Open letter to Professor Fritz McDonald

Dear Professor McDonald,

As a token of my appreciation for the invaluable services you have rendered to me and will undoubtedly render to many of your future students, I am responding to your most recent publication in Oakland University's virtual newspaper.  

"This university is a wonderful place. It is amazing that it even exists. You are incredibly lucky to go to such a university."

Yes, Fritz, I completely agree with you. We are incredibly lucky to spend $50,000 on a four year degree that will leave us even worse off than we were when we started. Please remind me how you get people to major in philosophy? Oh, that's right: you lure them in with that "life of the mind" claptrap. My dear child, don't you want to be wise? Don't you want to be the beneficiary of all that the intellectual life has to offer? Don't you want to be able to think for yourself instead of having your life directed by religious demagoguery, political propaganda or arbitrary social conventions!? Oh, of course you do because you are a bright young man, so how can you not major in philosophy!?

What's the problem with this rhetoric? Academic philosophy has little to do with the pursuit of wisdom as Socrates conceptualized or even how most ordinary people see it today. Instead of focusing on the important questions of life and pursuing the life of the mind, you'll just be rehashing the views of popular modern philosophers. If you're lucky, you'll be regurgitating the ideas of the authors of the classics. Oh sure, you will be asked to analyze some of their arguments, but that task will comprise 20% of your essay or final exam, at the most. What could possibly be wrong with that and who cares if you know how to think for yourself!? On the other hand, the ability to rehash every line of Roderick Chisholm's free will defense will truly make a positive difference in your life!

Is regurgitating the views of other thinkers pursuing the life of the mind or is it just providing an account of how others have done so? So, Fritz, what's your response to that? Last time you've ducked the question by asserting that you were in class to answer questions about the upcoming exam and justifying your practices simply was not part of your job description.

Here, let me help you. I know that the pursuit of academic philosophy has little to do with the "life of the mind", I am here to teach you the skills that professors of philosophy practice in their scholarly journals. You will never be able to publish a peer-reviewed article without demonstrating a thorough understanding of the views of thinkers who are preeminent in your sub-discipline of philosophy. So, why should I set you up for failure in your philosophical career by not teaching you the skills that my academic establishment recognizes as very important? Well, your chances of becoming a professional philosopher are practically non-existent, especially since you're graduating from a tier-four school, but I am not going to advertise that, alright? 

In other words, most esteemed professor McDonald, what you're saying is that you're teaching us the skills we will need for a job that we will never obtain, correct? You're more than happy to encourage us to drown in debt obtaining skills that make us none-the-wiser and not any better off in the real world, isn't that true ?

Didn't your office neighbor, Mark Rigstad boast that he gets a dollar for every new philosophy major?  Didn't you make an argument to your 2009 Capstone class that the rigor of your program would be increased if the university was to have all of its expenses covered by the government because you would no longer have to charge tuition? Right, that would exempt you from the charge that you're enticing students to get buried beneath a mountain of debt, but it will also empower you to keep on teaching them the skills that are worthless from the intellectual and a practical standpoint. At least now, some students may have the good sense to not major in your discipline because it is financially non-viable, but then you won't even have this impediment to your objectives.

 Yes, students were incredibly fortunate to have this experience in 1962 when courses in the humanities were much more rigorous and degrees far more instrumental in the job market than they are now. So, what exactly have you accomplished other than exploit the naivete of the callow youth?

"To only go to classes is to miss out on the experience of going to college itself."

Do you mean the experience of attending over-sized classrooms taught by TAs who do not even understand the most rudimentary principles of pedagogy and trudging through curricula that impart virtually no valuable intellectual or practical skills on students? Admittedly, the OU classes are much smaller than the classes of many more prestigious institutions and are less likely to be taught by TAs, yet my last criticism stands.

"When I was in college, I wrote for my university's alternative weekly. I met friends for life."

Why don't you be a little more specific here? What year was this and where did you meet these friends? In your undergraduate program or graduate school? How many of your friends were fortunate enough to spend the rest of their career in the college cocoon? Do you have an intellectually honest way of making the argument that your experiences will be shared by the students you are writing to?

" I was a member of the philosophy club, getting a good preparation for my eventual career and discussing some deep stuff."

Again, what are you doing to help your students prepare for their eventual career and what was the "deep stuff" you were discussing? You mean the nuances of Peter Singer's argument for infanticide and Robert Kane's libertarianism? While you may have engaged in some critical thinking in your graduate level academic institution, how many of your students will ever advance beyond the very basics of philosophy? What kind of "deep stuff" will they be discussing once they graduate with $50,000 of debt with virtually no viable career prospects?

"I understand that many of you work full time, sometime many jobs"

Of course you understand that because they are paying your salary or preparing themselves for a life of paying off student debt working jobs they could have easily procured before even attending college.

" Here is my advice to you: do as little work as you possibly can outside of college. College is a full-time job."

Yes, I completely agree with you, let's set them all up for a big fall: let's keep them ignorant about how the real world works. Keep them insulated from the realities of the job-market and most importantly, discourage students from having experiences that enable them to understand the difference between preparation for a career as an academic philosopher and the actual pursuit of the life of the mind.

"Go ask your parents for more money, if they have it." Of course, what grown child in his late teens or early 20s ever dreams about being independent, let alone becoming a productive adult who makes valuable contributions to society!  Now, serving society as opposed to the narrow interests of your academic institution is something that you know a great deal about, don't you?

Feel free to dismiss me as an envious libeler, after all, I should have followed your advice to extend my college life for as long as possible, right? I just couldn't have done better than to have insulated myself from the real world for 10 full years to obtain a PhD, who could have ever questioned the precious wisdom of that proclamation!?

Perhaps your colleague, William Pannapacker would have? Have you ever considered exposing your students to an alternative point of view by citing links to his publications in the Chronicle of Higher Education? Oh, right!? He is a crank, a marginalized radical and probably even a shill for the Republican Party! He teaches in Holland, Michigan; a relatively small town that is much more conservative than Oakland University, the bastion of independent thought, forward-looking values and the pivotal actor in the progress of the Western civilization.

Forget about the thousands of PhDs in philosophy who compete with high-school drop-outs for entry level jobs. Forget about the shrill cacophony of voices from thousands of adjunct-professors who are hovering on starvation and the hordes of unemployed PhDs who echo Pannapacker's central message.

What can I say, you're a good man, Fritz: you truly have your students' best interests at heart. They don't need to grow up or worry about their staggering student debt. Forget about all of those pesky statistics regarding the plights of students with the kind of degrees that you are promoting. After all, who cares about the mundane banalities of the economic world when you live the dream of the life of the mind!

Besides, a college degree is your ticket to the middle class, right? So, what could possibly be wrong with going deeper into debt, squandering your parents' money and postponing exposure to the real world until you're well into your early 30s, like yourself? You don't even need to preach the noble lifestyle of perpetual childhood, your life is the embodiment of your teaching.  

Your Sincerest Admirer,

-Aleksey

"The middle class must be artificially created by the government"

An inveterate leftist acquaintance of mine remarked that "the middle class must be artificially created by the government". The underlying theme of his claim was clear: it is impossible for a society to improve the quality of life for the average citizen without empowering the government to control the economy.

Ad hominems aside, this claim reveals stark ignorance of the history of the nascent stages of the modern society. Although the industrialists of the 19th century were notorious for providing factory workers with exiguous compensation and subjecting them to deplorable work conditions, the standards of living for ordinary citizens have improved.

Prior to the emergence of these opportunities, a significant portion of the population engaged in mere "subsistence farming" where a minor decline in productivity often resulted in famines that wiped out entire villages. To find evidence in support of this claim, one must look no further than the Irish Potato famine.

My interlocutor explained that the middle class must be artificially created by the government because the business elites invariably use technology to exploit the work-force. While that is true, the technology also empowers ordinary citizens to find more rewarding work.

This example is not limited to the 19th century United States and Britain, but also various nations of the developing world. For all of its affronts to human dignity, the proliferation of sweatshop labor across Southeast Asia empowers ordinary civilians to work in factories as opposed to prostitute themselves or engage in the commerce of begging.

The middle class in China and India is a phenomenon of the late 20th century. To be sure, it was not "artificially created" by the government. It is almost entirely a product of industrialization quite similar to the one that took place over a century ago in Western Europe and North America.

Collectivism and Moral Relativism

The authors of a popular persuasion book evinced the fundamental differences between the mindsets of collectivism and individualism. Individualists are often stereotyped as whimsical, flaky, self-absorbed and unlikely to stay true to their word. By contrast, collectivists are often seen as reliable, duty-oriented and dedicated to the public good.

Goldstein, Martin and Cialdini have shown that quite frequently, the exact opposite is closer to the truth. In their example, the individualist Tiger Woods exercised resolute self-discipline to compete in a major tournament despite a myriad of personal tragedies that beset him. Why did he do it? Because he made a personal commitment to the tournament and strongly believed that he should exercise self-discipline in his golfing career. Unlike the thinking of a collectivist, his moral reasoning was not motivated by social expectations, cultural mores or even obligations to society.

In his interview, Woods unabashedly disclosed that on that doleful day, he golfed only for himself. The authors explained that by their nature, individualists tend to operate based on their personal moral compass. By contrast, collectivists tend to believe that morality is determined by the expectations of their communities and individuals lack the moral prerogative to challenge it. In so doing, the collectivists have implicitly reaffirmed the key tenets of cultural relativism: that morality is determined by communities rather than inviolable and objective principles.

Although individualists can be moral subjectivists and subscribe to arbitrary and self-serving principles, most tend to believe that there is an objective justification for their stance. In other words, they are more likely to claim that they espouse their moral values because they are "right" rather than simply because they want to do so.

 Individualists may be open to the possibility that they are misguided in their beliefs and that is why it is common for people of this point of view to display pluralistic tolerance for the diverging views of others. Indeed, the world's most pluralistic societies tend to be resolutely individualistic and by contrast, totalitarian societies of communism and Islamo-fascism are invariably collectivist.

Although the United States has been founded as an individualistic nation and remains as such, the Academic Community has been taking our culture in the collectivist direction. They have done so by promoting the creed of post-modernism one of the key premises of which is that people are mass-produced by their environments, they are powerless to resist such influences and true objectivity is impossible. This ideological orientation has been re-affirmed by a proliferation of "hyphenated American studies" where the curricula center on the discourse of marginalized groups such as women, LGBT, African-Americans, Asians, etc.

While they may be correct that people invariably operate with biases and are often much less objective than they think they are, it is a mistake to conclude that people lack the capacity to resist social influences. By promoting this notion, the universities undermine the type of moral resolve and consistent behaviors with moral principles that is the basis of morality itself. Individualism is the foundation of objective moral values and the true vanguard against the encroachments of collectivism upon a free society. In light of this notion, Karl Popper famously declared that an Open Society is necessarily individualistic and its principal nemeses such as Plato, Marx and Hegel were inveterate collectivists.


What lesson about persuasion did Goldstein, Martin and Cialdini wish to impart on their readers? When dealing with people from an individualistic culture, we should entice them to act ethically by pointing out that such behavior is consistent with their personal moral principles. Conversely, when interacting with collectivists, we should encourage them to act in accordance with the moral principles espoused by their communities.

On the mentality of a politician

Reciprocity is the basis of all human relationships and because of that, most people want to earn a living in a way that benefits society. In a free-market economy, one must sell goods or services to others in order to obtain profits. Most customers are unlikely to make purchases unless they believe that doing so will benefit them. While it is true that customers often misunderstand what is in their best interest, they generally tend to purchase commodities that at the very least, appear to benefit them in the short-run.

Thus, to raise profits in a free-market economy, one must convince the consumers that the commodity they promote could be be useful even in the most superficial and short-term respects. By contrast, if one promotes goods or services through government programs that are imposed upon the entire population, he or she does not need to do that. Instead, that person must either become a politician by convincing voters that he is capable of serving their best interests or building an alliance with a member of the incumbent government.

The fundamental difference between the persuasive efforts of the entrepreneur and the politician is that the former must provide immediate evidence of how his product is useful to the consumer. By contrast, the latter must merely make it seem like it will be useful in the future. For example, President Obama promised that despite the rising health-care costs, the Patient Affordable Health-Care Act will improve the American healthcare system in the long-run. Similarly, Bush II did not need the immediate approval of the public to invade Iraq because the justification for this course of action rested on a dubious promissory note of making America safer.

Gross intellectual fraud is the basis of political discourse  because politicians rarely have incentives to provide immediate evidence that their programs serve their intended purposes.

Why anarcho-capitalism is not sustainable

Anarcho-capitalism is the ideology that in a market-oriented community, no government should be established. However, that is unsustainable because in such an environment, private parties will establish a government of their own in the interest of maximizing their share of control and prosperity.

When that happens, the new government will be unlikely to preserve the liberties of the citizenry at all costs. Instead of setting up an anarcho-capitalist state, why not take preemptive measures against the emergence of a tyrannical government by setting up a very limited government whose sole purpose is to preserve liberties of the citizenry.

If we could have learned anything from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, it is that in the complete absence of a sovereign, liberty in the community will be extremely difficult to preserve. As Hobbes himself put it, in the state of nature "life is nasty, brutish, solitary and short".

Anarcho-capitalism is little more than a naive attempt to preserve personal liberties by eliminating an institution that often encroaches upon individual freedoms. This course of action is fundamentally erroneous because it overlooks the vital role that governments play in preserving law and order, which is a prerequisite for a free society.

That is one of the pivotal differences between Libertarianism and Anarcho-capitalism: the former postulates that the existence of a government is justified only by its ability to maximize liberty and the latter posits that there should be no government.

The truth about Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Today's callow youth blithely wear T-shirt bearing the image of Ernesto Guevara without having the slightest clue as to what he stood for. They call him "Che" assuming that this was his name when that's just Argentine slang, which loosely translates to English as "dude."

When asked what was admirable about their mascot, the neophytes natter that he is a symbol of "anti-establishment" and "revolution." It is a little-known fact that in the aftermath of the U.S. orchestrated a coup in Guatemala, Guevara swore on the picture of Stalin that he would not rest until he crushed the "capitalist octopi."

Less than a decade later, the Communist Commandante urged the Soviet Union to mount a nuclear attack on the United States. It goes without saying that the likely possibility of permanent annihilation of all civilization was completely inconsequential for him.

Sentimentalized hagiographies portray this man as a martyr who abandoned his privileged life in Cuba for the global revolution against Yankee imperialism. The truth is much less inspiring: Fidel Castro deported "Che" because he compromised the fledgling communist state's alliance with the Soviet Union.

When your hero's intransigent ideology is far too extreme even for the most totalitarian state in the history of humanity, think twice before plastering his face onto a banner symbolizing your rallying cry for "social justice."