Robert Parham is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce. Witnessing first hand the growing distress among college students, Parham originally published his essay “To the Class of 2024: You Are All Diseased,” in The Free Press. Ignored by The Cavalier Daily, Parham hopes to connect with the UVA community through this Guest Essay in The Jefferson Independent.
- The Editorial Board
Hey UVA! With the changing speech climate on campus, now is an excellent time to reflect on the disservice we, the faculty, are doing to you, the students. Before you become enflamed about the (intentionally) harsh title, let me tell you I plagiarized it from George Carlin, widely considered one of the best US comedians of the last 100 years. His show “You are all diseased” is available on YouTube, and is so good I was willing to start by alienating you a bit just to plug it here. You’re welcome. It is especially recommended if you’re in any kind of altered state of mind.
Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide amongst people your age in the US are skyrocketing. I myself lost a student to suicide a few years ago – an experience I wish on no one. I’m here to tell you that I think it’s partly our (your professors’) fault. But I’m not just aiming to point fingers – I want to lay a vision of the present and future, which I genuinely believe and yet know many of you don’t share. Exposing you to unfashionable ideas is, in my view, a core part of a healthy education. By doing so, I hope to start a conversation on changing this sad state of affairs and possibly leading to better mental health outcomes for you, our wards.
Whenever I speak with my students, they seem deeply pessimistic about the state of the world. We all know the reasons – climate change is going to kill us all; late-stage capitalism is running amok; inequality is at an all-time high; racism and bigotry are rampant; gender-nonconforming and queer people are under unprecedented attacks; economic anxiety has never been worse; and AI is coming for our jobs. I then pose a simple thought experiment to them: given a time machine that can take you back to any period in the last 12,000 years – since the dawn of civilization – when would you rather live?
You see, I believe we currently live in the golden age of humanity. Things have never been better for humans, and yet, humans have never felt worse about their prospects. If you’re a woman, go back more than about 100 years and you become property (of your father and later husband), with no voting rights and little protection under the law. If you’re a person with above-average melanin levels, like me, the same (and worse) happens to you. The same is true for any gender-nonconforming minority. On the other hand, based on every objective measure of well-being, each and every one of you is actually better off and wealthier than the King of England was 300 years ago. You have better access to education, entertainment, leisure, and healthcare; cleaner water and more abundant food; and significantly safer and longer life.
And it’s not just you. Throughout recorded history, the vast majority of humans lived in what we would today define as abject, dehumanizing poverty. Income and wealth inequality were measurably worse than they are today by orders of magnitude. Women died during childbirth at staggering rates, most humans didn’t survive childhood, and various forms of subjugation and slavery were the norm in nearly all human societies. On these and a variety of other objective metrics, humanity has made breathtaking progress in the past 300 years. Which then begs the question: Why? Why is it that “everything is amazing and nobody is happy”?
Let’s go back to comparing you with the King of England. If you’re anything like my students, you felt that something was off with that statement. How can it be that you’re better off than the King of England? You don’t feel better off, do you? We economists call this phenomenon “relative wealth concerns” or “keeping up with the Joneses”. These are just fancy terms to describe a simple psychological fact – we are constantly busy comparing ourselves to our peer group, and feel bad when we fall short in that comparison. No one cares that they’re enormously better off than their grandparents; they just care that they’re worse off than Jeff Bezos. “Peer group” is an essential term in the previous sentence. None of you feels wealthy, despite the fact the median human, if they lived in the US, would live on the equivalent of $12,000 per year. Yes, you read that right. Imagine your life if you still lived in the US but only spent $12K a year in current US prices, and you’ve imagined the life of the median human today. Your “peer group” isn’t humanity; it’s social media influencers and billionaires, and you are deeply unsatisfied when comparing your lives to theirs.
You live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, yet you feel economic anxiety. The late Charlie Munger summarized it succinctly: “The world is not driven by greed. It’s driven by envy”. And in this era of instantaneous communication networks and social media, envy has been put into hyperdrive. But envy has also been transformed and rebranded. From a deadly sin, it became a virtue. We call it “fairness” or “equity” now, and concentrate our attention on all the ways the world is “unfair”. Mostly the ways that lead to others having more than us. You are correct, of course. The world is unfair. It’s just that you won the birth lottery. In a fair world, any dollar you make or spend above $12,000 a year would instead be given to someone else. Maybe a poor Kenyan, or Bangladeshi, or Indian. But that’s not the kind of fairness and equity you seek, is it?
You’ve been lied to. You’ve been told, by the media, social networks, and not least of all your professors, that this fantastic world we live in is evil. Not only that, you’ve been told it’s your fault. You’re too racist, too greedy, too white, too privileged, not sufficiently attuned to the plight of the marginalized. It is not enough to be non-racist, they say, you must be anti-racist. Anything less than that, and you’re complicit in evil. You are evil by default due to some accidents of birth. Small wonder you feel suffocated, anxious, and depressed. Any human, weighed down with this responsibility and guilt, would be just as depressed. The people saying these things may have meant well, but the outcomes are nothing less than horrific. You now live in a world in which, deep down, you kinda hate yourselves. The cognitive dissonance of being told colonialism is evil, American slavery is uniquely evil, and wealth is evil, yet going to school at a top-tier US institution built on “monocan land” using slave labor would incapacitate anyone.
Many of your professors keep reinforcing these harmful lies. Again, I think they mean well, they’re just profoundly and irrevocably misguided. They do so in the name of a Marxist, illiberal, oppressor/oppressed-based ideology. They don’t highlight all the good in the world, but rather focus on the bad, in the name of some evangelical belief of achieving progress. I have been teaching third-year McIntire students for the past seven years. My first class of the semester is titled “What is money?”. Without fail, at the end of the class a few students approach me and share that the content of the class was diametrically opposed to what they had been taught so far. It seems like everyone has an opinion about this question, and about how economies should be managed. I find it weird, you know. I don’t have expertise or deeply-held opinions about English literature, and would not dream to indoctrinate my students on the evil ways of Shakespeare. Yet somehow, other professors at UVA would not extend the same courtesy to me. I need to spend the first few weeks of the semester “deprogramming” my students after professors with no expertise in economics nevertheless indoctrinated them on the workings of economic systems.
So here’s a heretical statement you may wish to embed in your psyche: it’s not your fault. You are not evil. Being white / black / privileged / downtrodden / well-educated / illiterate / wealthy / poor / healthy / sickly / cis-gendered / non-conforming does not make you bad (or good, for that matter). The sins of your forefathers are not your own. You did nothing wrong by being born. Yes, aiming to improve the state of human affairs is noble, but choosing instead to study, play video games, and make out with the cute person you’ve got your eye on does not make you evil. It makes you a normal, healthy human being. And no one seems to bother to tell you that. So there, I said it. You are not subject to the “original sin”. Go forth and have a happy and healthy life. There is still (much) room for progress, but things are currently better than they’ve ever been, and improving fast.
Why am I saying such heretical things, you ask? It’s because I committed to it as part of my Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) goals for the year. I’ll share some institutional knowledge with you: all professors at UVA have a yearly review, covering goals in the all-important fields of teaching and research excellence, as well as the recently added “DEIB goals”. The specific DEIB question on my annual review was “Outline your priorities and plans for the coming year, including your specific goals to help foster Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging within the School and within your classroom.” Here’s what I had to say about that:
- Why is this category still here?
- I’m one of the most diverse faculty members here (a bone-fide refugee, veteran, immigrant, person-with-above-average-melanin, and the proud owner of the only Mezuzah at McIntire), and I aspire to include all of my students and give them a feeling they belong. Yet, possibly the thing most diverse about me is my opinion in the next bullet point:
- Diversity is great, inclusion is amazing, we should all feel like we belong here, but the only interpretation of Equity I’ve had rigorously defined is stock equity in a company. The main meaning of the word I could find was leading to the notion of equality of outcomes, which I hold to be anti-liberal and deeply misguided.
- My DEIB goal for 2024 is to help abolish the DEIB establishment at UVA.
I think I’ve done really well on my DEIB goal for the year with this article. They’ll probably give me a raise after that, don’t you think? At the very least, no one will accuse me of telling you only what you want to hear. And that, more than anything else, is a trap we must never fall into.
P.S. I sent this opinion to the Cavalier Daily’s opinion column. I wasn’t even graced with a rejection, just ignorance. I guess that’s what happens when they, too, are ideologically captured and deem you “an enemy of the people.” Cue “the Streisand effect.”
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