A PhD in a field X means one has done studies in X, but it also means one has PLEASED A HANDFUL of senior members of the PhD GUILD… One has entered a hierarchy. When I mixed up with the best and brightest, I was struck how hierarchical it all was [1].
The fact that professional intellectuals have to aspire to belong to a guild, to please a hierarchy to get the crumbs that feed them as the pigeons they are has the following consequence: Most great mental advances of humanity are from AMATEURS, OR INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATORS, NOT GUILDERS; it’s a historical fact. The very fact that “amateurs”, people who love a subject are viewed in a pejorative way is itself pretty telling. It is basically saying that working for love is inferior to working for a stipend: the lover is inferior to the prostitute, on matter of (prostitution?) principle. The prostitution principle makes employers the ultimate adjudicators of intellectual worth. And now the ultimate adjudicators are the global plutocrats.
Yes, ARISTOTLE DESTROYED DEMOCRACY, by building the box nobody was supposed to get out of [2]
It is true that individuals who, while members of the PhD GUILD do not follow the dogmas of the guild, are described as “fringe” and dangerous radicals, and lower order sorts. I was long around the highest top circles in math-physics and I noticed the very highest (Nobel, Field medal ranks) were less arrogant than the ones below them… The very top guys (De Broglie, Feynman, Wheeler, etc.) were just the opposite, humble and frank. But very consumed by their narcissistic selves…
The intrinsic nature of genius means one is out of the box: the box is not a genius, it’s a prison: new ideas come always from the outside, not the stampeding herd. So the very definition of genius implies asocial behavior towards the GUILDS.
This can be seen even in individuals such as ABELARD and BURIDAN, Middle Ages super thinkers who were the equivalent of celebrity rock stars in their times… So they were very famous. Abelard led the war against Saint Bernard, the de facto Pope and a crazed advocate of the 2nd Crusade; two centuries later, Buridan, rector of the world’s most famous university, Paris, advised four kings and was loved by a queen, etc… and also had a gigantic following, including the Oresemes, Oxford computing school… They were very famous but still they rocked the boat… Both fought the power of the church in a way which required extreme courage.
An example of resistance of dogma to significant fact is Dark Matter: the evidence for it is nearly a century old, but it was denied… It is a highly significant fact, as it means, POTENTIALLY, that existing physics is 96% IRRELEVANT. As an amateur of sorts, I found an obvious (?) POTENTIAL solution: a finite Quantum Interaction (there is no Quantum Interaction if CIQ, Copenhagen Interpretation Quantum… But I am sure Newton would agree with me, because he wrote on the subject, famously about gravity).
The problem with the identification of the PhD and UNIVERSITY EMPLOYED GUILD with the top intellectual class is that universities, and “university affiliation” are that universities are all in the employ of the top plutocratic class and its agent, the GLOBAL DEEP STATE… This enables the Global Deep State to establish its worldwide mind control.
An example is so-called “French Theory” an all-encompassing philosophical theory, which has been interpreted as saying that there is nothing as a superior cultural trait. Believing in the superiority of some system of thoughts over others is… racist.
Thus, in particular, claiming that “All Lives Matter” is racist.
Wait… what? Ah, because the founding members of “French Theory”, like the ignorant and, or, biased Claude Lévi–Strauss (a French anthropologist and ethnologist founder of “French Theory”) believed that the West rose on mayhem, and, implicitly, only mayhem… This has been parroted and amplified ever since, in an avalanche of Black Lies. And Black Lies Matter!
Whereas, in truth, the West rose on… Amateur geniuses… certainly the USA, a colony of Europe, rose on much more mayhem than necessary, but that’s another story.
The Occident arose from the creative destruction of yesteryear’s obsolete spiritual prisons… The history of ideas is the history of jailbreaks.
Patrice Ayme
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[1] Since then Zarathustra, or Nietzsche, following Descartes, himself echoing Montaigne and his “ivory tower”, will guess that I have entered a higher phase, where mixing would be akin to dilution: there is a time for the cave up high in the mountains, and the dialogue with the centuries…
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[2] Abelard, then Buridan, did get out of the Aristotelian box, It was perceived to be so at the time. Peter the Venerable, abbot of all powerful Cluny (by far the largest Christian church at the time) protected Abelard from Saint Bernard. He called Abelard “our Aristotle”.
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 