"Yay, College!"
January 4, 2024·13 comments·In Brief
In Epsilon Theory lingo, yay-something in quotation marks and with an exclamation mark is a narrative that has been said so loudly and for so long by the Nudging State or the Nudging Oligarchy that it has become common knowledge – something we all know that we all know – and as a result is not just accepted but embraced by we-the-people.
Now to be clear, the something in yay-something is always a good thing in its non-capitalized, non-sloganeered form. It’s something like patriotism or capitalism or going to college, all very good things indeed. But in its yay-form these very good things become narrative cover for the Nudging State or the Nudging Oligarchy to gather up more of what they can’t get enough – power and money.
- “Yay, Patriotism!” becomes narrative cover for a ginormous surveillance and military-industrial complex grown far beyond what is required to defend the United States, gorging itself on an annual budget of three-quarters of a TRILLION dollars.
- “Yay, Capitalism!” becomes narrative cover for a financialized economy in service to the increasingly disconnected interests of an increasingly narrow managerial class, supported by more than a decade of government-directed interest-free financing to the richest corporations and households, alongside TRILLIONS of dollars in direct asset purchases by the US government.
- “Yay, College!” becomes narrative cover for an academic-industrial complex that rivals the medieval Catholic Church not only in its sheer size and societal reach, but also in its cultural self-righteousness, intellectual rot and economic rapaciousness, all fueled by TRILLIONS of dollars in tax-deductible donations, tax-free investment portfolios and unlimited government-provided debt financing for its starry-eyed customers.
Once you start looking for the yay-form of society-supportive, human-uplifting concepts like patriotism and capitalism and education and healthcare and sport and art and public works and banking and philanthropy and religion and science, now perverted into self-aggrandizing, self-enriching Schemes of Enormous Proportion!, you’ll see them everywhere.
But you can’t say anything bad about them.
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