[lo_zamoyski]

Academia is a petty place.

No "system" can ever overcome such problems. Sure, some political orders are better than others in various respects, but nothing will overcome the basic origin of our problems, which is us! The "system" itself is made from the crooked timber of our humanity, and even if some perfect "system" could be made, its perfection could only be actualized by a perfect people.

Hence the need to focus less on systems and more on personal virtue. You want to find your greatest enemy? Look within.

To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”

[exceptione]

Your post being down voted is unjust. There is a tendency to expect salvation from the system and the rule, but they only have power if they are kept by and defended by the commons.

This also applies to society as a whole. The role of the media as the fourth estate in the system is to inform the public when destruction is breaking the rules, to explain how it will bring down the house.

But when in a Res Publica the media susses the common man instead, when the outlets prostitute them to the destructive powers that finally will kill their enablers, all is too late. The common man will have exchanged his virtues for hate towards imaginary enemies. Then it turned out that the rules did not save the public.

[potato3732842]

>To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”

This gets invoked way too often by bad people defending bad things that they were warned not to do/support at the time but did/supported anyway because there was something in it for them.

[lo_zamoyski]

Perhaps my wording was misleading. I am not claiming that reform is not possible. I am only claiming that the impulse, especially when it is messianic, that drives some reformers and revolutionaries is delusional, a dead end, and worse, usually involves tyrannical measures and produces more bad than it does good.

Of course, academia could absolutely benefit from certain changes and reforms - I have argued for this myself; education has been derailed by inferior goals - , but the primary place where the work has to happen isn't policy or institutional structure, but ourselves. Indeed, the counterpart to your criticism is that excessive talk of reform is a way of avoiding the difficult and unpleasant work of having to look in the mirror. This does not exclude the need for certain reforms, but unless you get your own house in order first, you will be in poor shape to know what to reform and how.

[avoutos]

I think it's more beneficial to think in terms of incentive structures. How we structure societies and industries can incentivize virtue, but it can also disincentivize fradulance and incentivize good clean work more directly.

[lo_zamoyski]

Sure, incentives are important. I don't disagree. The law is a teacher, and it involves the use of incentives and disincentives.

But there is a bootstrapping problem here. The first is that virtue is needed to know what and how to incentivize and disincentivize, and to be able to choose to do it. Corrupt men will tend to create incentives in their own image.

Another problem is that even when incentives are properly aligned, this alone does not guarantee good behavior. Murderers know what awaits them for their crimes. So while incentives are important, a purely game theoretic construction is not enough. It does not do enough to secure rational behavior. So the problem is not merely political, but moral. We each have a personal duty here to demand moral action from ourselves and to grow in virtue.