Institutional Failure

I’m guessing your distaste for chapter 2 was so great you didn’t want to touch it even to respond to my “closing comments” on it. Very well MM! To the ramparts of education! :)

I thought Hedges started the chapter off well with cold water in the face with this system-shocking quote from Sinclair Lewis: “Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal, and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.”

The statistics you list from Hedges are starkly, coldly, shocking. Refusing to read, whether to completion or even to read at all, has elements of denial and delusion to be sure, enfeebling things along the way to de-intellectualization. But there is also a cleaving to the paradigmic illusions that part of us know are not healthy, but would rend our psyches if we confronted those two really, Really, REALLY scary things.

Truth. Reality.

Is not our society a reflection of this? People cleave, with desperation and even angry fervor, to so much of what they feel they MUST believe, that MUST be the case for their world to be THEIR world. Or at least refusing to accept evidence to the contrary. Confrontations with the contradictions of their paradigms—about people, about ideas, about ideologies—are so emotionally jarring that they must be avoided or resisted with zeal.

Not only does polarization result from this, but the lack of reality means hard choices about personal lives and society don’t get made. And if reality is shunned, how easily it is for the moneyed and powerful to steer—in a hundred guises—the readily illusioned majority away from their true interests.

As others have said, often times people won’t read or listen to plainly presented facts, because all their “thoughts” and energies are poured into defending their beliefs against being called stupid. I know droves of both "party" proponents that are so ideological, that to have any chance of transcending their mental/emotional fortresses requires one to break complex and interwoven reality (especially the written kind) into several pieces. Why? Because our truly insanely overfilled lives cause too much of too much to be ignored, and especially if that too much is too long (as in, more than a soundbite or briefly described hyperlink). And that is assuming the intelligence is even there to go past mere headlines and catch phrases and three sentences (a byproduct of information overload for the still quite limited human capability). And all this assumes they will even make the effort, for if they already “know the truth,” they probably won’t bother.

Minds so filled with lies, fear, prejudice, distrust, and prejudgment make it so that if even those minds read and could possibly understand complexity rather than spoon-fed, ruinously wrong and simple-minded beliefs, they might still blow it off as propaganda of the other side, even if it was written by one of their own (who would then be branded a turncoat or “traitor”).

This is why it often takes a very long time, of the facts and just truth knocking incessantly at the door, for change to come.

But the alternatives are usually worse. Far better slow progress than none at all. The true heroes are those who labor long in the wilderness—ignored, rejected, vilified, and perhaps even forgotten, with seemingly no hope for “the people” to wake up. But so did the prophets of old, who labored long and without reward or success, the fruits of their work to be garnered by others long after they had departed.

As your aptly named “illusion of wisdom” signifies, more service to this “educational” system of ours means more self-subjugation. Hedges may not be entirely right, but overall I believe he is: our educational institutions largely serve economic, social, and political hierarchies, with accepted paradigms, among them “the primacy of an unfettered free market.” (89) Educational institutions, and the departments within them, specialize and separate, creating elitism (and backlash against that elitism). They talk, write, and otherwise incestuously communicate, hindering or even prohibiting understanding by the non-specialized citizen—and often creating suspicion and distrust and resentment. Such specialization “keeps the uninitiated from asking unpleasant questions. It destroys the search for the common good. It dices disciplines, faculty, students, and finally experts into tiny, specialized fragments. It allows students and faculty to retreat into these self-imposed fiefdoms and neglect the most pressing moral, political, and cultural questions.” (90)

The universities that were partially at the center of protest and change in the 60s and 70s have become nearly thoroughly corrupted and/or neutralized concerning the present system. And to think that agitators try to instead inflame people about all those “liberal professors’ excessive influence.”

That last bit gets a sardonic laugh from this professor. Whatever diminishing influence that such tenured professors—already at 35% of the teaching force and likely to shrink further— may have (for brief periods), it is virtually nothing next to the ultra-powerful and ever-present incessant realities of the system itself.

The system often moves powerfully to neutralize those who MIGHT actually influence the soon-to-be-servile next generations. “Those who critique the system itself—people such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Dennis Kucinich, or Ralph Nader—are marginalized and shut out of the mainstream debate. These elite universities have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement, and information systems are the only things that matter.” (90)

In service to the plutocracy. That 1% (really, .1%). Percentage-wise, the neo-feudalism largely already present outdoes even historical feudalism, where usually at least 2-3% of the population made up the controlling aristocrats/plutocrats.

So, Middle America, all those rough-around-the edges neo-hippies jabbing erratically at the system: Instead of getting irked at their seeming lack of focus, or the flaky or “weird” among them (and which the system tries to portray as THE face of the protesters), or that they “should be working at something,” etc., cheer them on instead. They are doing what the system has nearly ensured you can’t very well. Because it’s not just family commitments and responsibilities keeping you away from standing with them. It’s the consuming nature of everything about this spectacle-servile culture, from slavish jobs (and hours and efforts, and that’s if you HAVE a job), to falling wages, to the crushing weight of everything—from health care to transportation—put on the individual and the nuclear family, to the consuming diversions that distract you and delude you.

A prison that others fashioned for us—and that we finished from the inside.

Time for Andy to breakout! (See Shawshank Redemption again, if you don’t follow yet).