Truth vs. Today

There is very little profit to be made from the truth, whereas there is tremendous profit to be made from lies. The reason is simple: People pay for what they think they need, and most people feel an overwhelming need for comfort and reassurance, which are precisely what all effective lies (and liars) are offering. Truth, by contrast, neither cares what will make you comfortable, nor caters to what you wish to be reassured about. In short, truth provides comfort only by accident, and primarily to those rare few who find comfort in reality, whereas lies provide comfort by their very design and essential purpose.

The justifying purpose of the university in a modern society is to show the young person radical alternatives to the way of life urged by everything around him in the present. The purpose of today’s university, by contrast, is to reinforce and deepen today’s limited horizons and emotional biases within the student’s soul as the only viable options, by debunking the past, or at best reducing it to nothing but an immature and faltering precursor of the present. The intended and real effect of the university of the past was to fit the young adult with the intellectual armor one needs to defend oneself against the incessant assaults on reason and independent thought engendered by so-called majority rule, which is to say by mass manipulation. The intended and real effect of the university of today is to fit the young intellect for the shackles of fashionable certainties, which permanently prevent him from wandering outside the prescribed boundaries of thought and feeling demanded by the high priests of current pieties.