(06-09-2016, 04:40 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: For some generations, adulthood is the Holy Grail. For such cohorts, it is a time of self sufficiency, rich rewards for hard work, and seemingly limitless opportunities. For others, it is an unending nightmare of shattered dreams, limits to growth, and a nasty ride down the razor blade of life culminating in death and decay. Identify your cohort and tell me your view.
I'm a late-wave Boomer, and I graduated from college (which was then relatively cheap), only to find that the Vietnam-era draft-dodgers had beaten me to all the desirable opportunities. What was left? The crap jobs of the 1970s -- fast food, retail sales, and work in sweat-shop factories. I could never get on track. Once one takes those crappy jobs one's career potential is gone. Some times I wish I had never been born. The only good thing to say about the last forty years is that we have had some really-cheap entertainment. Mass low culture has become the opiate of the masses in the sense that Karl Marx saw religion as the opiate of the masses.
At the least the oppressed prole toiling in a sweatshop had no obligation to express how happy he was to hold the job that he had. Today the prole often is obliged to suffer with a smile in jobs that show how degraded his life is. In that respect workers in the service jobs have it far worse, at least existentially, than the millhands of early capitalism. But that said, people addled on stupefying bilge might see nothing wrong.
I could almost think of the plot of a dystopian novel in which a repressive and exploitative regime offers entertainment but little else as a reward for pliancy. If one is a double-high-ninety in verbal and mathematical aptitude, then that is the worst possible world. Most nasty systems co-opt people like me. Unfortunately that plot looks so much like reality that it would be a bore.
The rules changed for young workers around 1978. Before then college graduates could usually expect good pay in interesting work unless they went to some diploma mill. After that they were qualified to do the sorts of work that high-school graduates got. What has changed? A college education has become not only a way to qualify for jobs that used to require a high-school education, but also a means of beginning adulthood deeply in 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.