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Miscellaneous See other Miscellaneous Articles Title: Health, Education, and Learned Helplessness Options One of the greatest revelations that has come out of my research for my book The Natural Enterprise is something that should have been obvious, and should be obvious to all of us: Our education systems prepare us for dependence on employment by large corporations and government organizations. Why? Because this is the most ‘manageable’ way to run the system, and conveniently keeps us in our place. If the system were to equip us to be independent entrepreneurs, there would be a number of unpleasant consequences for the established wealth and power hierarchy: Large employers would have to offer a lot more to attract the top graduates: more money, more freedom, more flexibility. The burgeoning ranks of informed and educated entrepreneurs would begin to realize how the economic system is stacked in favour of large corporations (the accommodation of price-fixing, uninnovative, choice- limiting oligopolies, the massive subsidies given almost exclusive to huge multinational corporations, the trade agreements favourable to multinationals over smaller businesses etc.) and would hence demand that that system be changed. A vastly larger number of entrepreneurial businesses would network and collaborate to counter the artificially-maintained bargaining advantage of large corporations in their dealings with suppliers, and end the ‘Wal-Mart’ distortions of the economy. More agile, innovative entrepreneurs would threaten the huge profit margins and market dominance of the large corporations, and possibly innovate them out of existence. Customers, given a much broader choice of higher-quality, more innovative products from more socially and environmentally responsible entrepreneurs, at competitive prices, would desert the large corporations. Why would the government be complicit in this? Because their campaign funds come substantially from these large corporations. Because corporate donations to universities (although these generally come with a steep ‘price’), and to other parts of the education system, allow governments to run education more cheaply. I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy here. Education, like any other complex system, evolves and adapts. I don’t think anyone systematically ‘programmed’ education to be this way (there are many alternative education systems out there, but the ones that endure tend to exhibit many of the same characteristics as the ‘mainstream’ system) — despite the fact that some early education leaders were quite open about designing and using the system to suppress the population as a whole, and to meet the needs of the corporate sector. Like any large centralized system, education has become unwieldy, inflexible, and ineffective. It will take any help it can get. It will even accommodate lots of progressive teachers, locking them inside the academic system where they can cause minimal disruption, shrugging off their criticisms of the system that feeds them as ‘academic’ (i.e. impractical, unrealistic) harangues, and conveniently blaming them for the failure of the system to do more than produce ‘consumers’ who (to quote Jerry Michalski) are “nothing more than gullets whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash.” Our entire economic system has evolved around certain accepted rules (maximize profit for shareholders at any cost, buy and sell favour, reduce competition and diversity, avoid risk, standardize everything, ignore ‘externalities’ like pollution and social costs, grow or die) and the education system, as a component of the economic system, inevitably follows those rules. So we have people coming out of high school and university who must rely on finding menial corporate jobs or exploiting connections in high places to get plum jobs they don’t deserve, since they cannot provide for themselves. They do not know how to ‘make a living’. Entrepreneurship is painted as a high-risk, high-sweat, lonely alternative, whose end state is, at best, the development and sale of hard-fought innovations to corporate buyers and early retirement to something less exhausting, and, at worst, a life of never-ending stress and strife for subsistence survival. And since we don’t teach entrepreneurship, the students have no way of knowing whether this grim portrait is accurate or not. Hence — an endemic state of learned helplessness. Tow the line, kow-tow to the boss, do what you’re told and maybe, if you’re good and lucky, or well-connected, you may work your way ‘up’ to a middle management position and inflict learned helplessness on the next generation in your chosen ‘profession’. The perfect hierarchical system. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t think the purpose of education should be to learn a trade and nothing more. It should teach all the critical life skills (most of which cannot effectively be learned in a classroom, but that’s another issue) — of which ‘making a living’ is just one. One that it fails spectacularly to do, by any measure except the inculcation of learned helplessness and the resignation to a life of dependence. That dependence and helplessness is then further entrenched by the creation of artificial scarcities — shortage of houses near (ironically) good schools, shortage of quality health care (unless provided by your large corporate employer’s ‘largesse’), a shortage of (perceived) security. These shortages in turn produce the two-income trap, and addiction to consumption and to the debt that enables it. The cycle is complete. This got me thinking about our health-care systems. Public and private, they, too, now have produced a cycle of learned helplessness. The first step in this process was probably the fault of (who else) the lawyers: Until about a century ago, in most affluent nations you had the right to self-administer health care. If you preferred heroin or leeches as a treatment over what the doctors of the day were prescribing, and if you could afford them, it was your right to treat your body with whatever medicines you thought appropriate. Then the lawyers and doctors decided we were too stupid to make such decisions, and the concept of ‘prescription’ medicine was born, the paternalistic system that says you have to convince (or bribe) a doctor to let you take the medicines you want. Since then the number of restricted substances has ballooned. At the same time, in a grim irony, the number of chemicals we are forced to ingest, as a result of the pollution of our air and water by large corporations, and the deliberate poisoning of our food with toxic antibiotic (“against life”) chemicals and hormonal stimulants, has also ballooned. All in the name of maximizing profit for shareholders at any cost (“we’re not doing anything illegal“). Something clearly had to be done to protect the corporations and doctors from lawsuits for poisoning the citizens. What they came up with was a stroke of genius which entrenched learned helplessness irrevocably: They told us that illness isn’t the result of environmental poisoning — it’s all caused by tiny invisible microbes that ‘medical science’ hasn’t got around to finding ways to kill yet. The elimination of some horrific diseases — notably smallpox and polio — led credence to this claim. All that was needed was for the new pharmaceutical industry to get trillions of dollars of taxpayer money — some of which they would generously kick back to the university and hospital systems — and the right to charge whatever it cost to find each killer drug, and (if we could afford it) we would live healthy forever. So we needn’t worry about our own health anymore, or that mercury in the water or that lead in the air or those hormones in our hamburgers — the panaceas will all be forthcoming soon with good ol’ Western know-how. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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