The End of Emotional Intelligence

There is an old adage, “the worst thing about being stupid is that you don’t know you are stupid.” True enough, but emotional intelligence is even worse. If you lack self-awareness and emotional regulation, you are likely the last person that will recognize it. You will mistake outrage for wisdom, your fragility for virtue and your shouting for reason. And from there it gets worse. Because of your fragility and your sense of outrage, you will surround yourself either with people who think and act the same way you do, or people who will not challenge you in the least.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, I have described the modern university. Intellectuals so devoid of self-awareness and so filled with unwavering belief in the superiority of their intellect, that they rarely entertain even the remote possibility that they could be wrong. Students who suffer from a similar malady flock to them like a bee to honey, and they prop each other up in a scene of nauseating mutual masturbation. Survival in these kind of institutions is only possible through a number of limited options: having the same kind of malady, remaining silent to the extent possible, or being a duplicitous sychopant with the goal of gaining the diploma in order to escape the loony bin. In short, college these days has all of the warmth of being a member of Caligula’s inner circle.

It is probably pointless to try and understand precisely how this situation developed. Universities have been dedicated to the standard of mediocrity since they were founded. Even a brief perusal of the great thinkers and scientists of history makes it evident that most of the great achievements have been the result of being far, far away from the stifling environment of the university. Until recently, this was understood and assumed about the ivory tower. However, no more. The students that flock to universities suffer from widespread Stockholm Syndrome, and are far removed from the truly cynical college students who were at least wise enough to assume that most of what their professors were telling them was suspect.

Even more worrisome, is that the flawed model of the university has slithered out of the ivory tower and into our daily lives. Its corollary can be found in the corporate world, the law firm or in Silicon Valley. An emotionally infantile tyrant sits in the chair of the CEO, makes poor suggestions, gets paid an outrageous amount of money and surrounds himself or herself with like-minded robots who are only to happy to go along with these decisions. And it makes no difference whether the decision is one that is highly illegal. In fact, the SEC has made a cottage industry out of individuals who are among the only ones courageous enough to come forward, put their careers on the line and call out senior management for illegal activity.

But these corporate Caligula’s have done what they could to insulate themselves. The phenomenon we know as Human Resource Departments exist for the purpose of shielding Senior Management from its own bad decisions, or ferreting out potential “problem areas” for management under the guise of being a “resource” for employees. For fifty years, these professionals have played the role that Rasputin played to the Empress Alexandria, and have taken the opportunity to build an entire bogus mythology to justify their own existence. They have forced all sorts of meaningless make-work onto employees, justified its importance through pseudo-science, and are eagerly present solutions for non-existent problems. Their appearance in the corporate world has only created employee friction, factionalism and ill-will.

This monstrous corporate edifice has been erected in place of building true emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence, as popularized by Daniel Goleman in the 1990’s, is nothing new. It is an ancient practice, rooted in Aristotle’s phronesis and the Christian doctrine of self-mastery. These were considered absolutely essential building blocks of human flourishing. In today’s parlance, it means self awareness, self-regulation, empathy, social skills, and motivation. A simple way to put this is, “Don’t be a dickhead.”

But ever since the entrance of kooks like Marcuse into the American university—and the prevalence of his disciples on university faculties, these principles have been inverted. Being a dickhead is celebrated. Instead of teaching resilience and self mastery, colleges preach fragility and taking offense at the slightest infraction, knowing or unknowing. In fact, college programs today are basically a search for micro-aggressions. Instead of cultivating empathy and understanding, they promote tribal antagonism and empathy only within the appointed tribes. Instead or promoting dialogue, humility and a search for truth, they reward fanaticism bordering on totalitarian ideals, and encourage shunning, silencing and even violence.

Acting like this—something we used to call bullying—was something that was discouraged in the home, the church, the wider community and even in pre-school. Share your toys. Be nice to those who might not agree with you. Listen, don’t talk all the time. Don’t hit the kid next to you. Don’t act arrogant, and be kind to the student next to you, and maybe even help them with their assignment. Some of these things used to be chalked up to immaturity — and if people didn’t grow out of it, they were considered to be a “bad person.” Christianity preached against the sin of “pride” and trained people to control their passions—tantrums, violence, infidelity, all things that were once considered normal for living in a pleasant society. But in our age, universities encourage tantrums as truth. The person who shouts the loudest is entitled to “their truth.” The university is not a search for truth—and to an extent it was always a form of indoctrination. But, now it is a crowded bus station full of misbehaving brats, led by teenagers posing as faculty and administrators. It has more in common with Lord of The Flies than any serious endeavor. And since universities today reject the idea of truth altogether—except whatever happens to be the latest fad, for what reason do they even exist? They are chaotic day care centers led by incompetent and morally bankrupt charlatans.

This inversion’s intellectual roots can, in part, be traced to the Patron Saint of the Perpetually Offended, Herbert Marcuse. In his 1965 essay, “Repressive Tolerance,” he argued that true “tolerance” required intolerance toward opposing views. Amazingly, actual people claiming to be academics and intellectuals thought this was profound. We must remember that this was a time that the T.V. Show “Gidget” was considered to be watchable, and Tiny Tim was considered to be music. In Jazz, Cecil Taylor was considered to be “profound” when he banged on the piano, and John Cage’s “silence” was considered to be brilliant art. So in the 60’s a dog could have crapped on the rug and been considered Rembrandt.

Marcuse’s “student” Angela Davis extended this outrage to identity politics, arguing that outrage and disruption were not weaknesses but strengths. Her notoriety came from her Hollywood communism, and her involvement in a 1970 courthouse shootout — specifically the allegation that she supplied guns to a murderer, for which she was acquitted. She then became a heroine of the Left, but her scholarship was thin, bordering on silly and derivative. It was outrage, Frankfurt School dogma and slogans. In other words, she set the standard for the kind of shit we see in academia today, where the quality of your academic work is judged by the color of your hair and the size of your nose ring.

From here, narcissism became a system, college admissions were based upon proclaimed victimhood rather than merit, and college “research” was re-directed to finding or inventing offenses and micro-aggressions from which to express outrage. History was inverted, or even made up, as this new tantrum based ideology was projected backwards in time onto historical figures that would not have the slightest clue what someone like Marcuse was even talking about. Inconvenient historical facts were ignored, even if they forged gaping holes in the Neo-Marxist ideology. And the modern university remade itself into a fragility factory and temple of intolerance that would have even made Karl Marx throw up. In fact, if Marx saw that the kind of brutality that has been carried out in his name, he likely would have burned his books and taken a 9-5 job.

Well the so-called “graduates” of these institutions have to go somewhere, don’t they? I mean, they can’t stay in school forever, although many of them try. So they slithered out into government, law, teaching, and any kind of job with a fancy title where they wouldn’t have to work too hard and they could be around people “like them.” For those of us who love jazz, many of these geniuses went into jazz criticism and preached to clueless white people that the works of such “innovators” as Albert Ayler and Steve Lacy were “important.” We even had to listen to “jazz critics” tell us that the nonsense the John Coltrane was playing toward the end of his life, after he had fallen under the spell of the jazz Yoko Ono, Alice Coltrane, was something other than bombastic self-indulgence.

Now these people are everywhere. The credential factory of our “academic institutions” have produced hundreds of thousands of these automatons who wouldn’t even be able to properly behave in a day care center. Yet they are teaching in our schools, sitting in Congress wearing matching clothes in performative protest, while our cities get more violent, and our country goes into irreparable debt because they have broken into the American piggy bank for their pet projects and absconded with literally trillions in tax dollars. So far the climax of all of this is the self-righteous rants about how “speech is violence” justifying the murder or battery of basically anyone who you don’t like, agree with, or just happens to look at your the wrong way. It is worse than neandrathal behavior, because it is propped up with an elaborate theology and has been ingrained into our government and institutions.

We don’t need a lot of fancy language to come to the obvious conclusion that most of the academic, politics and corporate fucks who steal money from us are acting like dickheads. And it is increasingly becoming apparent where most of the problems are coming from: the American university and the media complex it created.

Unfortunately, for us to turn this around, it’s going to take the long game. It’s going to require disruption in the schedules of people who would prefer to be left alone. It’s going to take real parenting and real sacrifice across all levels of society. Like a garage in summer that is musty and covered with maggots, it’s not going to be fun job. But, we had better get going. So put your plans for the weekend aside, forget about watching your favorite TV shows during the week, and we all better figure out what we can do to help. Because the end of emotional intelligence, means the end of us. It’s time to teach the children how to behave again.