JD
Those that can, do. Those that cannot, teach. An adage that explains much of what is wrong in today’s society.
Teaching, whether in school or university, attracts those who have above average levels of intelligence but lack the strength of will to succeed in the commercial world.
Still feeling entitled to the benefits this real world offers, they gravitate instead to the teaching “profession” which grants them a certain level of reward and status.
However, as these rewards are usually less than those accruing to people who succeed outside of academia, resentment sets in among the teaching classes, and the idea of a ‘great levelling’ where these rewards must be ‘more fairly’ redistributed becomes an attractive idea.
This idea is of course is not confined to academia, it is common among second rate individuals everywhere to ask the same question – why can’t I have what they have got, not by working for it, but simply by wishing it were so?
And so the reasons why the majority of academia leans so resolutely to the left become clear.
They are a group of people intelligent enough to know they are above the average and who feel entitled thereby to status and reward.
However, being unwilling to blame any perceived paucity of such rewards on their own failings, they seek instead to accuse their more successful peers of unfairly acquiring what they themselves, through lack of effort and strength of will, have not.
Then, according to the extension of this logic, what has been unfairly acquired must be forcibly redistributed. And what can do this? Socialism of course.
The teaching classes try to justify their actions by claiming to seek this redress ‘on behalf of their fellow men’, the working classes but, at the bottom, it is envy, and self-interest rather than self-lessness, that drives their left-wing bias and its expression in the preaching of the doctrine of socialism and redistribution to their students.
And students listen because it plays to their own discontent. Not yet having acquired rewards and status of their own, students are quite understandably open to the suggestion that it is only right to take from those who have more (other people) and give to those who have less (me, the student).
Consequently, we have a situation where the teaching classes will always be dissatisfied with rewards never matching what they believe to be their entitlement, and a student class with similar resentment towards their immediate lot, albeit for different reasons.
This leads to the question, must it ever be thus?
The short answer? Yes. But there are ways that we, the majority, can ameliorate the effects of this inherent flaw in society. The most obvious being, we can just ignore it.
In the case of the student groups, consider the wave of pro-Hamas, anti-Jewish protest currently sweeping the Western world’s liberal universities. Student protestors for the most part don’t understand what they are protesting about. They don’t understand the 4000-year history of the near East and the Jewish state.
Their real interest lies in pushing back against their lack of power in society by banding together, exhibiting strength in numbers to redress their weakness as individuals, and protesting against something, anything, that allows them to subsume their weak individuality into the groupthink of the mob.
But they are basically children stamping their feet to gain attention and, like all the immature young, if we indulge their behaviour it will only get worse.
If, on the other hand, their tantrums are ignored they will eventually get bored, dry their self-induced tears and go play somewhere else, at something else.
An obvious proof of this can be seen in the way the great “School Strike 4 Climate” protests erupted with much fanfare in 2021 only to fall away to a pathetic rump in 2024.
Superseded now by the pro-Palestine furore, we can confidently expect that this too will eventually collapse under the weight of its own irrelevance to life in the real world of New Zealand.
In summary then, recognising that at the bottom the left-leaning culture in academia is driven by self-serving human nature, seeking to change the situation is an impossibility, but if we ignore it the results will manifest in two ways.
Firstly, although the “petit intelligentsia” within the teaching professions will always be dissatisfied with their lot, this is also a fact of life for the majority of humanity, and yet society survives perfectly well even as we pay little or no attention to this discontent in others.
Provided that we treat the teaching classes with a similar level of indifference, they too become simply an annoying, but ineffective, footnote to the lives of the great majority of New Zealanders.
Secondly, whilst we can recognise there will be a few permanently immature students who go on to make a living as rent-a-crowd agitators like John Minto, or as full-time leeches on the public purse such as the MPs of the Green Party, the socialist ideology of the majority of students will eventually be abandoned to reality.
Growing up, graduating into the real world and acquiring rewards and status through their own efforts, as adults, self-interest will eventually prevail, making it impossible for them to cling to the redistributive tenets of socialism.
It is no coincidence that, over the centuries, various commentators in various iterations have remarked “anyone not a socialist at twenty has no heart, and anyone not a conservative at forty has no head.”
This, too, will ever be thus.
