I grew up in a time when people were respected for their education. College was considered an inevitable next step after High School, or your life will forever be relegated to part-time jobs and shift work. Today, those very same people tell me that advanced degrees are suddenly elitist and snobbish. Well, it's a good thing I have lots of experience with society so I can see that as the bullshit it is.
Advanced degrees are not elitist. Being good and smart in a career is not something that puts you out of touch of the regular people. The truth is, those elitist snobs in structured 9-5 jobs with business cards and policies about lunches left over the weekend in the breakroom fridge are the regular people. It has become fashionable to characterize the fast-food workers on minimum wage and minimal hours as the working class. No, those are the service class for the working class. For all the families that have outsourced their meals to drive-thrus, those minimum wage earners are the modern equivalent of domestic help. It is hard to recognize it at first, but the uniforms and scripted interactions speak for themselves once your eyes can see it.
To be college educated and have a middling position in a company is the norm right now. The sheer amount of student debt clearly attests to that. That kind of environment means lots of compromise. All the HR training creates a cooperating environment that stresses community and teamwork over individual virtue by detailing acceptable performance measurements, sexual harassment awareness training, professional and responsible ethics, diverse workforce training, and safety policies. Nearly everything about an office environment is designed to model appropriate behavior and correct nonconformance. While it is not normally evil, it does provide opportunity to get in the habit of considering others more frequently. There is peer pressure to do well, and immediate feedback when things come apart. A career track is nearly always laid out, even if it is just ascending the lines above you by changing title prefixes. Policies and behaviors are there for reasons, and by using your brains and wits, you will be a reasonable person as a side effect.
Small businesses, part-time gigs, and hourly positions where just a body is needed suffer from a void of this kind of care and attention. The resources are regularly considered low value, and pluggable. If one doesn't work out, there is a line at the door to choose from. There is little concern for long term performance, and certainly no investment in personal development. Promotions, if any, are few and far between, and the most efficient way to rise up is to sabotage leadership in order to create an opening. Turns out, they are not considered valuable either. Survival in that environment is tough, and requires a more direct approach.
Is there a path to escape this classist filing system? And what does this have to do with being unreasonable?
Given the chance, reason gets things done with minimal unplanned side effects. When reason breaks down, things still happen, but through force, with lots of disastrous consequences littering the field. Once reason is thrown to the winds, there is little that can be done to reinstate it again without interrupting the unreasonable factions. And that's where we are today.
The unreasonable opponents will never become smarter, because the smart people have been painted as unreasonable. There is pride in not being like them. Their hard-won knowledge and expertise has been tainted as irrelevant, or just plain offensive when they try to elucidate facts. The facts don't matter when the message is unwelcome or doesn't conform to a mistaken, narrow, or naive world view. This is the age when all the knowledge in Babylon gets burned because it threatens the comfort of the brainwashed idiots that have spent too much time in front of a television. It is a dark time, and it must be ridden through.