Image: Elon Musk’s theory in a magazine cover

by Jorge Majfud

My grandfather was a farmer who did not read books, but (like most of his generation) he considered education the main instrument of liberation. So did the generation that followed him. Apart from being businessmen and workers, my parents were teachers at secondary schools and the Industrial School.

My father and his father-in-law maintained an intense dialogue, especially by telephone, since they lived at opposite ends of Uruguay, even two decades after my mother’s death and until my grandfather’s death. Beyond their ideological differences (my grandfather was a socialist, my father a capitalist), they agreed on fundamental values. A trait of tolerance that is more pronounced in Uruguay than in other countries in the hemisphere and that, to a large extent, comes from the culture of the Enlightenment promoted since the 19th century by the free education of J.P. Varela and J. Batlle y Ordóñez.

Both consumed news from the press, but they rarely read books. Still, their respect for enlightened education was unquestionable. My father, as a carpenter, exchanged debts for books.

“Why books,” I would say to him as a child, “if you never read them?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he would say. “Books don’t hurt anyone and, sooner or later, they will be useful to someone.”

In his small library, Shakespeare, encyclopedias, and technical books dominated, some of which were Soviet books translated into Spanish. When soldiers broke through the ceiling of my room looking for “subversive material” by my grandfather, it didn’t occur to them to bother opening a book from the library.

The fascist dictatorships of the continent imposed the idea that books could be dangerous. Not only did they burn them, but they made their readers disappear. This idea was inoculated by the CIA (one of the best-known operations was Mockingbird), who applied the theories of the Marxist Antonio Gramsci. At the same time, the Gramscians were blamed for “brainwashing” educated people. Gramsci diagnosed reality in the same way that class struggle was, rather than a prescription, a historical and social diagnosis of Marx. You have to be blind not to see it today.

The Nazi Göring is credited with the phrase: “When I hear the word culture, I take out my gun.” In the early 60s, Nobel Prize winner Cesar Milstein, a military government minister, said things would not be fixed in Argentina until two million intellectuals were expelled. When Milstein and a whole group of intellectuals were expelled in the 1960s, Argentina was on par with Australia and Canada. Fascism, always so clumsy with ideas, attributed the underdevelopment of Latin America to the fact that the poor read Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. Galeano dedicated his life to criticizing the powerful; the powerful never defended themselves because others dedicated their lives to criticizing Galeano.

As a hundred years ago, today’s neofascism is a simple expression of the neo-feudal order of the world economy and the frustrations of empires in decline. But its strategies have been updated: books are no longer burned, or writers kidnapped, as during Nazi Germany or Pinochet’s Chile. Now, they are presented as useless or irrelevant – when they are not prohibited by law, as in the United States.

Influencers have multiplied the illusion of the atomized freedom of entrepreneurs who, for a hundred or a thousand dollars (without retirement contributions, without the right to vacations, health or education) humiliate a beggar for a few hundred likes.

The other whip is against universities and public schools, which the Bush family began to privatize in the 1980s with its charter school model. As always, the genius was to vampirize money from the hated States to defund public education and present private education as the solution.

Since then, the hatred and contempt for universities, paradoxically arising against the most prestigious university system in the world, added a new strategy. Writers such as Andrés Oppenheimer summed it up in the cliché “We need more engineers and fewer philosophers.” Why don’t we “need more engineers and fewer successful businessmen, lobbies and financial sects”?

My first university degree was in architecture. Thanks to the Uruguayan education system, I could devote several years to calculating reinforced concrete structures and a shorter time as a college mathematics teacher. We can agree that the United States, Europe, or Latin America need more engineers, but since when are engineering and philosophy incompatible? Why can’t an engineer be a philosopher and vice versa?

The core of the problem is called education, not training hijacked by the ideological interests of the owners of the world. The attack on the humanities, philosophy, and arts does not come from scientists or engineers with a broad culture; it comes from “successful businessmen” who are always men and consistently successful because they manage to hijack the States they hate.

This utilitarian ideology has, as an undeclared objective, to confirm and control wage slaves. Precisely, the same thing was preached and practiced by the slave owners of the 19th century in the name of freedom: slaves had to specialize in a single, productive, helpful activity that was pleasing to God for their sound and the good of their country. Every time a slave learned to read, he was punished. If he wrote his memoirs, as was the case with Juan Manzano, he was tortured. If the slave prospered, he would be applauded. If he devoted his free time to some form of useless, liberating, humanistic education, he was demonized. For this reason, many slaves were staunch defenders of the slave system and persecuted those free men who dared to question the meaning of freedom that came from an entire system. Masters did not even bother to moralize because they always had professional sycophants who did it better.

We are back to that moment. In Uruguay, the attack on enlightened and liberating education has its promoters. Encomenderos like President Milei in Argentina and his horde of anti-enlightened barbarians have attacked public universities (independent of noble capital) from day one. Since they have no ideas, they dedicate themselves to copying what is already beginning to be old in the United States and creating demons to present themselves as holy saviors―as in the Middle Ages.

Meanwhile, in the United States, libertarian capitalists continue to blame all their ills on socialism (emerging from universities) and promote anti-Enlightenment slave-owning utilitarianism as the final solution—the solution to barbarism and slavery―always in the name of freedom, of course.

Jorge Majfud, January 12, 2025.

«Education for a more efficient slavery» by Jorge Majfud