Prometheus 6

[TS] Stepping on the Dream
By BOB HERBERT

One of the weirder things at work these days is the fact that we’re making it more difficult for American youngsters to afford college at a time when a college education is a virtual prerequisite for establishing and maintaining a middle-class standard of living.

Young men and women are leaving college with debt loads that would break the back of a mule. Families in many cases are taking out second mortgages, loading up credit cards and raiding 401(k)s to supplement the students’ first wave of debt, the ubiquitous college loan.

At the same time, many thousands of well-qualified young men and women are being shut out of college, denied the benefits and satisfactions of higher education, because they can’t meet the ever-escalating costs.

You want a recipe for making the U.S. less competitive over the next few decades? This is it.

Not so weird.

Picture a node tree depicting your typical social hierarchy. In our semantic world, where all forces are abstract crystalline essences and all forces are commutative, one can build an understanding such that the top is supported by the bottom or that the bottom is suspended from the top.

Only one is physically the case. Pick wrong, pay long. 

I once read in some Nietzsche book (I need to track down the specific reference) that every organization eventually ceases to serve the function for which it was created and becomes a vehicle to power. I suspect that point is the one where yin is treated as yang and common knowledge promotes the wrong analysis.