All in the Mind

No, I do not think that Fintan O’Toole plagiarized from me when he entitled his article about Donald Trump's antics in the March 13, 2025 issue of The New York Review of Books “From Comedy to Brutality.” (1) I had written on this blog—on February 11 (2):

Karl Marx’s observation, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce” is widely quoted. (Indeed, I believe I did so previously in a blog entry.) However, events this week have made me rethink the validity of the statement, and now I believe that it should be read backward: “History appears first as farce, then as tragedy.”

Comedy/Farce; Brutality/Tragedy. 

Not plagiarism, but maybe great minds thinking alike. 

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The Economist is a fine periodical, with a fault: it has too much information per issue; one can’t finish the issue one is reading before the next plops into one’s mailbox. But it has an even greater fault—which it shares with those who claim the term “economist” as their profession: both see the world through the mist of money. 

An article dated Nov. 18th 2024, but recently linked to in an Economist newsletter, asks,

Is your master’s degree useless?

New data show a shockingly high proportion of courses are a  waste of money

The newsletter goes on to say,

In America, about 40% of graduates hold a second degree of some sort. Britain’s universities hand out four advanced degrees for every five undergraduate ones. Yet there are growing reasons to question whether this educational “arms race” is very bright. Data suggest that a staggering number of master’s courses offer students no financial return at all.

(Italics mine.)

Why do we go to school? And why do we go on to higher education after high school? And, most especially, why do we go on to graduate school after college? Certainly not for money in the future if you’re studying Renaissance iconography or Elizabethan diplomatic history. We go TO LEARN! We want to know more than we know today. It’s that wonderful quirk of the human race: curiosity. 

In another earlier post from 2013 (3), I wrote about the drive to impose a “token” tuition upon the students of the City University of New York: 

Money morality may or may not be in itself evil, but the belief that everything good, true, or beautiful must first pass commercial muster is.

Maybe those deluded seekers of MBAs who believe that paying for that degree now will jackpot them into financial Valhalla later will be chastened by reading The Economist’s dire assessment of their losing bet. But I wouldn’t count on it. They have no soul.

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(1) https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/03/13/from-comedy-to-brutality-fintan-otoole/ (O’Toole actually wrote his piece on February 13, 2025, still after me.)

(2) https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2025/02/my-farce-their-tragedy.html

(3) https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2013/04/counting-spoons.html