Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Why institutions favor liberals

h/t to Dennis Mangan & "Daybreaker"

"Liberals dominate institutions because liberals want to dominate institutions. Conservatives want a school to be a place for learning or a garden club to be a place for gardening."

Some Points About Liberals & "Intelligence"
One, liberalism is a collective strategy (sometimes with a collectivist ethnic thread in it), and modern "conservatism" is individualist. In social conflicts of all kinds, collective strategies are exceedingly powerful in competition with individualist strategies. Elaborate theories of how everyone is supposed to thrive through individual competition fail instantly as individuals confront teams and duly lose. "Every man for himself" rapidly becomes "let save (himself) who can".

On the simplest level, liberals can advance through the institutions by favoring each other. Feminist networking rationalizes self-interested mutual back-scratching as "empowering women" and this produces career spoils that both advance lefties in bureaucracies and cements loyalty through patronage. What is the "conservative" equivalent? It doesn't exist.

Two, if you're smart (and not barred from promotion by ethnic nepotism or quota issues) you may get to a "managerial" position where you get to make decisions. The first time you make a decision and you are asked to rationalize it, you will basically have these options:
* Argue a non-liberal rationale for your decision. Congratulations moron, you have just killed your career. And you are likely to suffer social ostracism too.
* Argue a liberal rationale for a liberal outcome. Good! Even if the policy does not work, you are unlikely to be blamed, as nobody can admit what's wrong. (And of course you are a liberal, and to live with yourself you need to make yourself believe liberal dogma, if you can, or if you can't you at least need to make yourself forget how wrong you know you are.)
* Argue a liberal rationale for a conservative outcome. This is risky. There's more chance that the policy will be beneficial, but there's no special payoff for you for that. And there's more effort in contriving your paradoxical rationale, and more chance that you will be found not to have acted in the right spirit if things go wrong. (And of course you are a "conservative," and you need to get your thoughts firmly grooved within the bounds of liberal rationalizations to stay safe. Which will in the long run limit how "conservative" your results will be.)

People who reach managerial positions and like intellectual elegance are likely to be liberal."


I for one worked in TV at NBC, ABC & CBS as well as PBS. I worked as an FSO for more than a decade at the least incompetent [with the possible exception of the CIA] agency in the US government, the Dept of State. Job security in large institutions is rather stable, but in TV news & the entertainment world [the two are now not far apart!], there is little job security. State is full of petty functionaries with a lifer mentality while Hollyweird has insecure people looking to stay in the loop by aping the Penns & Clooneys in their political outlook. Academia blocks alternative POVs in an autonomic fashion---the key meme is "No fault on the Left" unless one is talking about a Stalin or a Saddam Hussein [the Baath Party in Iraq & Syria are both socialist in their ideology]. Bashir Assad may be the next "leftist" to join the club of libtard reprobates.

However, in my five years in a Jesuit seminary, I met some of the most intelligent people in my life---so no standard deviation is without its exceptions!

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