The Tragic Young Egalitarian

The destruction of his culture, his civilization, and his future is a crime, but the waste of his youth through the debasement of his education is a tragedy

A few years back I stumbled across the website of some “university” somewhere (I believe it was in South Dakota) announcing on its home page the addition of a new major—Chief Executive Officer. Can’t you just picture some clueless 18-year-old sitting at the kitchen table going through the college brochures with his parents and coming across that new field of study? “Hey… yeah…,” I can hear him say, “that’s what I should be… a C… E… O…”

Why not just cut to the chase? Offer a major in “Rich and Successful.”

The US Department of Education’s website used to make the money-purpose of education explicit, complete with an x = y graph purporting to “prove” how much more money you could expect to make over your lifetime depending on the number of years you sat in a magical room somewhere while something called college happened to you. The graph was even vulgarly titled, More College = More Money. The Department of Ed’s goal, of course, was to get the visitor to “apply” for federal money for their education’s costs, or, to put it more plainly, to agree to sit somewhere for four years while their social security number served as a conduit between the US Treasury and some rich person’s bank account.¹

In the mid-90s, I taught English in several Chinese universities. China was just then coming out of the dark, destructive, murderous years of communism,² and all my students wanted to be da quan—big money—stupid rich. “But why do you want to be rich,” I would ask them with an air of earnest innocence? They would look at me as if my nose had just sprouted a chicken. What did I mean, why did they want to be rich? Who would ask such an absurdly self-evident question?

But I would press them, and so the answers would come—precisely the answers one would get from American students. So I can travel. So I can give my kids a better life. So I can do good for others. So I...

And what are you willing to do to get rich enough to do these things, I would ask? Are you willing to work forty hours per week? Yes. Sixty? Yes, maybe. Eighty? Well… And for how many years? Forty? Sixty? Eighty? How will you know when you are rich enough to travel? When you are so old and worn out you can’t enjoy it? How will you know when you are rich enough to give your kids a better life? When they’ve lived it, but without you in it because you were working? How will you do good for others if the only good in the world you know is getting rich?

You spend hundreds and thousands of hours scheming how to get rich, I would tell them, but haven't spent ten seconds in your life pondering the all-important question of how you will know when you’re rich enough.

Eventually, the class would come to realize that the reason they had never considered this question of why they wanted to be rich was because the real reason everyone wants to be rich is because everyone wants to be admired. Money, the easiest and most instant measure of ourselves, allows us to look down on others and prevents others from looking down on us (and in China, with its obsession with “face,” this is, if it can be imagined, even more extreme than it is here in the US).

The way to be admired in our egalitarian societies is to be rich. So, the question, why do you want to be rich, is as unaskable as the question, why do you want to be admired; the point at which you are rich enough is as unknowable as the point at which you are admired enough.

Serve somebody.

Yesterday, I had lunch with about eight high school seniors graduating soon from the Council Grove Senior High School in Council Grove, Kansas. Tragically, every one of them was going on to college. Worse, every one of them had already decided their “major,” and every major was the method by which they were going to earn money. This has to be one of our culture’s most glaring and damaging faults—making money the purpose of education and then pushing 18-year-olds to decide up front the method of money-making to which they will dedicate their lives. While it’s okay to know “what you want to be” when you’re seven (“I want to be an astronaut!” “I want to be a fireman!”), at 17 you don’t have a clue. And that’s how it should be. But, almost all colleges take the ruinous approach: Decide what you want to be, then we’ll “educate” you.

But, not every college has succumbed to American commercialism. A college called St John’s College, founded in Annapolis, Maryland in 1696 with a sister campus added in 1964 in Santa Fe, New Mexico takes the opposite approach: We’ll educate you, then decide what you want to be (and then go get your training, if necessary, as society does indeed need educated welders and well-trained doctors).

From the St John’s website:

At the heart of St. John’s is a liberal arts curriculum focused on reading and discussing many of the greatest books and most important questions in history. This is perhaps the most distinctive undergraduate curriculum of any college in America. Our students read the original writings of great thinkers across 3,000 years of history, engage in vigorous classroom discussion with fewer than 20 students around the seminar table, and study interdisciplinary ideas across the humanities and sciences without limiting students to the restrictions of siloed majors. Read about the program in the words of our faculty…

Anyone choosing a college owes it to themselves to check out St John’s College and their Great Books Program. You have your whole life to struggle for money and status as described beautifully in the verse below from the American poet, Robinson Jeffers (the epigraph to Rene Girard’s Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World). Take these few precious years from 18 - 22 and experience life.³

I saw a vision of us move in the dark: all that we did or dreamed of

Regarded each other, the man pursued the woman, the woman clung to the man, warriors and kings

Strained at each other in the darkness, all loved or fought inward, each one of the lost people

Sought the eyes of another that another should praise him; sought never his own but another's; the net of desire

Had every nerve drawn to the center, so that they writhed like a full draught of fishes, all matted

In the one mesh; when they look backward they see only a man standing at the beginning,

Or forward, a man at the end; or if upward, men in the shining bitter sky striding and feasting,

Whom you call Gods

Robinson Jeffers
The Tower Beyond Tragedy

1. And just because you aren’t a US citizen, the website was careful to explain, doesn’t mean you can’t get federal money, too! (You didn’t think those millions in lobbying dollars the education industry dumps on the Department of Education every year goes to buy new drapes in the employees’ dining room, did you? Or even, LOL, for something in the best interests of the American people?)

2. When I was in China, Marx was still the only “philosopher” that the universities could legally teach. Poor kids.

3. St John’s also offers a graduate program.