Manufactured ignorance is a primary function of public education (or, how the world economy really works)

And it works.

By Denis G. Rancourt, PhD


A main function of the public education enterprise, beyond destruction of the personality and individual thought and agency, is to ingrain a camouflaged ignorance that becomes a permanent fixture in the host brain.

One of the best examples of such manufactured ignorance is the widespread ingrained notion that the dominant global military-industrial-propaganda complex does or could allow a large measure of "free enterprise capitalism".

This false notion is one where individual motivation to maximize individual wealth accumulation is the first mechanistic organizational principle at work, which "explains" USA economic hegemony.

This myth of "the invisible hand" as being compatible with reality is so pervasive that it has even penetrated the reinforced stronghold of independent thought that is the Libertarian mind.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

USA economic dominance is imposed and enforced by projected military power, which ensures physical control of both energy resources and trade routes, and which imposes global extortion via control of the world currency and financial transactions (the US dollar printed at will by the boss, and direct control of global investment and transaction conditions).

Projected military power also installs direct corporate exploitation on territories, thus preventing any national emergence. Corporations themselves are not so much for directly making money, but more for directly controlling human and natural resources to prevent local emergence.

Projected military power is visible in military bases in every region, and in a fleet of aircraft carriers, each more powerful than the militaries of most nations.

Macroeconomic hegemony is visible in the existence and operation of global finance instruments (World Bank, International Monetary Found) and in the regular USA use of devastating "sanctions" and associated physical blockades.

That the organizing principle is military-CIA-etc-mediated dominance and exploitation rather than benign self-organization from individual motivation for individual benefit is true at all scales: from "health and safety" regulations that create controlled markets further occupying the mind, to the regulated industry of death, to urban building-zone battles for more isolating and sanitized cubicles, and so on.

The Libertarians detect and denounce personal-scale and nuclear-family-scale oppression but largely accept the myth that a mega-corporation is simply an expression of free will. Many find it impossible to distinguish a small private business from an entangled "public" mega-corporation.

Think of the efficiency of the public education enterprise when even the minds of Libertarians are contaminated to this degree.

Surprisingly, fragments of the actual societal organizing principles at work nonetheless occasionally emerge, even in the academic literature: "Preferences for group dominance track and mediate the effects of macro-level social inequality and violence across societies, by JR Kunst et al., doi: 10.1073/pnas.1616572114, PNAS, May 8, 2017."