Despair, American Style
By Paul Krugman, Nov. 9 2015 (LINK to article)
The "style" of this despair may be American, but the cause is as ancient as civilisation itself, because inherently associated with it.
Academics give us a rosy-eyed view of civilisation, because, unlike the majority of people, they belong to one of its privileged elites and have a massive personal self-interest in rationalising and defending it.
The truth, which academics are loath to admit - even to themselves - is that the state, as the basic unit of any civilisation is a social, i.e. economic and power-political, construct, with the primary purpose of facilitating society's SELF-exploitation, to the personal advantage of its ruling elites and favoured (especially wealthy and academic) clients, at the expense, and ultimate self-destruction, of society at large.
Even if they admit this about the past, which with hindsight it is difficult to deny, most academics still expect us to believe that with the advent of the American Revolution, Democracy and universal suffrage everything changed, but it didn't.
How are we (especially academics) to see what we have a narrow and short-sighted personal self-interest in not seeing? By viewing ourselves and our situation from a human-evolutionary perspective: LINK to blog in which I elaborate.
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