Destroyers

We’re the products of mass higher education. Of its expansion beyond anything sensible.

We were given an intellectual chance when we didn’t deserve an intellectual chance. We were put before students who were likewise the products of the mass expansion. The mass inflation!

 

Really, we only increased the velocity of the fall – the university’s fall. Until it reached almost infinite speed. Until the fall itself opened as a black hole. That pulled everything into it – all of higher education.

And let it live on, in its destruction. In its mockery. In its desperation. In its contemptibleness. In its laughableness. In its pitifulness. But really, it was too grotesque to be pitied.

 

We were the destroyers. We were part of the Great Destruction. The democratisation. The opening of the gates of the academy to the comprehensive-school educated. To the working classes.

And not the working classes who’d been through grammar school. We weren’t the equivalent of Dennis Potter or Mark E Smith.

We’d been smashed by comprehensive school. Destroyed by it. We had been made stupid.

 

Such that we could only see ourselves as not belonging in academia. At having ended up her by chance, as much as anything else.

Not as rogue agents. As infiltrators. Because it wasn’t as if we had a plan. It wasn’t as if we tried to subvert it all from within. We weren’t part of some brilliant avant-garde. We weren’t part of some great cause.

This wasn’t some attempt to achieve hegemony. Part of some long march through the institutions. This wasn’t some Gramiscian thing. Some supposedly Cultural Marxist thing.

We followed no light. We had no mission or sense of mission. We had no goal in mind. We weren’t coordinated. We were here, that’s all. We’d found ourselves here.