‘The Constitution of Knowledge’ with Jonathan Rauch: So to Speak podcast 

15:51

Good point by Rauch re distiguishing blatantly dishonest and malicious lies vs lies of analytical failure. I disagree w/ his opinion that the former are worse. Those blatant lies are largely understood as car salesman bullshit, and even when not, can be more easily challenged/refuted. The analytical failure lies, (including good intentioned lies), are more insiduous. Both are bad. I'm much more worried about the latter. Many, like Rauch, are easily lulled by good intentions. This is an end justifies the means trap to the greatest tragedies and injustices in history. The worst attrocities are by those confident of their righteousness.

Great discussion. I have to keep my mouth shut and my thoughts firmly inside my head when it comes to the art world. I'm a children's book author and I have grave misgivings about contemporary art. I think the vast majority of it is nonsense - dangerous nihilistic and boring nonsense pushing away not only better art forms, but any artist who could really benefit society on a large scale. And I believe the history of contemporary art is not as it is commonly described. An egalitarian ideology has formed around art today, and likely for the last few decades, that allows anyone to declare themselves an artist. I think the primary function of contemporary art is to allow people with no talent to declare themselves artists. This allows all the power artists that artists used to have to go to those who would prefer artists not represent the public. (I think this might be happening to other fields of endeavour - a result of the talentless, lazy, and envious taking the easy route). All the primary functions of art that have existed for all cultures all over the world since they were first developed thousands of years ago have been inverted so often and so readily over the last hundred plus years that there are a new set of functions that might, on occasion benefit a select few artists, but don't benefit the best artists or the public. I would never be hired at a university to teach anything I thought worthy. And only two years ago I dropped out of the English Masters program at our local university. The English professors (not all - I found one hiding in fear) were indoctrinating their students into Marxism and a strange subjective aesthetic ideology that avoided the author's voice - not deconstructionism or postmodernism, but a strange kind of aesthetic approach to avoid anything the writer might have liked to disperse to the reading public. The professors were running an interference game as if they were suffering from massive community envy. They even seemed to hate the very idea of English literature. Anyway, I'm writing a complaint to the university and will refuse to pay my tuition even if I have to suffer legal action. If it was just me suffering, I wouldn't bother and let the professors wallow in their subjective little hole. BUT! I saw how demoralized and saddened some of the students were. Many of the students were able to roll with the nonsense, understanding that placating the professors would get them higher marks and better treatment. But for the student truly interested or in love with literature who wasn't looking to get a teaching career and wanted to be a writer - an artist - they were visibly upset and clearly afraid to speak their minds or question what they were learning or unlearning. For them I have to speak out. And if I become an activist against the university I used to love, it's because I was created to be one by the very writers I studied as an undergraduate.