What many call the “Talent Economy” is actually a “Class Economy”. Talent may sometimes be an innate genius. But generally it comes from a regular access to extensive knowledge; usually within favorable circumstances. What makes Talent so valuable is that it grants its owner a competitive advantage over a large population who don’t have access to similar knowledge: the class of the “immersed”.

As in ancient Egypt, church ages and in all times, advanced knowledge is too precious to be shared. The difference is that nowadays you can find abundant raw knowledge everywhere. The blocking wall is not the information availability anymore, but the lack of time and incentive to access it. People across the wall find themselves in a virtuous circle where leverage is a natural compounding force. The others spend their lives reinforcing the wall by their bare hands.

One of the paradoxes of our modern civilization is that it has been driven and braked in the same time by the knowledge specialization paradigm. Splitting knowledge into sharp specialties allowed many fields to develop fast, taking advantage of focused expertise. However, this has distorted the once encyclopedic profile of “Scientist” and “Expert”. It has instead created generations of smart well educated persons who have a meticulous knowledge in one specialty and a horrible illiteracy in all others.

Hence, the Class of the “Immersed” mentioned in upper paragraphs does not only include lower education or basically skilled people. It may also include engineers, doctors, managers and people who have received long years of education. They are devoid of multi-disciplinary wisdom due to the lack of time and incentive.

This phenomenon touches the major part of humanity. It is also the toughest challenge to be tackled if we want to avoid the collapse of the world modern civilization.

In fact, despite its solid theoretical foundations, the socioeconomic model based on liberal democracy and free markets is coming to a deadlock. The main cause is that it has long been concentrated on the concepts of “Talent” and the “Few” who grab compound advantage from the immersion and “forced ignorance” of the others. In the opposite, millions of inherently skilled people around the world are just lacking time and information. Alternatively, they would be able to disrupt, innovate and prosper even better than today’s billionaires. Instead, they spend their whole time wrestling with life inside a vicious unstoppable inanity circle.

The liberal democracy free markets system has in fact been hijacked and exhausted by the circle of The Few. The depression and risky outlook of today’s world economy are essentially due to the fact that most of the people are too dependent on routine work. They cannot find access to the entrepreneurship and innovation circle, even if they have skills and willingness. The result is an economy that lacks dynamism, resilience and flexibility.

From political point of view, democracy has been trespassed to become an electocracy system. Votes are acquired by selling shallow policy “goods” and exploiting the lack of political and economic literacy of the average immersed citizen. Even worse, we came to a situation where in supposedly democratic countries; citizens get humiliated by public officials and law enforcement agents who are supposed to be their servants. The very core values of democracy are being ignored because the average citizen lacks information, time and resilience to fight for his rights.

Besides the economic and political aspects, the knowledge gap also affects human essence and identity perception. People who develop rich knowledge in cosmology, history and science are humble and mindful when tackling identity and religious beliefs. They’re more able to develop their own balanced apprehension and pave a purpose path for their life. However, the life strugglers have no other choice but to take a ready recipe and are more vulnerable to dogmatic influence. Even worse, they can drown in an abyss of purposeless void existence, as shows the proliferation of suicides, violence and eccentric conducts.

Humanity is experiencing an unprecedented gigantic boom of knowledge. For the moment, few are taking solid advantage of this phenomenon. Most of humanity constitutes a rigorous class of the “immersed”; people who are busy struggling to earn their life and have neither time nor incentive to acquire advanced leveraging knowledge.

The only way for humanity out of the current socioeconomic and governance crisis is to focus on large-scale extensive education to shorten the knowledge gap between the “immersed” and the “few”. This can put the world on a new wave of unlimited innovation, wisdom, equality and peace. It can also save the liberal democracy free markets model and brings back the values of liberty and fundamental human rights.