Bad Ideas! 

Two of the most destructive ideas that took root in the 20th century – communism and psychoanalysis – were cooked up by two highly educated academics.

Karl Marx studied law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. His father was a lawyer, and his mother came from a prosperous business family that later founded Philips Electronics.

And Sigmund Freud not only had a medical degree from the University of Vienna, he was also an accomplished reader of literature and a proficient speaker/reader of German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek.

In the first two decades of this century, the number of equally bad ideas has been great. And like communism and psychoanalysis, many of these ideas have, at their core, worthy insights into the many frailties of human nature. As such, they have a strongly humanistic appeal.

As a result, and like their 20th century predecessors, these newish bad ideas sprouted quickly in the fertile soil of elite universities; bloomed among wealthy, liberal-arts-educated trust-fund dilettantes; spread like weeds among the artists, actors, and writers suckled by the wealthy elite; and were finally adopted as incontrovertible by large swaths of the mainstream press.

Here are a few of the contenders:

1. American Exceptionalism
2. Gender Theory
3. Cultural Appropriation
4. Identity Theory (including Critical Race Theory and White Privilege)
5. Language as Violence
6. The disfunction of Male Hierarchy and Toxic Masculinity
7. Cancel Culture
8. Research Justice
9. Recovered Memory Syndrome
10. The War Against Fossil Fuels
11. The War Against Poverty
12. Equality as a Social Good

I’ve touched on many of these bad ideas in past issues. In future issues, I’ll discuss them, one at a time, in detail. I’ll begin next week with one of my favorites: the “immorality” of Cultural Appropriation.