This article made me unreasonably angry. It's had me at a low simmer all day. It probably didn't help that it's eight parts, and that on mobile it flashes stroboscopically and crashes Chrome for some reason, or that it gives you a nag screen every time you load a new part. But it also doesn't help that it's nonsensical.

Teenagers weren't a thing until after WWII. Prior to that you got through eighth grade or so and you started working. Or you went onto college and did more sophisticated work. Higher education was never not tansactional; if you were scrabbling to afford it, it was so you could elevate your clan. If you weren't, it was so you formed the connections necessary for the aristocracy to function. This whole suck four years down contemplating the qualia of color shit is pure 'boomer escapism paid for by postwar expansion due to the military-industrial complex and the confiscatory extermination of a major portion of the European merchant class (IE jews).

Neoliberalism came to the fore right about the time the Golden Age of Capitalism ran out of money. Market forces arose when suddenly everyone had to compete for resources again. More than that, college wasn't an insanely expensive waste of time and money under Reagan, Bush or Clinton - it started getting completely asinine under Bush II and Obama.

Be that as it may, what the actual fuck is this?

What is to be done? Those very same WASP aristocrats — enough of them, at least, including several presidents of Harvard and Yale — when facing the failure of their own class in the form of the Great Depression, succeeded in superseding themselves and creating a new system, the meritocracy we live with now. But I’m not sure we possess the moral resources to do the same. The WASPs had been taught that leadership meant putting the collective good ahead of your own. But meritocracy means looking out for number one, and neoliberalism doesn’t believe in the collective. As Margaret Thatcher famously said about society, “There’s no such thing. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” As for elite university presidents, they are little more these days than lackeys of the plutocracy, with all the moral stature of the butler in a country house.

Is there any five consecutive words in that paragraph that have any basis in reality?