The Infantilization of College Students

When socialism finally collapsed all around the world in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s the academic Marxists did not just throw in the towel and face reality.  Indeed, not one of them has ever apologized for providing intellectual support for some of the worst mass murderers in world history – Stalin, Mao, Castro, and the rest of the communist/socialist gangsters.  Instead, they reinvented themselves in several different ways, including posing as “environmentalists,” and as “cultural Marxists.”

Taking their cue from socialist economist Robert Heilbroner in a September 10, 1990 New Yorker article entitled “After Communism,” many Marxists began promoting socialist central planning of the economy and of society as a whole (a.k.a. totalitarianism) in the name of “saving the planet” from capitalism.  The old Marxism was sold in the name of “the people”; the new Marxism said “to hell with people, we’re for the ants, the lizards, snakes, rocks, trees, etc. – Mother Earth.  People Schmeople.  Hence the “watermelons” were born:  green on the outside, red on the inside.

When Rand Paul first ran for the U.S. Senate the SPLC issued a “report” on “dangerous characters” running for state and local political office.  Next to a photo of a genuinely crazy-looking neo-Nazi from the mountains of Idaho was, naturally, a photo of Rand Paul.  When a group of military, police, and firefighters pledged their devotion to the U.S. Constitution by creating the group, Oathkeepers, the SPLC also branded them as a “hate group.”  And when Ron Paul was running for president the SPLC talked the Department of Homeland Security into issuing a public warning that people with “Ron Paul for President” bumper stickers were potential “terrorist threats.”

The heavy-handed, totalitarian censorship that now exists on most American college campuses is so ingrained that comedians Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld no longer perform on college campuses.  Too many students have been turned into dour, humorless, left-wing cultural Marxist scolds in the image of their professors and university administrators.   One thoroughly-brainwashed twenty-year-old even wrote a letter to Seinfeld, whose comedy television show was the most successful in all of television history, on the “proper” way to perform a comedy routine.

In his famous book, The Road to Serfdom, F.A. Hayek presciently described the effects of this kind of censorship under totalitarianism in a chapter (11) entitled “The End of Truth.”  Such propaganda in a totalitarian society is “destructive of all morals,” wrote Hayek, because “it undermines one of the foundations of all morals; the sense of and the respect for the truth” (emphasis added).  Moreover, “in the disciplines dealing directly with human affairs and therefore most immediately affecting political views, such as history, law, or economics, the disinterested search for truth cannot be allowed in a totalitarian system . . . .  These disciplines have . . . in all totalitarian countries become the most fertile factories for the official myths which the rulers use to guide the minds and wills of their subjects.”  This of course is what cultural Marxism and political correctness are all about:  spreading Official Myths to promote a totalitarian, socialist society.

“The word truth itself ceases to have its old meaning” in such a society, wrote Hayek, for “It describes no longer something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence warrants a belief; it becomes something to be laid down by authority. . .” and “intolerance is openly extolled.”  Herbert Marcuse could not have said it better.

This article is based on a speech delivered at the Mises Circle in Ft. Worth on October 3, 2015.