Posts Tagged → institution
Choices: Principles vs Institutions
Humans create institutions to institutionalize our values, religious practices, hopes and aspirations, cultural identity, etc. Our institutions are created in order to make permanent and carry our values forward, a sort of vehicle. Schools, libraries, government agencies, religious institutions, family foundations, charitable foundations, unions, associations, etc, every single one created with a mission to implement certain principles.
Over time people naturally identify with a particular institution, become a champion of it, and a stakeholder to it. Again, private schools, public school PTAs, library associations, the National Ukrainian Club, various church and synagogue umbrella groups, Democrat Party, Republican Party, etc, you know those particular institutions in your own life, because they reflect your values.
What happens when the institution no longer represents or reflects the founding principles that breathed life and cause into it?
Examples abound: The United Nations works against the western democracies who founded it and currently pay for it. The Democrat Party has become a wild communist orgy of anti-Americanism; the Republican Party has forsworn its abolitionist roots and has become a bunch of establishment do-nothing fuddy-duddies; the National Rifle Association accretes multiple layers of bureaucracy into everything it does, instead of spending its limited money pursuing individual freedom; school teachers unions become outlets for destructive radical politics, far outside the mainstream of American families; a local church or synagogue is poorly run by a small group of self-reinforcing, self selecting, like-minded establishmentarians who cannot and will not respond to changes in their respective demographics…
The one that got me thinking about this subject is the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs, a sportsmen’s group I had a long relationship with, which then attempted to take a hard left turn into climate alarmism and gun regulation back in 2020. In one quick weekend of fake votes and heavily manipulated elections, the PFSC leadership torpedoed the institution the leaders said they loved. Their far-left politics alienated their base, and the group has not yet recovered its former standing.
With PFSC, I took a hard and public stand, and while I succeeded in stopping the old group from becoming leftist stooges of the charitable foundation trust fund sector, I also lost a lot of friends. People who were loyal to the PFSC they remembered, and who they wanted it to still be. Some blamed me for damaging PFSC’s public reputation, while I blamed PFSC’s leadership for making unpopular decisions its base rejected. For sure the messenger got shot!
In 2020, PFSC’s leaders jettisoned the principles on which PFSC was originally founded, and a great portion of their natural base stopped believing in the institution.
Recently I stepped back from a formal leadership role in a local house of worship, as the venerable institution begins to crumble onto itself. Leaders there, who fondly remember this house of worship from their childhood, cannot make the tough decisions necessary to keep it alive, and in fact keep making decisions that guarantee few or no young people will join it and keep it going. This particular institution is beginning to greatly deviate from its own founding principles, and its base, its natural adherents and admirers, no longer recognize it.
One last example: The US Environmental Protection Agency was a place I badly wanted to work in while I was in college back in the mid 1980s. When I finally got to work at the USEPA, I realized that a great deal of the basic principle that had undergirded its founding had been long since tossed overboard. In place of the simple principle of a clean environment came a whole regime of anti-capitalism, anti-America regulations. After seven years as a policy staffer at USEPA, I could not wait to get out. I now think the agency needs a whole new name and a very clear mission change.
So should we be loyal to the hollowed out shells of institutions that now exist mostly in facade, gutted of what they once stood for, hopeful that they will somehow regain their former glory, or should we seek to create new institutions that are more representative of the principles that enervated the originals we so dearly loved and identified with?
Change is a constant, evolution is healthy, and institutions that do not change to some degree become stale, immobile, static, and fragile. But those that deviate from their founding principles are destined for a much faster devolution, because most people just simply stop believing in them.
The competitive free market will cause new institutions to spring alive, bringing hope and aspiration anew to old principles, replacing the old institutions as they dry up and wither away. For me, I am of two minds: Stay loyal to the old institution until that is no longer possible, on principle, and then help found a new one, on principle.
Supreme Court’s recent decisions reveal deep DC Beltway Bandito mentality
While all other American institutions – private, non-profit, for-profit, our entire military, the Cat Ladies Survival League, the Backyard Bird and Squirrel Protective Association, the Republican Party, the Democrat Party, the media, Hollywood, professional sports, the medical profession and its various Medical Associations, the legal profession and its various Bar Associations, and the entire federal government apparatus – have been Borg captured and bent to the Borg Left’s purposes, completely against the will of the vast majority of the American citizenry, there has remained one lone institution that has appeared to resist the capture:
The US Supreme Court.
Against the decades-long tidal wave of berserker Democrats and somnulent Republicans only the US Supreme Court has appeared unbroken, pure, un-woke, and integrity-bound to the US Constitution backbone and nervous system that binds all American citizens together as a living, breathing, functioning One Nation Under God.
And yet, with its recent holdings we repeatedly see not so much glimpses into the Court’s true soul, but rather flashes of the oft hidden but actual volcanic fire seething beneath our collective feet. For as much as the Court has tried to appear united and above the frightening political fray, it too is subject to the worming rat-gnawing effects of leftist wokeism. For as much as it has placed several unanimous holdings before the American citizenry in recent months as evidence of the level headedness of the Court’s members, it also holds a growing threat of Borg tyranny.
Three stalwart Borg leftists – Kagan, Sotomayor, and Katanga – maintain a unified beachhead on the shores of the US Supreme Court and America’s last residual semblance of the rule of law. Regardless of how obvious the legal question, these three ardent Marxists always vote for more, bigger, and more powerful government at the expense of We, The People as a people and as individuals whose rights are supposed to be protected from government overreach by the courts.
There is not one single public policy issue or individual rights question that does not get the Marxist treatment from these three members of the bench. And so one cannot really be surprised to see them vote against presidential immunity in the case of Trump. Because like all of the other politicians on their Borgian Marxist Democrat side of the aisle, Kagan, Katanga, and Sotomayor also lust for the blood of the one person who stands in their way, Trump. This morning’s holding by the Court reveals that such a simple question of presidential immunity (having none would result in a president being unable to do his job) can only hold naked political interests for three of the nine justices.
If left unchecked, in a simple matter of time, that number will grow to four and then a majority of five, and then American citizens will have no individual rights left under the federal jackboot.
This skepticism is justified by other recent holdings and indecisions by the Court: The First Amendment is not violated or even infringed by the Biden Administration’s active coercion of social media companies to conduct the censorship-by-proxy of American citizens’ speech critical of the Biden Administration. Subpeonaed political activist Steve Bannon must go to jail for failing to appear before the incorrectly convened J6 Committee, while lawless AG Merrick Garland flaunts all legal procedure, including precisely that which has ensnared Bannon, to hold onto and cruelly wield an unbridled official monopoly on violence.
The list of outright fraudulent decisions and spineless indecisions by the Court reveals that the three Borg Marxists are not just a beachhead, and not just a taste of things to come for our rights. Rather, the insular, disconnected, corrupt, and self-serving DC Beltway Bandito culture is seeping through all skin pores and lung tissue and hearing and tasting orifices of the supposed five or six “conservative” justices on the other side of Kagan, Katanga, and Sotomayor. We cannot trust or rely on the US Supreme Court to guard us, because this institution is also being captured, just in slow motion and in our sight.
It may be that if or when the American People sort out this constant assault on our rights on their own terms, that only Justices Thomas and Alito will remain fit to form the core of the new Supreme Court. The rest? Well, what does any assertive free people do with traitors?
“Higher Education” is dead
What was over-generously called “higher education” since the 1950s, when a college degree became the American standard and cultural norm for most coastal kids and the middle-America elites, has died. Also known as “the academy” and “academia” and the “ivory tower,” colleges and universities across America have just collectively rolled over, died, and begun to stink badly like the unburied rotting corpses they are.
How did this entire nation-wide network of institutions suddenly give up the ghost? Because of a known but unanswered, unaddressed, uncured cancerous rot inside of it that began in the 1920s, and hit its zenith in the past few weeks. The cancerous rot metastesized, spread throughout the body of each college and university, and finally killed the host. We who are reading this essay now have with our own eyes just witnessed the mass die-off of the species once known as higher education. We have seen it happen on the news, in first-hand documentary reports by participants and observers alike, on social media, and in the first-hand experiences college kids have relayed back to their friends and families.
What happened?
To start with, “higher education” became neither higher, nor education. Instead of having quantifiably elite thinkers spending time carefully training students measurable skills, especially critical thinking skills designed to have well-trained students capable of unemotionally resolving complex problems, colleges long ago began indoctrinating students with toxic cultural slogans and bullsh*t political narratives.
Such indoctrination strips away the thin veneer of Western Civilization, and appeals to the most base animal instincts all humans have, and which Westerners have long since buried deep and far away from our daily lives. This indoctrination taps into the most raw feelings of hate, anger, and a sadistic desire for personal retribution that people can have. We saw the full results of this indoctrination in the Nazi gas chambers and concentration camps, the Socialist Soviet gulags, the killing fields of Cambodian communist Pol Pot. Nazis and Communists alike enjoyed the help of children denouncing their own parents, because the toxic indoctrination was so deep.
This indoctrination in America began in the 1920s with the penetration of Marxists and communists into education at all levels, as they appealed to normal people’s acceptance of strange versions of “fairness” and “compassion.” And after that, the cancer simply metastesized and spread. Sure, we had some heroes like Senator Joseph McCarthy who tried to warn Americans about what was happening. But McCarthy and other patriots like him who tried to diagnose and treat the cancer were shouted down and shamed by the mass media and entertainment industries, which before the academy had already been penetrated and quietly occupied by Marxists and Communists. Who spread the indoctrination in their own way.
So over the past few months and weeks, Americans have watched the result of all the indoctrination in every single academic field, to the point where even math is said to be “racist.” The premier, most elite, “best” examples of so-called higher education literally emerged in the past weeks from decades of politicized hiring and indoctrination as living examples of Lord of the Flies. Amid hysterical shreiks of young women and mooing noises of young men, civilization is tossed overboard while students, faculty, and administrators alike contort into a frenzied violent orgy of racist hate and anti-American slogans.
These schools are not institutions of higher thinking, high principles, or anything else rooted in Western Civilization. They are now hives of terrorist training. And the shreiks and moos of bratty, spoiled children.
Best representative examples include former Harvard president, Claudine Gay, engaging in pathetic moral relativism in Congress, only to then get outed as a serial plagiarist and lose her president job, but then keep her $900,000 a year job “teaching” utter garbage and subjective nonsense at Harvard. To save her feelings, if not her students. Everything that happened around and after the Claudine Gay Incident revealed Harvard to be the exact opposite of an elite institution. Claudine Gay’s humiliation was months ago, before the nationwide college campus hatefest and orgy of violence began.
Another example is the nationwide college campus hatefest and orgy of violence we all get to see every day now. It’s not just that a few radicalized young people are doing this destructive assault on our civilization. It is that large portions of the students are enabled by their faculty and administrators alike to act like savage wild beasts. That is, those adults (the college professors and administrators) who are supposedly the best embodiment of elite education and higher values are themselves actual Nazis and communist Stalinists, all rolled into one angry, bizarre, gobbledigook speaking and acting person.
(To say nothing of the daily neo-Nazi Islamofascist violence visited upon major capitol cities worldwide. Especially on bridges and major city streets, and often filled with the same students, faculty, and administrators that are seen and felt on campus.)
Instead of using their leadership roles to diffuse the illegal and policy-breaking violence and racism, the college professors and administrators enable and promote it, usually joining the overgrown children themselves. And often repeating or teaching the overgrown children the indoctrination’s disinformation, lies, and fake political narratives at the core of the “protest” activities. And so, we see a total vertical breakdown of almost all “higher education” institutions, from the highest overpaid and underworked administrator to the untenured part time adjunct faculty to the first year middle income spoiled brat: Everyone involved in college today is a useless windbag with no discernable skills or value to larger society, but full of disinformation coming out of their ears.
But boy, do those “higher education” institutions sure charge a lot of money! What a scam!
Now that the mask is off, and we Americans see what a load of horse crap a college “education” is, here is what we can learn and apply:
- Parents: Don’t send your children or your hard-earned money to college, unless your child has a high aptitude for math, science, or technology, and will only study those subjects.
- Parents: Don’t expect your college graduate children to be able to do much for themselves or for society or for you, but to actually be a liability.
- Parents: Explore trade school for your kid. And if your kid does not have an aptitude for math, science, or technology, then teach them yourself how to work hard, save money, forego immediate gratification, and to plan ahead. Help them find a job where they can be themselves and succeed.
- College-age kids: Question authority and motive, especially of your teachers and their administrators, and always respect and appreciate your parents. And whatever you do, don’t go to college, because your brain will end up as dead and useless as those “higher education” institutions have become, and you will end up as a dumb loser with high debt for something that did not benefit you. Yes, you might feel that being throw-away cannon fodder for the anti-America movement is exciting, but this is only a flash of a moment. After this is over, your reputation will be in tatters and your future will be a big question mark. Your future will be as dead as the college that made it.