Let’s […] circle back to that list of school shooters. Actually they’re university shooters — a crucial distinction. [He] points out that most of them were grad students, and all of them were too damn old to still be hanging around in college. There’s a bit of chicken-and-egg going on here, but the point’s still valid. Even if you claim that every single grad school outside STEM is utterly worthless — and you’ll get no argument from me, buddy — the fact remains that grad students are functionally much closer to the aeronautical engineers and their 50-nerd slap fight than they are to the homies in the inner city. If a solution can’t be found in a very tight-knit environment, by a bunch of very concerned people who are constantly on the lookout for Oppressed People to champion, what chance do we normals have to even diagnose, let alone solve, the problems of half the fucking country?
You do acknowledge, of course, that it’s in the nature of math that 50% of the population are below average?
Our default “solution” for university shooters […] is psychiatry. More access to better “mental health care”, we say, would’ve prevented this. Maybe, maybe not, but at least it’s something. The problem, though, is that the only diagnostic criterion you can realistically use is “So-and-So is a twitchy, weird loner”, which — trust me — exactly describes 99% of grad students and 100% of professors. Do we force feed all of them powerful prescription psychotropics on the off-chance?
Before you jump to agree — and yes, I fully acknowledge how awesome that would be, if you put it on Pay-per-View I’d be the first to sign up […] I’d ask you to consider two things:
First, it’s the government doing this. The same stupid motherfuckers who can’t manage to rig a poll where only a handful of addled old farmers vote. Do you really want to bet America’s future social stability on them loading the right drug into the sprayers? Given the federal bureaucracy’s sterling reputation for basic competence, they’d probably crop-dust the ‘hood with meth.
Severian, “The Scientific Management of Populations”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-02-15.
February 23, 2023
QotD: Academic types
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