Sigh on Nostr: I think that most obvious reason why schools don't encourage any kind of awareness of ...

I think that most obvious reason why schools don't encourage any kind of awareness of monopolies or the inherent underlying class logic in monetary policy, is that they are essentially factories of proletarianisation, which serve the state's interests by protecting their monopoly on both monetary policy and violence, and their bastard offspring, taxation.

Demonstrating the illegitimacy of the state's monetary policies undermines the legitimacy of the state, which is itself just a loose network of institutions monopolised by the ruling classes to protect their ability to accumulate capital, both material and cultural. Public schools, and universities for that matter, through the effect of class pressures during a period where all strata of society have access to education, have been instrumental in keeping the lower classes in their places by propagating the myth of "capitalist realism". This is done by reframing the purpose of education and shifting the focus of its goals, away from producing civic-minded and politically active citizens, and toward producing an army of drones willing to slot themselves into whatever sector of the economy they deem to be most viable. The historical and socioeconomic forces that have influenced education in the past hundred years or so are inextricably tied to class dynamics, and so are obviously complex, wide-reaching, and the particulars may vary from region to region, but the globalised nature of capital means that its monopolisation, produced through proletarianisation, is a universal, if often unacknowledged, phenomenon.

As an aside, though very much related, I've been thinking a lot these days about an old Philip K. Dick short story (can't recall the name of it) about a guy who worked at a kind of interplanetary customs' house, whose job it was to inspect alien products for their suitability for the consumers of earth. One day they receive an alien-made children's board game that he and his co-workers become increasingly fixated on, but which seemingly amounts to nothing more than a simple game of resource accumulation and domination, you know, typical prosocial goals. The end of the story reveals however, in a major twist which unveiled the insidious nature of the game, that he hadn't read the rules of the game and that they had been playing it incorrectly the whole time: the real rules encouraged players to divest themselves of all their resources and thereby undermine the power of earth's establishment in order to make them more vulnerable to an invasion. I didn't really think too much about it when I read it some 20 years or so ago, aside from the basic allusions it made to cold war era politics and the fact that it was really creepy, but today I can't help but think how prescient and accurate it was in describing the perpetual class war and its co-production and appropriation by the state for its own war machine.

Yes we had "The Landlord's Game" become commodified and distributed en masse as "Monopoly", which entirely subverted and re-purposed the intent of the original, but the real conspiracy was infinitely more vast than the effect that a single board game would have on children's minds. The entire premise of education has become a vehicle by which successive generations are trained against defending their own interests, and are instead inculcated with the necessity of defending the system designed only to exploit them. But the most insidious and frightening part is that you can't just attribute the conspiracy to some foreign or alien forces that seek the downfall of some specific nation, or even humanity writ large, because it's simply the unfolding of the same class war that has informed civilization since such a concept has existed: a group of people works together to accumulate resources, uses the accumulated material surpluses to become dominant over increasingly large territories while simultaneously dividing itself into dominant and subaltern classes, and eventually develops systems of abstractions which become cultural and national identify, which is itself simply another means of defending the domination of territory and the lower classes.

Anyways, I hope I contributed to discussion in some way here. Whenever I take the time to thoughtfully type out a take on a serious topic that has been rattling around in my own brain for a while and it comes out like a wall of text, I feel like it comes across as ranting and raving, but some subjects just need a lot of words to do them justice! Thanks for reading.