Profound insight, that… And, what I’ve been saying for years.

Same thing with MBA degrees. Everything the modern academy touches turns to shiite in short order, and it’s consistent enough that I’d term it a truism.

You can observe the same syndromic life cycle in every institution out there–The early days are dynamic, effective, and manage to accomplish things. After a bit, dependent on the field and its significance, things are “systematized”, and start to attract the intellectual parasites and credential-happy careerists. Followed shortly thereafter by stagnation, utter BS, and a failure cycle that goes on until the field is discredited or something forces a renewal, whereupon someone revitalizes it and the same thing happens over and over again.

The root of this problem isn’t the brilliant lights that initiate these things, it’s the careerist parasites that come after them. Those sorts are never there during the hard days of establishing a field, but as soon as they identify that this new field is a potential goldmine of influence and status, they glom onto it like the vampiric nightmares that they are.

This is a universal truism, applicable to anything from the local knitting club to the Pentagon. It’s a glitch in human nature that we’re essentially unable to identify and deal with these inimical parasites among us who ruin everything they touch.

This is also a reason why I say that human beings are really bad at organization. Every institution we’ve created goes through this life-cycle of initiation, decay, and renewal (if we’re lucky…), which we’ve somehow managed to make institutional in everything we do. It’s the bureaucratic impulse, the careerist path, and a seemingly unavoidable side-effect of what we do as human beings. Whole thing is insane, on the outside of it all, and avoiding it something we seem to be unable to accomplish.