I wrote before about how potentially oppositional impulses get co-opted by the system and channeled into activities that maintain the status quo. I noted that I was purposely limiting my discussion to the capitalist era, even though it could be extended beyond that.
For no particular reason whatsoever, I think I will take a stab at a pre-capitalist example. In Europe during the Middle Ages, although the Church had a heavy hand in maintaining the education system, royal powers also learned how to turn it to their own ends. Lawyers, in particular, were inculcated with the view that only royal law (as opposed to divisive feudal legal systems and special merchant law) should be given a place of primacy. Lawyers and other university graduates, who might otherwise consort with the restive bourgeois, were coaxed into the royal bureaucracies, from whence they used their education and skill to enforce royal edicts and maintain the social order.
To me, this is very strikingly similar to the way in which young, educated idealists are currently drawn into government agencies and nonprofit organizations (bureaucratic extensions of government/business).
The question, as always, is… will anything ever change?
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