The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

By Joe Dixon

Are you struggling to find meaning in your life? Then you are a victim of the Mandarin Effect. This is one of the most sinister features of the modern world, and is being highlighted here for the first time. The force that most contributes to the crisis of meaning is the last one you would expect. Who are the Mandarins and how are they ruining the world? What can be done about them? Who are the small group that can combat the Mandarins, and why have they been airbrushed out of history, as if they never existed? Come inside and read the extraordinary story of a hidden war that is shaping the destiny of the human race. Humanity is currently losing. But, thanks to one group, hope is not yet extinguished.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780244241124

Joe Dixon

Joe Dixon writes about the decline and fall of the West. The West is being undermined by sinister forces.

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The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

Joe Dixon

Copyright © Joe Dixon 2019

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored, in any form or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

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The Victims

Are you struggling to find meaning in your life? Then you are a victim of the Mandarin Effect. This is one of the most sinister features of the modern world, and is being highlighted here for the first time.

The force that most contributes to the crisis of meaning is the last one you would expect.

Who are the Mandarins and how are they ruining the world? What can be done about them? Who are the small group that can combat the Mandarins, and why have they been airbrushed out of history, as if they never existed?

Come inside and read the extraordinary story of a hidden war that is shaping the destiny of the human race.

Humanity is currently losing. But, thanks to one group, hope is not yet extinguished.

The Mystery Begins

The modern world wasn’t born in the European Enlightenment. It was spawned by the Industrial Revolution.

The Enlightenment was about liberating the mind. It wasn’t about business. The Industrial Revolution was all about business. It was about liberating the plutocratic forces of capital. The liberation of mind is entirely different from the liberation of capital.

The Enlightenment sought freedom from decrepit religions, tyrannical monarchs, and outdated philosophies. The great expectation was that the Enlightenment would transform the human race. The French revolutionaries, the vanguard of the Enlightenment, the stormtroopers of the rational new order, envisaged the overthrow of all priests and monarchs, of the self-serving nobility, and the forces of privilege and inheritance, nepotism and cronyism. They dreamt of a new meritocratic world of equal opportunities for all. The execution of the tyrant and traitor Louis XVI was, symbolically, the execution of the Old World Order.

But something went horrifically wrong. The New World Order never materialized. The people were never liberated. All that happened was that a new elitist, exclusive power appeared and subjugated the people more ferociously and comprehensively than ever before. It wasn’t a religious power, it wasn’t a royal power, and it certainly wasn’t an intellectual power. It was the greatest power the world has ever known, even more powerful than religion or monarchy. It was the power of money.

Our whole world now dances to the money tune. It’s the only sound anyone can hear. It is the sine qua non – the indispensable condition – for everything that happens in our world. If you have no money, you are powerless. Only the rich have authentic power. Money is how power is physicalized or digitalized. Money is power reified. The Will to Power is practically, for almost everyone, the Will to Money. Everyone wants money, as much money as they can possibly get. They won’t let anything get in the way of their pursuit of money (power).

Everyone worships Mammon. His cathedrals are everywhere. There is no escape from his clutches. No one is free from his embrace.

So, the monstrous crime that took place was that the people substituted one tyrant – the royalty-religion-military complex run by superstition and faith – with one that was even worse … the military-industrial-banking complex run by Big Business, by the power of capital. Capital is much more real and persuasive than superstition and faith.

What is nowhere to be found in any of this is the intelligentsia. Where did the smart people go? Actually, one intellectual did identify predatory capitalism as the biggest danger to the human race. His name was Karl Marx. Unfortunately for Marx, he was unable to define a rigorous system that could actually beat capitalism, and merely specified a general dialectical process and its endpoint: a classless communist society.

The country that adopted the communist dream was the least qualified to do so – primitive, backward Russia, a totalitarian nation through and through. Russia swapped the dictatorship of the Tsar for the dictatorship of the Communist Party. The Communist Party, like the Tsar, was only interested in its own power, and holding onto it at any cost. It had no interest in unleashing the power of the people.

Marx would never have recognized Communist Russia as Marxist in any way. He would have been appalled by it.

There was only one country where communism would actually have worked – Marx’s own country of Germany. Instead, Germany went the other way. It embraced National Socialism, a species of Fascism. Yet again, the people were subjected to a dictatorship, by the Nazi Party and its all-powerful Fuehrer.

In a whole host of ways, Nazi Germany was the most successful regime there has ever been. What it accomplished in the twelve short years of its existence simply staggers the imagination. That’s what happens when you fully mobilize the talent and enthusiasm of the people. Unfortunately, Nazi Germany was also psychotic, possibly the most deranged and criminal enterprise that has ever stood on the world stage.

What Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union shared was a detestation of the predatory capitalism of the Anglo-American-Jewish axis.

The British and Americans, financed by Jewish banks and dominated by Masonic corporate cartels, were the face of Big Business. The Nazis were the face of extreme nationalism, while the Soviets were the face of absolute economic and social control of the people by the totalitarian State. The capitalists and the Nazis felt free. The people of the Soviet Union did not.

The Industrial Revolution led to the universal triumph of Big Business, and the conversion of humanity into a soulless commercial species to be bought and sold in the marketplace, and also to something else even more damaging. It caused nothing less than the industrialization of the intelligentsia. Intelligence became a commodity to be boxed, controlled, managed, and bought and sold, just like everything else. Only useful intelligence – i.e. useful to Big Business – was allowed.

Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin said, True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics. The same is true of intelligence. True intelligence can exist only beyond the reach of dreary, diligent, trustworthy functionaries and bureaucrats.

The academic world has succumbed to the Ortega hypothesis. José Ortega y Gasset wrote, It is necessary to insist upon this extraordinary but undeniable fact: experimental science has progressed thanks in great part to the work of men astoundingly mediocre, and even less than mediocre. That is to say, modern science, the root and symbol of our actual civilization, finds a place for the intellectually commonplace man and allows him to work therein with success. These remarks should be posted over every science department. It’s extraordinary how intellectually dumbed-down science has become, how full to bursting with mediocrities and intellectual pygmies it is.

This is true of the whole academic world. In order to make it industrial – predictable, uniform, toothless, unthreatening, sanitized, compliant, docile, anesthetized, servile – the elite replaced all interesting people in the Academy, all of Zamyatin’s madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics, with drones, clones, drudgeries and functionaries.

Nietzsche wrote, In heaven, all the interesting people are missing. That’s even truer of the academic world.

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith said, The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.

This is exactly what an economist – a bean counter and servant of the super-rich elite – would imagine admirable and desirable.

The academic world is now chock-full of predictable monotony. It is not only not inspiring, it is actively anti-inspirational. Young, impressionable, hungry minds, eager to learn, are turned by the mediocrity of the education system into people that can’t wait to leave school and college. They lose all love of learning. The very people who are supposed to give them a lifelong thirst for knowledge make them hate education and flee from it.

The educators have proved the destroyers of education. They have turned the whole world against education. They are the biggest dumbing down force earth has ever seen. Had they inspired the minds that are brought under their influence over the many vital years of childhood and adolescence, the world would now be an entirely different place. But they switched people off. They not only failed to turn them on to knowledge, they made them contemptuous of education. That’s because the teachers are tedious mediocrities – machine-like individuals, mostly on the spectrum. They wouldn’t know how to say or do anything interesting. All they do is bore everyone with their interminable mediocrity. They make knowledge seem tedious, uninspiring, bland – just like them – and unlikely to allow anyone to achieve an exciting life. They exude banality like ectoplasm.

It’s a thing of profound shame that so many minds have been curdled by the educational establishment.

Big Business demanded that the education system be no threat to it. It was always to be the master and education always the obedient slave, the supplier of what its factories and offices required.

Had geniuses – the opposite of mediocrities – run the education system, our world would be a fantastically different place, a transformed place, an enlightened place, a paradise. The power of money would have been shattered. Instead, everyone is in thrall to money. They certainly aren’t in thrall to knowledge, learning and education.

Teachers and professors are the least glamorous people on earth. No one is itching to emulate them.

Education should cast the enchantments of Circe and Calypso over the hot minds of the young. Instead, it stares at them like Medusa, turning their hearts and heads to cold stone.

Education produces horrifically narrow specialists these days. They have no breadth of knowledge. By contrast, look at our books. They cover every subject under the sun. Then look at the books of tedious academics with their dry, dull pedantry, their desperation to be academically respectable, to avoid all controversy and any possibility of giving offence. The academics all know how to avoid damaging their precious careers. It never pays to step out of the shadow of pedantry and say anything bold and exciting. You have to mimic your tedious professors if you aspire to be a tedious professor in your turn.

Could there be anything worse than a book on ontological mathematics churned out by those staking their claim to a place in the great halls of academic tedium that stand as a permanent insult to the original Academy? That was run by one of the world’s greatest geniuses – Plato – and his star pupil was another of the world’s greatest geniuses – Aristotle. What books do you imagine these Greek thinkers would prefer to read today? Ours, which fully honor their tradition, or those of tiresome academics, infected by the disease of materialism, which have inverted their tradition?

It takes people of the highest possible cultivation to appreciate our books. They go way over the heads of the zombified philistines who require every book to be laid out in that grotesque, scripted, stultifying academese they are so fond of, whose only purpose is to impress other pretentious members of the priesthood and never to communicate any actual information.

Ortega wrote, He [the ‘specialist’] is one who, out of all that has to be known in order to be a man of judgment, is only acquainted with one science, and even of that one only knows the small corner in which he is an active investigator. He even proclaims it as a virtue that he takes no cognizance of what lies outside the narrow territory specially cultivated by himself, and gives the name of ‘dilettantism’ to any curiosity for the general scheme of knowledge.

This is a perfect description of the modern scientist, a total ignoramus, except in the one tiny aspect of science in which he is a specialist. He knows nothing about the rest of science, and has no general knowledge at all. Such people are the standard bearers of education, if it can be dignified with that name.

Ortega wrote, The specialist serves as a striking concrete example of the species, making clear to us the radical nature of the novelty. For, previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his speciality; but neither is he ignorant, because he is ‘a scientist,’ and ‘knows’ very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with all the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line.

This is the exact problem of modern science. It’s full of specialists, but none of them can be called learned or cultured. Outside their sphere of expertise, they are ignorant. Their brains are shaped to think in a certain way and are incapable of thinking in any other way. They not only have a reducing-valve consciousness, as Aldous Huxley put it, but a reducing-valve ability to think. They automatically exclude all possibilities that do not fit the narrow paradigm used by their narrow specialization.

Science has presided over an immense rise in general ignorance, and scientists themselves are amongst the most ignorant of people, lacking all cultural literacy.

The core idea of science – that merely to observe the world is to bring us as close as we can get to the mystery of existence – is monumentally ignorant. It is in fact our ability to conceive, not to perceive, that solves the ancient riddle for us. You use reason and logic, not the human senses, to see the Truth. It’s not as if this should come as news. Plato said so thousands of years.

The mind of the scientist represents a vast degradation in the quality of the human intellect. Science’s one saving grace is its use of mathematics, a subject that has nothing to do with science and is in fact the quintessential conceptual subject. Science claims to understand the cosmos, yet can’t even understand what mathematics is and how it has any connection to the cosmos. It’s not even a topic scientists discuss. Why would they? They are mediocre functionaries, after all, not great geniuses that seek to confront the bare Truth.

Ortega wrote, The most immediate result of this unbalanced specialization has been that today, when there are more ‘scientists’ than ever, there are much less ‘cultured’ men than, for example, about 1750. And the worst is that with these turnspits of science not even the real progress of science itself is assured. For science needs from time to time, as a necessary regulator of its own advance, a labor of reconstitution, and, as I have said, this demands an effort towards unification, which grows more and more difficult, involving, as it does, ever-vaster regions of the world of knowledge. Newton was able to found his system of physics without knowing much philosophy, but Einstein needed to saturate himself with Kant and Mach before he could reach his own keen synthesis.

Today, scientists detest philosophy and contemptuously dismiss it. Unlike Einstein, they are not philosophically informed at all, and none of their theories has any philosophical substance. They reject philosophy as a subject worthy of adding any intellectual depth or content to science.

As for Einstein, to choose Kant and Mach as his philosophical guides – rather than the likes of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hegel and Schopenhauer – was already to be on the wrong side of philosophy.

The academic world is just an extension of the Assembly Line that defines production capitalism. Henry Ford, the master of the moving Assembly Line, said, The principles of assembly are these: (1) Place the tools and the men in the sequence of the operation so that each component part shall travel the least possible distance while in the process of finishing; (2) Use work slides or some other form of carrier so that when a workman completes his operation, he drops the part always in the same place – which place must always be the most convenient place to his hand – and if possible have gravity carry the part to the next workman for his own; (3) Use sliding assembling lines by which the parts to be assembled are delivered at convenient distances.

Educational theory, for all its big claims, is just a version of the Assembly Line, the sausage factory. It has to be efficient, which is to say only produce drones and drudges capable of doing the meager tasks required of them on the Assembly Line of predatory capitalism. You don’t want a billion Platos coming out of the education system, do you? They would never tolerate Big Business. They would overthrow it in one second flat. No, the efficiency of the education system is that it must calibrate the output in a suitably Goldilocks fashion – not too dumb, and not too smart, just right (for not challenging the established elite that control all of the capital, and thus the world).

Ortega wrote, ... modern science, the root and symbol of our actual civilization, finds a place for the intellectually commonplace man and allows him to work therein with success. The reason of this lies in what is at the same time the great advantage and the gravest peril of the new science, and of the civilization directed and represented it by it, namely, mechanization. A fair amount of the things that have to be done in physics or in biology is mechanical work of the mind which can be done by anyone, or almost anyone. For the purpose of innumerable investigations it is possible to divide science into small sections, to enclose oneself in one of these, and to leave out consideration all the rest. ... The work is done under one of these methods as with a machine, and in order to obtain quite abundant results it is not even necessary to have rigorous notions of their meaning and foundations. In this way the majority of scientists help the general advance of science while shut up in the narrow cell of their laboratory, like the bee in the cell of its hive...

Education is conducted in this exact way. Everyone is a machine part. The idea of trying to teach the masses Big Ideas – such as those we espouse in our books – is regarded as absurd.

Big Business doesn’t want Big Ideas, except where they concern establishing a monopoly of global markets to maximize profit. How would the Big Ideas of geniuses like Plato and Aristotle help predatory capitalism? It wants small ideas, small thinkers, thinkers in small compartments, thinkers who don’t know what anyone else is thinking and don’t have any time or means to find out. Divide and rule. Make sure no one gets the big picture.

Mediocre scientists conduct science. Mediocre teachers teach the masses. Mediocre thinkers run the intellectual establishment. Everything is geared up for, and intended to produce, mediocrity.

No geniuses are allowed to run the education system. Their genius would ruin everything – because they would seek to produce a brilliant education system that multiplied geniuses exponentially.

The most extraordinary thing of all is that the dullards that run the education system imagine they are high-caliber individuals. Just look at the world. Is it full of smart people or idiots? So who shall we blame for that if not the people in charge of educating us?

Nietzsche wrote, "One day or other institutions will be needed in which people live and teach as I understand living and teaching; perhaps even chairs for the interpretation of Zarathustra will be established."

Oh dear! Can you imagine?! Can you imagine universities churning out Supermen? No, no, no, Freddie. Universities have the opposite function. Only Last Men are to come off the Assembly Line. Last Men can walk straight into the drone-jobs, the McJobs, that predatory capitalism offers.

Why has the intellectual agenda failed? It’s because there isn’t one. The only agenda that rules in our world is that of predatory capitalism, and the people that run the education system are those suited to predatory capitalism, those of modest and limited intellect and absolutely lacking in any grand intellectual vision.

Limited people have limited ideas and limited vision. Limited people like narrow specialization. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

What Is a Philosopher?

When you hear the term philosopher, it brings to mind a certain idea, a certain impression. The trouble is that philosopher isn’t a monolithic concept. There are many different types of philosopher, and they go about things drastically differently. They think in very different ways and also relate to the world in very different ways.

Philosopher Justin E. H. Smith is the author of an instructive book called The Philosopher: A History in Six Types. These six types prove remarkably useful in charting the course – the decline – of great human thinking, and they provide the framework for our analysis of the Mandarin Effect, which is about how the right people to educate the people have been cast out, and the completely wrong people put in their place, leading to a crisis of meaning since meaning is exactly what is not taught in the modern education system. Educationalists regard meaning as superfluous.

Here is a list of Smith’s six types:

1)       Curiosus: this philosopher stands at the boundary between natural science and philosophy. Philosophers of this kind typically present their work as a monograph (a detailed written study of a single specialized subject or an aspect of it). These people are often eccentrics and their work rarely makes an impact and rarely endures. The inventor Nikola Tesla is probably the most prominent recent example. Despite enjoying great success at certain points, he ultimately died in obscurity, as an impoverished recluse. John G. Trump, a professor at M.I.T., said, [Tesla’s] thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.

2)       Sage: this philosopher is the Big Thinker. Philosophers of this kind typically set out a grand philosophy, a monolithic exploration of some Big Idea that is intended to account for everything. Examples of philosophers of this type are Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel.

3)       Gadfly: this is the philosopher who likes to sting, goad and challenge the prevailing culture. Philosophers of this kind might use parody, invective, satire, dialectics. They don’t set out grand philosophies. They usually have an essayist style, or choose anecdotes, aphorisms and parables as their chosen vehicle. Examples of philosophers of this type are Socrates, Giordano Bruno, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Camus.

4)       Ascetic: this is the philosopher who typically stands aside from society. Philosophers of this kind express their philosophy through how they live their life. They walk the talk. They reject the esteem of society. They do not seek wealth or honor or pleasure. They focus on some quality that they believe is neglected, such as virtue, reflection, simplicity, introspection. Examples of philosophers of this type are Diogenes (Cynicism), Zeno (Stoicism), Epicurus (Epicureanism). A contemplative religious leader such as the Buddha would fit in here too.

5)       Courtier: this is the philosopher who serves the elite. Where many philosophers, especially the Gadflies, speak inconvenient truths to power, the Courtiers speak convenient untruths to power. They are the self-serving mouthpieces of the powers-that-be, always seeking to present their masters in the best light. They are philosophers as public relations people. Their primary concern is to make money, be influential and have power and status. They write puff pieces about those that pay their salary. Plato called them Sophists. They will do anything to win an argument, even one they don’t believe in. Lawyers are a type of Courtier. Steve Bannon is a political Courtier. Philosophers of this kind do not make any great mark in philosophy.

6)       Mandarin: this is the academic philosopher, the philosopher inside the system, the philosopher looking for tenure. Most philosophers in history were freelancers and sought maximum independence. The Mandarins are not and do not. They are salaried thinkers. These people are conventional and institutionalized and never stray from safe, established, consensus paradigms.

Our central thesis is that Sages are the true philosophers and should be running the education system. Instead, we have a Mandarin education system that frequently flirts with being a Courtier system. Economics departments all over the world are typically courtiers for neoliberal predatory capitalism. Philosophy and mathematics departments are typically courtiers for science and computing.

True education – involving Big Thinking and Big Ideas by geniuses who want to transform the world – has been replaced by narrow, small, specialized thinking full of small ideas by salaried careerists who can’t see, and don’t want to see, beyond the prevailing institutions and paradigms.

Thomas Kuhn observed that no matter how many anomalies a paradigm generates, those that subscribe to it will not lose faith in it since to abandon it would mean to cease to be someone working in that field. A scientist that abandons the central doctrines of scientism is finished in science. Look at Rupert Sheldrake.

No Mandarin or Courtier will ever abandon their paradigm since it would mean the end of their cozy career and regular comfortable salary.

You don’t understand the education world if you think it has any connection to ideas and education. Like everything else, it is about career, salary, status, influence, power, comfort, pleasure, ease, convenience. All systems of the modern world have been Mandarinized and Courtiered. There are no Sages, no Gadflies, no Curiosi, and no Ascetics. It is impossible for such people to make a living in an institutional, paradigmatic environment based on universal groupthink in order to achieve total conformity and uniformity of output (as in an industrial process, which is exactly what paradigmatic, academic education is designed to reflect and enact).

Mandarins might study the work of Sages (for historical reasons rather than to seriously learn from them), but they never want to emulate them. They want to stay in their safe little box. They are Last Men, not Supermen.

Justin Smith bemoaned the fact that philosophy has become an activity one is enabled to do only with the appropriate accreditation within a particular institutional setting. This is the inevitable consequence of Mandarinization. This invariably creates a professional priesthood, and no one is taken seriously that does not belong to the cult, that does not know the right prayers and how to bow to the right pope.

The Mandarin education system is all about replenishing the priesthood. It’s a treadmill devoted to teaching, researching, publishing, sitting on committees, reviewing, assessing, marking, giving speeches, and so on – all the tedious bureaucracy associated with Institutionalized Man. The Mandarins themselves are bored and boring, yet they are wildly successful at passing on their tedium to the next generation.

To repurpose This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin: "They fuck you up, your teachers. They may not