A lot of obscurantism and tosh, muddled up with imprecision and poor definitional exactitude. Further tainted by his own claimed struggle with perfectionism. A very NPR First World Problems interview where it is unclear that the claimed issue even exists much less whether anything can or ought to be done about it. And in which everything is geared to burnish with a sheen of victimhood and struggle.
One of Curran's key points is that many people are making their lives worse through perfectionism because they are caught up in the capitalist system and in consumerism. What they need to do is to be satisfied with less. To be satisfied with enough. He has a number of rambling stories as examples of what people could be happier by being satisfied with less. Less material wants. Less status seeking.
The sycophantic interviewer kept offering questions and statements reinforcing of their joint membership of the global clerisy. She ended up asking an accidentally revealing question without either of them seeing the import nor exploring it once raised.
Her question was something along the lines of:
LSE is a prestigious and rigorous school. I would imagine that a disproportionate number of the students who are accepted there, suffer from perfectionism. Do you see evidence of that and is there anything you can do as a professor to help them.
Curran seamlessly transitioned into an acknowledgement that LSE did have a lot of perfectionist students and there were things that needed to be done to help them.
Ignoring all the talk about the fact that other people needed to lower their aspirations, that people should not see perfection, that people needed to relax and take it easy.
Curran is perfectly happy for his own institution to feed the frenzy of perfectionism, encouraging prospective candidates to be all that they can be, creating expectations that only the best of the best can attend the university, acknowledging that his own institution, his own professional and financial well-being, depends on fostering the exclusivity that arises from perfectionism.
Interviewer and interviewee exposed to listeners as hypocrites without them ever realizing that was what was happening.
They want to be the beneficiaries of a brutally competitive system (both competitive capitalism and selective education) but they want everyone else to make do with much less.
It is hard to know which is more off-putting - the arrogance and presumption or the complete absence of self-awareness or humility.
And they are mere proxies; representatives of the repressive, authoritarian clerisy.
The Woke Left in the US, heavily dominating academia, are all about equality and equity and diversity and inclusion. They bay and howl for the blood of those that want to accept variance in capability and accomplishment. When affirmative action is overturned, forbidden to use racism as an instrument in making their admissions decisions, universities and K-12 are outraged and invest time and effort in seeking to circumvent the law in order to continue their racist practices.
Ironically, there is a direct relationship between academic prestige and commitment to post-modernist, Social Justice, Critical Theory, Wokeness. It is nearly absent down in community colleges and state schools, increases with state flagship schools, and increases as schools become more selective. You reach the Ivy League and Most Competitive schools and they are nearly uniformly committed to diversity and inclusion of everyone.
Except, obviously, they are not committed at all. They are verbally committed to the ideas but their entire status and financial well-being rests on exclusivity and striving accomplishment. They are happy to indulge in racial tokenism but completely unwilling to address the complete lack of philosophical diversity much less the overwhelming class homogeneity (the top 10%).
Hypocrisy, thy name is academia (and MSM).
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