Back in the 1980s, I took an interest in Latin American guerrilla movements, especially in Central America. The general consensus among those who took an interest in such matters was that they were caused by the intolerable conditions of the poor, oppressed peasantry who rose up spontaneously against them. This was complete nonsense, of course. This is not to say that the peasantry was not poor and oppressed, but poor and oppressed peasants are rarely capable of more than a jacquerie, a kind of rural riot that exhausts itself and results in the oppressors coming back stronger than ever.
No; I came to the conclusion that the cause of the revolutionary guerrilla movements was the expansion of tertiary education in countries where it had not long before been the province only of the elite, largely, though never entirely, hereditary. (For the poor, gifted, and ambitious, the army was the route to social ascension.)
Tertiary education, however, was expanded with comparative suddenness. Before it was expanded, those who had it, being few, were more or less guaranteed important roles in the economy and government. They had already drawn a winning ticket in the lottery of life. Not surprisingly, a false syllogism insinuated itself into the minds of the newly educated: If the rich were educated and important, then being educated would make you rich and important. Again not surprisingly, this turned out not to be the case. If you turn out thousands of lawyers, for example, the remuneration of their work, if they find any, will be reduced and they will be disappointed in their hopes and expectations. They become angry, bitter, and disaffected, believing themselves not to be valued at their inestimable worth. They and their ilk became the middle ranks of the guerrillas (the very uppermost reaches being filled mainly by the narcissistic, spoiled sprigs of the upper classes). Only revolution would acquire for them the positions of influence and importance to which they felt that their education entitled them, and which such education had always entitled people to in the past.
Is it possible that Latin America was not so much in the rear as in the forefront of this modern social development (the case of Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path of Peru, was a pure culture of this phenomenon)? Is it not possible that we in our societies have duped tens of millions of young people into believing that the prolongation of their formal education would lead them inexorably into the sunny uplands of power, importance, wealth, and influence, when in fact many a PhD finds himself obliged to do work that he could have done when he was 16? No one likes to think that he has been duped, however (it takes two for fraud to be committed, after all), so he looks around for some other cause of his bitter disappointment. It isn’t ignoramuses who are pulling down the statues, but ignoramuses who think that they have been educated.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Bees With Degrees”, Taki’s Magazine, 2020-07-02.
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