What will happen is the same thing that happened between the Classical Era and Middle Ages.
The system of feudalism arose because of weak national political authority, the poverty of the masses and the unchecked power of the armed and wealthy. Personal security for the rich and economic security for the poor were at a premium.
The medieval educational system reflected those realities. The Classical Era system, focused on the study of liberal arts and empirical science, made possible by strong national political authority, was replaced by the feudal system of fealty. The poor promised their loyalty to the rich in exchange for providing for their physical security. Feudal mercenary schools trained squires in the few skills that were important to the wealthy of medieval society - mainly fighting and the building of castles and fortifications.
The medieval system endured for about a thousand years. What finally guaranteed its demise was the Black Death. The plague killed off a third of Europe's population and threw European society into a state of flux. Because there were suddenly far fewer people and the same amount of land and material, the value of land fell and the value of labor rose. Because of the jagged path cut by the plague through society, marriage between different social classes became necessary. To maintain their hold on society as the power of labor grew, the rich had to grant concessions, selling off land, liberating serfs, and allowing the bergers to gain privileges previously reserved for the aristocracy. The Black Death and the profound changes it brought to Europe did not bring down the feudal system overnight, but it did make its gradual demise a historical inevitability.
We have the same situation today as existed during the Crisis of the Third Century. Increasingly weak and ineffective national political authority. The rich grow richer and more powerful, and everyone else gets poorer and weaker. Injustice fuels chaos and lack of security. The rich create loyal forces to defend their interests the only way they can, through appeals to greed, militarism, and religious determinism.
So I think what we will see is a sort of modern corporate feudalism. Paramilitary academies run by the corporations for their own purposes, offering barebones technical education, with a heavy emphasis on proprietary systems and security measures, in exchange for some form of indentured servitude. In the long term, this will of course lead our society into further economic and moral decline, because that narrowness is self-defeating and serves only to protect the rich and forestall imagination and change.
The only way to turn this train around is to strengthen national political authority and reign in the wealthy. The problem is, American civilization is in a state of a profound moral, cultural, social and economic decline - a well-defined and pervasive downward spiral that many civilizations have encountered before, but very few manage to turn around.
Actually, the only civilizations that are known to have turned around such a decline are the French (gradual decline of the monarchy, reign of Napoleon and the development of the Republican way of life), the Germans (humiliation and defeat during the Napoleonic Wars, chaos and bedlam during the World Wars, developing a new national identity and hegemonizing Europe), and the Byzantines (rising out of the depravity of the old Roman Empire, taking Greek, Roman, Persian and Jewish wisdom and fusing them into a new way of life that combined the strengths of all and the weaknesses of none).
What all three civilizations managed to do was to develop a new national identity, a new way of life, a basis for political authority and moral clarity. Many civilizations (e.g., the Spanish, the Soviets, the Chinese, the Romans, the Mexicans, the Macedonians, the Greeks, the Mongols, the Poles, the Hungarians) failed to do the same, and after their time in the sun, went into terminal decline and wound up as loser countries. It is not easy, and it requires a mindset that Americans just don't have. Americans do not accept the idea that moral factors are more significant than material factors, or that social values are arbitrary and negotiable.
I call it the "mousetrap mentality". Americans solve every problem by building better mousetraps. It never occurs to them to ask why they are catching the mouse or that maybe the problem is not the mousetrap itself but the wisdom guiding its use. It is because of that "mousetrap mentality" that the US blames disgruntled individuals or groups rather than question the prevailing wisdom, and is obsessed with economic growth rather than considering the moral purposes that growth serves.
Jubbergun wrote:
As easy as it is to blame bankers, we shouldn't forget all the laws and programs that pushed to make everyone a home-owner that drove the market beyond rationality in the first place...
This is more "blame the blacks" propaganda.
Owning a home has been considered an important life goal in American culture since the days of the Homestead Acts. A home is and has always been a solid investment, for the simple reason that a house is hard capital and rent is dollars pissed away.
The problem was not people buying homes, the problem was that the price was jacked up by banks for the reasons I described, to inflate the value of the dollar and engage in loan sharking. When all this went sour, banks blamed the government and insinuated it was because of laws designed to benefit black people by banning discrimination in housing.
The proof that black people and the laws to benefit them are not to blame is the same as with education. The blacks who benefitted from those laws are a single-digit percentage. Most people who lost their homes were white, and banks took outrageous risks not because the government made them do it but because they preferred to exploit common Americans rather than take the risk of investing in real business ventures. Banks did the same thing in the SnL crisis and in the agricultural/industrial bubble of the Roaring Twenties.
Further proof is that this country is fuckin huge. Why are homes so expensive in the first place? Why is rent so high yet no one seems interested in building more residential high-rises? Because the banks are cool with the status quo, and that's not because of regulation, it's because they're sitting on assets, and that is so because there is no regulation to change things up.
Every time the banks have been given free reign, they've created huge crises. Every time the government has tightened its grip on them, things have gone better, from reserve laws to banning private currency to the FDIC to laws against excessive fees (e.g., the ban on charging to cash paychecks, ban on charging for withdrawls).
The problem is too little government authority, not too much. Simple as that.
Mind you, I am not accusing you of being a racist. I am saying you are buying into a disingenuous argument.
