06-11-2016, 11:59 PM
At one time, any liberal arts degree was useful because it established that one could think coherently and communicate effectively. One had been exposed to the Great Questions of Existence. As such one could be a leader. One could adapt to many things.
Today one needs think only in narrow categories on behalf of organizations that prefer having interchangeable parts (people as if machines -- how dehumanizing!), that people think only of reward and punishment, that people live in fear of the Master Class, and that they do not challenge the status quo. Blind obedience, recognize of economic elites as people beyond judgment or criticism, and ideally support of reactionary politics well serve a grossly-inequitable social order. So one had to do something nasty to people? Dissolve your conscience with booze.
...Even if colleges all became technical and vocational schools, there would be far too many graduates for the engineering and software-design people, lab technicians, and nurses.
We need to rediscover the subtle delights of being truly human even at the cost of economic efficiency and rationality. Efficiency and rationality are not enough; a plantation of the Old South, a Gulag, or a fascist labor camp could be extremely efficient and rational while denying the qualities that make people human.
...The late science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein castigated the old Soviet Union as the land of the drunk. For the common man there was toil and there was drink, and nothing else. I wonder if America is headed that way.
... Speaking of something Soviet, I have a joke. George W. Bush got struck by a lightning bold on a hot, clear Texas day, and found himself in the Hereafter. But instead of meeting such illustrious predecessors as Washington, Lincoln, and FDR, or even such mediocrities as Fillmore, Harding, or Coolidge he found himself with Leonid Brezhnev. Unsettling as that encounter they got through a discussion of their shared mess of Afghanistan, and finally discussed the relative merits of their respective economies.
Brezhnev said, "You know the old saying... the workers pretend to work and we pretend to pay them".
Dubya responded, "We give workers fear and pay them with debt!"
Today one needs think only in narrow categories on behalf of organizations that prefer having interchangeable parts (people as if machines -- how dehumanizing!), that people think only of reward and punishment, that people live in fear of the Master Class, and that they do not challenge the status quo. Blind obedience, recognize of economic elites as people beyond judgment or criticism, and ideally support of reactionary politics well serve a grossly-inequitable social order. So one had to do something nasty to people? Dissolve your conscience with booze.
...Even if colleges all became technical and vocational schools, there would be far too many graduates for the engineering and software-design people, lab technicians, and nurses.
We need to rediscover the subtle delights of being truly human even at the cost of economic efficiency and rationality. Efficiency and rationality are not enough; a plantation of the Old South, a Gulag, or a fascist labor camp could be extremely efficient and rational while denying the qualities that make people human.
...The late science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein castigated the old Soviet Union as the land of the drunk. For the common man there was toil and there was drink, and nothing else. I wonder if America is headed that way.
... Speaking of something Soviet, I have a joke. George W. Bush got struck by a lightning bold on a hot, clear Texas day, and found himself in the Hereafter. But instead of meeting such illustrious predecessors as Washington, Lincoln, and FDR, or even such mediocrities as Fillmore, Harding, or Coolidge he found himself with Leonid Brezhnev. Unsettling as that encounter they got through a discussion of their shared mess of Afghanistan, and finally discussed the relative merits of their respective economies.
Brezhnev said, "You know the old saying... the workers pretend to work and we pretend to pay them".
Dubya responded, "We give workers fear and pay them with debt!"
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.