Historians have long debated how rich families and in the last century, rich countries, engage in pay to play for their kids while everyone else's hoe potatoes
Back in the middle ages it was studying theology and convincing the poors to confess sin now it's social theory and therapy to confess feeling anything but allegiance to the factory to grave mindset foisted on blue collar America
Neuroscience has revealed brainwave sync between human meat suits is a physical reality; so we're basically just rsyncing the American conditioning among each other engaging in constant parroting of the civil religion's allowances[1] that there be gentile Mr Burns haves and thoughtless drone sycophants
Absolute quackery[2]. Kirk made whoopie with green skin hotties. Han bounced around. Yet for some reason everyone with power is like "boring missionary with no lights on and zero talking!"
Usually, most healthy societies have enough places to reasonably allow well educated, competent, people to achieve a high status, regardless of political structure. But as more and more well educated, competent people begin to compete against each other and their predecessors, many Elite Aspirants will become Counter Elites.
Anakin Skywalker ironically fits this perfectly, as he was an overworked child prodigy, born to a slave mother who was killed, and still did not reach the level of Master due to collective mistrust by the (wealthier and detached) older generation, who told him not to worry about his mother as she was being killed.
Behind every Anti-Intellectual movement, is a well educated individual. True for the Oath Keepers and Stewart Rhodes, the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Mao etc. Even if the face of the movement isn't well educated, someone else in the party often is.
The Disintegrative phase of the Secular Cycle will continue, unless the Wealth Pump is addressed, and Asabiyyah (Social Cohesion) is restored, either by the Left or the Right.
The first requires massive societal upheaval, the second likely requires the destruction of the Internet or to spend the next 500 years for humanity to learn to function around the incredibly disruptive effect it has on human communities.
And if we wait the Left or the Right to be the ones to save us, we’ll be engulfed by the Sun first.
We’ll find a way out of this mess, surely, but we still haven’t reached the peak of our malaise. Many of us at this point just want to see everything crash down to hope to start anew, and better.