Stanislaw Andrzejewski: Courtesy Google Images
[At the behest of my dear friend @giantbear I'm going to write a series on education (she said she'd take my lunch money and tell everybody I'm the one that's been eating all the paste if I didn't). I've never made a secret of my disdain for academia and the phonies that run it... So before doing my piece about my Homeschooling Pedagogy, I thought I'd take a couple of lighthearted pokes at academics]
There are three principles- when it comes to academia- of which I'm particularly fond: First is Sturgeon's Law- 90% of Science Fiction is bullshit because 90% of everything is bullshit (applicable far beyond sci-fi) and Stanislaw Andrzejewski's Law of Nebulous Verbosity- Verbiage increases to the extent that ambition exceeds knowledge. The third, and my personal favorite, is Occam's Razor- The simplest explanation is invariably the best (and yes, I know that this is paraphrasing).
One day Tom Bertonneau (someone who will pop up frequently in my posts- more on him later) and I were having coffee at the a local bistro. Dr. Bertonneau- who had gone from CMU to the Mackinaw Center- said something about putting the first two of these laws to the test. He suggested that I write a paper to present at an upcoming academic conference. So, I put together a 50 page word salad... complete and total bullshit. I did, however, base it on a sound foundation- a political theory I'd been playing with for a while.
I quoted every crack pot from Hesiod to Schopenhauer, then gave it the lofty sounding title: The Will to Power: An Analysis of Power Distribution Developed Within a Quadra-Modal Political Typology Model. We took it to an academic conference at nearbt Ferris State Univ. so I could present it along with the other bullshitters.
Well, it didn't take long to figure we had come to the right place... The woman who presented just before me had written a paper applying Marxist principles to Botany. Then it was my turn. I had already presented at several conferences before. My Sophomore year I published a paper on NAFTA that I presented 3-4 times including the APSA (American Political Science Assn) conference in Washington... I was already becoming an old hand at bullshitting the bullshiters.
I presented my paper and it went over their heads like a TWA: Bertonneau sat in the back laughing his ass off during the whole presentation (especially Q&A). He had good reason to be amused- they didn't get it at all... there was nothing to get. But, pseudo-intellectuals being what they are, they had to come up with some pertinent questions, such as: "Do you consider your model Aristotelian?" To which I replied" No, it's more Heraclitian... Based on, as I'm sure you're aware, his principle of dynamic equilibrium." He nodded sagely. (Heraclitus had no principle of dynamic equilibrium, that belongs to me; the closest Heraclitus came was his concept of flux- the world is constantly changing- nothing about equilibrium)... You gotta love a phony!
Tomorrow: More on the "Art of Creative Bullshitting."
GIF by @papa-pepper
