It will have its own reasons for not listening to Tudge. These will be just as misplaced as the original decision was.

The Liberals wished to punish Leftist indoctrination in the universities. Labor will want to egg it on. Both miss the point in their endeavours to implement a political fix. They miss the bigger problem. Perhaps wilfully.

BLOATED

I do not come to praise our bloated, corporatist, ideological, over-subscribed universities. But nor should we want to bury them.

Unpacking the problems of the Australian academy is fantastically difficult, perhaps impossible now, after the damage that has been done to our higher learning over two generations.

The universities have contributed to the Australian polity’s second biggest problem. The biggest, I contend, is executive government overreach verging on soft totalitarianism.

The second, which facilitates the main problem, is the closing of the Australian mind.

The closing-of-the-mind thesis was first articulated by the mercurial American scholar, Allan Bloom, back in the 1980s.

Bloom was both embraced and excoriated for his views, and also immortalised in the Saul Bellow novel, Ravelstein. Bloom’s achievement was to document the then emerging campus culture that we now call wokeism.

Many on the Right and those wedded to the late Christopher Pearson’s idea of “club sensible” will understand that the awful institutional and (largely millennial) individual buy-in to wokeism is but one leg of the twenty-first century’s thoroughgoing abandonment of intellectual rigour, of spine, of rational argument, of evidence-based thinking, of explanation over assertion, of placing a brake on lunatic utopianism and ideological misadventures.

It turns out that wokeism is a manifestation (and not the only one), not a cause, of the closing of our collective mind.

The other current, stand-out examples are COVID madness and climate lunacy.

These have the prospect of, respectively and permanently, crushing our freedom and destroying our economy. Together, the medical industrial complex and net-zero ideology will sink the West and its core values, without question.

Many of the Marrickville class, no doubt, want this very outcome. What would Bloom make of the roaring 2020s, I wonder?

The recently returned Prime Minister opined, on cue, that climate change caused the floods. Really, Albo?

The problem is that absurd claims like this are believed, repeated ad nauseum and casually absorbed into the public mind.

UNTHINKING

Then there is the widespread, unthinking acceptance of the vaccines-as-saviour cult. For a cult is what it is.

We all probably know someone who has had COVID – who hasn’t, now? – and who says, well thank God we had the vaccine, otherwise we might have died!

This baseless, indeed, delusional, thinking seems to be quite common. Yes, it is reinforced by relentless vaccine propaganda in the media and among the tame academics wheeled out to reinforce the dogma, but it is the easy acceptance of it by the masses that is of far greater concern.

We seem to have collectively outsourced our critical faculties and our once innate wariness of blatant scams.

The question is, how has this happened? That the Australian mind is closed is clear, and disastrous. But what was the mechanism that enabled it?

Baby boomers and (especially) their ill-educated children, have been seduced by the sixties’ mindset of easy relativism, the feel-good reassurance of hyper-tolerance, the comforts of the nineties’ technological revolution and its subsequent fun-toys – the smart phone and the endless distraction from real thought by social media principal among them – that do our thinking for us and divert us endlessly.

The civilisational consequences are there to be seen at every turn.

We have abandoned our critical faculties, and have not even noticed what has happened. And we appear not to even care!

We are far too comfortable and entertained. We are now two generations removed from the ability to use our minds to think our way out of our existential dilemma.

We have given up the whole of the ancien regime: God, tradition, the wisdom of the ages, prudence. Even science, at least as it has been perceived for half a millennium.

BAD IDEA

How else to explain that no one seems left in the place to argue persuasively that, for example, outlawing the internal combustion engine by 2030 might just be a bad idea?

How else to explain the mindless blue and gold flags? The clapping of the British NHS? The embrace of disaster-predicting models which have no credibility or basis in fact? The lemming-like surge over the cliff to embrace the (now recognised-to-be) farcical lockdowns and vaccine mandates?

Add to that the willingness to give over our personal data to billionaires who seek, then, to use it against us? The acceptance of the ludicrous claim that a slight warming of global temperatures has caused the droughts and the floods? And the bushfires?

It isn’t a mystery why clueless politicians absorb and propagate these lies. The mystery is why we allow them to continue to make such claims.

It is not clear why we would sacrifice so much. It is not that no one is making the case for policy sanity. It is just that rational arguments now gain such little traction.

Okay, so why do we embrace all the rubbish of the age? Are we idiots? Ideologues?

No, we are intellectually lazy and sublimely contented, with our techno-toys, our abandonment of worries about the after-life and our ever-expanding material comforts. This is why we have closed our minds.

The late American economist Anthony Downs spoke of our “rational ignorance”. He argued we had decided that the examined life was, contra Socrates, for most of us, not worth leading after all.

We left the running of the public square to those we thought would do right by us, not realising that they wouldn’t.

Those in charge have experienced their own transformation into self-serving policy oligarchs with little use for rational actor decision-making in service of the public.

PALPABLE

The damage done to our civil society by these forces is palpable.

As the Irish poet WB Yeats saw a century ago, as modernism was just emerging, the centre will not hold.

It has been the brutal coincidence, in the late twentieth century, of ill-education, civilisational ennui, turbo-charged elites, fatal conceits all about, and the abandonment of history that have conspired to seal the deal.

To lead us to a place where people think that floods are caused by global warming and that they didn’t get sicker than they were because of a COVID vaccine.

We have surrendered our chief weapon – our nurtured smarts. Yes, we have all been “nudged” into accepting, perhaps even to believing, the things we are told.

Propaganda is universally recognised to be a powerful tool for the duping of the masses.

But, we only believe all the tosh because we have abandoned our innate capacity to question myths.