Relevant to Keith's 20/80 demographic split, here's a piece that casts
some light on where the 1% gets the other 19% needed as
well-remunerated support for the 1%'s power and life style:
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/10590-the-ruling-elite-and-the-perversion-of-scholarship
From the article:
Hazing, comradeship and complicity in sexual abuse, including rape,
make up the glue that holds campus sports teams and fraternity houses
together. The National Study of Student Hazing reports that 73
percent
of U.S. fraternities and sororities haze. [....] Hazing weeds out
those with enough self-esteem and independence to stand up to the
hierarchy. It ensures conformity and obedience. These groups are, in
essence, self-selected. Those who have the fortitude and courage to
oppose their own public humiliation and the public humiliation
perpetuated with each new cycle of recruits or pledges leave. Those
who remain conform.
[snip]
The corporate world sees football players, fraternity brothers and
sorority sisters as prime recruits. They have been conditioned to
join
the team, to surrender moral autonomy, to accept and carry out
acts of
personal humiliation, to treat with contempt those who oppose them or
who are different, to define their life by an infantile narcissism
centered on greed and self-promotion and to remain silent about
crimes
they witness or take part in. It is the very ethic of corporations.
The ruling elite sees in Greek organizations and football
programs the
training ground for the amoral class of speculators, bankers and
corporatists who pillage the country.
[snip]
Corporate culture, which now dominates higher education, shares the
predatory culture of the military. These cultures are about subsuming
the self into the herd. They are about the acquiring of technical,
vocational skills to serve the system. And with the increasing budget
cuts, and more craven obsequiousness to corporate donors, it will
only
get worse. These forces of conformity are hostile to the humanities
that teach students to question assumptions and structures, that prod
them to seek a life of meaning and an ethical code that
challenges the
blind, utilitarian obedience to power and profit that
corporations and
the military instill.
I was more or less aware of this when I was in school, especially
reinforced by a happenstance encounter at an Amherst fraternity. But
I never thought clearly of it in systemic terms.
FWIW,
- Mike
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
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