Keeping up appearances at all costs accumulates moral debt and leads to monumental failures down the line. Everyone knows the senile boss is about to make another mistake, but the nail that sticks out gets hammered down, so everyone shuts up until bankruptcy and suicides.
I do believe that dissertation is just the song "America, FUCK YEAH!" Repeated on enough pages to make a red-tailed hawkbald eagle screech when you flip the pages fast enough.