About a year ago, I had dinner with a friend who I have known more or less my entire life. We hadn’t seen each other in over ten years, though, not since she started college. During the interval, she became an inveterate social climber – at one point avowing completely seriously that she was open to marrying a rich man if it meant that she could have a flat in one of the world’s most expensive cities. She was also an expert at being woke. The contradiction in her thought processes – her craving for a life of riches and luxury and her woke “eat the rich” attitude – caused me to recognize the fuel behind the attraction redistributionist ideologies have for young Americans.
At some point in her trajectory, my friend had pitched on using the education system to climb the social ladder. In fairness to her, there is a pervasive idea that this is a valid approach; J.D. Vance mentioned it in the conclusion to Hillbilly Elegy. Choosing between the flagship state university and a small private liberal arts college, she picked the latter, which was a “social” school held in high esteem regionally and thought to be intellectually rigorous.
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