gat

Nor have you heard the worst: an intelligentsia’s unhappiness builds geometrically—an
underemployed chinovnik or babu becomes angrier and more cynical with the passage of years.
Sometimes this rage discharges itself quickly, as when postal employees shoot up the joint;
sometimes it takes centuries. For an example of the latter, Toynbee offers us:
1. The Russian intelligentsia, dating from the close of the seventeenth century, which
"discharged its accumulated spite in the shattering Bolshevik Revolution of 1917"
2. The Bengali intelligentsia, dating from the latter part of the eighteenth century, which
began in 1946 to display "a vein of revolutionary violence which is not yet seen in other
parts of British India where local intelligentsia did not come into existence till fifty or a
hundred years later." [Shortly after those lines were written, the intelligentsias brought
British India down.]
I hope this helps you understand why, from a policymaker’s standpoint, the decision to muzzle
intellectual development through schooling has been in a bull market since the end of WWII
despite the anomaly of the G.I. Bill. The larger the pool of educated but underemployed men and
women, the louder the time-bomb ticks. It ought to be clear by now that the promises of
schooling cannot be kept for a majority of Americans in an economy structured this way; only by
plundering the planet can they be kept even temporarily for the critical majority that is necessary
to keep the lid on things.
In the society just ahead, one profession has astonishingly good prospects. I’m referring to the
various specialties associated with policing the angry, the disaffected, and the embittered. Because
school promises are mathematically impossible to keep, they were, from the beginning, a Ponzi
scheme like Social Security. The creative minority who unleashed this well-schooled whirlwind a
hundred years ago seems to have finally exhausted its imaginative power as it transmuted slowly
into a dominant minority without much creative energy. Dr. Toynbee points to such a transition as
an unmistakable sign of society in decline. Another ominous sign for Toynbee: the increasing use
of police and armies to protect private interests.
In 1939, on the eve of war, the defense budget of the United States was $11 billion (translated
into a constant dollar, year-2000 equivalent). We were at peace. Today, at peace again, without a
visible enemy on the horizon, the defense budget is twenty-four times higher. The appearance of a
permanent military force in peacetime, which claims a huge share of society’s total expenditure,
can’t be explained by saying we live in a dangerous time. When wasn’t that true? It is our own
leadership which lives dangerously, dwelling in a Darwinian world in which its own people are
suspect, their danger so far contained by ensnaring the managed population through schooling
into a conspiracy against itself.
We meet every day in school a reflection of the national leadership class displaying every
indication it has abandoned its fundamental American obligation to raise ordinary people up,
becoming instead an overseas transmitter of the original mother ideas of England.
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