Chapter 23: Education

Under the dominant modern feudalistic socio-economic paradigm, young people must prepare and strategize from early-on how they will come up with the currency needed to ransom their existence from the moment they become a legal adult. Realistically, the best strategy is to learn a trade or get a college degree, though it is no guarantee. Without either of those, we can expect to be competing for sub-living-wage jobs.

While many developed countries, such as the United States, have free education through high school. Unfortunately, the socio-economic paradigm creates a radical disparity in the quality of education that kids receive, based on their socio-economic status. The vast majority of young people receive an inferior education that barely prepares them for the lowest-paying, non-skilled jobs, much less college.

In a society where a person’s economic status determines one’s options, quality of life, the degree of freedom and respect that one is given, and ability to thrive, the same is true of school districts. A district in a poor area receives few funds. A district in a rich area receives copious funds. The caste system under this paradigm is every bit as rigid and repressive as the more widely acknowledged caste system in India. The ultra-wealthy modern feudal lords’ children almost always go to elite, exclusive private schools, which cost is astronomical.

Assuming that you, coming from a less-than-advantaged public school, succeed in getting good enough grades to get into a college or university, you still aren’t in. Even at state colleges and universities, the cost of tuition is typically more than most of us make in a year, over and above living expenses. If we aren’t in the ruling feudal elite, we have no way to manage it.

There is financial aid available, yet over time, tuition and other costs go up relentlessly while financial aid tends to shrink over time. In some places, you aren’t eligible until your mid twenties. In some instances, the school will deny financial aid and try to force parents to pay, even when they simply can’t. So all of your hard work studying and getting into a school could be for nothing.

Under the current paradigm, standards for eligibility for financial aid and most other social safety net assistance are demonstrably unrealistic and draconian. By analogy, imagine that you’re on a sinking ship but the coast guard won’t send help unless you are physically at or below sea level, which is defined for eligibility purposes as several meters below sea level.

To make things worse, the ever-accelerating rate of inflation in education (and living) costs, coupled with the glacial pace of wage growth, intensify and expand the disparity. In the United States in 1968, seventeen percent of people with college degrees were working for sub-living pay. As of 2012, nearly half of college graduates had jobs paying a sub-living wage, while being burdened with crushing student debt. And don’t forget that if job statistics state that the median wage for a given job is a certain amount, then that means that half of the people working at that job are making less than that.

In societies shaped by the modern feudal paradigm, there is strong reinforcement for choosing a career goal based on perceived earning potential, rather than on following your dreams, interests or strengths. This cements a pattern where people seek careers for which they may have little or no interest, ability or passion. This results in a majority of unfulfilled people working at jobs that they have no affinity for and are most likely not very good at. Quality of life is crushed, and the quality of goods and service that we experience is also seriously degraded. With few exceptions, career counselors strenuously discourage students from choosing their majors based on their passions and aptitudes.

As a result, we see societies where unhappiness, unfulfillment, and mediocrity are the accepted norm, where innovation is lackluster at best, and the economy is healthy while the people in it are suffocating. We are forced to choose between our passions and aptitudes, and survival. Apathy, alienation, cynicism, numb compliance, disempowerment and lack of connection or motivation are epidemic. This paradigm will always give rise to such a dysfunctional, crippled society. Both individuals and the community fall perennially far below their potential along every metric except profits.

This hurts productivity as well as human beings. People working at unfulfilling jobs for which they have little aptitude or passion, being paid sub-living wages and treated with little or no respect, produce far below their best, both consciously and subconsciously. With poor quality of life their only realistic prospect, people’s motivations are as low and grudging as the pay and treatment they’re subjected to.

The only reason to stay in such a situation is the unrelenting enforced need to come up with a constant supply of currency in order to keep ransoming our existence. This creates operational chains as rigid and restrictive as any physical ones, keeping us modern serfs and peasants compliant.

Modern feudalistic paradigms appear to show more productivity than egalitarian, synergistic ones. This is an illusion. The apparent advantage is an illusion. You can do more, faster, and longer on meth – for a time. You feel full of energy, don’t need to sleep or eat, and maybe you do move around faster. But the crash will come, your body and mind will pay a huge toll, and what you produce is rushed and defective.

In the new paradigm, this will completely change. Every one of us will be guaranteed our basic needs. Currency will be obsolete. Education and training will be free to all who want it and can do the work. There will be no reason to pursue any course of study or career that has no meaning for you or for which you have no aptitude. People working at their passions and natural aptitudes are demonstrably more productive at higher levels of quality. Goods and services will improve drastically. Our quality of life, as individuals and as communities, will soar, initiating a positive spiral of expanding wellbeing, productivity, and quality of life. We will all benefit in the new synergistic, symbiotic, empowering win-win paradigm.

Most likely, the very concepts of “work” and “play” will be much altered. When we’re working at something we love and enjoy, feeling empowered and respected, “work” is no longer a burden to be borne stoically by serfs and peasants. As time goes on, as empowered symbiotes, more and more of us will look forward to going to work nearly as much as we do to recreational activities.

Would you rather your surgeon, pilot, mechanic or the people who made your car were overworked, underpaid serfs or professionals in it for the money, prestige and perks – or fulfilled, empowered people doing what they love and are best at?

Many social democratic countries already do offer free education at ever level. In such countries, productivity, quality of life, worker and consumer satisfaction, and overall wellbeing are consistently dramatically higher than in countries under pure, unrestrained modern feudalistic paradigms such as the United States. The community supports and empowers the people in it, who in turn support and make their best contribution to the community.

Under the current dominant paradigm, rapidly growing numbers and percentages of people have no realistic prospect of higher education. Many who do get degrees or training in a trade, end up working for sub or barely-living pay, staggering under the burden of student loans totaling some years’ worth of their annual income. Society suffers from every person who would enter a trade or career if they could, who never becomes the composer, engineer, doctor, carpenter, artist, psychologist, or other contributors that they would have, if they had the chance.

In the new paradigm, there will be no “market forces” or “bottom lines.” There will be mutually-empowered, fulfilled, people following their most authentic callings - peers and co-stakeholders highly engaged in every aspect of life. Countries initiating it will quickly prove themselves on the world stage to be leaders and role models of whole new levels of thriving. The superiority and practicality of the new paradigm will quickly become stunningly clear to all.