American institutions are suffering from a collapse in public support. Among the institutions worst affected are government, the press and education. One could be forgiven for believing that government must be the most important, given its pervasiveness in our lives and its law enforcement powers; followed by the media, which — of late — does the government’s bidding; and then perhaps education.

But it is precisely the opposite.

As I have written elsewhere, a significant number of our country’s most serious problems have their roots in higher education. And there is no more serious problem than the notion — fashionable in academia for decades now — that truth is relative, or that it is a matter of individual perception or cultural mores, or even that there is no such thing as absolute truth.

Some may think that these ideologies are confined to the social sciences and don’t really have much impact outside their own disciplines. After all, the “hard sciences” (biology, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, physics aviation and so on) still conform to standards of objective truth, and they have a greater impact on our society, right?

Unfortunately, no.

The hard sciences affect the tools we make, build and use, but the social sciences affect how we see ourselves and others, how we interact with each other, and how we construct and regulate our societies. In fact, dangerous nonsense from the social sciences has bled into the hard sciences, which is why we now find ourselves in a situation where educators say with a straight face that math is racist, and where students at some of the most prestigious medical schools in the country cannot pass their boards — due, at least in part, to popular theories that academic standards for admission are racist and that certain races cannot meet them (which itself sounds like a racist theory to me).

At some of those same schools, students are forced to learn “alternative ways of knowing” and indigenous health practices. While understanding different cultural beliefs is important to the doctor-patient relationship, and a holistic approach to health — particularly an emphasis on behavioral changes that prevent serious illness — is long overdue in American medicine, it is important to distinguish both from indulging mere superstition or belief in magic.

The profound impact of ideologies from the social sciences is also among the reasons why millions of medical professionals were willing to suspend their own oaths and scientific educations to promote injections that were not “vaccines,” because they neither prevented the contraction nor transmission of COVID-19 but were, instead, largely untested experimental therapies with grave, persistent — and often fatal — side effects. And it is why large numbers of those same medical professionals support it (or are silent) when gender ideologues announce to the world that men can become women, and vice versa, by sheer force of will and self-definition (plus drugs and surgery in some cases), chromosomal biology notwithstanding. One would think it would matter to the medical profession that the same children who cannot drink alcohol, use tobacco, drive a car or enlist in the military can nevertheless decide that they are a different sex and “consent” to medical treatment that renders them infertile or perennially sexually underdeveloped.

The social sciences are affecting the hard sciences, not the other way around.

Tenured faculty at some of the most elite educational institutions promote the idea that there is no objective truth. Those schools then crank out graduates who, as journalists, believe that the primary objective of their profession is not the pursuit and publication of unbiased facts but the creation and dissemination of a “narrative” that shapes public opinions in ways the journalists desire (those desires often having been implanted by college professors). The graduates who find themselves in government similarly consider themselves uniquely worthy of power and control over ordinary people, and can then use government’s law enforcement powers to censor, silence, prosecute and imprison anyone who dares to question or challenge the prevailing narratives — even (perhaps especially) when those challenges include facts and proof.

It should be clear, therefore, that both the media and government are downstream carriers of the societal poisons that are permitted to fester and flourish in academia. The rot starts there, and it must be eliminated there.

Such arguments inevitably produce complaints that this will impinge upon “academic freedom.” That canard has already been disproven many times over, as tenured faculty use their control over academic departments to prevent the hiring or promotion of junior faculty with differing political viewpoints, or those whose theories and research may disprove the senior faculty members’ own work. The structure and operation of tenure means that the freedom academics claim to value is easily denied by academics themselves.

True academic freedom, while worthy and necessary to an educational institution of any merit, should not be construed to mean allowing the promotion of propaganda over facts, manipulation over informed persuasion, indoctrination over instruction, or intolerance of rigorous inquiry masked as “compassion,” “sensitivity” or other popular buzzwords contorted beyond recognition.

A real education starts with a belief in objective truth and a commitment to finding and promoting it. And western society will end without it.

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