Academia makes up part of the government-media-education uber-class who aspire to belong to an elite in-group that forms a metaspace to the rest of society. Gross and Levitt (1994) and Sokal and Bricmont (1998) have already provided brilliant exposés of the academic Left’s misguided critiques of science. Here, I shall attempt to explain why the vast majority of academics in the social sciences generally (and a minority in economics) are, despite well-meaning, politically correct fascists.
From a gene eye’s view, non-reciprocal altruism is impossible. Yet humans cooperate all the time, and they do so via the prisoner’s dilemma. The win-win situation requires trust, and we may elicit trust by demonstrating a capacity for altruism. When people are ‘good’, they are really just demonstrating a capacity for altruism. This is both a deceit, and a self-deceit, they are just signalling that they wish to cooperate, for their own personal gain. Due to their above-average intelligence and their remoteness from the commercial world, academics are well-equipped for demonstrating a capacity for altruism. They view the rest of society as currently failing to achieve the heights of their own altruism, thus damaging the potential for cooperation. It is therefore in their interest to aspire for a society where all individuals have the same capacity for altruism, the same as their own. Because a capacity for altruism involves self-deceit, it can cause a severe lack of understanding of human nature. Academics allow their altruism to deceive themselves into crediting the rest of society with having the capacity to behave as altruistically as themselves. They believe that individuals have the capacity to change, academics have a tendency to believe in the (tabula rasa). Academics assume that ordinary people have equal potential, but are not currently behaving altruistically out of choice because they are simply ‘bad’. The academics are wrong. For a trait to evolve by natural selection, three conditions must be present: 1) the trait must be heritable; 2) the population must exhibit variation in expression of the trait; 3) the trait must affect the fitness of an individual (e.g. number of offspring). If, say, intelligence wasn’t both heritable and unequally distributed across the population, it wouldn’t have evolved in the first place. By adulthood intelligence is 80%–90% heritable (Lynn and Vanhanen 2006). Academics assume that because people are currently ‘bad’, something is making them bad, so that something must be changed. In summary, academics aspire for a society where individuals end up being equal (socialist), they have a tendency towards blank slate thinking (human nature is malleable), believe that humans are essentially equal (egalitarian) and believe that change is necessary (‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ in the US)). In short, the majority of academics are on the Left. Now, the belief in the malleability of human nature is profoundly wrong (Moxon 2010) as is the related belief that people are really equal, which means that the quest for equality (socialism) is necessarily totalitarian (Barth (2000), Reisman (2005)), and that so-called progressive politics are anything but.
Whilst it is natural to behave altruistically towards those whom we trust, egalitarian policies dictate whom we should behave virtuously towards. Browne (2006) accurately describes political correctness as ‘an ideology that classifies certain groups of people as victims in need of protection from criticism, and which makes believers feel that no dissent should be tolerated.’ This is fascism, and it has dire consequences, as the following table shows.
| Egalitarian assumption | Men and women are equal | All races are equal | Everyone deserves a mortgage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Perceived problem | Pay gap between men and women | Blacks underachieve | Minorities don’t own their homes |
| Actual cause | Men and women are differently motivated | 15 point IQ differential | Minorites have a lower IQ |
| Egalitarian reasoning for the cause | Sexism | Racism | Racism |
| Egalitarian action | ‘Liberate’ women from men | ‘Liberate’ minorities from whites | Give mortgages to poor ethnic minorities |
| Result | Oppression of men | Oppression of whites | Current financial crisis |
Academics fall largely into three groups: politically correct (PC) fascists, those sympathetic to PC fascism and a small number of cowards. Not only does egalitarianism have no place in science, but denying (i.e. lying about) heritability is harmful because it implies that any differences between individuals or groups must be man-made, so someone must be to blame. Scientific illiteracy wedded to political correctness fascism breeds not just bad science, but injustice too: if traits were not heritable, and education is uniform, the implication is that parents would be to blame for every transgression of their offspring.
In practice, science is an institutional and social process, and consists largely of choosing strategies for the advancement of scientific careers. Academics are faced with the choice of two strategies: (1) Low risk/low return: The safe strategy with a minor payoff involves presenting yourself as an adherent to the received view, contributing only refinements of technical detail. You may wish to exaggerate the similarities between your own view and that of the major players in your field in order to throw their mantle around your own shoulders. (2) High risk/high return: Present yourself as a radical revolutionary: a very dangerous strategy that promises great rewards. Exaggerate the differences with the received view to emphasize how original your contributions are. The politically correct will shrewdly choose to combine both strategies. For example, they will simultaneously support Darwinism and radically criticize it. They claim that Darwin was right in the sense that creationists are wrong, yet Darwin was wrong in the sense that they don’t allow for any significant human evolution. Academics such as these seek great rewards with little risk; the only victim, of course, is science. See Hull (1988), p. 202–203 and Carroll (2004), p. 242. The sheer level of ignorance, distortion and flawed reasoning that characterizes the ‘anti-heritability’ camp is unprecedented in science and philosophy of science. See Sesardic (2005). Ordinary people have a far better understanding of human nature than most academics. For example, the better educated people are, the less of a grasp on the reality of racial differences they have (The Realist 2007).
When disciplines crossover, there is a reluctance to concede that not all subjects are equal. Again, this is egalitarian nonsense: in the US the average PhD physicist has an IQ of 130.0 and the average PhD in public administration just 106.0 (Motl 2006).
There exists significant social pressure for an academic to be seen as a polymath, Renaissance man or Homo universalis. This is particularly acute in the hard sciences, where there is a realisation that in order to attain mate value, one is required to take an interest in the arts. The downside to this is that academics are happy to wax lyrical about subjects about which they have only a superficial understanding. Academia breeds overconfidence and arrogance.
The academic left’s habit of dressing up politics as science is far more damaging than creationism (which is not taken seriously). The academic left uphold their egalitarian beliefs in the face of all of the real-world evidence. This is sheer blind faith and pious fraud; yet, amusingly, these same people would be the first to sneer at religion. The academic left don’t really believe in evolution at all (let alone understand it), their logic is political: ‘I am of the left, so opposed to anything of the right, religion is synonymous with the right, so I support anything that contradicts creationism, i.e. evolution’. Ideologies are substitutes for religion, they are belief systems based on ideas that are contradicted by history, science and even common sense: Marxism, fascism and socialism were ideologies that failed. Egalitarianism, political correctness and feminism are all ideologies, and are all failing. I would not employ anyone religious, nor an egalitarian for any scientific position, as both positions imply a failure to understand what science and evidence is all about. Such is the absurdity of politically correct Western society, both positions, despite being rational, are almost certainly illegal.