jakelodwick:

“They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers.”

George Carlin dispenses some painful truth. A venture into the underground history of American education will corroborate these facts; it nakedly was designed to render the public docile (“for their own good”!) and ensure the stability of society. Guess what, it worked — too well, and now we’re stumbling and convulsing like a nation with its head cut off.

My only criticism is Carlin’s tendency to go soft on the politicians as underdogs / corporate pawns and not the willful participants they truly are. Other smart people like Marco (who posted the video yesterday) also skew toward this worldview. It’s clear why someone would want to believe that it’s good guys fighting valiantly against bad guys; the reality of the situation (the gargantuan, sprawling, life-eating system of theft and oppression funded by business and enforced by government) is simply too upsetting for most people to accept. “Things couldn’t be that bad”, they wish. But there aren’t any good guys running this game, whether they work in Washington or simply finance the inferno.