“There are people—a non-trivial number of people—who teach in the academy, many of whom have tenure, who have obtained their credentials fraudulently. They have lied, they have cheated on their PhD, and that is an extraordinarily serious problem on multiple levels.”
As professor of philosophy at Portland State University, Peter Boghossian was known for challenging orthodoxies. Today, he uses his distinct “Street Epistemology” method to teach communication and critical thinking.
“There is something about giving people the tools to ask really good questions. But not only are we not giving them the tools so they don’t have the questions, but they’re force-fed one answer, and particularly to moral questions. And the consequence of that is it becomes an ideology mill, where the goal is to replicate the dominant ideology—whatever is morally fashionable,” says Professor Boghossian.
He is known for his role in the Grievance Studies Affair, where he co-authored a series of intentionally fraudulent papers that were published in well-known academic journals, exposing the corruption of scholarship in a number of disciplines belonging to the humanities.
Watch the clip:
“My guess to you is, you’re looking at 7-to-9 percent of dissertations in the humanities that are plagiarized. If I’m wrong, it’s not because there are fewer, it’s because there are far, far more,” says Professor Boghossian. “We have endemic corruption in our academic institutions. The only other question is what to do about it?”
🔴 WATCH the full episode (49 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0217PeterBoghossian
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Peter Boghossian, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Peter Boghossian: I’m delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.
Mr. Jekielek: You’ve been talking a lot about academic corruption. Plagiarism wars is the term that you’ve been using.
Mr. Boghossian: Right.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s start with plagiarism because this issue is now being described as a weapon that will be used by the Right to attack the establishment. Please tell us about this. You’re laughing.
Mr. Boghossian: I’m laughing because, first of all, if you didn’t plagiarize, you would have nothing to worry about. For the record, I had my dissertation checked and it’s clean. The idea is that this is somehow a vast Right-wing conspiracy to weed out people. To weed out who? People who have obtained their credentials fraudulently?
Would it matter if it was any kind of conspiracy? There are a nontrivial number of people who teach in the academy, many of whom have tenure, who have obtained their credentials fraudulently. They have lied, and they have cheated on their PhDs. That is an extraordinarily serious problem on multiple levels.
Mr. Jekielek: That makes perfect sense to me, but it doesn’t seem that people are treating it as seriously as you and I would.
Mr. Boghossian: That’s because they don’t understand the depth and the severity of the problem. Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard, who is paid $900,000 a year, got caught for plagiarism in an egregious way. She kept her job at $900,000 a year. She is no longer president, but she kept the $900,000 a year post at Harvard University. That is shocking.
Mr. Jekielek: There are other criteria that are more important to these university administrations, correct?
Mr. Boghossian: Yes. It’s assumed when you have a PhD that you went through a rigorous process to obtain it, and you did not commit fraud to obtain that credential. If you committed fraud to obtain that credential, then we can have a conversation about what should happen. It’s a little bit off-topic, but should you lose your PhD?
At a minimum, you should lose any academic appointment that you have. I think that’s at a minimum. Harvard is, arguably, the most elite university in the world. It is most definitely one of the top five universities in the world, and you have somebody who has obtained their degree fraudulently still in a position of authority there.
Mr. Jekielek: You’re suggesting that it undermines the whole system, but the whole system is already undermined.
Mr. Boghossian: You’re right. It further undermines and delegitimizes a system that’s already not legitimate. Don’t hire college graduates, especially from the elite Ivies.
Mr. Jekielek: In the woke worldview, everything is politics and everything is a power play. The means of getting there seem to be discretionary. You can easily imagine how this situation came about.
Mr. Boghossian: Yes. The first thing you said caused me to laugh, that this is a Right-wing conspiracy. Can you imagine saying that we need to keep people who have obtained their credentials dishonestly, who have cheated, lied, and committed fraud, that we need to retain those people in service to some other ideology? That, in and of itself, should completely delegitimize the whole institution.
Mr. Jekielek: My viewpoint was developed through many interviews, including some with you in the past.
Mr. Boghossian: Thank you.
Mr. Jekielek: Okay. For decades now, in the academy, in industry, and in government, there has been a selection process for allowing people that demonstrate wokeism to gain positions of merit and positions of power. There are a disproportionate number of these people.
Mr. Boghossian: They are not gaining positions of merit. They are gaining positions of authority, not merit.
Mr. Jekielek: Positions of authority, okay. That’s right. I would expect there is a lot of this cheating going on.
Mr. Boghossian: That’s the million-dollar question, “What percentage of dissertations in the humanities have been plagiarized? I don’t know and I can only guess. What percentage of dissertations in certain fields are plagiarized? The detection tool that we have now is called Turnitin, but it produces too many false positives and false negatives. There are other tools now being developed to analyze plagiarism.
Very soon, within eight months is the best prediction, we’re going to know in mass how many people have committed fraud. My guess is that 7 to 9 percent of dissertations in the humanities are plagiarized. If I’m wrong, it’s not because there are fewer. It is because there are far, far more, and the 7 to 9 percent is just a very conservative estimate.
My next educated guess is that it would be in fields with the word studies in them, like gender studies, grievance studies, black studies, Chicano studies, and indigenous studies. But again, that’s a guess, but that’s my prediction.
Something gets lost in this conversation when someone says, “Maybe it wasn’t intentional or there was a mistake.” People who would say that tend to be younger, and the reason they would say that is because they’re always working on screens and moving text around. But with plagiarism, you’re actually taking a book and copying from the book onto the computer. That’s not merely copying and pasting text. There is a level of intentionality with that.
When I give the figure of 7 to 9 percent, that could be independently adjudicated. We could bring someone in and they might say, “Wow, that is a clear instance of plagiarism, like with Claudine Gay.” It would not be like Harvard saying, “It’s duplicative language.” It is not. It is plagiarism, and it’s cheating. She cheated.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about the Grievance Studies Affair where you and two others submitted these fake papers to these various study journals. Then you cracked the code of how they could get published.
Mr. Boghossian: Right.
Mr. Jekielek: You were able to figure out that there was a code, and that these aren’t actually genuine areas of scholarship in the first place.
Mr. Boghossian: They are all fraudulent, and I’m really glad you said that, because that is also lost in the discussion. I’m going to use the figure of 10 percent. It’s not that just 10 percent of the people have cheated to obtain their credentials. It’s that there are entire lines of literature that are fraudulent, so that’s a deeper level of fraud.
Then there’s another level of fraud that we haven’t talked about where the universities are protecting people by making it more difficult to find those dissertations, and pulling people’s names off of DEI [Diversity, Equity & Inclusion] websites. Do I know that’s because they don’t want them to be searched? I have no idea, but it’s certainly a rather remarkable coincidence that has happened since the Claudine Gay scandal. I don’t know that, and I can’t prove that, but causally, it’s extraordinarily suspicious. The institution wanting to protect people who have committed fraud is yet another level of fraud. That’s like another story.
One; you have plagiarism, two; entire bodies of literature that are corrupt, and three; institutions that protect people who have cheated. There is no politic or polite way to say it, nor should there be. There are other things that we can talk about, like citation cartels, but those are the three areas of corruption in the academy.
Mr. Jekielek: To me, there’s a fourth area, which is that in many universities, the number of administrators has grown beyond the faculty. It’s not clear what they actually administrate. However, they are very dedicated to maintaining the ideological structure that exists.
Mr. Boghossian: That is correct.
Mr. Jekielek: It might not be the academics that are doing this. It might be the administrators who have built an empire, and they want to keep this empire.
Mr. Boghossian: That is absolutely correct, it is the administrative staff and the DEI boards. The DEI board is the engine and the weaponization of the ideological capture, so that’s true. There are layers and layers of corruption. I’ve been screaming about this since 2015. I took action in 2017, and initiated the Grievance Studies Affair in 2018. Everyone thought we were crazy people.
The problem with the Grievance Studies stuff is that it was too early. If we had done that later, it would have had far greater of an impact. But the fact of the matter remains, we have endemic corruption in our academic institutions. The only other question is what to do about it?
Mr. Jekielek: I would say that for some of us the Grievance Studies Affair was very valuable.
Mr. Boghossian: Thank you, I appreciate that. Chris Rufo and other people have told me that it changed their lives regarding their trust in the institutions and the institutions’ ability to discharge its original mission. That original mission has actually been changed as a consequence of this ideological capture or takeover. I don’t think people can quite grasp the severity of this—50 percent of the papers in psychology cannot be replicated. It’s called a replication crisis.
You have clinicians going into clinical settings flipping a coin on whether or not what they have learned is effective. We have to have a source of trust. We have to have a gold standard for something we can trust, and we don’t have it now. We don’t have legacy media, we don’t have legacy institutions, we don’t have the ACLU, and we don’t have Scientific American. All of that is gone.
We have to have something we can trust, but we don’t. Ultimately, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We have brought this situation upon ourselves. We could have done innumerable things to stop this, and one simple thing would be viewpoint diversity. As Thomas Sowell says, “I will believe that you believe in diversity when you put a Republican in the Sociology department.”
Mr. Jekielek: Yes, that’s funny.
Mr. Boghossian: We all know the absurdity of the situation, and I don’t say that as a Republican or a Conservative. I say that echoing themes of Western intellectual thought, you need people who have strong beliefs. John Stuart Mill has talked about this. For example, I used to teach atheism at Portland State University, and I always had people come in to argue the other side of it.
I had Phil Vischer from VeggieTales. I had Phil Smith from a conservative Christian university, who had the philosophy department come in and talk. I had people come in talking about aliens. I taught a science and a pseudoscience class. I had Nick Pope come in. I had a guy, Mark Sargent, who believes the Earth is flat.
There is something about giving people the tools to ask really good questions. But not only are we not giving them the tools to ask the questions, but they are force-fed one answer, particularly to moral questions. The consequence is that it becomes an ideology mill, where the goal is to replicate the dominant ideology and whatever is morally fashionable. This is a wholesale ideological capture of our institutions. It’s remarkable.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s go back to the cost of plagiarism, because in the end, most people aren’t in the academy. You’ve used the example of a fire department before. Could you reprise that for us? It was very apt and makes you think about it differently.
Mr. Boghossian: Sure. You’re right, most people aren’t professors of philosophy or of anything else for that matter. When you mention plagiarism they say, “Okay, it’s cheating, but so what? Why should anybody care about that?” Okay, think about it in terms of the fire department. Imagine you are the superintendent of the fire department.
You find out that 10 percent of the people who are currently in the fire department have cheated on their fireman’s exam. You have to assume there’s some lawful relationship between passing a fireman’s exam and the ability to put out a fire. If there’s not, then there’s literally no point in the fireman’s exam. It’s completely pointless.
Passing the fireman’s exam qualifies you to be more likely to put out fires than the people who did not pass the fireman’s exam. That is an eminently reasonable assumption. If not, then we should systematically think about what’s on the fireman’s exam.
Instead of thinking about plagiarism and cheating in the academy, think about it like cheating on the fireman’s exam. You are the superintendent of the fire department, you find out that a non-trivial number of people have cheated on the fireman’s exam. What should you do?
Mr. Jekielek: I would get them to take the exam again and see if they can pass it.
Mr. Boghossian: Okay. What would you do in terms of facing the public? Would you issue a statement? What would you do publicly?
Mr. Jekielek: I would say, “Something unfortunate has happened and we need some accountability. We’re going to solve this problem and make sure that we always run these tests properly in the future. Meanwhile, with these firemen, we’re going to run them through again, because it’s important to keep the fire department active.”
Mr. Boghossian: Because we want to put out fires.
Mr. Jekielek: Correct. That’s the underlying assumption.
Mr. Boghossian: Correct. It serves the public good. The first order of business is that you have to set up accountability. In public institutions we have to hold people accountable to discharge the mission of the public institution, or else the whole city would be on fire. We wouldn’t be able to put out any fires.
The second thing is, we have to be transparent as public institutions if there is a scandal and a certain percentage of people have cheated. The way to regain trust in the fire department is not to hope that it won’t be picked up by the New York Times or Substack. The way to regain legitimacy and trust in institutions is to be honest with people. You say, “There’s a problem here and we’re going to root it out.”
I personally wouldn’t use this solution, but that’s fine. You say, “We don’t know exactly who it is, but we’re going to retest everybody. If you fail the fireman’s exam, you’re not going to be a fireman. We want to assure the citizens that the fire department is perfectly situated to do what is in the interest of the public good. We were perfectly situated to discharge our primary mission, which is to put out fires. Currently, we cannot do that because people have obtained their credentials fraudulently.”
If you did that, yes, people would be upset, but that’s the mature, responsible way to do this in a democratic society. That is how institutions should function. It is not, “We’re going to hide the results of the exam, so no one can find these people. We’re going to keep this guy on at an extreme salary.”
As an example, for Claudine Gay, when they did an internal investigation of whether or not she plagiarized, she was found innocent. You’re not going to go to nepotism and cronyism and just say, “We’ve conducted this investigation. It was a terrible thing that happened.” In other words, you’re not going to lie. You’re going to be completely transparent with the public.
If you think about it in terms of a fire department, it becomes much more clear what you need to do to earn back the public trust. This is not particularly complicated. Someone cheated, and you need to fix the problem of their cheating. Fixing the problem of cheating doesn’t mean keeping the person who cheated in their position. That is insane.
If you wouldn’t do that for fire departments, why would you do it for anything else? Of course, you would root out corruption. It’s called a Right-wing conspiracy, because you want to root out corruption for people who teach at elite universities and who have obtained the degrees fraudulently. You want to root that out and put a stop to it, and you are called a Right-wing maniac?
You are in some kind of cabal, because you want to expose cheating at top universities? Are you kidding me? Anyone who would make that argument is so morally compromised and damaged that they should immediately be held suspect on any position that they offer.
Mr. Jekielek: You’re thinking about the plagiarism scandal. You did mention there being a lack of replicability in various scientific studies. It’s not just in psychology, it’s also in biology and all over the place.
Mr. Boghossian: 50 percent lack of replicability, correct.
Mr. Jekielek: John Ioannidis has a whole paper documenting that in detail. But this is how our health agencies have been behaving. We’re here at this FLCCC [Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance] Conference together. I was wondering if you could possibly be introduced as, “Peter Boghossian, unexpected guest.”
Mr. Boghossian: I don’t have any medical credentials and I never talk about Covid. I don’t pretend to know things that I don’t know. No one should come to me for their Covid advice.
Mr. Jekielek: But it makes perfect sense that you’re here now, because we have been talking about transparency and rooting out corruption. We’re talking about things which are applicable to the whole topic of this conference.
Mr. Boghossian: Totally applicable. It serves everybody’s interest to root out corruption. Here’s one way to think about it. You use the word woke. I love the word woke, but some people have a problem with it. You can call it critical social justice, if people don’t like the word woke. It is a universal solvent that destroys everything it touches. The moment it gets in, it destroys everything.
United Airlines has announced that it will seek more diversity with its pilots. That means people of a very specific race, usually African Americans and sometimes Native Americans. If I lived in a sane world, I would not have to ask you this question, but we do not live in a sane world. I am asking, “What factors, other than merit, should go into the selection of a pilot?” The answer is none, literally zero. Because every time you include some exogenous factor, then by definition, you are decreasing the meritocratic requirements to successfully complete the objective, which is to land the plane safely.
By the way, you can also think about corruption, fraud, and cheating in terms of the pilot’s exam. You would be in the same situation if you were the head of Southwest Airlines and you found out that a certain percentage of your pilots cheated on their exams or lied about how many flight hours they had in the air. Corruption is only in the interest of people who are corrupt.
Mr. Jekielek: Are we in the plagiarism wars yet?
Mr. Boghossian: We are in the beginning of the plagiarism wars. I predict that 7 to 9 percent of papers in the humanities are plagiarized. I predict that in a very short period of time, I'd say eight months is my best guess, if you have a PhD, you will need to have evidence or proof that it has not been plagiarized, but that’s pretty easy to get.
It’s not particularly complicated to get. I also predict that if my prediction is incorrect about the number of people, it’s not fewer than 7 to 9 percent, it’s significantly more than 7 to 9 percent. Again, I’m talking about cases of black and white plagiarism.
I also predict that you’re going to find things in the STEM fields. Harvard has been recently targeted for data fraud, along with top scientists at cancer institutes. You’re going to see more and more of this stuff become mainstream. The consequence of that is there will be a further loss of legitimacy in our institutions. Fewer and fewer people are going to trust the institutions, and why should they? They are filled with liars and cheats. There are whole disciplines that have gone off the rails. Those disciplines once forwarded moral conclusions.
Mr. Jekielek: Yes, exactly. Many people have been using ChatGPT and similar AI models. There was an example of someone submitting a legal brief that was written by ChatGPT that contained made-up references, so that’s how they got found out. This is a whole new realm where the integrity of our work means a lot less, and any means can be used to get the credentials.
Mr. Boghossian: Yes, the legitimacy of the credentialing mechanism itself is undermined. I want to speak to the ChatGPT thing, because that really bothers me. What bothers me is not in the context of this conversation, that it’s bad for institutions or corruption. It’s that it prevents you from learning how to write well. The invention of the calculator did the same thing, it prevented people from quickly adding numbers in their head.
You could use ChatGPT for whatever you want, but don’t use it to write. But that’s another thing—various AIs are going to make it more difficult to root out cheating. The problem is that there’s such an ideological movement in those universities that many of those decisions would not be made honestly, and would not be made sincerely. They would be made on ideological grounds. They would use those as a kind of witch hunt for one’s ideological enemies.
Mr. Jekielek: This is the argument that is being made by people who are backing Claudine Gay, because I’ve seen those discussions happening online. They are saying, “This is just the Right attacking its ideological enemies.” You’ve spoken to this already, but that assertion is that everything is just politics.
Mr. Boghossian: Yes, two things on that. First of all, the Left overwhelmingly dominates the academic institutions. Greg Lukianoff at FIRE [Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression] has done great work on that and categorized this situation by discipline. Some disciplines are well over 95 percent Left-leaning. There may actually be more conservatives, but there are very few people who are willing to admit they are conservative. If the situation were reversed and the Right controlled the academic institutions, I guarantee you the same criticisms would be there, “This is a Left-wing witch hunt. They’re just out to do this ideologically.”
Mr. Jekielek: It occurs to me that using AI to write a dissertation would be like hiring someone to do it for you. It would be similar, correct?
Mr. Boghossian: There are PhDs in India who do this. You can go to a paper mill and pull a paper, but that’s easy to find. The last time I looked you could spend $3 or more a page. It’s not a lot of money, and you can have a PhD. They’re usually in India where they custom write your papers for you, and people have done that for fun. There’s literally nothing you can do about this. Pedagogically, you could change it by requiring in-class exams, so that would change things.
Mr. Jekielek: But you have to defend your PhD.
Mr. Boghossian: Defending it would be less of a problem than writing it, just doing the required data collection and the literature review.
Mr. Jekielek: We need a morality that enshrines meritocracy, because we’re not there anymore.
Mr. Boghossian: No, we’re not and it came in sheep’s clothing. It came under the guise of equity. By definition, equity is the enemy of meritocracy. You can just look at the acceptance rates at Harvard, since we have been talking about Harvard. If you drew from the top 10 percent of Harvard applicants, over 51 percent would be Asians, cold-climate Asians. Whites would drop a little bit, Hispanics would plummet, and African-Americans would go from 13 percent to 0.9 percent.
That’s a whole separate conversation from the questions there. What really is the problem if half the graduating class is Asian? What role should racial diversity play? Should racial diversity apply to extremely wealthy African-Americans, or should it apply to poor white people? Who does it apply to?
Those are questions worth considering, but we’re nowhere near having that conversation. If we can’t even kick out people who have blatantly cheated, how on earth are we going to have that conversation?
Mr. Jekielek: Right. If you are concerned that certain demographics are not doing well enough, or are not represented well enough, how do you actually help them to do better?
Mr. Boghossian: It’s a very complicated system. Many African-Americans are in school systems that are failing and are poor because of the tax code that they’re in. How do we assure them a public education of the first-rate while maintaining a meritocratic environment across all K-12 systems?
Mr. Jekielek: James Lindsay has co-written a book, The Queering of the American Child.
Mr. Boghossian: Yes, he just asked me to blurb that.
Mr. Jekielek: There are a lot of answers to this question in that book.
Mr. Boghossian: Queering is not gay. Queering is just looking at something with a particular lens that makes what was once not normative look normative. Yes, there are answers in that book. The perennial question is, “Are the people who need it the most going to read it?”
Mr. Jekielek: Yes, I had the same thought. The book makes the case that the purpose of education has been subverted.
Mr. Boghossian: Yeah. The purpose of education now is to give people a critical consciousness to remediate oppression, as opposed to giving them critical thinking skills, or teaching them how to be less wrong more often, or teaching them how to participate in civic life, or teaching them how to be entrepreneurs, or teaching them other character values, although that’s little tricky in and of itself. It’s to develop a critical consciousness. For example, we all know that racism has occurred. It’s the ordinary, everyday state of affairs. How did it occur? It’s from the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire.
Mr. Jekielek: In this interview, we might get very depressed. The same things we’ve been talking about today now apply to medical schools and this new generation of doctors.
Mr. Boghossian: They didn’t get in through merit, they got in through some other characteristic. It is the same with pilots.
Mr. Jekielek: They have also been taught that being a good doctor is not the key reason you’re there.
Mr. Boghossian: Correct, now the key reason is health equity.
Mr. Jekielek: Right, that’s another example. We’ve talked about firefighters and pilots. Doctors take this to a whole new level.
Mr. Boghossian: We live in a democracy, and we’ve done this to ourselves, so we’re getting what we deserve. If you don’t like it, speak up and change it. Don’t be a coward. Be forthright in your speech and physically attend meetings. Don’t be held hostage by a small number of people.
The last time I looked, around 8 percent of the people are actually true believers of this ideology. But they’re hyper-vocal, almost universally under-accomplished, online constantly, threatening people, and hurling epitaphs like Nazi and grifter. Enough people have capitulated to that to give this group a voice in society. You get what you deserve. If you don’t like it, fight back about it.
Mr. Jekielek: The first time we interviewed, we talked about one of my favorite books of the last several years, How to Have Impossible Conversations.
Mr. Boghossian: Thank you. That’s very kind.
Mr. Jekielek: You wrote it with James Lindsay, and it’s a very valuable book. It becomes more valuable as we continue on with all this. You have a lot of great ideas about how to talk to people that are not on the same page. We might have fear, or we might be unaware. It might be that we are just distracted.
Mr. Boghossian: I'll suggest a different question, “How do we listen to people?” You listen to people by asking questions, repeating back what they said to you, making sure that you understand it, then trying to figure it out and honestly reason with them. That’s street epistemology. That’s what we go around the world doing with my nonprofit, the Natural Progress Alliance.
We go around the world and ask people, “Is the confidence you have in a belief justified by the evidence you have for that belief?” The only way you can reach any conclusions is to listen to people and understand where they’re coming from.
We need more listening. Again, social media is a problem. I don’t know if we use the term anymore, but there are loudmouths. We have a lot of people who exert a disproportionate influence on certain public spaces. As a general rule, it takes a different skill set to deal with those particular people.
We’re talking about the people in the center. We’re talking about people who are afraid. We’re talking about people who know what a woman is, but are terrified to say it. We’re talking about reaching people in the center. Reaching people on the fringes on this axis of Left or Right is a different skill set, but it always still starts with listening.
Mr. Jekielek: There was a question for Justice Jackson in her Senate confirmation hearing, “Please define what a woman is.” She said, ”I’m not a biologist.”
Senator Marsha Blackburn: Can you provide a definition for the word, woman?
Judge Ketanji Jackson: Can I provide a definition?
Senator Blackburn: Yes.
Judge Jackson: No, I can’t.
Senator Blackburn: You can’t?
Judge Jackson: Not in this context, I’m not a biologist.
Senator Blackburn: Okay. So, you believe the meaning of the word...
Mr. Jekielek: There is a deference to expertise. I’ve encountered this in numerous situations, like with people avoiding responsibility for the Covid decisions they had made. It’s a kind of deference, but maybe it’s convenient to do so with authority. Have you noticed that or thought about it?
Mr. Boghossian: Yes, quite a bit. We need experts in society. We have to have experts, But whether they occupy a position of authority or position in an institution, they have to actually have earned those positions through meritocracy, so that they actually are experts.
The idea that we should demean expertise entirely is just total nonsense. The question is, “How do we create systems that guarantee that the people who are credentialed are actually experts?” That’s the real question. To do that, you cannot have any value coming into the system other than merit. Period.
Here’s a little philosophical tidbit for you. The closer an activity is to reality, the more expertise is demonstrable. That would be playing a musical instrument, speaking a foreign language, doing jiu-jitsu…
Mr. Jekielek: You can’t fake it.
Mr. Boghossian: Yes, that’s exactly what I was going to say. You can’t fake it. Activities like gender studies, you can fake. Using plagiarism, you can fake something. You can just plagiarize. Activities that align with reality and have corrective mechanisms within them cannot be faked.
Of course, I can give him a black belt on his waist, and we can throw him in a jiu-jitsu studio, and you will see what will happen to him in literally 10 seconds. You cannot fake genuine expertise, and there is such a thing as expertise. We need experts. It comes down to creating institutions that we trust, so that when they do produce experts, they actually are experts.
Mr. Jekielek: Kevin Bass is an individual who has been studying for his PhD and has been in jeopardy for doing a lot of truth-telling online. Recently, he looked at different professions, both white-collar and blue-collar professions, and what the political orientation of those people in those professions was. The fascinating thing is that the white-collar professions all went hard Left and the blue-collar professions had reasonable distribution.
Mr. Boghossian: In general, the more applied something is, the more conservative the person—within any field you can think of, like applied epistemology and philosophy, for example. More conservative people, not only politically, but dispositionally as well, tend to go into more applied fields, and more applied sub-disciplines within their field.
Mr. Jekielek: I hadn’t heard that hypothesis before, but my observation is that there’s a war on the working class and the middle class as a whole.
Mr. Boghossian: That’s where you’re going with it, okay.
Mr. Jekielek: If the Left has captured the elites, according to your hypothesis, it would make sense that people on the Right would be more targeted.
Mr. Boghossian: Yes, I think so. I also think we have created a managerial class. I resisted talking about this for a long time, but I really am starting to come around to the idea of a managerial class within our institutions that thinks that they know what is best. They think that their interests are the best.
The overwhelming majority of these people are sincere, and they actually do think that they know what is best. They’re not acting for nefarious purposes to hurt people. But it’s creating an incredibly dangerous situation where they’re taking over the colleges of education and certifying the teachers who teach kids in K-12. These are all more or less a managerial class.
Mr. Jekielek: Why is this so dangerous?
Mr. Boghossian: It’s dangerous because the interests of the managerial class are not necessarily the interests of everyday people, not even working class people. Just because a group of people has a certain value, that doesn’t mean that everybody else should adopt that value, and if they don’t adopt that value, they are immoral. But when you control the institutions, you can certify the teachers who teach people, so that you can replicate that ideology. They’re using the institutions as a way to replicate the ideology.
Mr. Jekielek: You didn’t believe that these people existed before?
Mr. Boghossian: It’s not that I didn’t believe that they existed, but I didn’t believe that they exerted the radically disproportionate degree of influence that I now think they do. Look at Brexit as an example. Virtually none of the elites thought it would pass, and it was passed overwhelmingly. The managerial class is just the best way to describe this, and it is somewhat different from the elite class.
Mr. Jekielek: We can actually have good conversations, and I’m going to recommend your book again. I’ve recommended it many times, because I have certainly learned a lot from it.
Mr. Boghossian: Thank you very much.
Mr. Jekielek: We talked about institutional reform. At this conference, we’ve talked a lot about parallel institutions, and I see FLCCC as a parallel health system.
Mr. Boghossian: That’s a big thing we haven’t talked about, but we probably should. What does it mean to create a parallel system and a parallel architecture to the existing system? It’s not just that you’re creating a new university. How do we create accrediting bodies that decide which universities become accredited? You’re literally talking about building entirely new systems.
There are two things to look at. First, you need to build new things, which I’m in favor of. Full disclosure; I’m a founding faculty fellow for the University of Austin. You could do nothing to the existing academic infrastructure, and let come what may, or you actually attempt to move people, students in particular, from college to vocational schools, or to the new institutions that are being founded.
But I’m not a Pollyanna about this. To be sure, these institutions are going to take time. We’ve talked about peer-reviewed literature, making new bodies of literature. Peter Singer, the Australian ethicist, is trying to do that now with the Journal of Controversial Ideas. People are trying to do new things, but these are slow, expensive, and in some cases can take decades. What do we do in the meantime when we have people in legacy institutions teaching kids that sex is assigned at birth or that you can change your sex?
Have you ever spoken to young people? I was giving a talk fairly recently, and there was a young person there. I don’t usually pick young people, but I asked her mother if I could ask her a question. I started listening to questions in which she used the phrase “assigned at birth,” and many of the ideas from queer theory.
Queer theory states that there is no natural order of things. You can queer the fact that you have certain genitalia and make it agree with your preferred description. If you’re assigned sex at birth, then that’s an arbitrary relationship. Actually, this is capricious and you might as well just assign somebody something else.
We’re now in a state in which people are going to these institutions and they’re learning things that are just completely false. They’re going into teacher training programs, and then they’re instructing new teachers to teach kids things that are completely false.
Sex is not assigned, that’s just completely false. You cannot change your sex. We can have a reasonable conversation about whether gender is performed and if you can change your gender. I personally think you can, if you buy into the idea of gender, but you can’t change your sex. That is total nonsense. That’s just one example, and we now have kids thinking this is true. Ultimately, they grow up and then they influence public policy. They get into positions of authority.
Mr. Jekielek: It’s a kind of nihilism.
Mr. Boghossian: Yes. That’s because we think about the people tearing down statues and subverting the democratic process. Small groups of thugs are doing just that and taking the law into their own hands. A great example of this is Mayor Ted Wheeler in the city of Portland, Oregon. Rene Gonzalez, the city commissioner, had his car firebombed outside of his house by Antifa.
Not turning into a banana republic would be job number one of anybody in authority. Rene Gonzalez is an inveterate Leftist. It’s not like he’s some far-Right guy. But when you are an actual communist, someone that is just a hardcore democrat like Rene Gonzalez looks like they’re on the Right. That’s Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker’s Left-pole thing.
We have to speak up. We have to maintain a kind of vigilance on the structures and the systems that we have created. These are tenuous things. You don’t just build this ex nihilo, out of nothing. This has come to us and people have literally died to give us this system. My grandfathers were in the war. If you think that you can be callous with this inheritance of Western civilization, you are in for a very rude awakening.
Most of all, the thing that you can do is to not be a coward. You can speak up. When you do speak up, one of the things you realize is that people will respect you more, not less, because you have been forthright in your speech and you have spoken up. But the key to that is having the disposition to change your mind.
If someone presents you with evidence about Covid, or experts, or pilots, or firemen, or plagiarism, you have to say, “Okay. I thought this before. Now, I’ve looked at the evidence, and I’ve changed my mind.” You have to be open to changing your mind, but the key there is to not be a coward. It’s a simple prescription.
Mr. Jekielek: You can internalize that.
Mr. Boghossian: Be honest in your speech, and be forthright in your speech. But make sure, before you do anything that you listen and understand what somebody is actually claiming, as opposed to what you think that they’re claiming. The other thing is that very few people physically go to meetings. People don’t show up for meetings.
When you go to these meetings, there is a very small number of hyper far-left activists at these meetings. It appears as if their voices have a disproportionate weight. I’m not even talking about if you’re on the Right, from the center, or on the Left. If you want to have a better world and you want to have a better society, you have to show up at board meetings.
You have to show up for your kids at school. You have to just show up to these things, and that alone will help move the needle. Educate yourself, and speak openly and honestly. This is not complicated. These are time immemorial prescriptions for dealing with any kind of lunacy or mass psychosis.
Mr. Jekielek: Find some courage and participate. Peter Boghossian, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Boghossian: Thank you, I appreciate it. Can I say one more thing?
Mr. Jekielek: Absolutely.
Mr. Boghossian: If the fear is that you'll lose your friends as a result of speaking honestly with them about something, you’re probably right. But why would you want someone as a friend if you can’t speak openly and honestly with them? Once you start having what Aristotle calls virtue friendships, where you’re actually honest with people, you will have more fulfillment and satisfaction in your life than anything else you could do.
The best thing you can do for your whole life is to be a person of virtue and have friendships with people of virtue. The only way you can have those friendships is if you’re honest about what you say. We’re living in a society right now where the cultural climate is preventing people from speaking openly and honestly.
Mr. Jekielek: That is great advice.
Mr. Boghossian: Thanks.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Peter Boghossian and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
🔴 WATCH the full episode (49 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0217PeterBoghossian
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