A National Death Wish: How Science, Education, and the Future Were Sacrificed For Profit and Power
This past week something unprecedented happened: the price of oil fell below $0 dollars.
In fact, the price of a barrel of oil plummeted to nearly -$40, meaning, theoretically, that you could be paid to take a barrel off the hands of a producer. It was stunning. An instantaneous lesson in the laws of supply, demand, and the arbitrary nature of money and the rules of our world.
Already, President Donald Trump, patron saint of bad ideas, has nodded toward bailout oil and energy companies, calling them “very important” and all but tripping over himself to promise they’ll be taken care of.
It is a “crisis” that anyone could have seen coming. In fact, most people did. The oil and energy industry has been endangered for decades now and represents one of the most predictably disastrous activities in human history. Obviously the amount of oil to be had is limited, meaning this was always going to end badly, but these corporations have waged war on humankind by knowingly polluting the Earth, creating a totally preventable extinction-level event, destroying competitors and new technologies that could free us from their financial control, damning us to deadly, expensive, illegal wars, and all but eradicating necessary foundations of our society: scientific study and effective public education.
Companies like these oil and energy giants are the architects of the current societal crisis. In this economy, they have worked together to undermine the healthcare system, scuttle reform, and ensure lower wages among American workers. Partnered with the Republican Party, they have created an anti-future death cult dedicated to immediate profit and gain at the expense and sacrifice of the future. This partnership has resulted in unbelievable consequences, including a dilapidated national infrastructure, fractured social connections, and the twisting of reality.
It is no surprise that, during a pandemic, so many Americans now lack an understanding of the crisis itself and the science behind it. After all, energy companies and the Republican Party have purposefully attacked and all but undermined the institutions of education and science. This maneuvering, based on the pursuit of profit and power, has left America needlessly vulnerable to a generational pandemic and lost in a sea of misinformation, propaganda, and out and out manipulation.
In the field of education, a pursuit that ensures future viability and innovation, the GOP and corporations have all but destroyed the institution in totality. The reasons are legion. Since desegregation, white supremacists have attempted to wipe out public education in favor of private schools where African Americans can still be barred from the halls. The wealthy and corporate interests prefer a defanged curriculum that hides their past crimes and manipulations in favor of making students more susceptible to their marketing and propaganda while ensuring they’re incapable of understanding government or civic duties. At the collegiate level, these interests are still warring against the academy after the counterculture in the 1960’s found its home on the campus, a massive shift from a past wherein colleges, departments, professors, and even students were used during the Cold War as guinea pigs and cogs in the war effort.
Science-wise, it is a lie that these companies and political bodies do not trust experts. They do. They simply mean to undermine them as to keep their intentions clandestine in nature. As early as the 1980’s energy companies like Exxon were warning of “potentially catastrophic” climate change, a concept they still deny now, four decades later. The companies were well aware that they were peddling poison and ushering in destruction on a truly global scale.
They just didn’t care.
Or rather, they were able to replace their care with focusing on short-term profits and pawning off possibilities for the future. Energy companies and the Republican Party saw the writing on the wall as surely as anyone else, they simply chose to hide it from everyone else.
Now, because of their efforts, including billions spent in fabricated “studies,” billions spent on “scientists” muddying the consensus, and billions spent on Right Wing, bold-faced, corporate cable news lies, they have created an American society that is distrustful of science and diametrically opposed to scientists. Education is seen as an affront, a liberal indoctrination instead of a democratizing leveler.
These companies and these Republicans got their wish. They manifested an America ripe for manipulation and control, but doomed them to a society teeming with a virus they can’t believe exists and facing an extinction they can’t believe will come. The people they’ve affected, the people they’ve trained not to trust experts or educators, are in the streets demanding the right to die so they can return to work that is designed to exploit and lessen the quality of their lives.
They’ve made their own beds. They’ve damned us to shorter, more miserable lives. Of course they’ll get their bailouts and relief packages. But they deserve to drown in their own lies.
Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. He is an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.
