I begin to realize that the monetary and resource wealth that has guaranteed that the 1% that was at the top of the hierarchy is being challenged by a new kind of wealth: education as a way of rising through the levels of society. For millennia since the advent of agriculture, the base of wealth has been hard work, territory, force, children, tradition, and relationships — mostly formed around patriarchs. It was the old men who ruled.
Today high technology that emerged from industrial resource development and empires has created huge communal efforts like the satellite web or the energy network. Yet investment in education and technical knowledge makes a new kind of wealth that helps explain why this political situation keeps devolving into youth against power. A whole new “language” has developed and is now vital, learned along with English. Any ten year old can handle a smart phone but the president can’t even handle a standard desktop phone with features. Experts say the senile president speaks at about the level of a ten-year-old while kids talk fast and smart in several different languages: computers that fit in pockets, standard pop television, and junior high jargon.
Maybe it began at the end of WWII in a way no one noticed. In the necessity of renewing the world, great attention given to money, precious objects and the borders of nations. But few noticed that the enemy rocket experts and chemical geniuses slipped over to the USA, creating new kinds of engineers. Major corporations realized they could often increase profits by using the knowledge of lawyers and the expertise of advertising geniuses. Farmers and plumbers believed their children could escape from drudgery and dirt by going to college, and that it would mean they could earn more money, leveraging the GI Bill. The better and more high status the university, the more safety and nice things ensued.
Until today’s glut on the market for Ph.D’s and business majors. Now the doctors and lawyers are deeply in debt. Academia had to raise money for more research, more dependence on international corporations. They delegated the work originally done by tenured professors to the equivalent of indentured labor. The learned are too educated in all the wrong things. In the meantime farms and small towns dwindled until valuable knowhow was lost.
So, the power and value of an education, like tulip bulbs and homes, inflated until the product was lesser — stuck, throttled by custom and expectations. Yet the expectations persisted. My rural aunt told her daughters, “It’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one.” Two daughters married lawyers and one married a man who ran titty bars. It wasn’t quite illegal but they made money. These cousins sold the farms to pay for college and live well in cities with grown children who have good lives. Their lives revolve around athletics. They are very middle-class, part of this new part of the demographic that is about rising through education.
In the meantime, those who got power and wealth the old-fashioned way — inheritance, hard work, resource exploitation, scams, and mafia — could not understand why education should be entitled. Once you could spell and count, what was the use of all that other stuff. Who really needs fancy stuff like opera and museums? Around here, the resentment is open, said out loud to me by the grocery store owner last week: “I haven’t got time for all that intellectual stuff.”
The humanities took a hard hit. Part of the loss was the idea of democracy, citizenship, and patriotism. The point of leadership became simply to maintain the economy, and to maintain the perks and authority of the status quo. Trust in government eroded to the level of game TV.
This pushed a liberal agenda on those who wanted to change for the sake of those who were oppressed, ripped off, and angry. Such do-gooder morality was mocked by those in power. Change is often described as “progressive” but it is often linked to “dethroning.” Those who are doing well simply avoid the growing layer of society that barely manages to survive, accumulating in disintegrating housing or hooches invented on sidewalks.
Beyond that, because of the handicap of generations of the past who cannot use computers and the internet to enter what amounts to a different world, their understanding and therefore leadership, much less management, are dangerously crippled. Even the “rule of law” is interpreted differently. Those who grew up “gaming” in a virtual reality saw the rules of law as arguable. Old empowered leaders saw that and also gambled that if they broke those laws, no one had the power to stop or punish them. Those who might once have rebuked them were now weak and irrelevant. Liberals. Children. Even if they stuck together, music expressing their solidarity.
Another dynamic was the public picture of blue collar workers. The “pink collar” workers — mostly women hairdressers, manicurists, health assistants, servers, et al — claimed the status of “professional”. Blue collar work was pictured as digging holes and packing truck loads. Stuff done by “neanderthals”. (At the time we hadn’t realized how smart and artistic those predecessors were.)
In fact, the “mechanics” and artisans who were the kernel of the middle class lost status, and the sub-class of educated managers claimed the focus, taking advantage of cars, appliances, and condos to live in quite a different way that might have nothing to do with family. Any sense of obligation was bypassed by defensiveness and a brittle sense of appearance. It is easy to resent them. Often their children reveal them, while demanding a share of the wealth. This class walks with heads down, tied to a rolling screen of “news” that is about nothing much: science minutia, celebrity reveals, the newest and latest thing. We are discovering that we need the immigrants with their traditional family and religious values. Who else will get the crops in?
Nervousness and anxiety justify the forming of a domestic military accountable to the executive branch of the government, separate from domestic police or specialized and cyber-enabled military. These new uniformed enforcers are said to guard our national borders (even internally) but actually guard the traditional ruling class, regardless of voting, and those of the young who become clients, often uneducated, and therefore seeking old-fashioned wealth.
In the Sixties we worried about the government making lists of combat veterans, people who had guns and might defend lower class neighborhoods. Today we worry that the government makes lists of the educated people who might resist them, waving the rule of law. But no one listened to the warnings about an invader that speaks a different language entirely, a genomic code. Now we feel it sweeping the country, all the humans, changing all the patterns. It is inscrutable to the old-fashioned privileged who think they are rulers. They predict war between the classes, but meanwhile the viruses come unseen.
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