If you are in school, you probably hear this a lot. If you are
out of school, you probably remember hearing it all the time too.
"Work hard, study hard, and get good grades, so you can get into
a good college and get a good job." But how does this actually
work in the real world?

It's a lie. Getting into a good college depends more on having
money and family connections than on intelligence, academic
ability, good grades and SAT scores. I graduated at the top of
my class in high school, but because of lack of money and having
family responsibilities (helping my widowed mother), I could only
go to a local community college. To the elitists, community college
is the 13th grade, a high school with ashtrays, a place for dummies
who couldn't get into a good school. Why the latter, "place for dummies"
connotation? Because everybody believes the lie, that there is equal
opportunity in America. When in fact we have a caste system. Even
the attempts to level the playing field result in perpetuation of
the caste system. The community and state colleges were ostensibly
created to make college affordable for lower income students having
academic ability. But they are scorned by the elitists who could
attend the "real," private institutions. Even with the supposedly
level playing field, some of us are always more equal than others.

And how about getting a good job? Surely hard work, ability, and
knowledge have merit there? More lies. There is an old saying,
"It's not what you know, it's who you know." You don't hear
that exact sentence too much anymore, because it's been gussied up
with the buzzword "networking." Which means the same thing. If
the teachers and educrats were honest, instead of saying "Study
hard," they would say "Party hearty," so you can develop those
all-so-important social connections that you can parlay into employment.
In fact, the students taking the advice to "Study hard" will be at
a disadvantage, since they will be hitting the books, nose to the
grindstone, with no time to socialize.

Do we even have any good jobs available anymore? I know someone
with a master's degree in psychology who is working in retail. Yes,
it's an upper level position, but it's still retail, not cutting
edge psychological research. And there is an old joke about what
one Ph.D in astronomy says to another: "Would you like fries with that?"

It may sound like I'm being anti-intellectual here, but that is not
my intention. I personally enjoy reading and learning. I believe
that knowledge, like virtue, should be its own reward. And in some
situations, knowledge is power. But not as often as money is power
and power is power. The greatest anti-intellectual force in America
is the general system that rewards ignorance, dishonesty and apathy
and punishes their opposites.

Seeing the hypocrisy of the for-profit "real world" at an early age,
I gravitated to the non-profit sector. You know, the good guys,
trying to make the world a better place, people who aren't in it
for the money. Boy, was I wrong. More lies and liars, hypocrites
and frauds. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The same
prejudices and stupidity abound in the non-profit realm.

For example, many of the activists I worked with were products of
the 1960s, when youth was where it's at, when they said "Don't trust
anyone over 30." But they had contempt for me because I was a few
years younger than they were. What happened to all that peace, love,
freedom and equality stuff they were spouting? I guess it was only
for them, not for anybody else.

Most of the do-gooders I encountered were liberals who claimed to
care so much for the poor and disdvantaged. They scorned me, with
my 13th grade, "high school with ashtrays" community college (formal,
on-paper) education. Why can't activists who are trying to fight
poverty realize that there are intelligent, studious people who don't
end up at the Ivy League because they can't afford it? Who is the
bigger fraud, the conservative who publically says "If you're so smart, why
aren't you rich?" or the liberal who privately appears to believe the same
thing?

This one liberal I encountered was a real trip. He went to Yale,
even though he only got Cs in high school. Somebody pulled strings
to get him in on an athletic scholarship. Based purely on academic
achievement, I should have been at Yale and he would have gone to
13th grade. But even though he got into the Ivy League through
undemocratic, nonmeritorious means, he would fawn over anybody who
went to Harvard or Yale as "heavyweights," while regarding me as
someone slightly above retarded. And no, this isn't jealousy talking,
it's just disgust with the hypocrisy and lies.

In the non-profit world, one hopes to get funding from foundations.
And this is another world filled with lies, fraud, and hypocrisy.
The foundations love to promote themselves as objective bodies that
carefully evaluate the funding proposals they receive, based solely
on merit. More lies, more prejudice.

Just like the liberals, the foundations also fawn over people
with Ivy League credentials and scorn those without them, even
if the latter are actually making a difference. They also tend
to fund groups that already have lots of money. The "who you know"
game operates in full force as well. Plus, there is
a geographical bias. Most of the big foundations are either in
the Boston-Washington corridor or in California. Everything
in between the coasts is considered fly-over land, meaning,
Dogpatch. Just like in real estate, it's location that's key;
location plays a big role in what groups get funded. Hint:
Dogpatch loses out to the DC beltway. Unless they find someone
in fly-over land who is willing to serve as their useful idiot puppet.

Case in point: a certain environmental prize. In
the 1990s this prize, $75,000, went to an individual who chained herself
to a desk at a midwest state EPA. Another example of the system rewarding
an anti-intellectual approach.

I've given up trying to understand why the system works the way it
does. All I know is that an awful lot of people, corporations, and
institutions seem to have a vested interest in keeping the public ignorant
and pacified with bread and circuses. And that most of the things
the powers that be tell you are so important are not, in the grand
scheme of things, and most of what we are told is lies.