Journalists resist change

A few months ago, Conner Habib mentioned something a professor told him: graduate school isn’t for learning what you need to know to go out and change the world, graduate school is about getting admitted into a club, the club of scholars with advanced degrees.

It’s as if the university exists to maintain its own existence. It’s not a place to sow a social revolution that would lead to its own demise. Keep the radical political philosophy to the confines of ideas, not action, thank you very much.

Unlike most universities, media corporations are for-profit. They both, however, have similar interests. The corporate structure itself can’t exist apart from the laws of the modern State. Like universities, which rely (directly or indirectly) on taxpayer funding, mainstream media aren’t interested in biting the hand of the corporatist State to which they owe their existence.

I recently watched the film Dark Crimes (2016) starring Jim Carrey. If I had gone to Rotten Tomatoes beforehand, I would’ve skipped it. Nevertheless, I gleaned some insights from the film.

It’s set in Poland not long after it transitioned from communism. In one scene, a cop says, “See, people don’t want justice. They want good and evil. Big, bright stories told with conviction.”

He understood what’s required to thrive in a new, western-style democracy. The government earns its legitimacy, the support of the people, by the appearance of doing good things, the appearance of justice.