The Education of Capital

Something of an idea (which I'm certain has been voiced before, but which I'd like to echo here) came to me while I was reading a series of lectures given in 1979 by Michel Foucault, called The Birth of Biopolitics.

The idea was this: government, at least in the contemporary United States, has the majority of its populace seeking not to accumulate capital - as every good free market economist will tell you is the very point of life itself - but to become and develop as (human) capital. This constant struggle to increase the value of a body helps to minimally obscure, or at least marginally distract from, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the minority.

This is, of course, done in a number of ways. One method occurs through the education system. Noam Chomsky, for one, calls education a system of "imposed ignorance." It seems to me that throughout our primary education here in the U.S. of A. we are taught precisely how not to learn. We are taught to regurgitate conventional truths about the history of America - like the idea that we, as a country, are benevolent, or that the doctrine of Manifest Destiny ended way back in the nineteenth century. It did not: it was simply repackaged as a number of different doctrines along the way, all of them as presumptuous and arrogant as the rest. Most recently it was the Project for a New American Century - a doctrine written by the brains behind Bush the Second's regime, and the justification, for them, of the illegitimate war in Iraq. But I digress.

If we're lucky, in colleges we are actually taught how to learn - and how to analyze and criticize the things we do learn. But again, these cases are rare. Most college educations are simply a continuation of the indoctrination experienced from early on in life.

There is clearly much more to this than I've gone into here, but it's 8:45 in the morning and I'm hungover, so this will have to do for now. The coffee's done.

-the ambassador