By Professor Doom
As the student
loan debt is now getting closer to 2 trillion dollars than 1 trillion dollars1,
it’s time to consider how it happened.
“Cargo Cult”
refers to religious splinter groups that kept forming among the stone-age
tribes in the Pacific as they encountered modern civilization, during the 20th
century. The best book to discuss it is Road Belong
Cargo, which has a great account and many fascinating insights into
why these cults kept finding followers. The basic idea of the cult was that
material possessions were acquired not by manufacturing them or by hard work,
but as gifts from the gods as a reward for the “right” prayers and rituals.
These rituals were
imitations of what the indigenous people were seeing. For example, they’d see a
massive cargo plane land, and dispense boxes and boxes of goods. Then the natives
would go back to the jungle, carve out a “runway,” weave a “radio” from leaves,
and chant into the radio lines like “You’re cleared for a landing. Over.”
They’d do this for days, trying to get a plane to land. “Road Belong Cargo” is
basically pidgin (and the book has many examples of this mishmash trade
language) for “Which road has cargo?” or, more clearly, “What do I have to do to
get those things?”
The natives had
an exceptionally hard time truly understanding what was happening. Christian
missionaries would come in, for example, and put up schools, and the schools
would quickly fill with natives, who were diligent and did everything asked of
them. The schools were very successful…but after over a decade of faithful
study of scripture and sitting in rows in a disciplined manner, there were still no planes landing to dispense
cargo to the native tribes. The natives finally realized that “going to school”
was not a road that would get them cargo, and they all walked away from the
schools overnight, completely mystifying the missionaries who now stood in
abandoned classrooms, teaching nobody (or perhaps I should say "teaching as many
as they were when the rooms were full").
The reasons for
the fundamental problem the natives had with understanding how the modern world
works are varied, but, one of the most interesting was how this stone age
culture actually had Intellectual Property laws.
I’m serious.
If you had a prayer which (you thought) caused
your crops to grow better, your neighbor couldn’t use that prayer unless he
first paid you the rights to it. Intellectual property really is insane, and
the gentle reader should realize that huge, huge, quantities of knowledge are
now buried forever, owned (for example) by state governments that don’t know
what to do with the knowledge…and terrified of releasing the knowledge to the
public for free as that would lead to a theoretical loss of money. The cure for
cancer could easily be locked away in a vault somewhere, guarded by a minimum
wage security guard who has no idea what he’s doing to humanity.
Intellectual
property (more accurately, government enforcement of it) is a big factor in why
health care is insanely expensive now—I was recently hospitalized for a few
hours. My only treatment was a morphine IV, and yet the bill was nearly
$2,000…your typical insulin shot costs a few pennies to produce, and yet costs
hundreds of dollars, because of intellectual property rules that prevent anyone
who wishes to make their own insulin shots to compete with the “official”
version.
Anyway, the evil,
savage, barbaric idea of intellectual
property, that ideas can be owned, and such is more important than
actually creating physical property, is core to how cargo cults came to exist.
The indigenous people were raised from birth to believe that every material thing
comes from having the Official Sanction, the paid-for approval so that the
Powers Above would rain down their boons. With this belief cemented into place,
the only thing that mattered to these people was learning the correct magic
ritual, which is why even natives taken back to the modern world and shown the actual factories producing the
goods still kept wanting to know what ritual would get them the cargo.
Perhaps I’m wrong
about the evils of intellectual property, but it’s clear that for many of our
children, higher education today is a Cargo Cult. Much like the stone age
people of the Pacific, our kids are raised from birth to believe a certain
thing which is very detrimental to their well-being.
This belief? A
“college education” is the secret ritual which will get them the good life. Our
country now has a Cargo Cult consisting of millions of current and former
college students who honestly believe, thanks to their abusive upbringing, that
debts don’t matter, that the only thing that is important is to get that magic
seal of approval, the “College Degree” and then the cargo shall come.
“F%^K YOU
TRUMP!”
--a guest
on Bill Maher told Mr. Maher how he wasn’t funny, and that any moron could do
Maher’s job. The guest, who doesn’t care much one way or the other about Trump,
then shouted the above at the audience, who cheered wildly…just like they do
when Maher says it. Some magic words are powerful, to the gullible.
How else to
explain students who devote the majority of their education to taking courses
on Gender Studies? Spending 4, 8, or even 12 hours a week patiently sitting in
a classroom while some nutbar professor spews misandric hatred is no longer
reserved for half a dozen students on campus. Now these types of classes are
taught in auditoriums with hundreds of students, several times a day, and it’s
hardly the only “subject” taught like this.
Any rational person
looking at these courses would realize it’s madness to think anything
beneficial will come of it, any more than chanting into a “radio” made out of
palm fronds.
But our students
are engaging in this behavior for years on end, because they’ve been told that
a degree is the only thing that counts.
What’s been done
to our children is evil, and it’s time to point the finger.
In the Pacific,
the Cargo Cults were eventually squelched by the “adults,” the conquering modern
civilizations who, while pretty vicious to the natives, were at least correct
in stomping these cults out every time they’d spring up.
On the other
hand, in higher education, the “adults,” the administrators who run higher
education, are forever strutting around like royalty on campus, are every bit
as vicious to the kids as the modern conquerors of the Pacific isles…and do
nothing to stop the College Cargo Cult.
Instead,
administrators actually assist the kids in their own self-destruction, pushing
to offer more bogus coursework, to make even the “legitimate” courses have less
and less material in them which could be helpful, to constantly debase
education; after only a handful of years, administrators rake in more money
than their victims will ever see in their lives.
Sooner or later,
much like the natives in the missionary schools, our kids will figure out that
there’s no cargo to come from higher education, and there’s just no reason to
take on tens of thousands of dollars of debt trying to get a magical diploma
which, ultimately, is worth nothing. They’re going to walk away, and our
massively overbuilt and over-administrated schools will be every bit as empty
as those old missionary schools.
I wish there was
something I could do to hasten that day, to end the evil being wrought here…
1. Hey,
remember when it was considered horrible that the entire national debt was a trillion dollars? I do, though I guess Reagan was a long time ago.
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