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There's a standard and very controlled foreign affairs education in the US (and the rest of the Anglosphere). All the top professors and think tanks interact with the State Department regularly. Papers like The Economist are approved reading. Atlantic Council galas are mandatory for the serious.
In that culture there's a disbelief in any sort of autodidactism. Not disapproval, they literally believe that you can't come up with any sort of informed opinion on your own. You need to go to the proper schools and read the proper papers.
When they see someone intelligent and charismatic on the popular stage with some views that differ they immediately ask "Where did she get that from?". Admitting that she developed different views from her experiences and encounters outside the continental US implies that their own education was insufficient.
It's easier to just claim she's a Russian agent.
Honestly I don’t think this is just the foreign affairs people, it’s becoming endemic to most PMCs through the creeping credentialism promoted by university. There’s a large and growing population of people— most of them college graduates— who think that unless you have studied a topic in a college classroom, you cannot have possibly learned it. No, you cannot just read the Western canon and understand it. No, you cannot possibly learn philosophy without a lecture hall. No, you don’t understand math or statistics until you have gotten college credits.
I find the whole notion doubly ridiculous. First because people have self educated for hundreds of years, and it used to be the standard. Abraham Linchpin taught himself law by reading law books. Most of his peers did the same thing. And it wasn’t just law. If you wanted to run a business, you taught yourself accounting, and so on. Books, video, internet and other sources are much more available now than ever before, and any determined person can teach themselves just about anything they want to. They might have to work a bit harder than their peers who get spoon fed readings and practice sets, but in return, they will absolutely know their stuff as they aren’t studying for a test (and going to forget it afterwards) but trying to learn and understand it.
But much more importantly, I see a lot of ignorance in college grads that make me doubt the process does anything more than what they did in high school on most topics. They don’t actually understand the outside world. They don’t understand that electric cars are plugged into the electrical grid and thus would cause whatever types of pollution that our current electric grid causes. They don’t know anything concrete about other countries. Gays for Palestine is a joke that’s been told a million times, but it’s true, they don’t know what Islam has to say about LGBT rights. They don’t know the whole history of the conflict or why Jews went to Palestine in the first place. They cannot find Ukraine on an unlabeled map, nor do they know anything about its population, industry, minerals, or strategic importance. They have no idea why Russia wants it, nor the history of the region. Go down the list and it’s just amazing how the education that’s supposed to make you a better citizen of the country and the world produces a population with strong opinions but no knowledge.
The people who don’t get that education form equally strong opinions and have an equal lack of knowledge. You simply like their opinions better.
Most people do not, in fact, teach themselves philosophy or statistics from the Internet. Instead they learn directly-relevant job skills plus whatever knowledge floats around their social sphere. The conflict happens when someone tries to privilege their social-sphere knowledge.
These are standard, intuitive social tactics. They’re also decoupled from reality. Unfortunately, the natural response is similarly decoupled, because it’s way easier to shout “nuh uh!” than to explain law or philosophy or chemistry to amateurs. Especially when the Truth is genuinely still under debate.
I’d like to think that’s why we’re here.
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I can't tell whether this is a silly autocorrect fail or an incredibly clever pun+metaphor.
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