It takes an awful lot of educated people working at an awful lot of jobs to keep civilization running.
Prevent the people from getting strong technical jobs, of being scientists and mathematicians, by strangling education, and the masses forget how to maintain the infrastructure and society crumbles - each generation less than the one before it.
Reduce enough people to minimal education, and society regresses.
Kill off enough people, through bad food, through bio-weapons or the spread of once eliminated diseases, or through lack of access to even minimal healthcare, and there's nobody left to keep society running. There might be small enclaves, but even they will feel the effect of long term starvation of the masses of people through lack of education and lack of health care.
We're at a tipping point. The two places where we need to pour our resources to save our civilization are education and health care. Our society requires educated people to run it, people with technical knowledge, with the ability to move us forward without killing the planet we're on.
If we don't do something, our descendants will tell one another, "In the olden days, there were wizards. They built the old buildings, and the steel monsters that lie dead across the land were powered by their wizardry. The magic went away, though, and fewer wizards were born until now, the few wizards hole up with the wealthy. And they are dying off. Soon, we will be a land without any magic at all."
And 200 years from now, that story will change some. "Once upon a time, there were wizards who powered devices to fly people through the air, and they walked upon the moon. But the magic began to go away. Some say it was because the wizards wasted it. The wonders they built began to die, and the protections they wove about us to keep out sickness faded, and then the wizards began to die. The magic is gone."
Are those the stories we want to leave behind?
I remember the stories of my childhood. They were full of hope and wonder. "We'll learn to do these marvelous things and we'll walk on the Moon, colonize Mars, and then the stars will be ours. We'll have video phones and flying cars, robots to do all the house work. Everyone will be healthy. Everyone will have enough to eat, and no one will be unemployed except by choice. The marvels we can create if only we study hard enough and work hard enough."
And we did some of that. We walked on the Moon. We built space technology up to man the space station, and to send probes out. But then the money started drying up, and that was used as an excuse to reduce funding for education. Medical technologies are wonderful now, but who can afford to use them? When formal education started becoming difficult and expensive, the jobs began to go away, making education even more expensive and difficult to acquire.
Now, we have this trifecta effect, one created by the wealthy amassing and hoarding the money that lubricated our society and allowed it to flow into the future. The wealth created by the masses is concentrating into the hands of a few, who won't let it go back to those who created the wealth to begin with. That's one leg, the foundational leg, of the trifecta. The other leg is the double whammy of making education and health care for-profit endeavors, moving them out of the reach of an increasingly larger number of vastly underpaid wealth-producers. The final leg of this trifecta is a government teaming up with religion to convince the masses that education is evil and healthcare is against God's will and God bestows his blessings only on those with the money.
The story we are writing for our future is a grim one.
I demand a re-write.