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Noelle Mering, fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), recently published a piece for The Daily Wire, exploring the problem at the root of the recent college protests.
The students’ message is clear, Mering said: “we want a new regime in charge and it’s not the one reflected in the stars and stripes.”
The destruction of public property at Columbia University and the disruption of the education there, however, points to a deeper issue within the education system, as Mering points out.
“When the moral mission passed down to you by your educators is to disrupt, destabilize, and make a mess — violating an establishment policy is an opportunity, not an obstacle,” Mering said.
She elaborates that the corrupt morals of our college students will not only impact the present, but also the future. Instead of giving the students the foundation they need to think for themselves and learn from the past to better the future, the education provided is meant to “deform and reengineer them to be programmable pawns of cultural disruption.”
“You give them your best. They send back students who don’t believe in the moral law but are full of moral outrage” Mering wrote. “You send them your brightest. They give back 22-year-olds who do not believe in truth but are certain everyone else is wrong. Especially you, dad.”
In some sense, the anger and frustration of young people is completely understandable, according to Mering, because they have been robbed of their cultural inheritance and wasted valuable time and hard-earned money on a degree which bankrupts them.
“It is a bankrupting of their interior life: a poverty of the life of their mind and soul and a robbing of their capacity to experience reverence and wonder,” Mering stated.
Mering added that in our culture, a shift is being made in the minds of the youth from the development of virtue to the adoption of the idea of victimization.
“A victim identity appeals to a perennial human temptation to deflect from our faults and failures,” Mering argued.
Success in marriage, friendship, the workplace, or in any sort of community requires persons who develop the muscle to self-examine. If you want someone to flourish in life, you teach them responsibility. If you want someone to fail — or even an entire society to fail — teach people to develop a grievance mindset.
The article discusses how those with a “grievance mindset” always put themselves at the center of the narrative, think they have the right to be a perpetual accuser, and blame others for their problems.
Yet Mering says the future is not without hope.
“Let’s cheer then for the wins that speak to the source of this present poison in a way that eliminates it root and branch. There are many of them – from the mass exodus out of public schools to the greater and well-deserved attention turning to the many good schools that know what it takes to form the future,” she wrote.
The long march through the institutions has finally been less about institutional capture than it has been about the capture of the interior life of the human soul. Building and rebuilding whole human beings is the necessary restoration that is beyond calculation and the one pivotal investment into our future that we cannot fail to make.
