At American Greatness, Emina Melonic writes about intellectual coercion inside the university, and how it leaves a profoundly negative mark on the whole of society when ideology takes precedence over reality and the pursuit of truth.
The object of linguistic coercion in the academy is to change students on an existential level. The weak succumb immediately but the strong quietly accept their fate while still having an awareness that they are swimming in a sea of lies. This is the great sadness that today permeates higher education.
Are academic ideologues like the imprisoned souls in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” seeing only shadows with a firm conviction that shadows are the things themselves? This is perhaps true of students but it is certainly not true of most professors. Prisoners in Plato’s cave are oblivious and the only harm that they are inflicting is on themselves. Academicians may be living in an existential darkness and be sadly unenlightened beings who lack reason, but they are willful and quite deliberate in the harm they perpetuate. This harm usually takes the form of revolt against tradition and the order of things, and we have seen the poisonous fruits of this labor in the public square.
Read the whole article at American Greatness.
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