This mindset is being pushed HARD by anyone in the NYTimes / Sam Harris / Centro-sphere.
It seems like the closer America gets to class consciousness, the harder we get flooded with disinformation.
A few months ago Sam Harris had a best-selling Yale Professor on to discuss 'The Failure of Meritocracy'... it was a hate-listen, but I was hoping that it might have faint traces of leftism. Wishful thinking. The episode quickly devolved into re-defining the word 'Capitalist' to encompass all of the petite bourgeois and most of the working class... and actually, according to our good professor, the only difference between a successful lawyer and Jeff Bezos is that Bezos works more hours than the lawyer, and we should feel bad for how many hours the top 20% is 'forced' to work.
Absolute laser-focused propaganda for the current (and aspiring) Petite Bourgeois.
The NYTimes review is actually more critical than you would expect, but the fact that this got boosted so hard kind of invalidates their latent criticism.
"When he squares off against the meritocratic elite, he keeps pulling his punches, assuring us that its members’ educational credentials really are excellent, that their skills are real and that they work extremely hard. At times he even seems to lament the psychic toll that all that work takes on our white-collar professionals, as though one might simply persuade them to give up their system of privileges.
The book’s most unfortunate blind spot is the past. Markovits asserts that the oligarchic situation we are in today has “no historical precedent,” by which he seems to mean there has never been a social order in which the people on top were there because they worked so hard and thus appeared to deserve what they had."
I know you already know this, but even a lawyer billing out $600 an hour putting in 100 billable hours a week (both very, very high and both involve actual labor) couldn't come close what Bezos earns merely by being an owner of Amazon. Like, that lawyer is closing maybe 3 million a year with that kind of billable hours. Bezos "makes" more than that in a half hour through investments.
That shit is such baby-brain nonsense and would instantly collapse if anyone pressed against it, but these authority figures seem so untouchable to regular people who tend to just fold instead of challenging authority figures.
I've been trying to remove this language from how I talk about wages/pay because it's deceptive to the point of propaganda. I don't "make" X per hour at work, I am paid X per hour for the much higher value I make for the company.
That shit is such baby-brain nonsense and would instantly collapse if anyone pressed against it,
Very optimistic. This is how my conversation with boomers usually goes:
"So almost all of your money has come from a salary... and you've spent the vast majority of your life working in an office because if you wanted to have a family you didn't have a choice but to work . For most of modern history, Capitalists were referred to as 'the idle rich' because 'work' for the wealthy is an optional hobby."
"Yeah but I'm a capitalist now. If I work for another couple years I'll have saved up enough Capital to let me retire... you know, as long as the stock market doesn't crash again, which it can't because the last two crashes were improbable aberrations, just like Trump. If you work hard enough, one day you too can be a Capitalist. That's the American Dream."
but these authority figures seem so untouchable to regular people who tend to just fold instead of challenging authority figures.
I think another part of it is that the numbers just get too abstract for people to really take in. Like, a billion dollars is an INSANE amount of money; if you worked 40 hours a week and took no weeks off and were paid hourly the equivalent of what someone making minimum wage would make in an entire year ($15,080), it would still take you over 31 YEARS at that rate just to get to your 1st billion.
I think people's minds just kind of gloss this over a lot of times; a million is a lot, but it's not that much, right? And therefore a billion isn't really that much more than it, right? Close enough. And since it's not that far fetched to think that someone can achieve a million dollars in their life, surely it can't be that much harder to become a billionaire.
This mindset is being pushed HARD by anyone in the NYTimes / Sam Harris / Centro-sphere.
It seems like the closer America gets to class consciousness, the harder we get flooded with disinformation.
A few months ago Sam Harris had a best-selling Yale Professor on to discuss 'The Failure of Meritocracy'... it was a hate-listen, but I was hoping that it might have faint traces of leftism. Wishful thinking. The episode quickly devolved into re-defining the word 'Capitalist' to encompass all of the petite bourgeois and most of the working class... and actually, according to our good professor, the only difference between a successful lawyer and Jeff Bezos is that Bezos works more hours than the lawyer, and we should feel bad for how many hours the top 20% is 'forced' to work.
Absolute laser-focused propaganda for the current (and aspiring) Petite Bourgeois.
The NYTimes review is actually more critical than you would expect, but the fact that this got boosted so hard kind of invalidates their latent criticism.
I know you already know this, but even a lawyer billing out $600 an hour putting in 100 billable hours a week (both very, very high and both involve actual labor) couldn't come close what Bezos earns merely by being an owner of Amazon. Like, that lawyer is closing maybe 3 million a year with that kind of billable hours. Bezos "makes" more than that in a half hour through investments.
That shit is such baby-brain nonsense and would instantly collapse if anyone pressed against it, but these authority figures seem so untouchable to regular people who tend to just fold instead of challenging authority figures.
I've been trying to remove this language from how I talk about wages/pay because it's deceptive to the point of propaganda. I don't "make" X per hour at work, I am paid X per hour for the much higher value I make for the company.
Yeah good idea, I'll try doing that for myself as well.
Very optimistic. This is how my conversation with boomers usually goes:
"So almost all of your money has come from a salary... and you've spent the vast majority of your life working in an office because if you wanted to have a family you didn't have a choice but to work . For most of modern history, Capitalists were referred to as 'the idle rich' because 'work' for the wealthy is an optional hobby."
"Yeah but I'm a capitalist now. If I work for another couple years I'll have saved up enough Capital to let me retire... you know, as long as the stock market doesn't crash again, which it can't because the last two crashes were improbable aberrations, just like Trump. If you work hard enough, one day you too can be a Capitalist. That's the American Dream."
I think another part of it is that the numbers just get too abstract for people to really take in. Like, a billion dollars is an INSANE amount of money; if you worked 40 hours a week and took no weeks off and were paid hourly the equivalent of what someone making minimum wage would make in an entire year ($15,080), it would still take you over 31 YEARS at that rate just to get to your 1st billion.
I think people's minds just kind of gloss this over a lot of times; a million is a lot, but it's not that much, right? And therefore a billion isn't really that much more than it, right? Close enough. And since it's not that far fetched to think that someone can achieve a million dollars in their life, surely it can't be that much harder to become a billionaire.