The Thinkers of Tomorrow

Spare a few minutes for this small but instructive drama in which a self-described “bottle blonde bacon-eating vegan,” one famed for railing against “privileged people,” “conservatives” and “heteropatriarchal crap” – and for complaining about the burden of student debt – is shocked to discover that her degrees in “social justice and peace studies” and of course “gender studies” are not entirely useful in the job market. 

It’s a reality our heroine finds difficult to process. 

Update: 

In the comments, rjmadden notes that “the ‘angry studies’ crowd feed on idiots like this.” Indeed. And setting aside our social justice warrior’s comedic obliviousness, there is a tragic, or tragicomic, aspect. This credulous young woman is hardly alone in her self-inflicted predicament. Thousands of young people sign up for similar tat and spend years learning to beg questions and regurgitate boilerplate, while inflating their egos and racking up huge debts. And their comedy qualifications may signal to potential employers things that aren’t at all enticing. You’d think that by now these Incredibly Clever People – the ones who feel they’re destined to correct the rest of us – might have cottoned on to the hustle. If only belatedly and at ruinous expense.

As yet it’s hard to be sure how Andria XX will “process the reality” of her situation and how she came to be in it. Quite often the resentment is displaced onto less than obvious targets – free markets, bourgeois values, etc. It would, I imagine, be painful for our bacon-eating vegan to reflect with some realism on her own choices, and on the role of the snake oil merchants who share her leftwing views and wish to propagate them. At someone else’s expense. Andria does admit that, maybe, perhaps, she “made all the wrong decisions.” Though it seems she can’t quite understand why her “education” is “apparently worthless in the current job market.” Presumably, she imagined a world in which degrees in “social justice” and doctrinaire bloviating would be irresistible bait for employers and the surest path to a glamorous career.

For some reason this quote by John Ellis springs to mind, on cultivated victimhood and the Angry Studies racket:

Just as Pinocchio went off to school with high hopes, only to be waylaid by J. Worthington Foulfellow, minority students are met on the way to campus by hard-left radicals who claim to have the interests of the newcomers at heart but in reality prey on them to advance their own selfish interests. Of course, what black students need is the same solid traditional education that had raised Irish, Italians, and Jews to full equality. But that would not serve the campus radicals’ purpose. Disaffected radicals wanted to swell the ranks of the disaffected, not the ranks of the cheerfully upward mobile. Genuine progress for minority students would mean their joining and thus strengthening the mainstream of American society – the mainstream that campus radicals loathe.

Ellis is talking about the manipulation and exploitation of minority students, but the same principle applies to the drama above and to any number of thin and tendentious degree courses, according to which almost any personal difficulty, however small or self-inflicted, can be construed as a validation of a leftist worldview. The victims of such hucksterism, the ones who really internalise it, typically imagine themselves as radical titans who are subverting this and that and speaking truth to power. They are in fact foodstuff.

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