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Preview is your friend. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes
Mission accomplished.
I don't think anyone on the Left was expecting the ferocity of the counter-attack. It's taken a couple of decades just to come to terms with the fact that it happened at all, never mind what to do about it.
I partly blame the academics and the intellectuals we've had for the last couple of decades. Instead of making Thatcherism and Reaganism look juvenile and ridiculous they've mostly been more interested in playing intellectual games like deconstruction, apparently with the delusional belief that this is somehow profoundly influential, rather than spectacularly irrelevant.
Which is why the Left has lost the universities. There's a bit of token claptrap Culture Theory on many media courses in the UK, but in terms of political influence - forgedaboutit.
Right wing faculty positions weren't common, except possibly in science and engineering, and there they were never talked about in class.
The London School of Economics used to be a bastion of the far left. That was partly because of radical student action towards the end of the sixties, but partly because the culture was already pre-existing from the 30s onwards, and being an intellectual meant you were almost certainly a communist or communist sympathiser.
From the start of the 90s MBA culture started to erode that, and now it's becoming formulaic and marginalised, and is being replaced with a much more small-minded and pinched entrepreneurial spirit.
This has done so much damage to universities that the current meme is - why bother? You'll get a better paid job more quickly with vocational experience.
Which is quite true. But there's no longer much sense of going to university to learn, or question, or challenge - it's strictly about finding yourself a shelf on the job market in the hope that someone rich and important notices you.
As you said, they thought fact contained the narrative...most accademics at that time would have failed to explain any story-telling coherently...
A pleasure I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude
they've mostly been more interested in playing intellectual games like deconstruction, apparently with the delusional belief that this is somehow profoundly influential, rather than spectacularly irrelevant.
and the right is going to seize advances in neuroscience for its narratives (We are greedy killing machines, therefore, we must legislate this and codify it culturally) while the left ignores what is happening by clinging to its obsolete century old theories.
you are the media you consume.
the number of false theories about how the brain works is astonishing... the number of DNA nonsense you can read in the major newspapers is amazing...
And there is noone out there fighting back..why brain plasticity suddenly dissappeared from major media? why the fact that DNA cannt code anything relevant int he brain because it doe snot ahve aenoug information never expained? because most of the scientists either beleive the interpretation crap or just do not know what it is hitting them.
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