A Lottery: Elite Education in the Western World.

it has always seemed very strange to me
that nobody wants to evaluate or question our system of education in terms of justice and injustice many people want to become medical doctors some are going to have that opportunity others are not isn't there an inevitable question of or an inevitable problem of justice and injustice just in the distribution of that opportunity the access to that opportunity right how the winners and losers are chosen and the example of becoming a medical doctor rests on relatively easily verified facts and scores when you take a look at the way cambridge university or oxford university in england the way they choose who will get the opportunity to write a phd in anthropology anthropology a science where you know there is no objective measure of who has the talent to do this who's going to get a phd or a master's degree in dance or art or literature or poetry whose poetry deserves to be published sure but who deserves to get advancement in the education system because of their opinions about someone else's poetry where there are no objective criteria and in in my own experience even in fields where there is something as tangible and verifiable as language ability like can you read chinese or not in order to get ahead in this program chinese the actual question of who is selected to be a winner and who is a loser is not based on verifiable factually real questions of ability at all it's not even based on things like how many peer-reviewed publications you've published not not at all at cambridge in oxford and england very often the selection of who is a winner and who is a loser is based on the student and the supervisor the senior professor having a nice little chat you know meeting up and chatting with one another since early childhood it always seemed to me very strange that nobody wanted to question the lottery nobody wanted to question gambling in terms of justice and injustice now boxing is a somewhat morally disturbing sport because if you want to win at boxing you want someone else to lose your own victory entails someone else being badly hurt and injured morally we all seem to be comfortable with this as long as it's between consenting adults who understand the risks there's some other kinds of terms and conditions for who is and who isn't allowed to go into a boxing match but you're risking brain damage you're risking serious injury in some cases death once in a while people do actually die uh in the boxing ring and strangely everyone is perfectly comfortable with this in the 21st century if you walk up to a roulette table and you want to win it means you want everyone else to lose and not by any virtue they may have not by any virtue you may have and that they lack not because you're better than them or smarter than them you want to walk up to that roulette table and win just because you're you and you want everyone else at that table to lose their money because if the wheel spins and it's your number that wins that means there's a whole lot of other people that lose there's a it's much more surreal than a boxing match where at least we have the consoling delusion that hard work or virtue decides who is the winner and who is the loser now on formal lottery gambling so people buying lottery tickets well those are scratch and win tickets where you buy the number and then here on the radio what's a winning number this principle has been scaled up to such an extent that it resembles taxation right on a massive scale thousands of people hundreds of thousands of people buy a ticket knowing that they will lose but somebody will win so this is like a roulette table where the number is going to spin and the vast majority of people are going to lose but somebody somewhere is going to win not based on any virtue they have that you lack completely arbitrarily and people are happy to pay this tax people are perfectly satisfied they have no sense of injustice knowing that many thousands of people or even millions of people are being taxed unjustly if you want having their money taken away from them or becoming a little bit poorer so that somebody somewhere arbitrarily will have this positive opportunity whether it's that they win ten thousand dollars or they win a million dollars right people accept this i think there is a very similar logic at a deep level culturally in people accepting that somebody somewhere is going to get the chance to learn sanskrit somebody somewhere is going to get the chance to learn ancient greek somebody somewhere is going to get the chance to become an x-ray technician and they don't really care who it is as long as it is in this way arbitrary and indifferent and all of us are paying for it whether you live in canada or denmark or england or even the united states of america in fact we are all buying lottery tickets to support this order we are all paying taxes look at the percentage even in the united states of america where people pay a lot of money in tuition look at how many millions of dollars the government is giving to support those same universities that charge those high rates of tuition right it's it's shocking but there's a lot of money being poured in from the taxpayers also throughout western europe throughout the western world right we're all paying for somebody to win the lottery with no questions asked with no standard no accountability no transparency as to who should get that opportunity who merits it who deserves it because we feel comfortable that somebody will win the lottery now there are there are problems here when i was a kid there were two types of professors in the whole sphere of politics history and economics i wish i had one word for that range of subjects there were two types of professors there were die hard marxists who found one excuse after another to say something positive about joseph stalin and mao zedong and to teach you their crazy superstitious reinterpretation of the world history in terms of karl marx's dialectical materialism you know they were in big numbers in academia when i was a kid right and then there would be these more skeptical anti-communist historical revisionists if you want who are looking at the same history in the same politics and saying well where did this all go wrong people who were willing to admit communism in russia was a disaster people were going to admit communism in china was a disaster and a lot of ev a lot of those people in academia when i was a kid a lot of them had been communists when they were younger they had been marxists but over time they got cynical they developed a more nuanced perspective i'm not joking i did i'm from canada all right where i didn't have any right-wing christian conservative professors period they did not exist in the social media i was i was born into um so this was kind of the political range there were people committed to making excuses for marxism and communism and there were people willing to ask hard questions about it what if you have a department in a university or you have a field of study where a hundred percent of the people are the true believers 100 percent of the people are the crazy communists or the marxists what happens in that field with ideologies that are much less obvious to outsiders than communism this happens in one field after another again and again right like oh our whole department are just people who worship the intellectual legacy of foucault or marcusa or our whole department is just people who worship noam chomsky and you have a pro-chomsky linguistics department where it's linguistics mixed with marxism and communism by the way this kind of far-left ideology or you know women's studies could be this wonderful vibrant field of research and education take a look at what the ideology is that defines a particular department of women's studies right and who is being filtered out who is being excluded and who is being recruited into that department on a on a like-minded basis right very briefly you can imagine most departments most not all that study christianity they will only include they will only recruit christian students christian professors and you know sessional lecturers teaching assistants uh m.a students speeches they will only recruit and reward people who share the particular christian ideology of that department right christians christians are actually maybe especially open-minded you'd be surprised christians just because of the nature of their religion they actually may be more open to inviting in a sinner they may you know a protestant may be more open to including a catholic or a jew in their department than any other religion you might think it's the most narrow-minded religion but in academia it's not right but you know what about someone who is an overt atheist nihilist who wants to look in a hard-hitting way christianity and slavery where they want to do research that is just completely condemning the history of the church the institution of celebration something like you know what what if uh some specific area of research this is this is real what if you have someone who wants to research on catholic priests who left france to go to cambodia and vietnam and got huge numbers of women pregnant and operated orphanages where they were buying female slaves this guy i've read accounts of this right you know like the role of liberating slaves that end up becoming the sexual pawns of christian missionaries okay this is really embarrassing is that research going to be so are they going to hold a conference on that are they going to are they going to teach that in their classes are they going to incorporate that into the real something really hard for that field to deal with and if you guys if you're new to the channel you don't know this about me i was a scholar of buddhism for many years i was asking questions that tough that hard to deal with within buddhist studies okay can the people who work in buddhist studies actually recruit actually reward actually educate actually give credentials to someone who asks tough questions that really challenge that field including by the way questions about slavery questions about sex questions about corruption but even the questions i was asking about the history of meditation mistranslation of meditation into english what the ancient texts say and what matters those were deeply disturbing questions to people in positions of authority people in positions of power in academia and the answer is no they can't deal with it so what happens one generation after another in this lottery where there is absolutely no transparency there's absolutely no meritocracy in the sense of having objectively verifiable real criteria whereby we choose you get this opportunity and you don't now one one of the telltale aspects from my perspective is just how high the rate of attrition is in elite university programs that when you give people these opportunities a remarkably large number of them once they go there once they start spending the money and spend time once they figure out what the nature of the opportunity is a remarkably high number of them do drop out so i'll stick with buddhist studies just for the sake of it um i knew i knew i could use specific faces and specific names this a scenario i saw play out again and again is um a young man who is a hippie has been into marijuana and lsd and maybe has done some drug tourism to thailand you know and feels he's an open-minded person goes and approaches the professor and they have a very nice charming chat where he's not in any way offensive to the professor or challenging the professor's authority and they're they're taken on as a m.a student or one of these package programs where they're doing an m.a going on to a phd or something on this basis of seeming like a nice young chap probably this person was born rich and again they they went on vacation in india they went on vacation in thailand they think they're into this you know groovy buddhism and then once they're given this opportunity guess what they find out what the hard work of the field is it's the type of hard work i actually did and i demonstrated that i that i could do but like guess what this field is about sitting with a manuscript and you know like the language work the translation work even the social science research going and interviewing people in prison about prison conditions and buddhist chaplains going there's all kinds of social important social science research to do related to buddhism what hey what's going on with buddhism and hiv aids do you ever think about that you know like i mean there are really interesting questions for the right people to handle those are not the people you're recruiting a very large percentage of the people given this opportunity right they burn out they flake out they drop out and the greatest tragedy of all is the ones who don't go on to become completely useless professors who spend their time trying to recruit and reward the same sort of completely useless student that they were before communists in the department of history marxists in the department of women's studies same pattern and on a massive scale right what we get through this lottery-like education system is the apotheosis of mediocrity we get whole institutions where people have no ambition there is no pursuit of excellence people spend their whole careers just trying to conceal their ignorance conceal their mediocrity and recruit like-minded people who will affirm their own high opinion of themselves you get a kind of expertise that is with the passage of time increasingly detached from the real world outcomes that the discipline was supposed to accomplish in the first place anthropology is a dramatic example of this right so let's just talk about british anthropology to specify that french anthropology is a little bit different german anthropology is a little bit different but like anthropology in the english-speaking world was founded on the example of you know a brilliant young man going out to live with a remote tribal group in africa or papua new guinea where the language had barely been documented you know like there may be no text but there would be no dictionary for this language and laboring for years to become fluent in that language laboring for years to gain the trust of the medicine man or the chief in that society and to document and explain to the western world what their culture is what their religion is how their society works right this is this kind of heroic vision of going out and you know working at the frontiers of what is known or knowable in the living cultures of the world and and documenting it right so um there's a guy named boaz b-o-a-z b-o-a-z if you're if you're american and you know this guy presided over similar heroic attempts to document the culture and the legends of canada's indigenous people the tribal people such as they still existed they weren't they weren't really tribal anymore but you know uh to write down their legends their literature their stories and their language which begins with taking white people and immersing them in that culture and having them really practice the language up to this high level of ability where you can do that so just just even with a modern language is this in the real world think about how tough that would be for you to do right now in an easy language like russian or chinese and i mean easy in the sense of there is a dictionary there is an app on your phone there are a lot of resources okay now think about it with a language where none of those resources exist where you're really the first person that was those definition of of what anthropology was supposed to be about and now look at the reality of what anthropology actually is in academia today and what the actual abilities are of the people who are produced by master's degree programs and phd programs what is it they're capable of i mean long story short the first thing to disappear was the language aspect because it's very expensive to teach and hard to value are you actually producing people with these high levels of language ability but you're going to see people i can i can give you a ton of real world examples it's a woman who did her thesis on the fashion industry in milan going and interviewing people in the in the fashion industry there's a woman who did a like a motorcycle vacation in vietnam and didn't even learn the language there are people i mean it's really it's really like tourism as an academic discipline now right and people just write about their own feelings you know they go they go to some exotic foreign country and write a memoir of what they did and that's a phd in anthropology and they going to produce other people with phds anthropology the downward spiral is dramatic now look i think the fundamental reason why people are comfortable with the injustice of the lottery is the sense that it doesn't matter most likely in the country where you live they have these scratch tickets and let's say the scratch ticket so this is a piece of paper and you scratch off with a coin and when you reveal the part you scratch off you found out if you win this is one mode of government created gambling in most countries the ticket will cost five dollars and maybe the maximum you can win is five thousand dollars right it's this particular type of gambling they they they don't give you a million dollars doesn't go that high for different reasons i think including the fear of fraud or what have you they're different types of lotteries in different countries everyone knows it's stupid everyone knows it's poss but they feel like look it's only five dollars all of us pay five dollars and somebody somewhere will win fifty thousand dollars and it won't it probably won't even change their lives that much it'll just be a nice funny happy thing for somebody somewhere right the problem is there are real world consequences to the corruption of our education system this way all right we've been through a series of unbelievably tumultuous political changes last 20 years let's say or yeah this is now this is now 2021. okay i can remember september 11th 2001. okay after september 11th 2001 i remember so i was at a university i studied the politics of the muslim world at university not the only thing i studied but this is one of the topics i i studied right and we had one professor teaching that topic and he he and i were friends uh you can guess why you can guess why he and i were friends we really we talked about our personal lives he was getting divorced at that time he talked to his personal life and all this stuff you know we we we really were not just professor and student and he was the first professor who told me to read max sterner philosophy of max turner which is now discussed in my channel so influence each other's lives and their advice all right and the whole university's attitude before september 11 2001 was that politics in the muslim world was something marginal that didn't matter he had to fight to get a half credit course added to this getting ah nobody cares and this is just think geographically what a huge part of the world this is no no they were telling them to just teach just teach a generalized course on political philosophy uh you know telling them to teach kind of fluff nonsense and not to insist on doing this kind of hard research on what what's happening what was unfolding at that time in iraq iran saudi arabia you know it's a huge part of the world you know it goes on indonesia okay september 11 2001 happens and the senior management of the university and of the department come to him and say we made a mistake we want to offer you a contract we want to we want to give you a for all of a sudden this this matters and you know he told them they can stuff it down their hat and he suddenly had job offers from new york and washington dc yeah all of a sudden this area of expertise was in wasn't was in high demand right that was one moment where we had to stop and ask where now are your great scholars where now are your great specialists of the politics and languages and history of the middle east however you want to term it of the arabic speaking world of the muslim world right each of these terms has different borders on the map they are not synonymous right where now in 2021 even today where now are your great scholars of afghanistan where now are your great scholars of the politics of china kind of a small country of india of pakistan of the political relationships between these countries how many people do you have who can even read and respond to what's happening in the newspapers of nepal of uzbekistan there is a real social need for competence and for profound levels of linguistic and political ability right in each one of these languages in a country like the united states canada or england and then when you need it all of a sudden you turn to academia you say oh well where okay so who can we recruit even if you're trying to recruit people into the cia even if you're trying to recruit people into the army and they do that they try to hire people all of a sudden we need expertise and oh oh it turns out the university isn't isn't producing that at all and you can sit there i've done you can sit there with a stack of the master's degree thesis uh that these people have produced i've just happened to be m a thesis i remember sitting with a stack of these on paper and leafing oh oh we have a we have an m.a thesis here about you know feminism and how you know karl marx was right about everything like oh you start flipping through and seeing the research people are actually doing what it is that justifies having an m.a or a phd in any of these fields and trust me what's going on even in a field like buddhist studies like even something that's as specific and technomatic as that it is just that bad i think what begins with the lottery mentality of accepting that an opportunity for someone somewhere is good enough for all of us everywhere that we can all contribute our tax dollars we can all buy the lottery tickets so that someone somewhere you know can have this opportunity it results in a whole society based on the blind leading the blind you have an education system that recruits and rewards incompetence that creates ideological silos of self-serving people who only want to work with others who share their fundamental assumptions in life who will reinforce their sense of their own ego right re reaffirm their sense of security in their unchallenged confidence when in reality you know the decades have gone past and even in easily verifiable things like can you actually read this language can you actually do this work the professors lack the confidence and they produce one generation of students after another who lack this kind of competence also is there a solution to be found just in this simple storied concept of justice i think that in western democracies it's only when people perceive an injustice that things start to change