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A mainstream academic economics department is in some ways essentially a modern theocracy.

The book "Disciplined Minds" helps explain the social dynamic behind that (which applies to some extent in most graduate programs, but may be most extreme in some like economics these days):
http://disciplinedminds.com/
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

Supporting examples include "The Market as God": http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...
"A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar.
Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of deja vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies. ..."

And "The Mythology of Wealth": http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
"Justifications for elites and social hierarchy goes all the way back to the pharaohs. For 6000 years, society has organized itself into social classes. The people who do the work are always in the lower classes. The harder and nastier the work, the lower down in the social order you sink. The people who don't do this work must justify their position. They do it by establishing their "worthiness", and a variety of cultural devices have been concocted over the millennia to accomplish this. The pharaohs, you may re

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/182889/
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/04/05/1522215/getting-a-literature-phd-will-make-you-into-a-horrible-person
http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/bioforum/1997-December/025426.html
http://100rsns.blogspot.com/

http://disciplinedminds.com/
"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
    The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."

http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-04-20/news/wanted-really-smart-suckers/
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off. Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air. ..."

Or also:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
      1. age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
      2. age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
      3. age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
      4. age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
      5. age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
    This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
    Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias. "

For ways beyond that, see my online book:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

Or this book by Jeff Schmidt:
http://www.disciplinedminds.com/

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/the-science-of-success/307761/
"Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind's phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail -- but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society's most creative, successful, and happy people."

So, rather than address issues of society making good parenting difficult, it sounds like this "ethicist" would just terminate in advance all the children at risk of "potential alcoholism" who just need good parenting and good societies to blossom in -- places with walking trails (see "Blue Zones"), with people getting vitamin-D from sunlight, lots of cheap vegetables and healthy fats like omegas-3s, with toxins like many artifical colors and flavors excluded from the food supply, and so on... As Dr. Fuhrman says in "Eat to Live", genes may give us weak links, but how much those links are pulled on is a function of diet and lifestyle (and upbringing).

Note also that nature is often more concerned about parasite resistance and disease resistance than many other factors this ethicist might focus on instead -- so that ethicist's plan put in practice might produce a society of great-looking high-IQ people who collapse at the first sniffle. Just look at what industrial breeding of tomatoes has brought us as far as what you see in your typical supermarket (compared to heirloom varieties).

It's sad what passes for overly-cerebral "ethics" these days (as much as I too might have said much the same when I was younger, brought up in a hyper-competitive US culture); here is part of why that is (but a bunch more is just a cultural pendulum swinging perhaps):
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/11b.htm
"The eugenics movement begun by Galton in England was energetically spread to the United States by his followers. Besides destroying lesser breeds (as they were routinely called) by abortion, sterilization, adoption, celibacy, two-job family separations, low-wage rates to dull the zest for life, and, above all, schooling to dull the mind and debase the character, other methods were clinically discussed in journals, including a childlessness which could be induced through easy access to pornography.2 At the same time those deemed inferior were to be turned into eunuchs, Galtonians advocated the notion of breeding a super race. Humanist Scott Nearing wrote his masterpiece, The Super Race: An American Problem, in 1912, just as the drive to destroy an academic curriculum in public schools was reaching its first crescendo. By "problem," Nearing wasn't referring to a moral dilemma. Rather, he was simply arguing that only America had the resources to meet the engineering challenge posed in creating supermen out of genetic raw stock."

Gatto suggests even the reason school rooms were called "class rooms" is linked with the eugenics notion that "classes" of people kept together would end up breeding with the same class, to produce superior offspring for the high ranked classes, and easily exploitable and disposable ones for the lower ranked ones.

As you say, today's defect can be tomorrow's salvation. There seems to be plenty of room for more people with more unique ideas and perspectives as part of a global (or someday galaxy-wide) cooperative discussion:

AC wrote: "The post-scarcity society is not going to end this, even supposing it does turn from utopian dream to reality. If anything, it will make everything worse, because you'll have more resources with which to bestow your benevolence."

This is just about exactly the point I'm concerned about, as reflected in my sig of: "A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."

And that is the nightmare we are actually living today! People tend to forget about all the nuclear missiles still ready to launch from a computer glitch in decades old hardware from the 1960s and 1970s.

That is exactly why we need some sort of global mindshift to a newer way of thinking in order to survive having discovered all kinds of new sorts of technological "fire" (like nanotechnology, robotics, biotech, nuclear, networked bureaucracy, etc).
http://www.global-mindshift.org/discover/viewmeme.asp?memeid=239
http://anwot.org/

By the way, on "education" which in practice means compulsory state-sponsored mass schooling, see:
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm

Or also on your theme:
"The NED, NGOs and the Imperial Uses of Philanthropy: Why They Hate Our Kind Hearts, Too"
http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/05/13/why-they-hate-our-kind-hearts-too/

"No, I think you'll find what's "hard" is actually making things that other people talk or dream about :-)"

True, but that is also hard to do when most of the social resources to do that are diverted into "me, too" redundant competition, paperwork related to that like patents, or, alternatively, military arms races.

I would have been happy to work on the details of all sorts of neat socially-useful devices. (I've ended up do mostly software because it was cheaper to do that as a small independent compared to stuff like robotic hardware or things requiring lab chemistry.)

Essentially, there is little support for fundamental or basic civilian research anymore, including at places like IBM Research. The few slots to do that are intensely fought for these days, meaning the best social infighters tend to get them (not saying some of them are not good scientists, too).

So, what is really hard is actually making things with essentially no budget while also having to do something else so you can get ration units to pay your bills and also trying to be a nice person. :-)

Still, the scale of our society is so big that fundamental stuff happens anyway here and there. But it is such a lie compared to the picture I was painted in the 1970s when I was in school. Part of the reason:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://disciplinedminds.com/

That's one reason much better fundamental science will flourish with something like a "basic income".

Here is a 12 minute YouTube video I just made that talks about a balance between five interwoven economies that shifts with cultural change and technological change:
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
A PDF file of the presentation is here:
      http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf

Also indirectly related to life in big organziations:
"Smile or Die"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo
"Have Fun at Work"
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/org/hfaw.html
"It is dangerous, and often fruitless, to try and solve problems without considering the underlying social system. ... On a purely practical level, this book is an excellent survival manual for results-oriented engineers who have developed attitude problems about the structural barriers to success in their work environments. Livingston discusses how to evaluate your social structure's potential for success, ways to get working projects out the door in spite of these barriers, and how to tell when you're wasting your time even working there."

Thank you too, in return. I just used that point on fish and water writing to someone else today, coincidentally.

I've been trying to get Richard Stallman and the FSF to consider supporting a campaign (suggesting maybe run by me for pay, so I'm biased, but OK if it was someone else) for fostering the cataloging, creation, and discussion of free software that explores conventional and alternative heterodox economics for a 21st century of abundance for all, based on this appeal:
http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/
"The authors of this appeal are deeply concerned that more than three years since the outbreak of the financial and macroeconomic crisis that highlighted the pitfalls, limitations, dangers and responsibilities of main-stream thought in economics, finance and management, the quasi-monopolistic position of such thought within the academic world nevertheless remains largely unchallenged. This situation reflects the institutional power that the unconditional proponents of main-stream thought continue to exert on university teaching and research. This domination, propagated by the so-called top universities, dates back at least a quarter of a century and is effectively global. However, the very fact that this paradigm persists despite the current crisis, highlights the extent of its power and the dangerousness of its dogmatic character. Teachers and researchers, the signatories of the appeal, assert that this situation restricts the fecundity of research and teaching in economics, finance and management, diverting them as it does from issues critical to society."

Also related indirectly:
"RSA Animate - 21st century enlightenment "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo

So, it is more than a lack of visionaries. The world has no shortage of would-be visionaries, like Paul Hawken documents:
http://www.blessedunrest.com/
"Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people's needs worldwide."

The problem is more like visionaries are filtered out or bought off or changed or isolated or starved or turned into wage slaves doing unrelated stuff to survive. Example:
"The murdering of my years: artists & activists making ends meet"
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_murdering_of_my_years.html?id=iBA7vACOwngC

Related articles on how dissent in academia is systematically suppressed:
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

Yet, things progres anyway, as a tribute to the better side of human nature. Here are examples of GPL'd software that could serve as a base for moving further into exploring alternative economics:
http://p.seppecher.free.fr/jamel/
http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.ryzom.com/en/

There is also a lot of other softwar

Great points. Somewhat related:
    "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream" by Noam Chomsky
    http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm

And:
    http://disciplinedminds.com/

I liked the other reply, too.

Still, it is true that worries about potential crisies can lead to innovation as responses:
    http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

So there is a process going on, even if the media may be driven by more extreme dynamics.

Albert Einstein on science and religion:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. "

With that said, we should be careful to distinguish the mindset the uses skills (engineers, doctors) from the mindset that explores new ideas (scientists at their best, of which there seem to be not too many, since the PhD process is designed to destroy independent inquiry as discussed in this book: http://disciplinedminds.com/ ).

Of course, a really good doctor or engineer may be interested in fundamental ideas too, like Charles Darwin who started out getting a medical education, so there is no clear boundary...

Also, it is very common that engineers tend to create thing using what they know and some trial and error. Scientists then try to systematize what the engineers know and have shown actually works (even if engineers can not explain why it works). Then engineers uses the systematization created by the scientists to push the boundaries even further... And then they find new things, and the scientists get interested again.

That may be about to happen in a big way of the Rossi/Focardi eCat cold fusion device turns out to be all that it is claimed? Maybe scientists will even eventually decide there is no such thing as "hot fusion" which is just a speculation and the sun really is mostly a ball of iron, and maybe most oil comes from hydrogen produced by the Earth's nickel hydrogen core? :-) Related:

Also: http://www.google.com/#q=peer+review+as+censorship
http://www.counterpunch.org/mazur02262010.html
http://www.suppressedscience.net/censorship-medicine.html

A key point being that keeping information from the public is not the same as modding up (or revising interactively) information like on slashdot. What would slashdot be like if every comment needed "peer review" before it was posted? Instead, slashdot uses after the fact moderation. (Nothing is perfect, of course.)

In general:
http://www.suppressedscience.net/
http://www.disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=37
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm

And from a previously posted link (from 1994 from the Vice Provost of Caltech, and it has probably gotten worse since):
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.
    We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. ..."

http://www.thecaseagainsthomework.com/
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.educationrevolution.org/

Related stuff with more links (my me):
"College Daze links"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
"The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
"Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student
protests)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

Why aren't you homeschooling/unschooling then?
    http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html

If you "saw the spark in these kids eyes extinguished" why not move to somewhere less affluent (cheaper) to live if you have to so you can make homeschooling work? Why pay so much taxes for "good" schools that are really just fancy prisons?
    http://www.thewaronkids.com/
And often lead to a lifetime in fancy prisons?
    http://disciplinedminds.com/

See also:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

But if homeschooling absolutely can't work for you, see also AERO, the Alternative Education Resource Organization for lots of other possibilities that don't kill off creativity so much:
    http://www.educationrevolution.org/

(From a parent in a family that has given up a bunch of material stuff to homeschool and hopefully keep that spark alive...)
   

Forgot: http://disciplinedminds.com/
"""
Who are you going to be? That is the question.
  In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
    The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
    Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job.
"""

This book reminds me of Disciplined Minds, a book about the subjugation of personal political and ideological beliefs to the need to 'get on'. In a nutshell, we may all think we're nice people, and we may all believe that it's right to help others, to 'do good' and so on, but when it comes to the modern workplace, particularly the corporate workplace, these ideas are pushed aside. In fact in the modern corporation internal competition is encouraged: i.e. don't see your team mates as your friends, colleagues, etc. See them rather as competitors on the promotion ladder.

When I step back and think about it, I'm amazed that we put up with it. For example, annual appraisals are the norm. Some people will tell you that these are a necessary part of any modern business, and that they benefit the appraised as well as the company. Fine, but never forget who's in the driving seat and has all the power at these things. Who appraises who, and why should the world be like that? We should look at these power structures and challenge them for their legitimacy: what exactly is it that gives *your manager* - who is, after all, another flawed human being, not unlike yourself or anyone else you might meet - the right to actually pass judgement on you and give you a rating? Why do we as a society let this happen? It's not the way normal 'more voluntary', natural human relationships work.

What gives managers that power right now, is their ability to climb the greasy pole quicker than you. And it goes right up the chain, to the top few (in relative terms, absolutely minute) people at the very top of the chain - the people with all the wealth/capital (== power).

The nature of corporations as "systems" is to maximise profit, market share, and so on. That's what they do. If they don't, they cease to exist, because some other bigger corporations either wipes them out or gobbles them up. But this motivation to maximise profit in these huge, powerful corporations does not always, in fact many would argue, does not typically sit well with what we should do as a human society. So we eat up the planet's oil resources and worry about tomorrow tomorrow, we ignore global warming, and occasionally (as was recently shown), we go to war and kill people.

Corporations, the biggest of which are now larger than many countries, and which hold huge political sway in supposedly democratic countries, are 'tyrannical' in nature. Internally they are extremely hierarchichal, with the power flowing from the top downwards. We wax lyrical about how great democracy is and so on, but the vast majority of people spend a huge amount of their lives in a workplace with zero democracy (ever been asked to vote for your manager?). They're pretty much told what to do, and they do it to get on. Or they're weeded out.

Anyway, I've kind of strayed from my main point, which is that the modern world requires "professionals" to behave a certain way - in fact when people say 'be professional' they mean control your natural reactions and behave in a way that the surrounding entity dictates. Anyone who doesn't conform to this either (1) doesn't get on, or (2) is weeded out of the system.

Please excuse the excess verbiage.