What a Sales Job
Don't tell me what you want. I'll tell you what you want, and you'll be glad to take whatever I hand you. That attitude runs through a lot of modern business and politics. The people at the top sit a long way from how most of us actually live, and they forget something basic: we have a democracy, and the ordinary person's voice is supposed to count for something. What happens instead is that we get force-fed whatever the experts have decided is good for us, which usually turns out to be whatever is good for them.
Plenty of people build entire careers out of instructing the rest of us. They advise on situations they've never been inside, make decisions about conditions they've never had to live under, and rarely stop to ask whether they'd know the first thing about it from experience.
There's a particular kind of hypocrisy in telling others how to behave while exempting yourself. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Ask the person selling you something whether they'd buy it. Have they ever used it themselves? If the answer is no, the pitch is a lie dressed up as advice, and there isn't a polite word for that. When someone holds real power (think of a President, or the CEO of a large company), they often push their own picture of what society ought to want, and they'll keep pushing even when it harms people and happens to serve themselves. Regular workers get swept into the same machinery. Somebody who badly needs the paycheck will promote ideas handed down from above, aware that they're wrong, because speaking up costs too much. At what point does that become a crime against people?
Why does the truth scare us this much? And why don't we build schools that put students in front of many competing points of view, so they can figure out what they actually believe? Teaching logic would do them a favor too, giving them something sturdier to lean on when they have to decide anything. Here's one catch, and it mirrors the problem with the politicians and executives: academics tend to champion a single theory and quietly bury whatever contradicts it. A student is easy to sway, especially when the professor seems brilliant and carries weight in the field. Maybe some of them just want to be admired. What I've seen is that the influence can run deeper than it should. And not every teacher works that way. Some throw the door open to curiosity and nudge students toward staking out new territory of their own.