The bigotry of proxy outcomes.

I was talking to an IT tech yesterday. The university has upgraded its systems: I work in a hospital-owned building, and the interface between the two is challenging. She is an expatriate American, and her despair about the Trumpenreich was palpable. Like most expatriate Yanks over here, she is successful, of the left, and Democratic. And like most Dunedinites, she does not understand our PM, John Key.

In the conversation, I noted that in Auckland John Key is understood. His casual approach and ability to make fun of himself is an asset. The fact he grew up in a state house and is now worth millions is an asset. What Dunedin sees as slimy and superficial is seen as success in the North: and that city of 1.4 million, when the nation has but 4 million, is where elections are won and lost.

However, Key’s success has a weakness. He can belittle those — on both the right of him (National is functionally centre-left: not libertarian nor conservative, and Labour is further left, and the Greens further still) and on the left. This is not unusual: it is part of human nature.

The bigotry of successful people is stronger than that of uneducated ones, because their life stories tell them they know best. So they stop thinking and instead merely disdain those who disagree with them. Years ago, Mr Cameron famously derided Ukip as “swivel-eyed loons”. Such people exist, perhaps, but the present danger is much more from the swivel-eyed moderates, who so resolutely refuse to look at the way the world is going.

They also do not see how much they have failed. In the 21st century, the world order and financial systems dominated by the free West have been shaken more profoundly than at any time since 1945, and the people in charge do not know how to correct their own errors, or even admit them. The euro is a major part of this new world disorder, as is the effort to deepen the European Union in the wake of it.

Lots of grand people wrote disapproving letters to the newspapers in the late Thirties about Winston Churchill. They genuinely wanted peace, but about how to achieve it they were wrong. Might their equivalents today not at least consider they could be wrong too?

But Key is successful. Not that credentialed — he has a degree, but worked as a trader rather than going to graduate school, as most pragmatic Kiwis would — successful. This has been warped within the educational system to meaning you have credentials.

Credentials used to mean you were likely to be successful. However, that may be broken. What credentials signal now is debt and that you will be a problematic employee.

University of Pittsburgh students last week declared themselves “in danger” and “traumatized” over a provocative campus speech by righty flame-thrower Milo Yiannapoulos.

So traumatized that, at a student government hearing, they demanded to know why the school hadn’t provided on-site therapy for those who felt “invalidated” by the speech.

A speech that no one had to attend.

The student-gov president broke down in tears as she heard the complaints, then apologized for spending student funds on the guest (but said court rulings had left her no choice).

Meanwhile, two members of Bowdoin College’s student government faced impeachment for .?.?. attending a tequila party where some guests wore (gasp) tiny sombreros.

The school launched an instant investigation into this “act of ethnic stereotyping,” put partygoers on “social probation” and expelled the hosts from their dorms.

Oh, that more colleges had presidents like Oklahoma Wesleyan’s Everett Piper, who in December told his students to “grow up” and “get a backbone.”

“The creation of a safe space so that a countering idea cannot enter your world,” he said, “is not education — that is nothing but ideological fascism.”

At least his graduates won’t melt into puddles in the real world, because they’ll have attended a college — not a day-care center.

The world is challenging. Always has been. There has always been danger. Parents shield the young from this. However, by the time you are old enough to go to college, you should be able to handle people saying things that you do not like.

In acceding to the demand for safe spaces, the modern academy is treating grown men and women as infants. They are encouraging them to be dependent: not to be wise, but to remain as fools, and within the liberal or progressive vote-farms.

They want our young to forge the chains of debt and ignorance that will enslave them. In this society, having a four-year degree, outside of the competitive and limited courses (that in the USA are now all postgraduate) is not a sign of success, nor a measure thereof.

A four-year, state university or Ivy League degree is a sign that you are an institutionalized failure. Sending your young people to such is unwise. Far better to do a trade, or community college, or work. And get the credentials you need to get into that graduate programme as close to home and as cheaply as possible. For, as the academic bubble breaks, the gates are being opened wide so that all can come in, and College becomes your second high school, and about as meaningful.

But you don’t have to attend this one.