Only the Jung can say

In response to The Jung and Restless:

Another thing I find interesting about the credential fetish is that it elevates potential over actual achievement; we are supposed to get excited about the marvelous educational and political backgrounds of the elite, rather than take a cold hard look at what they actually did, or failed to do.  This mirrors the way socialism, the ultimate triumph of intellectual hype over experience, is always judged according to its promises, never its results.

Has there ever been a better example of this phenomenon than the current occupant of the White House?  He’s the “brilliant academic” nobody can remember from school, the “Constitutional expert” who seems vague about some of the basic principles and history of the Constitution, the back-bench Senator who scarcely bothered to show up for votes, and the “community organizer” whose organized community we were strictly forbidden to examine.  I seem to remember something about a $10,000 gazebo, though.

The modern academic’s idea of a “meritocracy” is a system in which the “right” people can never be wrong – why, the only problem with Obama’s wasted trillion-dollar stimulus is that it wasn’t big enough!  Meanwhile, the “wrong” people should be ashamed of themselves for their surly disobedience and lack of faith in their betters, which has caused so many brilliant central plans to come up far short of how they should have performed.  Utopia: where evaluation ends with graduation.