Vivek Ramaswamy is Right

But not in the way he thinks

Vivek Ramaswamy, the swarthy Robin to Elon Musk’s Cape(town)d Crusader, has spent the last two days assisting his eccentric billionaire partner in stamping out a veritable Rogues’ Gallery of internet hoodlums, each doing his insane supervillain best to trick the public into destroying the American tech industry by forbidding the importation of some 430 million Punjabis desperately needed by Silicon Valley just to keep the modems spinning. Memes are rotting on the vine due to a lack of skilled technicians to harvest and upload them onto social media, and hordes of X-Jokers, like their incel movie hero, just want everything to be about them. So immediately after watching Musk take a Bane-style alternative chiropractic beatdown on his own website, Ramaswamy decided to step into the fray:

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.

(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).

More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”

Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.

Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.

“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.

This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.

That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it. 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

How did it go? Riddle me this: Why was Pythagoras wrong? A: It turns out irrational numbers can produce ratios.

Ramaswamy was rightly roasted for his cringe allusions to Saved By The Bell high school clique dynamics as a critique of American society, though to my mind not enough people called him out for advocating Whiplash- a film about abuse, obsession, and suicide- as a positive model for education. But does he have a point at all? Are Americans suffering from a cultural malaise breeding mediocrity?

Plenty of SbTB alums went on to better and more noble pursuits.

In a word, yes. In a better word, absolutely. Is this mediocrity threatening America’s place as a world leader in dynamic innovation? Even absolutelier. What’s my evidence for this? Vivek Ramaswamy.

Circling back for a moment… there’s like a hundred rooms in Wayne Manor. Why are they sharing a bed?

When one goes back to great eras of cultural and technological greatness in the West, one is always struck by the range of knowledge and ability in the best men. An artist like Brunelleschi would have been embarrassed to be thought of as a mere technician; he was a goldsmith, a painter, an architect, and something of a philosopher as well. The great patron Il Magnifico would have looked askance if you’d asked him something so banal as what his job was. His calling was to use his money to further his own excellence and that of others in as many areas as possible. Closer to our own age, one finds America’s leading scientist was also its foremost writer- the Sage of Philadelphia had about a year of formal schooling under his belt but could rub shoulders with the greats of any field. J. P. Morgan’s taste for art was somehow even more refined than his taste for money, and even the most uncouth Robber Baron would be ashamed to not be associated with elevating himself and the masses. Their names grace universities for that very reason. Look at Tesla, Diesel, Wright, Hughes, Von Neumann, etc. and you’ll see men with interests and knowledge broad and deep. America’s great periods of innovation were fueled by men with a real and compelling connection with Western culture and broad educations, however acquired.

This guy published an article in an academic journal for Classics concerning his reflections on Gibbon.

Over and against this is the model Ramaswamy proposes, at least by implication. That part is important; many tech bro education reformers- even those like Mark Zuckerberg who should know better- have unthinkingly prescribed narrow technical credentialism as not merely a goal of education, but its very definition. Soaked in neoliberalism like pickles in brine, they see quantifiable metrics as reflecting the most basic reality; what can’t be measured in numbers isn’t real. This is rarely spelled out as a fleshed out theory of education. Rather, it tends to be expounded as though it were obviously true by men who can’t imagine otherwise.

This is, to one degree or another, the majority consensus in the world of American education, the minority view being gay race communism. Since the latter is so manifestly insane, and the former is generally expounded by intelligent and well-off men wearing nice ties, skills-that-pay-the-bills seems like a reasonable goal for tax expenditure. But however plausible it sounds, its practice has lead us to the present moment. We as a nation embody the liberal notion of employing the mind toward maximizing personal bodily comfort and mental ease, the former more so than the latter, in an internalized but misty echo of Jefferson’s pursuit of happiness (statesman, philosopher, scientist, architect, prose stylist, essayist, musician…). Those who can compel others to forgo bodily comfort and mental ease for their own we call our elite.

The problem with American kids isn’t that they can’t do math. It’s that the reductive model of life they’ve been offered doesn’t require that they do, so they don’t. If life is about getting stuff, and one can get stuff without algebra, then what’s the point? The mediocrity doesn’t stem from a lack of reverence for Screech. It’s a poverty of vision and imagination, born of cultural illiteracy and enervated spirituality.

It’s for this reason that the techlords, unable to browbeat Americans into toiling 80-100 hour weeks to inflate an IPO for the latest venture capital rug pull, have turned to foreign coolies for their needs. Brought in on work visas, they’re loathe to complain for fear of getting sent back to the countries they’re endlessly proud of on social media, and in any case have no collective memory of a time when workers could compel fair treatment from their overseers. Such who are successful in this environment are those able to check the right boxes and play the system by exploiting it to the hilt. But what sort of person does that system produce?

Canadians should be ashamed at taking advantage of their trusting and gregarious nature.

In the quote I posted above, Vivek Ramaswamy shows no real awareness of the culture of the country of his birth beyond remembering the sitcoms of his youth. His solution to the problem of mediocrity centers on favoring the insectoid specialization of the dedicated nerd over the bovine focus of the committed jock; he does not entertain the possibility or desirability of being both athletic and intelligent. Nowhere does he suggest reading something for reasons other than material gain, nor that there might be reasons to study apart from dedicating your life to further enriching Vivek Ramaswamy. In none of his public statements that I could find does he evince any passion for anything other than gaining money and the prestige that comes with it. There’s no evidence that he’s thought deeply about the greater meaning of his high station. His books are well-intended but ultimately prosaic takes on social policy from a crabbed and narrow worldview (contrast his work with the depth and insight of Carnegie) He’s simply a bigger and more resourceful version of the couch potato he deplores, better able to finesse the system but no different in his basic orientation. That someone so profoundly mediocre himself could advance to the heights of wealth and power in America is indeed an indictment of our system. QED, sir.

I should say that I am not myself a tech guy. I know enough about computers to use them effectively, but I’m not any more skilled in their employment than the average person. That wasn’t always the case though. When I was in high school, we were just making the transition from the Apple IIs to PCs, and I was very into them. I was actually doing better in computer science than history. I might have gone further with it, but something about the other kids who were into tech repelled me. There was a repulsive soullessness to tech culture, a reductive and ugly cheapening of knowledge into pure function. Habits change us, and we become like to things to which we habituate ourselves. The boys (it was all boys) who obsessed over systems became creatures of systems, locked into mental patterns whereby they could think but not imagine. The overlap with atheism, porn addiction, drugs legal or otherwise, and self-referential humor was and is strong, stemming from a view of man as a closed loop of buttons to be pushed. It’s pervasive in our culture but especially concentrated online, feeding off of broader negative American tendencies toward anti-intellectualism, consumerism, and anomie.

The archetype of the species, purely mercenary, consumed by addictions, philistine, and doughy. Behold the Final Boss of Elite Human Capital. Pro-tip: just because you’re afraid of sunlight doesn’t make you a dark elf.

It’s never the guys like that who are the real innovators. Look at the history of Silicon Valley and you’ll see very few if any Tiger-Mom-driven-grinds at the leading edge. Its origins lay in the Homebrew Computer Club, not the Hagwon. Steve Wozniak got kicked out of college for hacking. Steve Jobs did have a connection to India- he toured the ashrams as a hippy. Peter Thiel was inspired by Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons. Mark Zuckerberg is steeped in the Classics, with his irritatingly woke sister being a professor of that subject at Princeton. Whatever their politics, all of these people benefitted from a wider development of their faculties than toiling away at weekend science competitions for clout points on college applications will produce.

If you’re winning the Math Olympiad but you can’t bench the bar, talk to a girl, interpret a poem, or discus a novel, you’re a mediocre human. You might be useful to Vivek Ramaswamy, but you’re of little use to yourself or your society, however much money you make. We don’t need to import such people, but we certainly don’t need to produce them here either. American society has its flaws, but it got where it is because, at its best, it fostered a culture of freedom and discipline tempering one another in the souls of young men and women who aimed for higher things.

There’s nothing wrong with going to Mars, but you should at least be able to answer the question, “why?” I mean, there’s vapes and porn on Earth. If the only point of education is to elevate your consumption habits, then any great undertaking will necessarily fail, not due to technical incompetence, but to weakness of the spirit. Inner space is a scarier but more rewarding place to explore than outer, and in any case, men who cannot do the former will be unable and unwilling to do the latter. The explorers of old, like the other great men of old, were believers. They sought the higher by way of the difficult; challenges are meaningless unless they’re the means to some end.

Ramaswamy is right, the problem is culture. Being normal is low. We are called by faith and ancestors to be differentiated men and women, not grazing herbivores in a field of plastic grass. But his solution is more of the same. In order to help him and Musk I advocate ignoring their pleas for fresh serfs in favor of a system that produces the free men who will actually be of use. Culture is indeed the way, real culture, authentic modes of being that transcend habits of employability. Be the nerd, the jock, the prom queen, and the crusader all at once, so far as you are able. Human capital and human beings are not the same thing. I leave you with the words of St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, from his Handbook of Spiritual Counsels, page 67.