I will never understand the right's issues with failing to acknowledge things like systemic racism, systemic classism, and the way that both of these things plus inherited wealth poison the concept of "meritocracy" that this country is supposedly so proud of. If people are excluded from equality of opportunity at universities via a syste…
I will never understand the right's issues with failing to acknowledge things like systemic racism, systemic classism, and the way that both of these things plus inherited wealth poison the concept of "meritocracy" that this country is supposedly so proud of. If people are excluded from equality of opportunity at universities via a systemic paywall that excludes everyone below a certain class, then you don't have a true meritocracy, you have a faux-meritocracy derived from a skewed sampling pool that excluded a lot of people who aren't there simply because they don't have enough familial wealth to compete.
Either way, once the best of our faux-meritocracy pool makes it in the new economy, they only ever marry across class at scale and concentrate their wealth into their kids so that their kids can grow up and do the same exact thing as their parents some day. Our country's best and brightest aren't doing shit to lift their fellow citizens up, they're just co-mingling with each other and "living their best lives" as they raise the cost of living on everyone else while pretending that racism and classism don't exist anymore. THAT is why systemic racism and systemic classism still exist to such a degree in this country: the rich don't want competition for their kids, they want to maintain their advantage *for* their kids. They would rather keep a sick system that their kids will benefit from in place rather than fixing the system while diminishing the advantage their kids have via familial wealth.
"They would rather keep a sick system that their kids will benefit from in place rather than fixing the system while diminishing the advantage their kids have via familial wealth. " This just seems like garden variety self-interest. It's a tough sell to ask people to deny their kids the best opportunities in the name of making a more equitable system under the best of circumstances. Harder when the criteria seem to be group-based rather than merit-based. This is why fewer people are sold on affirmative action than on dejure desegregation. And why getting rid of testing for magnet schools has caused problems in San Francisco.
Right. But patriotism is precisely what we have used to call on people to deny their self-interest for the good of the nation. Men and women in military, law enforcement, and medical services have done it. So have politicians, at least in the now, somewhat distant, past.
If patriotism can get poor kids from rural areas and ethnic minorities to risk their lives to protect the country, it should also be expected to get the wealthy to create a fair system.
This is a good point, and one I think that should be a lens to view the difference between cold war America and post cold war America. During the cold war we had a competing economic system as the bad guy that we had to make sure we kept our system better than. When the cold war was over, communism was fully discredited and thus less of a (perceived) need to sand off the rough edges of capitalism.
Yes, I have noticed that, too. Almost makes me nostalgic for the Cold War. There may have been the uneasy threat of nuclear annihilation, but at least the fear of godless Commies taking over the world kept our leaders more honest.
And then we wonder why congress is populated with people who can't spell "martial", our health care system was run by people who thought that a viral URI with asymptomatic transmission was going to "fade away", or how Elon Musk came to run three giant companies with large social ramifications.
If MTG had to *actually* compete with a Morehouse grad instead of inheriting a company her dad set up, we'd be spared her shenanigans. If the med school admissions process couldn't be gamed for thousands of dollars, maybe we wouldn't have had two terrible CDC directors under Trumps tenure. Maybe if Elon Musk had higher melanin content in his skin, the only headline he would make would start with the words "Florida Man..."
We've had these discussions before, so forgive me if I take a bit of wry amusement from your opening lines and your closing lines. You say you don't understand and then clearly lay out exactly why they wouldn't acknowledge it. And yeah, I know you do understand, just amusing is all.
The wealthy right denies the problem exists and the wealthy left loudly laments about it and then doesn't do much to fix it.
Personally I think what is needed is a focus on the inequality that doesn't lose sight of the fact that human nature seems hard-wired to marry for advantage. We aren't going to legislate that out of existence. What we can do is cut down on the factors that encourage it. Increased wealth transfer taxes, higher marginal tax rates, etc. Then use the money to help lift up those who need it (inner city and rural schools come to mind).
"Not understanding" is a rhetorical device used to ask particular questions and make particular statements. I do that al the time. Another entry into that path is "did you ever wonder..."
As you point out, it usually (not always) become pretty apparent that the person that didn't understand or wondered actually has a clue ;)
Nepotism is wired in (why wife was talking bout it this morning in connection with her job--how the ranks of the institution she teaches at are now filled with people from India and the office workers are largely East Asian).
We have a preference (extending beyond nepotism) for those like us--either in appearance and secondarily in belief. We socialize and marry with those like us--same socioeconomic status and background.
[Nepotism is wired in (why wife was talking bout it this morning in connection with her job--how the ranks of the institution she teaches at are now filled with people from India and the office workers are largely East Asian).]
A case could be made that this is an example of just what those who try to maintain privilege are worried about. "Once I stop cheating, someone else will start. Thus, I move from advantage not to equality, but to disadvantage."
We certainly are imperfect (especially in society as a whole) in understanding 'human nature', but any time we ignore, wish away, or try to legislate it out of existence we're going to be disappointed.
The idea of fairness of opportunity and education is a specifically American idea. I have know people from India and East Asia and they don't have a problem with hiring people of their nationality, race or social class.
Americans do the same thing but understand it is wrong culturally, which is why the idea of tokenism came about.
My mind goes to the cultural acceptability of bribes comparatively between the US / West and much of the rest of the world. I can't help but wonder if things like that and the viewing nepotism as wrong don't partially explain the west's economic success compared to much of the rest of the world. By no means the only factors, nor even saying major factors, but I'd think they are in the mix.
Having a relatively incorrupt system helps. One of the things people forget, however, is that we were pretty corrupt during most of the 19th century. Especially before the Civil Service Reform.
Many administrative posts in the federal government were part of the spoils system (political appointment). Same with a lot of local offices.
Then there were things like Credit Mobilier.
Open bribes were less socially acceptable.. but they still occurred and they occurred in other less visible forms.
I would argue that it wasn't freedom from corruption that accounts for the success. It was largely a combination of culture and less-autocratic forms of government.
I think you're right. Look at a lot of the kids of musicians, actors, artists, et al, who have all the doors open to them and yet don't have the fraction of the talent the parent has.
"Like seeks like." This is the core principle behind the concept of "assortative mating," and I would propose that it's the core principle behind tribalism, classism, and racism as well. Over-trust of in-groups and under-trust in out-groups breeds assortative mating, but the irony is that it's usually someone who is closest to you who leads you the furthest astray. You think it's some member of a racial or class out-group who will sexually violate your child some day, but then it really turns out to be your brother or a priest at your church. People who seek shelter in the comfort of their ingroups are often betrayed by the same people they thought had their back through common identity or class or ideology. Excessive assortative mating across a wealthy society leads to concentrating the wealth among the wealthy and class systems that persist generation to generation, which is basically where we are with a Gini Coefficient higher than Russia's (A country we consider to be an open oligarchy via this measurement).
Travis have you considered writing fiction? You have excellent macro views of all kinds of human tendencies. You could weave together really nifty motives & flawed characters. Seriously.
Okay, I should rephrase: "I understand how the right ignores and justifies the problem, I just don't understand how they live with themselves."
If they have to lie to themselves about how things got this way in the first place and then force the rest of society to acknowledge those lies so that they can live comfortably with things being the way they are, then what does that say about *humanity* more generally? Maybe this is how slavery went pleasantly by for so long too? The rich people who were able to afford slaves told themselves a story about "merit-based" success/failure in life, and that the slaveholders were the "successful" while the slaves were "failures", and so the playing field of merit left slave and slaveholder where they "ought to be." This false idea of "merit" existing on unequal playing fields is such a common thread in history that is oft-used to justify societal inequalities to sickening degrees. Until that part changes I really don't see the rest coming undone. The part where humans that had natural advantages over others never acknowledge those things and instead use their advantages to seat themselves atop society and declare themselves "merit winners" and then use their wealth and power to enforce societal inequalities so that their kids have a shot at doing the same thing they did. Until humanity stops gaslighting itself to make the rich feel better about themselves, we're going to be generationally-unequal until the extinction event comes, and when it does, only the rich will be allowed to board the escape rockets to newly-colonized Pandora.
Well said. But the slaveowners didn't use success/failure, per se, to explain how they were the slaveowners and not the slaves. They used white supremacism to argue that other human beings were inferior from birth and naturally suited to slavery. And we are still dealing with the aftereffects of those rationalizations and lies...like denying that systemic racism existed.
The can live with themselves because, like most people they are almost entirely self-focused and have little empathy for the Other. Especially the other who is a different color or sex or whatever.
Many people exist in a zero sum world where there are winners and losers--and if you are losing it is because someone took something from you... and if you are winning it is because you HAD to take things from the losers.
It is just the nature of things, eh? No real reason to feel too guilty about it, amiright.
Besides, if I don't do it they will do it to me.
There are "good" people, but in general people are not good--not without the existence of a cultural and economic system that basically forces them to be good (at least until they manage to corrupt it).
There is no substantive moral/ethical structure with a society to write and enforce it.
There is no arc of history bending towards a better world for all unless there is a continual effort to make that happen.
The question is not about making people better (because we can't) the question is about how do we build a system where people MUST be better--and how do we protect it from being co-opted and corrupted for as long as possible.
I think this gets to the heart of it. We're not remotely close to perfect, and any system designed by us isn't going to be perfect either. It will take constant updating and modification to keep it doing what it is supposed to do (forcing us to be good).
To me, the key is to get enough acknowledgement of this to be able to improve the system. Too bad that the truths that were self evident were all positive rather than having some negative in there.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people will seek their own and their children's advantage, almost invariably at the expense of others; that gaming the system and pulling the ladder up behind them is something most people will do if given the chance; that our tribal nature of in-group vs. out-group thinking isn't suited to societies of thousands let alone millions of people. That to guard against these tendencies Governments are instituted among people..."
TJ would need to flower that up a bit, and certainly I don't want to go down the road of man as inherently bad, but we are inherently flawed, and while it may have gone without saying 250 years ago, it could use more saying these days.
Good and bad are contextual judgments. We can only say that something is good or bad by looking at the outcome and judging that outcome WRT some goal that we have.
People are not good or bad. People are people. They behave in accordance with how they were shaped by evolution and then constrained by culture.
If the goal is to create large, powerful, equitable, and harmonious societies, then there are obvious goods and bads. Obvious positive and negative behaviors... and so we judge good and bad on THAT basis.
If the goal is to concentrate power and wealth, then there are obvious goods and bads, and we judge on THAT basis.
But without the constant dedication and watchfulness towards particular ends, an effort towards the first thing is doomed to founder on the rocks and shoals of human nature as we tend towards the second thing.
I will never understand the right's issues with failing to acknowledge things like systemic racism, systemic classism, and the way that both of these things plus inherited wealth poison the concept of "meritocracy" that this country is supposedly so proud of. If people are excluded from equality of opportunity at universities via a systemic paywall that excludes everyone below a certain class, then you don't have a true meritocracy, you have a faux-meritocracy derived from a skewed sampling pool that excluded a lot of people who aren't there simply because they don't have enough familial wealth to compete.
Either way, once the best of our faux-meritocracy pool makes it in the new economy, they only ever marry across class at scale and concentrate their wealth into their kids so that their kids can grow up and do the same exact thing as their parents some day. Our country's best and brightest aren't doing shit to lift their fellow citizens up, they're just co-mingling with each other and "living their best lives" as they raise the cost of living on everyone else while pretending that racism and classism don't exist anymore. THAT is why systemic racism and systemic classism still exist to such a degree in this country: the rich don't want competition for their kids, they want to maintain their advantage *for* their kids. They would rather keep a sick system that their kids will benefit from in place rather than fixing the system while diminishing the advantage their kids have via familial wealth.
You nailed it
"They would rather keep a sick system that their kids will benefit from in place rather than fixing the system while diminishing the advantage their kids have via familial wealth. " This just seems like garden variety self-interest. It's a tough sell to ask people to deny their kids the best opportunities in the name of making a more equitable system under the best of circumstances. Harder when the criteria seem to be group-based rather than merit-based. This is why fewer people are sold on affirmative action than on dejure desegregation. And why getting rid of testing for magnet schools has caused problems in San Francisco.
Right. But patriotism is precisely what we have used to call on people to deny their self-interest for the good of the nation. Men and women in military, law enforcement, and medical services have done it. So have politicians, at least in the now, somewhat distant, past.
If patriotism can get poor kids from rural areas and ethnic minorities to risk their lives to protect the country, it should also be expected to get the wealthy to create a fair system.
This is a good point, and one I think that should be a lens to view the difference between cold war America and post cold war America. During the cold war we had a competing economic system as the bad guy that we had to make sure we kept our system better than. When the cold war was over, communism was fully discredited and thus less of a (perceived) need to sand off the rough edges of capitalism.
Yes, I have noticed that, too. Almost makes me nostalgic for the Cold War. There may have been the uneasy threat of nuclear annihilation, but at least the fear of godless Commies taking over the world kept our leaders more honest.
And then we wonder why congress is populated with people who can't spell "martial", our health care system was run by people who thought that a viral URI with asymptomatic transmission was going to "fade away", or how Elon Musk came to run three giant companies with large social ramifications.
If MTG had to *actually* compete with a Morehouse grad instead of inheriting a company her dad set up, we'd be spared her shenanigans. If the med school admissions process couldn't be gamed for thousands of dollars, maybe we wouldn't have had two terrible CDC directors under Trumps tenure. Maybe if Elon Musk had higher melanin content in his skin, the only headline he would make would start with the words "Florida Man..."
We've had these discussions before, so forgive me if I take a bit of wry amusement from your opening lines and your closing lines. You say you don't understand and then clearly lay out exactly why they wouldn't acknowledge it. And yeah, I know you do understand, just amusing is all.
The wealthy right denies the problem exists and the wealthy left loudly laments about it and then doesn't do much to fix it.
Personally I think what is needed is a focus on the inequality that doesn't lose sight of the fact that human nature seems hard-wired to marry for advantage. We aren't going to legislate that out of existence. What we can do is cut down on the factors that encourage it. Increased wealth transfer taxes, higher marginal tax rates, etc. Then use the money to help lift up those who need it (inner city and rural schools come to mind).
"Not understanding" is a rhetorical device used to ask particular questions and make particular statements. I do that al the time. Another entry into that path is "did you ever wonder..."
As you point out, it usually (not always) become pretty apparent that the person that didn't understand or wondered actually has a clue ;)
Nepotism is wired in (why wife was talking bout it this morning in connection with her job--how the ranks of the institution she teaches at are now filled with people from India and the office workers are largely East Asian).
We have a preference (extending beyond nepotism) for those like us--either in appearance and secondarily in belief. We socialize and marry with those like us--same socioeconomic status and background.
It is how you build and maintain a noble class.
[Nepotism is wired in (why wife was talking bout it this morning in connection with her job--how the ranks of the institution she teaches at are now filled with people from India and the office workers are largely East Asian).]
A case could be made that this is an example of just what those who try to maintain privilege are worried about. "Once I stop cheating, someone else will start. Thus, I move from advantage not to equality, but to disadvantage."
We certainly are imperfect (especially in society as a whole) in understanding 'human nature', but any time we ignore, wish away, or try to legislate it out of existence we're going to be disappointed.
The idea of fairness of opportunity and education is a specifically American idea. I have know people from India and East Asia and they don't have a problem with hiring people of their nationality, race or social class.
Americans do the same thing but understand it is wrong culturally, which is why the idea of tokenism came about.
My mind goes to the cultural acceptability of bribes comparatively between the US / West and much of the rest of the world. I can't help but wonder if things like that and the viewing nepotism as wrong don't partially explain the west's economic success compared to much of the rest of the world. By no means the only factors, nor even saying major factors, but I'd think they are in the mix.
Having a relatively incorrupt system helps. One of the things people forget, however, is that we were pretty corrupt during most of the 19th century. Especially before the Civil Service Reform.
Many administrative posts in the federal government were part of the spoils system (political appointment). Same with a lot of local offices.
Then there were things like Credit Mobilier.
Open bribes were less socially acceptable.. but they still occurred and they occurred in other less visible forms.
I would argue that it wasn't freedom from corruption that accounts for the success. It was largely a combination of culture and less-autocratic forms of government.
I think you're right. Look at a lot of the kids of musicians, actors, artists, et al, who have all the doors open to them and yet don't have the fraction of the talent the parent has.
"Like seeks like." This is the core principle behind the concept of "assortative mating," and I would propose that it's the core principle behind tribalism, classism, and racism as well. Over-trust of in-groups and under-trust in out-groups breeds assortative mating, but the irony is that it's usually someone who is closest to you who leads you the furthest astray. You think it's some member of a racial or class out-group who will sexually violate your child some day, but then it really turns out to be your brother or a priest at your church. People who seek shelter in the comfort of their ingroups are often betrayed by the same people they thought had their back through common identity or class or ideology. Excessive assortative mating across a wealthy society leads to concentrating the wealth among the wealthy and class systems that persist generation to generation, which is basically where we are with a Gini Coefficient higher than Russia's (A country we consider to be an open oligarchy via this measurement).
Travis have you considered writing fiction? You have excellent macro views of all kinds of human tendencies. You could weave together really nifty motives & flawed characters. Seriously.
You can only be betrayed by someone you trust.
It all comes down to who do you trust--and we often trust very poorly--for the reasons you note and with the results that you note.
Okay, I should rephrase: "I understand how the right ignores and justifies the problem, I just don't understand how they live with themselves."
If they have to lie to themselves about how things got this way in the first place and then force the rest of society to acknowledge those lies so that they can live comfortably with things being the way they are, then what does that say about *humanity* more generally? Maybe this is how slavery went pleasantly by for so long too? The rich people who were able to afford slaves told themselves a story about "merit-based" success/failure in life, and that the slaveholders were the "successful" while the slaves were "failures", and so the playing field of merit left slave and slaveholder where they "ought to be." This false idea of "merit" existing on unequal playing fields is such a common thread in history that is oft-used to justify societal inequalities to sickening degrees. Until that part changes I really don't see the rest coming undone. The part where humans that had natural advantages over others never acknowledge those things and instead use their advantages to seat themselves atop society and declare themselves "merit winners" and then use their wealth and power to enforce societal inequalities so that their kids have a shot at doing the same thing they did. Until humanity stops gaslighting itself to make the rich feel better about themselves, we're going to be generationally-unequal until the extinction event comes, and when it does, only the rich will be allowed to board the escape rockets to newly-colonized Pandora.
Well said. But the slaveowners didn't use success/failure, per se, to explain how they were the slaveowners and not the slaves. They used white supremacism to argue that other human beings were inferior from birth and naturally suited to slavery. And we are still dealing with the aftereffects of those rationalizations and lies...like denying that systemic racism existed.
The can live with themselves because, like most people they are almost entirely self-focused and have little empathy for the Other. Especially the other who is a different color or sex or whatever.
Many people exist in a zero sum world where there are winners and losers--and if you are losing it is because someone took something from you... and if you are winning it is because you HAD to take things from the losers.
It is just the nature of things, eh? No real reason to feel too guilty about it, amiright.
Besides, if I don't do it they will do it to me.
There are "good" people, but in general people are not good--not without the existence of a cultural and economic system that basically forces them to be good (at least until they manage to corrupt it).
There is no substantive moral/ethical structure with a society to write and enforce it.
There is no arc of history bending towards a better world for all unless there is a continual effort to make that happen.
The question is not about making people better (because we can't) the question is about how do we build a system where people MUST be better--and how do we protect it from being co-opted and corrupted for as long as possible.
I think this gets to the heart of it. We're not remotely close to perfect, and any system designed by us isn't going to be perfect either. It will take constant updating and modification to keep it doing what it is supposed to do (forcing us to be good).
To me, the key is to get enough acknowledgement of this to be able to improve the system. Too bad that the truths that were self evident were all positive rather than having some negative in there.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people will seek their own and their children's advantage, almost invariably at the expense of others; that gaming the system and pulling the ladder up behind them is something most people will do if given the chance; that our tribal nature of in-group vs. out-group thinking isn't suited to societies of thousands let alone millions of people. That to guard against these tendencies Governments are instituted among people..."
TJ would need to flower that up a bit, and certainly I don't want to go down the road of man as inherently bad, but we are inherently flawed, and while it may have gone without saying 250 years ago, it could use more saying these days.
Good and bad are contextual judgments. We can only say that something is good or bad by looking at the outcome and judging that outcome WRT some goal that we have.
People are not good or bad. People are people. They behave in accordance with how they were shaped by evolution and then constrained by culture.
If the goal is to create large, powerful, equitable, and harmonious societies, then there are obvious goods and bads. Obvious positive and negative behaviors... and so we judge good and bad on THAT basis.
If the goal is to concentrate power and wealth, then there are obvious goods and bads, and we judge on THAT basis.
But without the constant dedication and watchfulness towards particular ends, an effort towards the first thing is doomed to founder on the rocks and shoals of human nature as we tend towards the second thing.