It’s hard to decide whether to laugh or cry at the education chaos in Liberal Land. There’s Dalton, the swank private school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, whose staff has just issued a 24-point anti-racist manifesto demanding, amongst other things, twelve diversity officers, thusly

Expand the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to include at least 12 full-time positions: one Director, one Office Assistant, three full-time staff members per division, and one full-time staff member for PE/Athletics.

Back when I went to a swank private school in England in the 1960s, I’d say the total administrative staff, from headmaster and bursar down to office staff, was no more than five.

Then there’s the school district in swank Brookline, Massachusetts, a town full to the brim with highly-credentialed, well-paid experts and NPR honchos like Meghna Chakrabarti who all seem to have the credentials to boss around the school district and its teachers’ union. Because credentials.

(I wonder if Chakrabarti is a relative of Sandy O’s former eminence-grise, Saikat Chakrabarti? Maybe not: Chakraborty means “ruler of the country,” peasants.)

I have an idea. Maybe this system of politics-and-protest is a good way to cause chaos in our children’s education.

Rather like  billionaire-inspired nationwide reform, like No Child Left Behind and Common Core.

Right in line with Harvard president James B. Conant’s Fifties vision of mega high schools.

Remember the late 19th century system of schools that would prepare children to be good factory workers?

Or the excerable Transcendentalist Horace Mann’s 1830s vision of the “common school” that would keep the Puritans and the Catholic Irish in Boston in their place?

Hey, Mann wasn’t all bad. He inspired the Irish to build their own school system with the slogan “first build the school, then build the church,” and so the Catholic Irish had pretty good schools for a century and a bit.

Do these delta-minus progressive morons really think that their CRT 24-point manifestos to build a race culture at Dalton is going to do a thing to ameliorate race disparities or that their expert-led political games are going to make a blind bit of difference among the $1.5 million homes in Brookline?

Ah! I see you are way ahead of me. They are not thinking at all, you say. They are just mindlessly rehearsing the cultural protocols that they have been carefully taught since K-12.

And these are the best people, the committed people, the educated people, that presume to rule over us?

Well, I got introduced to the blogger and YouTuber Steve Turley the other day. He gave me a bit of encouragement:

The key here is that because the rising tide of populism is just beginning and promises only to get bigger, it is almost inevitable that populist lite parties will indeed work themselves out into bona fide populist Right parties.

By “populist lite” Turley means center-right parties that co-opt populists but that “easily [digress] back to technocratic globalist norms.” But not forever.

Okay. Now I am going to go off into the weeds, and get all Jungian. See, this mad passion for system -- the 24-point system that will eliminate racism at Dalton, or the systematic experts that will right the ship in Brookline -- results in chaos. Just like Joe Stalin’s USSR.

Jung’s line is that our notion that we are ruled by our conscious-mind’s reason is an illusion. Ninety-odd percent of our mind is unconscious, and we don’t know how it works and what it is doing. When we get too systematic or rational, he argues, the irrational takes over and centers us back to a balance between reason and emotion. Maybe it overcorrects into chaos.

You can see why I like that. My “Great Reaction” line is that the left is a lurch back to chaotic primitivism:

Socialism is a return to slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is...

So when we create an inhuman but oh-so-rational system -- say like our government child-custodial facilities -- our unconscious minds eventually rebel and kick over the traces.

As I wrote a week ago, lefty systems leave chaos in their wake, humans pounded into rubble.

But still, there is also the notion of Mercia Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return:

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

So, if we Deplorables are suffering from the idiocy of the progressives and their mad systems, is it from our own “personal fault” or from the progressives’ “malevolence?” Or is it all simply due to quantum-mechanical indeterminacy?

Oops! I forgot! It is all the fault of “systemic racism” and the malevolence of “white supremacy.” Which all goes to demonstrate the truth of the Jungian chaotic system that drives our liberal friends to Wokie insanity.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Joe Loong