.

(from The Ordeal of Change)

And in 2020, the Assistant Village Idiot linked an article from The Economist, titled Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?, and said:

People with advanced degrees who are not prospering are often deeply resentful, certain that something must be wrong with “The System”*. I have worked with them for years, MSWs who believe that in a just world they would be  entitled  to the salaries that other people with their number of years of education get.   Other measurements, such as relative value to society, difficulty of the task, level of risk, and the like do not factor in…That they may have been lied to by the educational establishment or their upper-middle-class expectations (“For a good job, get a good education”), that they may have made poor economic decisions due to Following Their Dreams,  or that they may have chosen one of the easiest of Master’s degrees to pursue does not occur to them. It is largely political, cultural, and attitude training.  

In my post linking the above, Advanced Degrees and Deep Resentments, I said:  I don’t like the title of the Economist piece…“Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?”…which confuses intelligence with credentialism, but I think the point about highly-degreed and resentful people is spot-on.

In the WSJ article, the author goes on to say:

Today, a similar form of status frustration is building. The postwar expansion of higher education has created a surplus of advanced degree holders. People with doctorates far outnumber tenure-track positions. Many members of the American intelligentsia face precarious employment, rising debt and declining institutional pathways. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s agenda has disproportionately harmed the “knowledge class”: policy analysts, researchers, educators and civil servants who once found stability in public institutions.

This is more than a mere bureaucratic shake-up. When large numbers of educated, politically engaged people lose access to institutional influence, they often seek alternatives. For now, most are channeling their frustration through protests, digital activism and ideological writing. But under certain conditions—state repression, widespread disillusionment or charismatic leadership—radicalism can escalate. We already see hints in environmental sabotage, anarchist organizing and violent clashes involving Antifa and far-right groups. These remain on the fringe, but so were the Weather Underground and the Red Army Faction in their early days.

President Trump’s policies could intensify this dynamic. By hollowing out state infrastructure and devaluing educational institutions, the administration risks creating a surplus of ideologically driven people with no outlet for their talents. Many are trained in critique, moral reasoning, and systems thinking—the very profile of earlier generations of radicals. Most won’t resort to violence, but history shows that a small, committed vanguard can inflict enormous damage.

and

The question is whether political leaders will mitigate or exacerbate the risks. Defunding and demonizing higher education may offer short-term political gains, but doing so carries long-term dangers. By targeting perceived left-wing strongholds, some on the political right may cultivate the very radicalism they fear.

This sound to me perilously close to blackmail…give these credentialed people their desired jobs, or they will destroy our society.

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Worthwhile Reading and Viewing

Allocation of IQ to thinking about relationships–different in men and women.   So argues this article, which is linked and discussed in a thread by Rob Henderson at Twitter.

The Great Untethering–school choice and remote work.

East of the Mississippi–19th century American landscape photography.

How Allied mass production drove the victory over the Axis powers. A YouTube documentary, which I haven’t seen yet but which looks promising.

What kinds of people are attracted to mass movements?   “(Eric) Hoffer emphasizes that creative people–those who experience creative flow–aren’t usually attracted to mass movements.”   (Twitter)   Makes sense, but is this really true?   Seems to me that there were quite a few creative scientists and artists who were strongly attracted to Communism, and I can think of at least one supposedly-creative philosopher who was strongly attracted to Naziism.

The Real Roaring Twenties Was… the 1720s.   So argues Anton Howes in this article.   His Twitter feed is here.

A 3D Reconstruction of the Aztec Capital of Tenochtitlan.

Trafalgar, 1805, and the USA, 2022

Trafalgar Day was marked last week, and I remembered again the essay written in 1797 by a Spanish naval official, Don Domingo Perez de Grandallana, on the question:   “Why do we keep losing to the British, and what can we do about it?”

An Englishman enters a naval action with the firm conviction that his duty is to hurt his enemies and help his friends and allies without looking out for directions in the midst of the fight; and while he thus clears his mind of all subsidiary distractions, he rests in confidence on the certainty that his comrades, actuated by the same principles as himself, will be bound by the sacred and priceless principle of mutual support.

Accordingly, both he and his fellows fix their minds on acting with zeal and judgement upon the spur of the moment, and with the certainty that they will not be deserted. Experience shows, on the contrary, that a Frenchman or a Spaniard, working under a system which leans to formality and strict order being maintained in battle, has no feeling for mutual support, and goes into battle with hesitation, preoccupied with the anxiety of seeing or hearing the commander-in-chief’s signals for such and such manoeures…

Thus they can never make up their minds to seize any favourable opportunity that may present itself. They are fettered by the strict rule to keep station which is enforced upon then in both navies, and the usual result is that in one place ten of their ships may be firing on four, while in another four of their comrades may be receiving the fire of ten of the enemy. Worst of all they are denied the confidence inspired by mutual support, which is as surely maintained by the English as it is neglected by us, who will not learn from them.

Imagine Don Grandallana’s feelings when, eight years later, he read the reports of the Spanish naval catastrophe at Trafalgar.   He had accurately diagnosed the key problems of his side, but had been unable to bring about the sweeping changes necessary to address them.

There are uncomfortable parallel in America today to the polities and mindset that Grandallana observed in his headed-for-defeat Spain.

Over at Ricochet, the physician who posts as Dr Craniotomy describes the extent to which his time is devoted to satisfying the bureaucracy and its systems.

It’s 9 p.m. on a Friday and I’m waiting for my hospital’s slow, clunky electronic health record (EHR) to load. I’m logging in from home because the administration emails became threatening.,,,The patients were already seen by me, and the notes written by either a resident or nurse practitioner.   The hospital just can’t bill until I click the “cosign” button.  

Meanwhile, there’s this  JAMA article outlining how the National Academy of Medicine is going to tackle physician burnout.   The plan revolves around installing a “culture of well-being” into the healthcare workplace.   They want to develop training protocols to address discrimination, bullying, and harassment while increasing leadership roles such as Chief Wellness Officers.   This sounds like more bureaucratic busywork to complete and administrators to answer to.   I would be shocked to find out that there was a single aliquot of improved wellness from a wellness module.

I have governmentally mandated appropriate use criteria that questions every imaging order I place on a patient, forcing me to click box after box, justifying an MRI that I know is clinically indicated because I spent 12 years training in neurological surgery to know exactly when an MRI is indicated.

I have the joint commission telling me I’m not prescribing enough pain medication one day and the next day, I’m being threatened with manslaughter charges if I don’t check a slow, cumbersome, often nonfunctional online database every time I write a prescription.

As I noted in comments to the post:   The “culture of compliance” and the micromanagement of employees by bureaucracies and by rigid automated systems, as practiced in America today, bear a disturbing resemblance to the cultural practices that Don de Grandallana identified as the main cause of his country’s repeated defeats.

There is a great deal of this kind of thing in many parts of America today, and trends have been running that way for a long time.   See this Washington Post article from 2005, back when the WP was not yet totally politicized:   Over-Ruled.   Discussing hurricane response and some of the bureaucratic obstacles that appeared, the author says:   “We’ve become a society of rule-followers and permission-seekers.”

Causes of this situation are multiple; certainly one factor is the prevalence of litigation.   Another is the proliferation of top-down automated systems.   And one factor, I think is the excessive emphasis on formal education and the associated credentials.    In his post The Most Precious Resource is Agency, Simon Sarris observes that when looking at people who became highly successful in earlier times, “the individuals were all  doing from a young age, as opposed to merely schooling.”

He goes on to say:

It seems that the more you ask of people, and the more you have them  do,  the more they are able to later do on their own. It is important to note that while we shouldn’t allow children to be bobbin boys, no one would describe Steve Job’s summer job at 13 as his exploitation. We should be thinking much harder about making sure children can make meaningful contributions to the world.

also

And I suspect the downplaying of agency in childhood not only creates fewer opportunities for great people, it must also create more marginal people. Ushering everyone into an endless default script is disastrous when underlying conditions or assumptions change. Even when they don’t, some people exit academia almost terrified to leave (to interact with the “real world”), a kind of Stockholm syndrome.

Does an assumption that people will spend 16 or 20 consecutive years in formal education…and the related assumption that this formal education will be the most important factor in their future success or lack of same…reduce the sense of individual agency? I think it probably does.

Also, this brings us to another factor that Grandallana did not mention, either because he didn’t see it as a problem or because he didn’t dare talk about it: the dominance of a hereditary aristocracy.   I think it’s pretty clear to historians now that one major reason for Spain’s naval failures was that people tended to be placed in command positions because of their titles and bloodlines, rather than their demonstrated competence.

We don’t have a formal aristocracy in the US, of course; indeed, the Constitution explicitly prohibits any such thing.   But while educational credentialism was initially sold as a form of meritocracy, and indeed did initially lead to some progress in that direction, it has devolved in too many cases to a form of aristocracy light, where obtaining the most ‘elite’ credential is largely a matter of conducting your early life in a manner of which admissions officers approve–including demonstrating the ‘right’ social attitudes–and, often, of having the right family and connections, rather than a matter of true performance-related merit.

More than 50 years ago, Peter Drucker wrote that a major advantage America had over Europe is that access to key roles in society was not controlled by a admission to a small number of ‘elite’ universities.

The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…

American society today is much closer to accepting that and similar claims than it was when Drucker wrote the above in 1969, and I think this has something to do with the dysfunctionality of many of our institutions.

For discussion: How far are we down the road to the kind of environment that Grandallana described? What are the causes, and what are the potential paths for reversal?

Worthwhile Reading & Viewing

Our friend Bookworm has great photos from her trip to the Porcupine Mountains in Michigan.

Speaking of photographs,   Nikon’s Small World has an extensive collection of images captured by the light microscope.

A mosaic depicting the Trojan War has been found in Syria.

The most precious resource is agency.   Excerpt:

Seizing opportunity requires opportunity to exist at all. And I suspect the downplaying of agency in childhood not only creates fewer opportunities for great people, it must also create more marginal people. Ushering everyone into an endless default script is disastrous when underlying conditions or assumptions change. Even when they don’t, some people exit academia almost terrified to leave (to interact with the “real world”), a kind of Stockholm syndrome. How could we celebrate a higher learning that creates something so pathetic, the opposite of a readiness for life?

What is going on in the world’s art museums?

Organizational cultures and product failures. (at Twitter)

A very interesting analysis of the embedded energy associated with various products.

This natural resources investment firm suggests that the reductions in the cost of wind and solar technologies has been driven not primarily by a Moore’s-law-like learning curve, but rather by reductions in energy and capital costs.

The energy transition of the last 700 years: trends in the share of economies consumed by acquiring food and fuel.