DOING WELL BY GOING ALONG

During Cornell’s 1979 fall semester, I took a fifteen-student class labeled The American Supreme Court. The instructor, a thin, bearded, thirtyish, wire-bespectacled, leather-jacket and business-casual-wearing attorney/PhD candidate with longish, flaxen blonde hair introduced himself as Mark Silverstein.

Other than that Silverstein smoked cigarettes while he lectured, I enjoyed his class. As he paced around the front of the small, windowless, modern Uris Hall room, he expounded clear, interesting themes. He occasionally dealt in irreverence and quoted Dylan and Rolling Stones lyrics to underscore various points and build rapport. When I dropped in during office hours, his wall displayed art-quality 8 x 10 black & white concert photos of a then-young-and-hip Bruce Springsteen.

The course required students to write a series of five-page papers. Silverstein first assigned us to write “an intellectual autobiography.” He explained that we should identify and discuss the experiences, people, writings and maybe even music or art that informed our analytical approach and our beliefs. Asking 18-year-olds to demonstrate such self-awareness seemed a tall order.

Having two parents who didn’t attend a day of college, having not, by then, read much classic literature or major works of history or social science, and taking a countercultural tack—Punk Rock was big then—I cited an hour-long lecture an austere nun had delivered to my fourth-grade CCD class about our obligations to God and our fellow humans. While I no longer remember much of the sister’s specific content, I found her presentation infinitely more compelling than Randy Pausch’s trite and self-congratulatory The Last Lecture, which, four decades later, somehow enthralled millions. Maybe, in both instances, you had to be there.

When, a week hence, Silverstein handed the papers back, mine had plenty of red ink on it. I’m not much of a card player but my classmates’ faces told me that many of their papers had been similarly defaced. Without identifying anyone, our instructor spent much of the hour citing examples of the ambiguous, stilted and silly things his students had written. He wrote passages on the chalkboard and then edited them. I was pleased that he didn’t use any of my content as examples. I wondered if he had made up some of the quoted passages, just to illustrate various points.

I wasn’t offended by Silverstein’s edits. Most of his pointers were new to me and I saw their value. He required us to read Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, with which I had been unfamiliar. He told us that we should repeatedly rewrite everything we wrote. Above all, we should cut as many words as possible.

During the term, we read, and wrote papers about, multiple books regarding American jurisprudence, including Alexander Bickel’s The Least Dangerous Branch. In our final submission, we had to write an intellectual biography of a chosen Supreme Court Justice, as manifested in his life experiences and themes running through his opinions. I selected Hugo Black, partly because I liked his name and partly because Black was a strict constructionist with an interesting life story, as presented in his biography, which we had also read.

Despite his admittedly liberal political leanings, Silverstein didn’t openly disdain strict constructionists; he begrudgingly acknowledged that conservatives typically wrote better than liberals did. But he made it clear that he believed the Supreme Court should be willing to legislate from the bench in some cases because legislators were sometimes unwilling to take political risks by addressing polarizing subjects.

Before I had taken that class, I hadn’t thought to compare strict constructionism to judicial activism; I probably had never heard of either approach. But given what Silverstein had said in class and during office hours, I knew that the person who would grade my paper endorsed judicial activism. Thus, while I praised Black for his legal coherence, I opined that courts should occasionally look beyond the Constitution’s four corners in order to adapt to social change when legislatures hesitated to do so.

During our final class a week later, Silverstein returned our papers. Using very little red ink on mine, he wrote several sentences complimenting my manner of presentation, gave me an A, and concluded, wryly, “You can never go wrong repeating a professor’s ideas back to him.”

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In a July, 2024 post, I described why I ended my legal career after winning a case against my town. Our municipal government had planted shade trees between residential sidewalks and streets. Over decades, these oaks and maples had grown tall and wide. Their roots cracked some of the sidewalk sections and lifted others.

This is a common scenario. Most towns react to such damage by patching sidewalk cracks or grinding the lifted sidewalk edges until they’re level. Or they sensibly tolerate some imperfection and trust humans to exercise basic judgment as they put one foot in front of the other.

Instead of applying these rational strategies, my town cut down many dozens of hundred-year-old trees and required over 1,000 homeowners who lived alongside slightly lifted or cracked sidewalks to replace any mildly flawed sidewalk sections, even though the homeowners hadn’t planted the trees that damaged the sidewalks; the town had.

Nearly all residents agreed the town was overreacting and overreaching. But my town is 8:1 Democrat. If you’re part of that Club, you can get elected to the Council, or appointed to one of a variety of political patronage positions, e.g., Planning Board members, Rent Control Board attorney, et al.

Most of these positions didn’t pay high salaries. But the associated pensions made these jobs lucrative over the long term. People who did these very part-time jobs—say five hours a month—got a full year’s pension credit for every year they held such a position. To calculate an employees’ pension, the Public Employee Retirement System multiplied the average of three highest years’ salaries by the number of years one held any government job, including one that required only five hours/month. If, again exploiting a political affiliation, micro-part-timers later got some three-year, full-time job with a substantial salary, having held a part-time job would multiply their pension multi-fold, ultimately making hundreds of thousands of extra retirement dollars. This was a common scenario. It was institutionalized corruption.

During the pendency of my lawsuit, several people who held such patronage positions quietly told me they knew the town’s sidewalk crusade was unfair and overzealous. But they didn’t want to speak out or become co-plaintiffs because they might lose the part-time municipal job that would later juice up their pensions.

Others who owned businesses in town told me that they wouldn’t openly oppose the town because they thought the town would crack down on them in some way or other. Rank-and-file Democrats also withheld comment. They knew the sidewalk crusade was wrong but wouldn’t break with their tribe.

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To “build character,” we make schoolkids read high-minded stuff by Aurelius, Jefferson, Lincoln, Wiesel, MLK, Mandela, et al. They present Rosa Parks and anti-bullying skits. We reward them with good grades for echoing back to the teacher the lessons of these writers’ and activists’ lives. Graduation speakers exhort students to go forth, set aside self-interest, show courage and confront evil-doing officials and mobs.

But when the time comes to apply these lessons, as in Durrenmatt’s The Visit, many adults set aside these lofty principles. Money, status and tribe talk. Integrity walks.

The same thing I did in my Hugo Black essay and my townspeople did during Sidewalkgate happened in spades, and far more consequentially, during Coronamania. Many saw the overreaction but quietly went along because it was in their personal interest to do so. They profited from “enhanced unemployment” and PPP giveaways. They were happy to skip their commutes. Hospitals built their revenue via subsidies for Covid diagnoses, for ventilating patients and by administering favored, but ineffective and dangerous, drugs. School boards masked kids in order to obtain lavish federal subsidies. Those who might have called out the fake crisis narrative were thusly bought off.

Those at the top of the Coronamania food chain were the worst. I know a few people who have worked for the NIH, CDC or WHO. They say that some of their former colleagues knew that the Covid response was groundless and destructive and the shots were unnecessary, ineffective and/or harmful. But they wouldn’t speak against the lockdowns, masks, tests or shots because they didn’t want to jeopardize their jobs, which pay well and allow them to inhabit swanky lodgings in places like Geneva and Georgetown, send their kids to private schools, dine at trendy restaurants and take luxe vacations. Aside from receiving high wages and patting themselves on the back for their expertise and public service, they get to tell their old-school-tie pals of their exalted positions whilst their Mums and Dads boasted to their friends about how their offspring are benefactors of humanity.

During Coronamania, academicians also became Scamdemicians. Despite being tenured, very few professors or administrators opposed lockdowns, college and school closures and student vaxx mandates. Many supported these measures because these favored Democrat politicians in upcoming elections. Contemporary college culture, including faculty and administration, is socio-politically monolithic and hostile to dissent and dissenters. Those who break ideological ranks are ostracized. Breaching the code of silence and speaking against the institutional narrative jeopardized their work relationships and their jobs, along with the attendant perquisites.

Going forward, both global and American public health bureaucrats will continue to overstate viral peril. Doing so promotes government funding for the “Pandemic Preparedness” that will continue to pay their high-echelon salaries. Additionally, people like to justify their occupational existence. If they’re employed by some loftily-named entity, they convince themselves that they really do control disease and make the world healthy, despite contrary evidence.

Media personnel also sold out. While none of the Covid response made sense, so-called journalists and editors failed to ask obvious questions; instead, they relentlessly incited fear. Lately, media figures have wondered why much of the public has stopped subscribing or tuned them out. This loss of credibility and audience is overdue.

Spineless public-school teachers, attorneys, MDs and millions of others who saw the lockdowns’ obvious illogic and its harms said nothing because it was more profitable and politically and socially acceptable to go along than to think critically and speak the truth. The nail that sticks up is hammered down.

Thankfully, a distinct minority of doctors and nurses have spoken out about the iatrogenic deaths and vaxx injuries, some at great personal cost. And some attorneys brought cases opposing mandates. If I had my license, I would have been one of them. If I had foreseen the Scamdemic, I wouldn’t have let my license lapse.

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Many students excel in school and obtain positions of power for reasons other than brilliance or public-mindedness. As Yale Professor William Deresiewicz wrote in his book, Excellent Sheep, there is, among graduates of elite universities, a sense of entitlement to prosperity and some form of leadership.

Commonly, there’s an inverse correlation between high academic status and the ability to think critically. Academic and institutional life reinforce conformism. Those who echo their teachers, peers and supervisors are rewarded. Those who ask too many questions elicit annoyance and are marginalized or ostracized.

During Coronamania, far too many in, or near, institutional power succumbed to incentives to parrot messages they didn’t believe, or to simply acquiesce. The public has paid dearly for the elites’ groupthink and venal compliance.