College enrollment is down around 8 percent since 2010. This is a positive development. No longer are we drawn to the increasingly valueless college degree taught by an increasingly out-of-touch credentialed class. These developments are more acute in times of regime decline, and college-age students know higher ed is not up to the task.

The problem in general with the professoriate, no matter the party affiliation, is the thinking that their august opinions matter in times of necessity (there are a few exceptions). Telling people to sit down and read a book is counterproductive in times of regime politics. Most people — that is, non-academics — know this; they are not fools, and they know time is running out.

Normal people understand that academics often get things wrong and have no solutions, yet they never pay a price for it. If a businessman makes a mistake, he may lose his business; a family may lose their home. Not so for academics. They are lauded for their “intellect” and often get promoted. As Thomas Sowell noted, they do not feel the consequences of their dumb advice.

Peter Thiel wrote in Zero to One: “Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation.” 

Once again, Thiel: “Academics make their reputations through specialized research; their primary goal is to publish papers, and publication means respecting the limits of a particular discipline.”

This is also true for those academics who purport to be speaking about “the whole.” They still do not know how to change their own oil, much less know how internal combustion works. Aside from the fact that academics might reach 100 readers who even begin to agree with them, their chances of persuading other academics are practically nil, and their broad efforts to affect culture are wasted. Normal people have no interest in their condescending opinions because they cannot write in a way that connects with real-life experience of salt-of-the-earth people. It is quite evident why.

If all you know how to do is read books, you have no skills to support yourself or your family. Academics make their money from others, and they need benefactors. This is not a reliable life model. Their entire existence relies on politicians and taxes (and federal loans). This is, in fact, a form of slavery, if that is ALL the skill you have.

This is why most academics have literally no answers to our present state of affairs. We must do more than “hold on.” We must turn to religion rather than higher education. In the wake of the pandemic, the Orthodox Church received a flood of catechumens in part because they know we need something better — an answer that speaks to our eternal souls.

And philosophy actually only gets you so far in the answer category — most of the deep questions are merely tentative, even for the ancients who believed in natural rights. And normal people who barely read Aristotle on “prudence” already know his teaching through their life skills. They are wiser than mere academics. Pretentiousness turns them off, and an academic telling them to go read Plato or Aristotle is not only unhelpful but arrogantly ignorant.

I am not against all of higher education, but we have perhaps only a handful of honorable institutions available. They should be preserved and expanded, but in the meantime, the difficulty remains that a good education is hard to come by, and the good schools are full.

What to Do?

Get busy and start with yourself. Learn something that matters for you and your family, and do it now. Those skills will stow away the fruits of your labor should you really need them.

A more important task is to make for ourselves “owned space.” This is the action plan for individuals looking to break the chains of liberalism. Instead of being seduced by higher ed, it is becoming increasingly more prudent to develop your skills — a sort of Tyler Durden advice of getting back to our nature as men.

As one student said to Victor Davis Hanson, “The best teachers I’ve had … have always done something other than teaching.” This is instructive. Those who can’t do, teach. Mere academics, over time, become detached from reality. (Mike Rowe and Peter Thiel, among others, are onto this problem). So blinded by their august sinecure, these academics do not even see that AI is coming for their jobs. Then what will they do? They have no discernible skills to take care of themselves. The inoculation against this is to have some tangible skills and know-how to take care of yourself and your family.

There is a great need to do something far more positive and constructive. Learning a tangible skill should be at the top of the list: electrical work, plumbing, woodworking, masonry, metallurgy, farming, livestock, mechanics, machining, farming … something. Muscular jobs equal muscular minds.

These skills reorient the soul far more than a book. You can certainly read Plato in your spare time, like the American founders (who knew how to farm, invent, and build). But if all you have is book smarts, you are cheating yourself. We need people who know more than X said on page X about X that we should do X … In times of regime politics, people must know how to take care of themselves. Human beings are commanded to work with their hands and toil, or at least know how to. The mere reading of books offers no lasting answers to the task before us.

Doing matters and can in fact have an instructive force on the soul. But we are faced with a domestic crisis that academics and colleges cannot solve. We need innovators, creators, and builders — people who are not shy about physical work. We have a deficit of the kind of people who actually Made America Great in the past. If we do not solve this problem, the USA is cooked.

We have families to protect now. We have a Faith to defend now. The choice is easy and clear: Sit and read secular works while the world burns down around you, or get on your knees, pray, and do something that matters by learning a skill that is tangible so you can at least stop a fire like a hot shot crew when that fire comes to a neighborhood near you.

Erik Root is a homesteader who restores classic cars and trucks. He documents his restorations and builds on YouTube at American Savage Garage. He is a graduate of the University of Montana, where he earned his B.A. and M.A. in political science. He earned his Ph.D. in political science at the Claremont Graduate School.