The Truth about "Credentials"
A list of things I believe are true about credentials, i.e. how the world works today
It is nearly impossible to know what is happening in the world at-large. Most of what we understand to be happening in the world is comprised of information that has been sourced through second-hand reports of subjectively biased witnesses, and then further filtered through the third-hand interpretations of other biased individuals who claim to be able to analyze and report upon world events in a wholly objective and unbiased manner.
In order to prove their so-called “unbiased objectivity,” these individuals present credentials which they insist render their loyalty to the “objective truth,” rather than to the individuals and institutions who granted them those credentials.
Despite the fact that all adult humans know their own internal feeling states as ones dominated by a chaotic flux of conflicting motivations and loyalties, many nonetheless persist in the belief that credentials are somehow able to elevate a human above such biases and distortions. This is often true even if they themselves possess multiple credentials that confer no such objective clarity unto them.
This curious belief is due to the fact that participating in erroneous beliefs about the powers of credentials, or that credentials serve to bestow objectivity and purity to their holder, is an unspoken requirement of being granted said credential in the first place.
Most credentials granted in the world today do not actually indicate talent, knowledge, or skill, but instead primarily serve to verify that the individual to which they are conferred has demonstrated sufficient adherence to the preferred rhetoric, mannerisms, affectations, and opinions of the credential granting-institution.
When one is granted credentials, awards, or salaries by dominant cultural institutions, they are expected to propagate that institution’s preferred ideology in both word and deed, but mostly word. If they fail to perform this task to a standard the credential-granting institution deems adequate, they can be relieved of their credentials, awards, and salaries via official and unofficial disciplinary mechanisms.
The official disciplinary mechanisms are codified, managed, and executed by Human Resource Departments, which are entities that serve as a type of “etiquette police” for workplaces. They enforce the internal cultural expectations of the credential-granting institution as a means to mitigate liability and enforce ideological norms.
As many of the individuals who work in HR departments are of low intelligence and ability level compared to their presumed peers in the business sector, they would be unable to find profitable employment elsewhere. As such, they are exceedingly beholden to the norms and rules proffered by a credentialing institution’s ideology, lest they be relieved of their title and salaries and easily replaced by someone of similarly low aptitude but of higher eagerness to conform.
Though their purview is supposedly limited to the workplace itself, HR “professionals” are often eager to enforce their norms upon behaviors carried out in the employee’s personal time as well. By doing this, they create plausibly-deniable incentives for the employee to not only conform to the behavioral expectations of their position, but also to a chosen ideological worldview.
These worldviews, created by spheres of extreme influence in government and capital, corroborated by their sister institutions in academia and media, and morally-laundered through their cousin institutions of charity and non-profit management, are often posited in terms of over-simplistic binaries. Usually, the side of the binary represented by the credential-granting institution is self-evidently and unassailably “righteous,” while the other side - comprised of hyperbolic caricatures of intentionally evil and selfish individuals who mostly do not exist - are represented by those who do not ascribe to the ideology of the credential-granting institution.
By encouraging casual acquiescence to the institution’s worldview, an otherwise low-insight employee of the company (or student of the university, or member of the organization) is able to maintain a readily-accessible list of moral heuristics by which to guide their behaviors in their personal time. In other words, it allows the employee/student/member to absolve themselves of critical ethical inquiry “as long as I do and say the right things.” This especially applicable to their political and consumer behaviors.
This friction-less transfer of institutional norms unto personal political and consumer behaviors is the highest source of value that these institutions provide to the greater ideological complex of major cultural institutions, and why they are happy to funnel massive amounts of wealth and attention into their ever-expanding treasuries.
This wealth and attention is then exchanged for the manufacturing of research, theory, data, commentary, and cultural memetics that normalize the extreme psychological derangements necessary to influence otherwise sane individuals into senseless acts of consumerism, activism, and social posturing.
If, for some reason, credential-conferring institutions are unable to obtain ideological acquiescence through “official” channels, they can employ a variety of unofficial disciplinary mechanisms. These strategies are usually facilitated via campaigns of massive social engineering directed toward the outcomes of character assassination, reputation demolition, and eventual delegitimization of an institutionally non-compliant individual’s standing in society writ large.
These unofficial disciplinary mechanisms are not limited by the constraints normally associated with organizational policies that are governed by regulatory or legal requirements, and thus can inflict maximal personal damage to the livelihood of an individual who has fallen out of ideological compliance. They often involve associating the individual’s behavior with some morally reprehensible trait or worldview, or suggesting a moral or sexual deviance, and then empowering those sympathetic to (or afraid of) the institution to similarly enact campaigns of public dismissal and personal boycott of that person.
No matter how ruthless or unfair these strategies my be, they must be done to ensure adherence to their ideological aims and to dissuade others who might feel inclined to present similar public refutations of the organization or its ideology. They also encourage public displays of confessional adherence, as many believe such ardent declarations of ideological loyalty will spare them from a similar public humiliation should they themselves ever fail to meet the rapidly-evolving ideological standards in the future.
These public displays of adherence are necessary and appreciated by credential-granting institutions, but they confer absolutely no protections for the individual should they fail to adhere to their ideological tenets in the future. This lack of loyalty is well-chronicled yet fails to dissuade most from doing so.
When carrying out any public displays of ideological adherence, credentialed individuals (or credential-aspirant individuals) are to verbalize the primary edicts of their credentialing institution’s ideology verbatim and with an affectation of radical self-assurance. The goal of this approach is to make certain social realities seem pre-determined and obvious, and suggest that opposition to these pre-determined and obvious social realities can be born from nothing other than profound hatred, malicious ignorance, mental derangement, or spiritual perversion.
Most credentialed individuals who behave this way are borne from one of four aforementioned institutional spawning points: academia, media, consumer capital, or non-profit organizations. The first two are responsible for the creation, refinement, justification, and stylization of the ideological messages approved by the third, and the fourth provides all money-laundering services for those benefitting from the financial fruits of the enterprise.
Politics, Healthcare, and Primary Education (and increasingly the realms of law and the military) are battlegrounds for which these four sectors jockey for influence and ideological monopolization.
The credentialed individuals from these four spawning points often migrate from one sector to the other throughout their careers, and as such are able to leverage a wide network of inter-professional acquaintances who serve to form a loop of self-reinforcing corroboration with each other.
By publicly agreeing to each other’s conclusions, no matter how fragile, spurious, or absurd, the collaboration of those with these self-authored credentials serves to create an illusion of authoritative verification, i.e. “anyone who knows anything would know that this is true.”
These credentialed individuals operationalize this system of collaborative internal verification to bolster the apparent validity of their initiatives of social engineering. Further, because so many of these individuals emerge from ideologically-aligned spawn points and transit frequently between each other’s institutions throughout their careers, they are able to present the messaging of their social engineering campaigns in a manner that is both unified and coherent, utilizing similar language and mannerisms.
Though carefully designed and administered for maximal saturation into the public consciousness, their delivery appears spontaneous, informal, and organic, thus endowing it with a quality of authenticity that disabuses the uninitiated mind from suspecting they have been manipulated.
As a rule, the four aforementioned institutions deny their collaboration and marginalize those who would accuse them otherwise by treating their claims as laughable, paranoid, malicious, or a combination of all three.
All four of the aforementioned institutions absolutely collaborate to influence public opinion and align others to their aims. They specifically seek to influence the outcome of electoral politics through covert and often plausibly deniable means.
Because of all of this, national electoral politics - oft suggested as the main mode of political mobilization in the United States - is mostly a predetermined contest and has minimal ability to effectuate substantive change.
Rather, it is mostly emblematic of change that has already happened on a widespread scale, propagated by credentialed individuals who operationalize social engineering campaigns of the institutions to which they belong, directed toward shifting public opinion in subtle but discernible ways.
The sublest and most discernible way to shift public opinion is by shifting the opinions of those who have the least ability to reject or even recognize political ideology.
Children have the least ability to reject or recognize political ideology.
If you understand #30, then you will understand why the “credential individuals” of society want school teachers, counselors, and doctors to overrule the decisions of parents.
It's absolutely evident. If you brainwash the children, you have successfully taken over the future. If you have the children, then when you flip the switch, you can move the world to tyranny.
That's why parents should never give up control over their children to anybody, not the church, not the schools, not the government.
It's why the Marxists want to change your kids sex, their Ideas, and their education.
For an ideology to be good for enforcing cohesion and loyalty, it _must_ be at least somewhat absurd. One does not simply build a cult around saying that 2x2=4.
Also, media are not good at transmitting complex information as most journalists are fairly dumb. (There are of course exceptions but you can't bet on exceptions and survive the long game.) This is likely why big countries, where more information is passed through media, are dumbed down faster than small countries where «everyone knows everyone».