Investigating the foundations of the House of Lies brings us to some deceptively critical components. The form without content called credentialism & the fruit-fly tier memory.
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When the topic of credentialism comes up it's usually in the context of ballooning paper requirements for jobs or positions. Unnecessary resume padding that forces people into unproductive degree and certificate programs at considerable cost in time and money. This is totally legitimate and a another sign that our beast system - what we call the House of Lies - is in a terminal state. But what it misses is how big a part of the House of Lies credentialism actually is.
Click for links to recent posts on the Functionally Two Species model and the House of Lies.
Part 3 - Postcards from the House of Lies
This is a legitimate problem. Inflated credentialing is a terrible way to add selectivity to a job where it isn't necessary. It's just an arms race. And as the need to push numbers through institutions goes up, the difficulty goes down. The only change is the necessity of wasted years and money on "school". This improves unemployment numbers while breeding fields of debt cows.
A full account of credentialism reveals a much deeper problem. It is actually a critically important manifestation of the reality-representation inversion we've explored in recent posts. And that's a deep structural mechanism of the fake, manipulative, centralized beast system that we currently inhabit. The House of Lies. The House of Lies absolutely requires huge numbers of denizen-perpetuators to be possible - functionally second species or FTS-2 identified in the last two posts. And FTS-2 couldn't exist the way it does without the credentialist processes.
Narrative-huffing needs narratives to huff, but it can't huff them all. That means there has to be some way to differentiate the lies they uptake as fake truth from the ones they don't. Enter the credential - an inherently meaningless chit that has the same name as something significant. A reality inverted into a false representation that curates the lies in the House of them.
Credetialism is connected to symbolism on FTS-2's glowing screens. The credentialed expert is indicated by posing in a costume while flourescently lit. It tells the huffer that this credentialed.
The Band is often critical of what we call fruit-fly tier memories. This is the wide-spread inability to remember programming accepted without logical or empirical reason in the face of new programming, also without logical or empirical reason. It’s an integral part of how the beast system operates today and the operating system of what we call the functional second species.
If we assume human behavior should reflect response to observed reality, the functional second species is opposite. It's why they're sometimes less charitably called the idiot masses. FTS-2 [Functionally two species 2] ignores sensory evidence when making choices and won’t or can’t make logical connections. They respond emotionally to inputs from designated “sources” without empirical or rational assessment. Like a puppet in a lab coat.
We've mentioned this symbolism. It's deeply programed. This unfortunate ad has the look of a poor translation, but makes the point.
This is a character, not a vocational model. And when programmed properly, FTS-2 will associate it with smartness, knowledge, and reliable truth.
It's symbolic image creation. And think how reinforced this is.
The FTS-2 processing problem is temporal. Observation is cumulative and logical relations unfold over time. Both are time sequenced. Consider how a child learns by accumulating pieces of information while growing the capacity to understand what they mean. Cumulative observation and logical relations. This implies the necessity of a working memory. Unless you remember that the pretty glowing stove burnt the first time you touched it, you won’t know to stay away. And forget about building more complex social or intellectual comprehension.
The utility of reason and evidence are tied to time and memory.
Learning isn’t just temporal, it’s judgmental. Because not all the information we receive is reliable. Consider the first time we encounter a liar. Someone that presents their information as positive knowledge when it isn't.
To avoid being victimized, we have to make more complex judgments than simple information uptake. This means drawing on past lessons – observed and reasoned – and applying them to the present situation.
Pattern recognition.
And judgments based on pattern recognition require... well... recognition. Remembering previous experiences from different points in time and how they relate to one another and the present.
Judgement is the application of reason and evidence through time and memory
And that brings us to the dyscivilizational nature of the fruit-fly tier memories of FTS-2. It’s not amnesia like the guy in Momento – he actually remembers a ton of functional information about how things work, but no personal details, people, or relationships. FTS-2 remembers who people are and what their job entails. What they can’t do is remember what they believed in a way that makes it accessible for learning or judgment.
The fruit fly is an excellent metaphor. Mindlessly flocking to whatever the beast media lie food source is with no regard for what happened last time.
There's an unchanging quality to the behavior pattern that would be impressive were it not so societally destructive.
This is because the beliefs aren’t grounded in cumulative observation or logical assessment. They have no temporal build-up. No chain of pieces. And so there is no idea of comparative – or any other - relations across time in them. There’s nothing empirical or rational in how they’re created, so there is no empirical or rational process in how they’re appraised. The beliefs are simply given by the glowing screen atemporally. The fruit-fly tier memory sees the world as a context-less perpetual present.
It’s how the self-evidence nonsense and error of the “pandemic” was accepted by a critical mass of idiots without a moment’s reflection on the idiocy. And how when the measures did nothing to stop the spread, the idiots kept embracing not only the idiocy but the liars who continue to promote it. It seems almost impossible how for all the contradictions of previous epidemiological knowledge, fake claims, and psycho-socio-cultural destruction, the perpetrators never lost their ill-founded “credibility”.
Previous epidemiological knowledge is easy to account for. A population defined by inverted education and plummeting IQs is too stupid for technical knowledge. The Band will miss indoor plumbing.
But fake claims need to be cross-referenced with observed reality. Noting that the curve didn’t flatten after two weeks and that !vax rates don’t correspond to case numbers means having to remember what was said and applying it to what is happening.
These official Scottish numbers are aggregate not normalized rates, but the trend is diametrically opposite the liars' claims about !vax efficacy and safety. Like this bit of beast propaganda from a year ago.
Remember?
Note – we aren’t accepting the validity of “case numbers”. We are merely pointing out obvious signs within the beast’s own metrics. Like the liars' conga from it makes you immune to you're not immune but it stops transmission to it doesn't stop transmission but it minimizes symptoms... And the same liars! In reality we're hovering around [it worsens infection, outcomes, and may blow out your immune system].
Put another way...
If it's fool me once, shame on you and fool me twice, shame on me, what's fool me over and over and over?
Societal destruction is observational but needs some reasoning to make sense of the accumulated observations. Hardly anything complex – but being aware of implications of masking children during speech and social development years, paying people to not work, and vaporizing the economic base does require a rudimentary time consciousness. And if all you can do as a species is uptake atemporal snippets without any empirical or logical processing then this is impossible.
The disconnected snippets can't linger. The snippet uptake process doesn't involve any of the necessarily temporal dimensions of learning and judgment. It's atemporal - simply an ephemeral emotional impulse. Easily dispelled and forgotten when the next atemporal ephemeral impulse from the screen takes over.
This is why the Band spends so much time on the simple foundational bases of knowledge and truth. What we can know and how we can know it requires us to pay attention to observations and rational assessments over time. It's how we learn instead of unreflectively leaping at anything someone says that pushes some emotional button.
Remember the logos-pathos distinction. How you feel about something can be related to the truth or completely detached from it. They aren't intrinsically linked - beyond applying to you.
So fruit-fly tier memory is a series of disconnected emotional impressions. Disconnected meaning detached from alignment with empirical reality or any sort of logical consistency. They can have an internal emotional thematic “consistency” – all the scattershot pandemic lies play off the same basic unfounded fear foundations. But this internal consistency is simply fragments of disconnected fictional narratives that share a topic. But what they don't do is form a coherent whole like chapters in a book would. And even better, as narratives, the fragments don't conform to external reality or internal logic. Just think about that for a moment. Imagine living like that...
Fruit-fly tier memory is fragments around a theme and not just a fake narrative because narrative implies some sort of internal logic. We balk at stories that violate their own internal rules. If someone was telling the Robin Hood story and suddenly Robin wiped the Sheriff out with an air strike, the narrative would collapse under it’s own absurdity. Or if he suddenly flew and shot lasers from his eyes. Or commanded a vast army of undead warriors. They’re elements with no logical connection to what had been going on.
A flow of disconnected vignettes with no rational connection beyond FEAR! CASES! is essentially the pandemic “story”. There nary a scrap of the logical consistency of the kind you see in narratives. Or the real world that narratives apply to. Nothing that happens has any real tie to what just happened. The only consistency is rhetorical.
Being able to assess if a narrative is consistent requires temporal continuity. You need to understand what happened to assess what’s happening. It's cumulative, and cumulative implies accumulating over time. Truthful narratives have this necessarily temporal internal consistency, making it impossible to ascertain if something is true or false with a fragmented fruit-flu tier memory.
However... rhetoric doesn't require internal consistency.
The visual equivalent to the "pandemic" would be something like this. None of the elements make logical sense in a way that you can connect them together to actually be reflective of material reality. But they work around a common emotional resonance.
That's the thing about emotional triggering. Each piece is a an appeal to emotion with no inherent connection to sequence. Rhetorical claims can be true - or false - on a case by case basis, but that’s irrelevant how effective they are as rhetoric. Good rhetoric makes you feel the way the rhetorician wants, true or false. Bad rhetoric doesn’t, also true or false.
The pandemic “story” - in quotations because it doesn't actually cohere as a story - is rhetorically consistent because logically inconsistent and empirically false pieces all fall into the same basket of feelings. They don't follow in a cause-effect way that describes anything real, but each reinforces a basal fear - CASES! - and the illusion that [retarded thing X] can magically alleviate it. When it doesn’t, the next piece taps into the same fear and offers the same fake remedy. Wash rinse repeat.
This is what we mean when we say the pieces are disconnected. They aren’t describing what is really happening, and they don't follow logically. But that doesn’t matter to a fruit-fly tier memory that can’t build observational knowledge or make rational assessments across time. All that matters is an irrational, unreal “feeling” of dread and trust in the glowing screen. That is the continuity. And each new piece can be as far-fetched or contradictory to the previous one as long as it comes from the same trusted source and feeds into the fear.
The connecting theme is a false emotional impression.
The Band isn’t going to waste space on “trust the science” idiocy. That’s a category error. Science as conventionally defined is empirical and rational. It is observably and logically verifiable, making trust irrelevant. You don't have to trust you eyesight when walking through a door and not into a wall or not touching a glowing stove. You know because it's empirically and rationally verifiable. Where "trust" factors in is with the scientists.
Are they actually employing empirically, logically verifiable methods and protocols? Or are they hacks mouthing prescripted talking points from government and industry?
Neither choice has any bearing at all on the scientific method as a form of knowledge production.
Two things are happening here.
1. The meaning of “science” is inverted into something other than rationally structured empitrical assessment. We've called it Science! That’s pure beast-funded-and-generated narrative blathered by white-coated midwits who lack the cognitive ability to assess the discursive contextualization and conceptual underpinnings of their own disciplines. Useful idiots who can spin up whatever “justifications” their paymasters prefer.
It's more than just corruption. Professional science tends to attract those in the IQ danger zone - smart enough to master some specialized processes and technical vocabulary, but not smart enough to see the inherently limiting assumptions that their processes and vocabularies are founded on. This isn't something that can be explained - it's a cognitive ceiling. When the Band encounters materialists that can't understand the self-limiting nature of materialism, we write them off as someone worth discussing serious matters with. This is related to our post on thinking and will be coming up again in the next big project.
Talking to a science midwit is like talking to someone that knows every nanometer of a world in a box without being able to understand the box.
2. To the idiot masses, science is one of those terms that retains the credibility of its original definition - the Scientific Method as systematized empiricism - despite it now being inverted into the opposite. It becomes a signifier of fake “truths” that it is onto-epistemologically incapable of providing but sounds convincing to a degrading population of glowing screen watchers. In other words, more rhetorical comfort that doesn’t describe reality in an empirical or logical way.
But it makes FTS-2 feel reassured...
So there’s that.
As noted, what “trust the science” really means is "trust the scientists". Science is a verifiable process, either done well or poorly. Spokeslabcoats that don’t show their work or respond to third-party criticism are like rhetoric and truth – inherently unrelated. They may engage in the scientific method, though most don’t. They may spew lies for beast paymasters. Neither has any relevance to whether they self-identify as “scientist” or wear an inane costume. And yet, the self-identified inane costume-wearer is what the narrative-huffers are actually thinking of when "scientist" comes to mind.
One might think that that’s wrong. That a title should reflect the reality and not an arbitrary claim without external truth value. But that one would be unaware of that what is true has no place in the House of Lies. And how one of its central tentpoles is replacing reality with what started as... wait for it... a representation. That is, credentialism. Just not the credentialism you might be thinking of.
Credentialism usually refers to the increase in amount of formal education required for a position. Generally unnecessary education. As in we used to take high school grads and now we need a master's.
The problem is that is forces people into time and resource-burning programs for no actual reason.
The Band is referring to a deeper inversion beneath the proliferation of pointless years in school. The standard critique of credentialism assumes that the unnecessary educational credentials do correspond to some actual knowledge. That the problems is that you don't need a master's in administration to work reception in a hotel. The master's teaches you stuff but that stuff is superfluous for the position. Real knowledge unrelated to the activity - like an engineer driving a cab or a landscaper with a doctorate in poetry.
What is overlooked is that the credential increasingly doesn't refer to any truthful knowledge at all. Some facility with an "academic discipline", which more and more simply means politicized Progressive! materialist lies. It's not that the master's is unneeded knowledge for the desk clerk. It's that the master's is beast inversion that isn't knowledge of reality at all.
The credential was to represent a skillset, knowledge base, or achievement. It meant the holder could do something.
Now, with bloated enrollment, declining student IQs. and beast narrative service, a "college diploma" is mostly meaningless. A participation trophy in an inversion camp with little to no connection to reality. What was a representation is values as a thing in itself.
Hold on to the idea of a credential as a worthless representation pretending to hold the value of something it doesn't actually represent. Now go back to how FTS-2 uptakes their disjointed rhetorical pap. The glowing screen is the conduit for their “trusted sources”. But here's the rub. They have fruit-fly tier memories, and they can't make observational or logical assessments. So how does a source become “trusted”? The glowing screen tells them, but we know that. The question is how trust is built if you can't remember beliefs or make rational judgements?
In the beast system, a position, designation, or accolade is a credential. The "authority" doesn't come from actual, logically and empirically sound knowledge or expertise. It comes solely from the position, designation, or accolade. Whatever the chosen credential. And how do the fruit flies know to trust them? They're the ones that are identified as such on the glowing screens.
The glowing screen - t.v. or big tech - is like the meta-credential. Being on it is incontrovertible "proof" to any FTS-2 narrative huffer that the shill in question is an "expert". That they speak Truth as if in voices of fire.
We've used this meme before but it's just dead on accurate. There's really nothing to add.
It doesn't matter if what spokeslabcoats say is nonsensical or even what they actually know. If' they're on the glowing screen, the fruit-fly tier memories know to trust them.
The thing is, the hollow beast credentialed "experts" are presented as if they actually have real truthful knowledge. It's what makes this so bizarre to people who can make observations and draw logical conclusions. Those odd occasions of exposure to mainstream media are dizzying sprays of self-evident absurdity and logical incoherence. It seems unbelievable that anyone could fall for it. Yet the masses mindlessly repeat the shifting incoherent drivel like pull-string dolls.
Observation - Fruit-fly tier memory has some correlation to intelligence but intelligence level doesn't determine it.
Law of averages dictates some of them would have triple digit IQs. That's the old functional retard category - not actually mentally deficient but acting as if you are.
The role of the glowing screen as credential tells us credentialism in the House of Lies is more complex than making one supposedly representative credential into the end in itself. It's layered, with each credentialed tier building on the one before.
First up is the chit. This is the intrinsically meaningless certificate purchased from a "college" for years of productive life and an extraordinary amount of money. The chit will be emblazoned with the name of an academic discipline, but doesn't mean two things in particular.
1. That the academic discipline is known or understood in any meaningful way.2. That the academic discipline - even if it was perfectly known - has any connection to empirical or logical reality. The exception - some technical fields that are defined by specific skills, though even these can be watered down to the point of uselessness.
Apart from a few technical specialties, the chit-holder is almost guaranteed not to be asked about their discipline when job hunting. And even there, the bulk of "coursework" won't matter at all.
It's unlikely any employer will care about their grades either. And there's no guarantee that the chit will gain employment. But without it, entire sections of the beast economy is closed.
Second is the position. Some chit-holders are hired into "positions". These come with titles that correlate to some sort of activity, but like the discipline on the chit are disconnected from empirical or logical verification. This is how we get the proliferation of criminally stupid "officials" responsible for failing real things from urban planning to public health.
Observation - "meritocracy" is a lie parroted by ignoramuses. To have a meritocracy, there have to be standards that are assessed by some form of impartial evaluation with the most meretricious being selected. And failure to maintain the standards needs to result in termination. Since neither of these have anything to do with how chit-holders are installed in positions, there is obviously no meritocracy.
Try to imagine any merit-based system where this mendacious, psychopathic midwitted freak is in charge of... anything.
Finally comes appearance on the glowing screen. There are thousands of chit-holding position holders sapping parasitically off the system who spend their lives in relative obscurity. Some even accrue considerable wealth and influence. But to be accepted by the fruit fly tier memory as trusted, they have to be featured on t.v. or big tech.
The process is sequential - like a pyramid of fakeness. The chit is needed for the position, and the position is needed to be featured on the glowing screen.
But it's a chain of inverted credentials. At no point is there a necessary link to empirical or logical truth.
Note that you can assess the actual value of each stage logically and empirically. Is the diploma-holder is actually innumerate? Is the “scientist” is making self-evidently false claims? Is the talking head is only there because they serve the narrative engineers? Is there any demonstrated truth-value in any of the purported skill or knowledge?
But assessment takes observation and reason, memory and time – that is, more than a FTS-2 fruit-fly tier memory. So vertically integrated House of Lies credentialing determines what to trust. And since there is no temporal logical judgment, the credential can say whatever it wants, whenever it wants and be taken as True! – so long as it maintains the rhetorical consistency.
Which is how a liar saying "two weeks to flatten the curve" can become record cases after two years without losing credibility in the tiny minds of the huffers. There’s no functional mnemonic capacity to log the first claim, compare it to the later one, cross-reference it to reality, and draw a conclusion.
So long as the liar has the right House of Lies chit and appears on the right House of Lies screen, each statement becomes truth.
It can only end when the trusted sources declare a new rhetorical theme to respond to...
The rise of credentialism was unnoticed by FTS-2 because it is a temporal process. Their fruit-fly tier memories can't make make connections or assess relational changes that take place at different points in time. So long as the current trusted expert calls it by the familiar name, it will be treated as the same no matter how much it changes.
Consider education, since it’s the font of chit production that replaces expertise at the most basic level in the House of Lies. Colleges and universities are bizarre when you really think about them - as in try and define what exactly it is that they are and do. What their actual purpose in society is. Everyone is familiar with the concept of "going to college", and we've all heard how they're essential to the economy and "innovation". But what are they? Try and succinctly define them. Then think about "essential" entities that lack a clear mission statement or even basic identity.
Children going to a monastery as students, illumination from the Decretum Gratiani, a mid-14th century Bolognese manuscript of canon law, UB Leipzig, Rep. II 9b (CCXLIII), fol. 200v
Modern “university” is a bizarre phenomenon – an incoherent institutional pastiche with roots going back to the Middle Ages and before. The first university in Europe appeared around 1088. Before that it was monastic and cathedral schools.
The medieval university taught the Trivium and Quadrivium - the seven Liberal Arts - and law and medicine. They were limited to a small segment of the population - the wealthy or smart - and not considered essential drivers of the economy. But the point isn't to comprehensively describe the early university. It's to note that the early university had an easy-to-define identity and purpose and wasn't an absurd drain public resources.
Simple questions are a good litmus test for beast nonsense. Again, what is the comparably succinct statement of purpose of a contemporary university? The lack of succinct answer indicates the problem. It has no clear definition because it is founded on nothing more than the lies and projected desires of countless House of Lies functionaries. Some high points…
Philosophy and the Seven Liberal Arts, illumination from Herrad of Landsberg's Hortus deliciarum, around 1180
The original universities had a limited list of subjects - the Liberal arts with medicine and law. This is the birth of the modern “discipline” – the arbitrarily defined knowledge categories that universities are built on. Faculties, departments, etc.
It's noteworthy that the split between pure or basic and applied knowledge was there from the beginning.
Each discipline develops its own methods and procedures. Almost their own cants. This is because they were originally completely different. The Quadrivium - music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy - and the Trivium - grammar, logic, and rhetoric - are based on numbers and words but don't really overlap methodologically much beyond that.
The purpose was also clearly defined from the outset. The quantitative Quadrivium was comprised of subjects believed to relate to what was believed to be the basic harmonies of the cosmos. The Trivium was a set essential knowledge for civic life. Of course this implies that universal truth and civic essentials were accepted by people at the time - a problem for the satanic inversives in the House of Lies. We assume medicine and law were subjects that were better suited to university-type teaching than in other venues.
Over time, disciplines proliferate without any sense of larger consistency...
What do Bachelors of Creative Writing, Mathematics, Social Work, History, and Finance have in common epistemologically? What vision of the world or civilization ties them together? The incoherence of the credential factory is apparent in its structure.
This has two levels - internal and external. The external is what people on the outside see. That fading canard that a chit with one of these disciplines on it represents meaningful understanding of that body of knowledge. Internally, standards are continually loosened to accommodate larger numbers of dumber students and the whole galaxy of politicized retardery that comes with government centralized control and dumber bloated faculty. How the discipline is presented - what trivial body of work is required for the chit - is not a reflection of any fixed truth. It's merely what the chit-masters are prioritizing at the time. Or just time-filler to push the cash cows through. Or both. Google some current university syllabi - the results are pretty shocking.
Doctors performing a cadaver dissection. Miniature from the Book of Properties of Things (De proprietatibus rerum) by Barthelemy the Englishman, 1475-1500.
Medieval medicine is a forerunner of the idea that university should be linked to vocational training. This gets the the main incoherence in the university today – “academic research” vs. practical value. These are inherently contradictory impulses, but both are endlessly blathered when university is discussed.
Teaching was a way for the academics to pay the bills, introducing the necessity of selling value to clients. This amped up in the Renaissance, when Humanists were competing against the Scholastic establishment by peddling the socio-cultural value of their own version of the liberal arts to the rich elites. The elite dimension is central. The historical image of the university had two factors – the presumption of intelligence and the connection to wealth and prestige. Both are forms of social currency, and related but different.
Fast forward to the 20th century and the idea that some bastard hybrid of elite finishing school and technical college should be the backbone of society. This was the era of cultural madness preceding collapse – godless de-moralization, rabid materialism, catastrophic war, mass migration, complete inversion of art and culture – the foundations of the House of Lies.
"Free speech" protests at Berkeley in "the 60s". What did these pampered assholes achieve other than blow open the fiction that university was anything other than an instrument of cultural degradation. Consider "free speech" at Berkeley today...
Twentieth-century university is a basket of incoherent impulses starting with the absurdity that everyone can partake in advanced study without diminishing quality or content. That working in hermetic academic disciplines is also somehow “advanced research” with efficient and direct socio-economic benefit. That economic incubation and pure knowledge generation aren’t contradictory imperatives. That the above-average socio-economic profile of college graduates meant passing through college will make everyone richer.
University was never the indicator of intelligence that it was thought to be, but it used to represent a floor. A college man had a minimum mix of smarts and self-discipline.
Hardly a cognitive elite, but substantially smarter than the average, with the prestige schools on the smarter side of that.
It's hard to get current numbers that aren't just repetitions of the old 110-115, but the sheer number of bodies in colleges and universities indicates that there has to be some decline. This piece is interesting. It's probably overly optimistic since it doesn't incorporate the dropping general IQs. To say nothing of the moron covid cohort coming along.
Note that the second half of the 20th century was a sustained process of removing what need for intelligence there had been. Everything from GI Bills, to draft deferments, to legacy admissions, to affirmative action, to enrolment bloat, to every other non-performance based criteria is further affirmation that being smart isn’t the primary correlate with university. It can't be. Anything other than IQ-type assessment is a necessary admission of criteria other than pure intelligence.
Yet despite this, as the population has grown commensurably larger and less capable, the chit requirements have diminished.
Graph from a good piece on rising grades. Whether "keeping people out of the war" or maintaining consumer satisfaction, is irrelevant to the larger picture. The grade isn't a metric that correlates to knowledge/performance over time.
So what is it?
It's not just the As either...
There's another number that's continually risen as well. The cost of the chit. Melting standards in a diluting talent pool are no impediment to skyrocketing costs - way beyond other expenses. Here's another graph from a few years back. Note the correlation with the GPAs. It appears that it isn't "knowledge" that university sells.
What's deceptive about much blather about educational costs is the assumption that the "education" is otherwise constant. But with bloating enrolments and cratering standards, it isn't. Grasp that cost and difficulty are both moving. In opposite directions.
The rapid decline will be astonishing even to someone educated in the later 20th century. Yet people not even all that long out of the system cling to their own experiences and standards instead of assessing what is happening right now.
Whenever the reason for or definition of something doesn't correspond to what is happening, the real reason or definition is elsewhere. The assumption is that a degree in mathematics implies some degree of advanced quantitative reasoning. A degree in history implies some information processing and communication ability. And so on. These aren’t value judgments, they’re existential qualities without which the disciplines don’t exist. Replace that with a scrip saying "History" and all you've done is demonstrate that historical expertise is irrelevant to what the scrip is cashed in for.
Exactly. But first an aside.
There are certain contextual limits to the level of degradation. Having mentioned math, there’s a degree of inherent conceptual difficulty in the material in some fields that provides a floor.
But how many math majors are there? Probably the same pool who would have been math majors 80 years ago. Probably ditto for physics and engineering. The bloat isn't taking place in intrinsically challenging areas. It's the arts, the social sciences, and the myriad of designated pre-career programs that have proliferated like mushrooms.
Relative bloat is a semiotic issue. Quantitative expression is highly cumulative, in that the upper-level operations are impossible without fully grasping the lower-level ones first. It doesn't matter what it's applied to - this cumulative nature is implicit in mathematical languages themselves. No algebra without arithmetic, no calculus without algebra, and so on. And if a level becomes incomprehensible, the journey ends. So the nature of the quantitative language itself limits watering down.
If vector analysis requires calculus, the most you can do is require simpler problems. And we're sure they do that. But the subject can't be formulated with only arithmetic. In that case, it's not vector analysis but random numbers on a page.
In other words, a canon of objective prior knowledge is needed to make sense of these functions.
Qualitative language - written and spoken words and texts - is different. Once you can read and write, the meaning-making structures are essentially constant. A sentence can be more or less complex, but the basic grammatical combinatory operations apply. You can even decipher grammatically incorrect sentences in a way that isn't possible with number strings that break mathematical rules. Because of this, there is no intrinsic standard of difficulty in a course based on words beyond basic literacy. It's not cumulative is the same necessary way.
There's no inherent curb on a literature course that maxes out with the Cat in the Hat. There's nothing inherent to stop a psychology class from being entirely Youtube videos. There's no inherent reason a social work course can't consist only of short simplistic lists that don't map onto human realities.
The premise is that a magic fairy called "disciplinary standards" was supposed to ensure that text-based fields maintained the cumulative rigor of the quantitative counterparts. But the House of Lies is built on switching representation for reality. Without an intrinsic criteria, corrupt functionaries can simply blather about "excellence" and do whatever they want. That's what no intrinsic standards means. Something like history can abolish any canon or standard and propel the bloat through with greater ease.
And the evisceration of traditional fields is outstripped by the generation of new clusters that never had any standards to eviscerate. So the chit may say “history” or "conflict studies" on it, but apart from those areas with intrinsic requirements, there is no necessary correlation to a body of knowledge or set of skills. Just that demonstration we mentioned that what it denotes isn't the the expected measure of expertise or intelligence.
What is denoted is money paid - and generally borrowed - and time put in.
Borrow the money, sink the time, get the chit...
An alien visitor would wonder how such a retarded system either came to be or is continually tolerated. The answer takes us to the next level of the integrated credentialism pyramid.
In the beast system, most positions require little skill or knowledge.
We obviously aren't talking about technical fields, but that’s different. They either need those forms of training that have intrinsic knowledge or provide it themselves. But consider most chit-requiring busywork, service industry jobs with no connection to academic disciplines, and virtually anything in the ever-growing, “public” sector.
It doesn’t matter if you know anything. There was no need for a college degree in the first place. It’s a clearing house to manage unemployment figures and a debt-creation ponzi scheme. No one cares what your degree is in. And most work requires minimal intelligence or critical thinking. It’s a clown world Idiocracy where there is no intrinsic correlation between what people do and the standard of living they enjoy.
Just consider the intellectual firepower vs. the pay of the faces on the glowing screen.
The advantage to this system goes beyond the debt and warehousing. The artificial bubble world is House of Lies finishing school, where huge numbers of immature narrative huffers can be indoctrinated into any moral inversion the beast is pushing. And while it's true that the "academic disciplinary" knowledge is irrelevant, there are opportunities to show compliance with and willingness to whore for the beast system.
The rest follows.
The integrated credentialism of the House of Lies is one meaningless representation standing in for its reality atop another. Selectivity refers to the number available positions, not requirements of intelligence or expertise. Pyramiding layers of form without content climaxing in momentary fame among the fruit-fly tier memories and their glowing screens. Otherwise, how would they know what to believe?
And like any soulless husk, form without content is short lived.
We’re watching it.
