I think people really really really resent the idea that their achievements should be graded on a curve. They like to think that they are at the very top of society because they (and their family) earned it.
I have a nasty suspicion that human societies trend toward aristocracy over time. The longer the social order lasts the further ahead the people who won the first few rounds get… until they start to seriously consider themselves a different species than the lower classes.
Then every so often the people at the top fuck up and the whole thing collapses and the board sort of resets (often lots of stuff is left over with the people that control that stuff often getting to be the new rulers of society) and there’s another mad scramble for resources… and the whole thing repeats endlessly.
When people don’t recognize the luck aspect, it’s very difficult for them to empathize with and help other people. They see the difference between them and others as the difference between brilliance and hard work versus stupidity and laziness.
I’m a huge believer in capitalism (with controls) but it’s hard to expect people to row their own boat when others have engines, and the people with the engines have an armed security force taking away the oars from the rowers. And then on top of it all, the bastards with the engines want to lecture the rowers about hard work and perseverance. It’s gross.
Honestly, I would’ve resented that idea too if I hadn’t spent several years living in a third-world country. It definitely gave me perspective because it allowed me to get a general idea on how the majority of the world really lives. Most Americans don’t have that opportunity and would likely decline it if offered. Hell, most Americans who travel to the Caribbean or Latin America stay in fucking tourist compounds and never leave to see anything interesting. I’d rather save my money and jerk off in my apartment for the week than spend it in a goddamn compound.
There’s no contradiction in thinking that people should put their noses to the grindstone and bear responsibility for making the most of their circumstances AND advocating for structural reforms that give more people a better shot of having better personal circumstances from which to work.
Zara… with love… you’re squarely in that group of people who struggles to have empathy for people who are weak where they are strong. You’re smart, hard working, have a strong internal locus of control, and a significant pool of willpower. That’s because you’re the child of people who went through some pretty intense stuff mostly intact. I mean you’re your mothers daughter ffs.
All of that is good stuff about you. Other people are average or worse for intelligence, don’t have much willpower, and had their internal locus of control intentionally destroyed so that they would be easier to exploit. They are capitalisms answer to the pidgeons with broken wings you see in every parking lot there are pidgeons… injured, ill suited to their environment, and fairly helpless.
Nobody smart wants you to see your own life any differently. That feeling of control over your own life is one of the things that makes you effective… But you need to see the good luck you’ve had to be able to tolerate people like your fucking no good neighbor lol.
EDIT: I should note that my own empathy level took a pretty major temporary hit in early 2017 when I gave a buddy of mine a job. This buddies story was basically that he was a similar sort of dude to me (smart can talk) but that he’d had a brain hemorrhage in his early 20’s that had derailed college followed by a hideous set of health insurance collections related stuff, into just a total whirlpool of misery. I never had proof that any of this was true, but the guys an exceptional liar and I bought it hook line and sinker.
It lasted ten weeks and to the best of my knowledge he did absolutely no work while pocketing just shy of 10k of my money. Then he took unemployment and sat on it for six months in the middle of the best job market in US history to date. The entire time the only work he did was working me.
The opportunity I gave this dude… in his shoes I’d have turned my entire life around. He had an ungodly amount of leeway, decent pay for the part of the country he was in (roughly 1 months rent in a decent 2br per week), and the opportunity to learn freight brokerage 1 on 1 from yours truly. The ladder I threw down for this dude was like 50x better than the one I’d scrambled up… and he sold it for firewood.
After that it took a while for my empathy to grow back lol.
It’s also important to remember that there are significant numbers of people who are smart, hard working, have a strong internal locus of control, and a significant pool of willpower - and still struggle mightily to make ends meet. For instance, most migrant farm/temporary workers from Mexico and South America.
It’s not just about the luck of having developed these personal traits.
This is true. Although it’s important to note that people like that are generally pretty successful for wherever they are. It’s not all that common and these are the people who generally start getting promoted young and steadily rise until something really bad happens.
And awful lot of these people end up in the first world after being born at the very bottom. That’s where our immigrant population comes from. Which is why being anti immigration is absolutely idiotic lol. Particularly with barriers to entry being as high as they are in the current system.
I use a similar argument when talking to conservatives that say they believe in equal opportunity vs equal outcomes.
If you really believe in equal opportunities you have to believe in UHC and UBI. Otherwise there is nothing equal about the opportunities everybody has in life. (Not that those two things would fix everything but it would make it to where people are not consumed by trying to survive).
I genuinely believe this is how we’re going to settle this argument. I think when they say equal opportunity our side should just instantly say “yes and that means we should…”
because after that it’s a long long long list of priority issues to fix.
This topic is probably where I diverge from this board the most.
I agree with most of what everybody is posting but as a community we don’t apply it to everybody.
The racist MAGA guy or gal that grew up dirt poor in the south with a racist family must have a path to redemption. I feel like we are quick to just say “well they are stupid and racist”.
It is possible if that same person had a different upbringing their views would be completely different. Conversely if any of us were raised in that persons environment it is possible we would be just as stupid and racist.
I don’t know what the answer is and I’m not saying that we should let their behavior slide. I’m all for calling out racist and shaming them. Shame is actually part of the reason humans have survived and thrived.
But I also feel sorry for them, the same way my heart sinks when I see really fat kids at the gas station buying huge soda’s with their really fat parents. That kids chance of overcoming that type of abuse is going to be tough.
I agree to some extent but on the other hand choosing not to carry hate in your heart and have it guide your actions is a choice available to everyone. That’s quite distinct from not having enough money to buy food or being bankrupted by medical bills.
There have been a ton of programs aimed at these people as the labor market has evolved over the past 50 years. They’ve spit in the face of each and every one of them. Remember how pissed off the coal workers got when Hillary tried to be up front and honest about the future prospects of coal mining jobs? They think they are entitled to “their way of life” even as the rest of the world moves on without them.
I would be thrilled if the opportunities for job training and other benefits that have been offered to those people where widely available to all people in the US in need.
Yeah put me down for camp empathy. Even for shitty rich people who think they earned everything they have when they inherited an eight figure estate. Who knows what kind of kooky shit they’ve been getting fed their whole lives. They decided to learn what had the lowest emotional cost and they probably made that decision early… and that’s not an easy decision to come back from.
Those programs are worthless dude. They don’t work in any other communities either. They’re basically just a grift where borderline worthless upper class people get to take photo ops with the blue collar workers (or minorities, or felons, or whomever) whose jobs they exported to places without unions or environmental regulations.
The reason blue collar white ex factory workers have gotten so many “opportunities” for these kinds of job training programs is because dying steel towns in the midwest are terrific marks for this particular grift. They are desperate to reskill their workforce so that they can bring in different kinds of companies… which of course is borderline impossible since people learn jobs by doing them and nobody in that area has ever had a job like the ones they need to attract.
Is there a good site that can do fantasy sports style snake drafts, but for selecting pool time slots (or whatever) instead of sportsball players? The default option will be to use a shared spreadsheet with draft order selected by random.org, but if there’s anything to make it easier or more fun, I’d like to use it.
Hard disagree on that one. Sure, there is too much grifting and we can do better, but there are also real opportunities for job training and education. I benefited myself from free education after having been laid off sometime around '90. Got a license for wastewater treatment and from there moved on to various technical jobs in labs/research and then went on to get my BS and MS (starting in my mid thirties) and none of that likely would have happened without the wastewater treatment certificate.
And those opportunities are called community colleges. The people who have the strong locuses of control lose their factory job, go back to school for something else (there were like 10 ex factory workers in their 40’s with my wife in nursing school), and life resumes. The people with weaker locuses of control are in big trouble and often never work a decent job again.
EDIT for your edit: You’re doing it. You have a strong locus of control and it’s hard for you to see the world from the perspective of someone who doesn’t. Those programs have about a 10-15% success rate. The big question isn’t ‘does anyone who goes into this program get anything at all out of it?’ it’s ‘does this program help anyone who isn’t already going to be fine?’
Sure they can be a short cut for people on their way up… but how many people are they actually helping avoid poverty?
That’s because the thing they used to get for being white was a middle class job with good benefits and retirement… and their capitalist overlords changed that into some crappy job training.
When you live in a world of extremely scarce resources the last thing you want to do is share with more people. And that’s the one thing I’ve consistently found among poor white people… a grinding certainty that there isn’t enough to go around.
Which is just obviously false at this point. There’s plenty to go around… and one of the only ways society can keep up the illusion of scarcity is to pit the poors against each other over race. Because seriously if the bottom 60% ever vote as a bloc scarcity is finished.