The Secular Fundamentalist

MacSocialization

VISIONS:



By the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, leading business think tanks began to feel that the inherited semi obsolescent non-market socialization and governance, including much of the social welfare, educational and legal enforcement/corrections systems, had become so dysfunctional, the market system would have to step in.  Their suggested reforms would make all parts of social and cultural life responsive to market pressures and would ensure certain benchmarked quality outcomes occurred.

From then on, the business of education and socialization would be produced by anyone who had the capital, technical knowhow, media savvy and psychological research capacity to deliver learning and behavioral solutions, and sell them like any other commodity, on the basis of marketing and consumer appeal, but above all, results. 

The final piece of The Greater Market Solution needed to be put in place and by the time it was introduced, so was the necessary social consensus.  Its evolution was not just a matter top down manipulation.  There was a widespread exasperation and disappointment with traditional liberal humanist leaderships, who for nearly a hundred years have had ever increasing carriage of the civil side of our system of social reproduction.

As the schooling system started to drown in the data flows and cultural pressures of the electronic age, it attempted to adapt at the margins, by constantly adding bits to its increasingly expensive, ramshackle, time serving and unwieldy structure.  This preserved it for a while, but in an increasingly unsatisfactory manner.  By comparison, the competitive pressures of the business world kept ruthlessly dissolving obsolescent structures and work practices, so that transformation could lead to more productive and cost efficient outcomes.

For schools, somehow, there was never enough money to fix the problems, because the old teacher centered physical classroom system kept guzzling the vast bulk of resources.  And the unpleasant reality was, teachers couldn’t compete for attention against the razzamataz of mediaspeak.  Teacher authority was being progressively eviscerated by a selling culture whose relentlessly growing presence was invisibly buried inside its increasingly sophisticated programming, technology and capital intensive artifacts.
                  
“We don’t have secondary schools as such these days.  We have media software corporations that competitively package data rich, audience specific, interactive knowledge building and participatory experiences.  They allocate ‘blockbuster’ media budgets to these offerings well in excess of even the most expensive entertainment packages. They are researched and tested as thoroughly as pharmaceuticals in recognition of the potential lifelong damage caused by product failure.  They are designed to preferentially engage, motivate, organize and hold the attention of their target audiences over alternative products. 

It is no coincidence that News Corp, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Time Warner are amongst our largest providers.

Our primary benchmarks are productivity and participatory enthusiasm.  Rewards, Recognition and Competition exist at every point of interface, from the smallest tasks to the largest, with sponsorship support and prizes at local, national and international levels.  Youth knowledge shows and project competitions have huge audience ratings.  Some of the top competitors are already well on their way to becoming high net worth individuals!

Because we now rely mainly on knowledge systems rather than knowledgeable people, the learning software can be used by anybody, at any learning level, anywhere, anytime.  Knowledge workers are available on twenty-four hour feedback and backup helplines that can be located anywhere in the world.  All young people have a knowledge and sports coaches to motivate them to win at the highest level possible. 

Our cities are now full of Youthbiz Cafes, where young people can team, work, play and consume together under the eye of slightly older team leaders who are trained by and accountable to government or business co-coordinating and facilitation hubs.

Unauthorized ‘gangs’ are not actively discouraged, but if they want to survive in the team mix, they have to go through a rigorous standards integration process or risk marginalization.  Somehow members of unauthorized groups never seem to ‘have the time’ to participate, given their onerous group obligations in the mainstream. Nor can they get access to sponsorship or facilities.  The extensive monitoring and mentoring networks quickly pick up on any negative ‘counter-productive’ attitudes and activities emanating from such groups.  Their leaders suddenly get attractive alternative offers and the led follow them back into an allied but authorized part of the system.
     
Productivity checking is continuous in real time through the electronic, Youthbiz team, sport and intellectual mentoring networks.  There are productivity centers for those whose output falls behind.  There are dedicated resources for particular learning difficulties.  There are winner centers for those who develop negative attitudes and challenges for them aplenty. There are four three-week high intensity ‘‘knowledge download’ camps a year that pull out all the productivity plugs at once.  Seniors put in sixteen-hour days!

Virtually all industries now directly provide integrated learning software, training and industry participation.  For instance, MacDonald’s ‘Youth Management Campuses’ (YOMACAS – pronounced yo mackers) provide promising individuals and teams with advanced training and organizational mentoring.  This and other ‘MacKnowledge’ initiatives provided it with significant revenue streams and labor cost reductions.

It has turned what used to be just a fast food company into a mixed food and training services institution.  While its food business peaked in the early 2000s, its educational services arm has grown so fast, even now it cannot keep up with demand.

Industry likes MacGraduates.

Software savvy youngsters as young as 8 or 9 are not only learning about Google’s operating systems, they are helping to design and upgrade them!  Microsoft’s Youthnet and Softschools have combined training and employment to the point that it is sometimes hard to tell the difference.  Young people work to train and train to work, almost seamlessly.

Adolescent emergence between 14 and 16 gets special attention, whereby social development takes precedence over all other learning outcomes. The emphasis is very much on doing rite-of-passage tasks that win acceptance into the grown up world.  It begins with an assessment of knowledge and intellectual skills, which must be passed before proceeding to a period of national service, business participation, community work and activity based learning and entrepreneurialism. 

These programs emphasize social engagement, sexual matters, fitness, living skills and such things as are necessary to make the individual fit in and do their best at all times.  They emerge at the other end with a limited suite of provisional adult rights and responsibilities, ready for base level workforce participation, independent team ‘barracks’ living and higher intellectual duties preparation.
 
Non participation is not an option.  Failure hardly exists.  Some people just take a little longer to succeed.  Everybody’s a team player.  Everyone is enthusiastic.  Everybody is a winner.  Productivity is never minimum; always maximum.  Whenever you do a personal best, your next job is to beat it!  The only way anyone can live comfortably in this system is to outperform demanding benchmarks all the time, from as soon as he or she is old enough to pick up a mouse or a ball.

Parents who cannot or will not support and maintain this pace for their children can go into winning family programs or lose certain parenting functions, substantial tax and credit concessions, and an array of market rewards.  Nobody wants loser parents in the Coles New World. 

What is more, aspiring young losers don’t aspire that way for long, as they find themselves training to break the Melbourne to Sydney hiking record, with significant prizes for winning teams and four week military style ‘boot’ camps for the drop outs and slackers.  This is not a punishment, but an opportunity to do better for themselves.

Negativity is fought with encouragement and relentless, escalating and inescapable programmed pressure that keeps increasing until positive outcomes are achieved.  Problem attitude is identified and dealt with early to prevent negative character formation.  Our greatest boast is that almost no one avoids the appropriate attention at the appropriate time.  Now that resources have ceased to be tied up by inefficient centralized institutions, there is usually sufficient funding and timely attention to problems. Juvenile crime, youth suicide and substance abuse have dropped away to historic lows.

Industry is a heavy investor in youth services and it wants a return on its money: in the long term by way of getting top career recruits, in the middle term, by low cost trainee labor and in the short term, by training revenues.  To get this, they have had to develop a system that consistently delivered very close to a one hundred percent hit rate.  What is more, this has been achieved at a long term cost significantly below that of the schooling, child and family welfare, and juvenile policing and legal management systems it has replaced.

Traditional justice management fell into disrepair because it could only punish offenders without dealing with any of the root causes of their offending behavior.  By the time the system started to punish people, in all too many cases, it was too late.

Further the most severe punishment process, imprisonment, itself often tended to reinforce negative behavior instead of change it.  The less severe and more rehabilitative punishment regimes lacked deterrent credibility and tended not to rehabilitate anyway.  And then of course, given the above, there was the culture of excuses and third and fifth chances which overlaid the already increasing loss of judicial confidence in its own enforcement system.  The unavoidable fact of life was that the legal system was almost helpless to do anything about an increasingly dysfunctional system of social reproduction.

By both constantly promoting positive role models and identifying and managing negative attitudes before they had a chance to harden into a person’s character formation, the new system took care of most of the risk variables long before they had become problematic enough to arrive before the judicial system.

Thus, if it came about that someone did leak through this system, it was because they really were intractably insensate and shameless rogues who required and deserved ‘late term character reconstruction’.  For the success stories that came out of reconstruction centers, they were known as Rebirthing Centers.  For the failures, they were ‘Azkabans’.  Discreet one-way mirror and video documentary tours of these centers with groups of at risk ‘Loser Profilers’ tended to focus the wayward mind most forcefully towards positive life decision making.

In the Coles New World, only success is accepted.  No matter how ‘disadvantaged’ and difficult a person’s background is, no matter how small their talent or how weak their character, the shuffle of life has only one direction, which is forward, upward and no escape.
 
Totalitarianism does have some benign features.  In Mussolini’s Italy, the trains ran on time and the Mafia was completely suppressed for the entire Fascist period.  In Nazi Germany, a proud people were for a while able to retrieve their jobs, security and national self- respect.  Without the slave state industrialization and regionalization programmes of the 1930s, the Soviet system could never have withstood the German invasion of 1941-2.  They lost almost their entire pre 1914 industrial base in the first three to four months of the German assault!

The completion of the capitalist project through the comprehensive marketization of the entire culture would be its crowning achievement.  First there was the mastery of mass production technique, then mastery of the disposal of that product, and finally the Capital Man and Women.  The creation of the latter meant the mastery of the means of social reproduction completely freed from historical baggage; free to engineer a future with all the ideological and existential wrinkles ironed out.  This was a social system completely devoted from top to bottom, without angst or doubts, to the selling and buying of products, services and ideas; and all without the obviously unpleasant downsides that so disfigured the Great Social Experiments of the past.
         
From other cultural perspectives, the Capital Man and Women may be a hideous caricature of our humanity; as in one of those American beefcake college movies of the 1950s; so narrowed, shallowed and adolescentised within their producer/consumer field of vision, they seem less than three dimensional.  And yet they will know who and what they are.  They will know what little boys and girls are for.  At least to some extent, everyone will be a winner, certain, that all they have to do to live good lives, is to enthusiastically buy the system and sell it in their turn, as learners, teachers, producers and consumers.

Such beliefs probably do not have enough substance to sustain them in the long term.  However, I believe that efforts motivated by the utmost necessity will be made to entrench them in the not far distant future.  It will in the short term turn industrial society into a far more formidably integrated and streamlined production war machine; all the more capable of burning the life out of its slaves as quickly as it does the ecological systems on which they depend.