Utopia for Realists

No, the real crisis is that we can’t come up with anything better

A worldview is not a Lego set where a block is added here, removed there. It’s a fortress that is defended tooth and nail, with all possible reinforcements, until the pressure becomes so overpowering that the walls cave in.

In the 21st century, the real elite are those born not in the right family or the right class but in the right country.

If you were the GDP, your ideal citizen would be a compulsive gambler with cancer who’s going through a drawn-out divorce that he copes with by popping fistfuls of Prozac and going berserk on Black Friday.

question altogether: Which knowledge and skills do we want our children to have in 2030? Then, instead of anticipating and adapting, we’d be focusing on steering and creating. Instead of wondering what we need to do to make a living in this or that bullshit job, we could ponder how we want to make a living.

The focus, invariably, is on competencies, not values. On didactics, not ideals. On “problem-solving ability,” but not which problems need solving.

The modern marketplace is equally uninterested in usefulness, quality, and innovation. All that really matters is profit. Sometimes that leads to marvelous contributions, sometimes not. From telemarketers to tax consultants, there’s a rock-solid rationale for creating one bullshit job after another: You can net a fortune without ever producing a thing.

In a world that’s getting ever richer, where cows produce more milk and robots produce more stuff, there’s more room for friends, family, community service, science, art, sports, and all the other things that make life worthwhile. But there’s also more room for bullshit.

For starters, you have to memorize some very important-sounding but meaningless jargon. (Crucial when attending strategic trans-sector peer-to-peer meetings to brainstorm the value add-on co-creation in the network society.)

David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, believes there’s something else going on. A few years ago he wrote a fascinating piece that pinned the blame not on the stuff we buy but on the work we do. It is titled, aptly, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.”