Skilled, craftsmanship, and commitment are dysfunctional in a world in which, according to Bill Gates, one should ‘position oneself in a network of possibilities.’ Such a world, however, might well be regarded as a form of dementia.

-Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

-George Orwell, 1984

This article is not intended to appeal to horror or sci-fi enthusiast.

Last week, while I sat at my computer, a pop up appeared, warning me of a virus. It was false; I knew that. The Microsoft Essentials virus program on my computer soon appeared. It detected a threat. Clean? Yes!

End of story? No.

Clicking on any news site resulted in my command redirected to a “chick” site or an unrecognizable version of Democracy Now or Al Jazeera.

Remnants of the virus!

As I had done several months before, I called Microsoft. Houston, we have a problem!

After a few minutes, a voice on the other end of the line assured me that he was there to help (as long as the problem did not lie with a third-party product).

I believed him. I believed the stranger because, those months before, another voice or two rescued my computer from a virus that left it a non-functioning blue screen. The voice on the line had control of my computer. I put the phone on speaker and ate two cups of yogurts. I was confident too. I did not have a choice, as we have become too dependent on technology to even be critical of it!

Remnants of the virus removed, my computer was functioning by late afternoon, and I replied to a Microsoft email inquiry: The manger, supervisor, boss wanted to know if the voice on the other end of the phone was helpful, successful, professional, and polite. Excellent job!

I thought about the young man behind the voice, possibility from India or Bangladesh. Do his wages reflect his training, education, skill level? How many family members is he supporting with his income? Yes, his income, his position at a call center in India or Bangladesh, allows him an income and one above those of his countrymen and women, if they are able to locate work at all.

In 2009, 2,023,392 jobs were outsourced to predominantly foreign workers. The bogeyman/woman is not the Mexican immigrant or the Indian or Bangladeshi voice on the other end of the line. And if you really think about it, it may not even be the monster who next week, next month, next year, two years from now will hand out a record number of pink slips to American workers.

That evening, I came across economist Dr. Richard Wolff’s video, “Public Higher Education,” at Truthout/Op-Ed. Wolff, Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) and currently Visiting Professor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York, begins with this:

“A serious crisis affects public education in the U.S.”

Fifteen million students, Wolff explains, attend college. Of that number, over 12 million attend public education. In other words, the bulk of education is sustained by public funds. Our future, he continues, depends on public education.

So how strange is it that the current economic crisis is “forcing many of the 50 states to cut back on the support they give to public education?” How strange, he asks, is it “to fire teachers, to cut back on programs, to close whole departments or to demand more money out of students and parents at a time when they can least afford it?”

“We are damaging the institution that trains out workforce.” Consequently, “something deep and dangerous is happening here. There are other reasons besides the crisis for taking out the problems of our states on the back of public education.”

Wolff offers this understanding of the corporate dream:

American corporations have been deciding, for decades now, to move manufacturing jobs out of the U.S., to provide work in India, China, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, instead of to America.

In recent years, Wolff continues, the corporate strategy is to move jobs that are not manufacturing but those “that are supervisory, technical, professional,” - the kind of jobs “for which university education is required.”

The multinational corporations are thinking, says Wolff, and they are thinking it is cheaper to hire an engineer, a technically equipped graduate from India, rather than his or her counterpart in the U.S. In other words, “business calculates - who needs higher education here in the U.S. for millions. We are not going to hire them. We’ll hire their counterparts overseas.”

Wolff warns of the horrific consequences if corporate thought takes hold and is allowed to become the way a whole generation of young adults identifies with the monster: This way of thinking, corporate thinking, will reduce the U.S. to a lower standard not only in terms of its “economic well being,” but also in terms of “its culture and what makes us a civilized society.”

“The education system in the U.S. is being deconstructed.” It is a “self-destructive act to undermine public education in the name of a crisis when the same economic system - capitalism - is driving both of those crises upon us.”

This scenario is past the drawing board stage; it is being implemented.

Schools and universities, on their knees for corporate dollars and their boards dominated by hedge fund and investment managers, have deformed education into the acquisition of narrow vocational skills that serve specialized corporate interests and create classes of drone-like systems managers. They make little attempt to equip students to make moral choices, stand up for civic virtues and seek a life of meaning. These moral and ethical questions are never even asked. (Chris Hedges, “Power Concedes Nothing,” Truthout, March 14, 2011)

Our college graduate is often lacking in critical thinking and communication skills. In this consumer society, to structure freshmen courses around moral and ethical questions is to offer a course in which students feel betrayed and cheated. The acquisition of As, diplomas, and jobs is already the only reason for sitting in a college classroom.

For the college student willing to consider “networks of possibilities,” as the capitalists imagine they will, the former sites, once called universities and colleges, would crank out young Americans apt at following orders and pleased to accept non-union, low paying jobs for which “networks of possibilities” will be endless. Freedom is enslavement. For there will be literal enemies anywhere around the world to infect and enemies to create, virtual viruses to destroy at the NSA or the CIA and viruses to create.

If the Koch brothers, the Tea Party Movement, Republican and Democrat politicians have their way, we will see the return, as some critics of Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker suggest, to a pre-populists era where individuals fend for themselves in slums surrounded by gated-communities of the wealthy few.

We are dependent on the poverty, suffering, and enslavement of others now and that should concern us, but we may not remember the days when we had the privilege to call Microsoft for help just as the new college graduate, like Rep. Michele Bachmann, does not remember now that the Battles of Lexington and Concord occurred in Massachusetts, not in New Hampshire. But that kind of information will become obsolete anyway.

No need to study literature, history, philosophy, sociology - the humanities. All the young will engage in some form of warfare work for Big Brother, the Corporation.

“Day and night the telescreens” issuing from State news media outlets bruise the ears of our young with “statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations” - that they live longer, work shorter hours, “were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent; better educated, than the people of fifty years ago” (1984). Leave the unhealthy, unintelligent, undereducated, unhappy non-believers to their own demise. No thinking is required of you if you buy this illusion of freedom!

In the meantime, the fearless leader of the Free World, Barrack Obama, lectures the young on bullying. He dances and waves his arms here and there when asked about the torture of whistleblower, Pvt. Bradley Manning, bullied day and night by young American soldiers trained to bully and torture in the name of freedom, but he cannot answer the question without resorting to the narrative instilled in him by the corporate capitalist advisors.

But Obama, not “immune to bullying,” as he admits, ought to know the subject well.

Obama admits that his ears and last name caused a stir when he was young but failed to remember that as a young upstart 30-something, he pushed aside the Black representatives and their constituents in the predominantly Black communities of Chicago. But then he, President Obama, thanked the bankers of Wall Street, the CEOs of medical insurance and pharmaceutical companies - his partners in crime - by rewarding them with an open war chest. Take as much as you want! Maybe, in corporate thought, this is an example of “positioning” the too-big-too-fail-interests first and above the interests of the insignificant citizens of the U.S.

Days before Obama and Mrs. Obama talked with American children about the impact of bullying and warned parents to “speak up” and “make an effort to know what’s going on in their kids’ lives,” Republicans and Democrats slashed educational programs (Washington Post, March 2, 2011). In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker’s budget calls for a $1.5 billion cut in aid to public schools and government. YorkDispatch.com reports that Gov. Tom Corbett’s budget cuts 50 percent of state funding to Penn State and the other 14 state universities - “the most severe funding cut in the university’s 157-year history” (March 3, 2011). Michigan’s Gov. Rick Snyder proposes a 21 percent cut on average for each of the State campuses - “possibly the biggest cut ever to higher education in the state” (DetNews.com, March 5, 2011).

Bullying, Mr. Obama? I expected you to tell the American children the truth: Expect more of the same - on the Internet, on the television screen, in the classroom, in the schoolyard, at the malls, at the financial aid offices on any campus throughout the country! Bullies produce other bullies! Ask the political prisoners here or in Guantanamo or the people of Tunisia or Egypt or Haiti or return to Chile after the CIA-coup that ousted a democratically-elected Allende or return to the Congo when the CIA orchestrated the assassination of Lumumba. (Yes, right! No history!).

The American children are being bullied by a spineless regime that cannot stand up to corporate capitalists because it is too indebted to the entity that subsidizes the Empire! They are being bullied by an economic system that will not allow them to think beyond corporate thought and to ask the crucial questions necessary for them to pursue a more meaningful existence for the good of all and for the good of Earth. The American children are being bullied by an economic system that means to enslave them as it extinguishes the lives of their parents. Bullying is how others are able to identify Americans!

Soon, the children Orwell’s Wilson encountered in his apartment building and on the streets will cease being fictional monsters and will become the all-too-familiar reality of an authoritarian dictatorship in our lives.

The monster is within us, in our procrastination, in the way we greet the corporate dictatorship with a wait-and-see attitude. Yet, the corporate capitalists have not relinquished the projector, and the telescreens still flash the attractive message: Big Bucks with Us! We know what brings these narratives to a climax. We cannot afford to wait and see any more.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.