Quote:
Originally Posted by woj
how to accomplish that is not clear... but good start is probably to move towards eliminating various subsidies, forcing people to become self sufficient....
I know... it all sounds like a pipe dream, realistically we are fucked, "loser-ness" is so ingrained into our society now, that any politician trying to make any positive change will surely fail...
|
From my phone so that's why there are typos...
Here is my take based on what I've witnessed in my lifetime. We used to worship success. It was part of being American since the founding of the nation. People came from all over the world to find either some form of freedom or opportunity for success. As we transitioned put of an industrial economy to a more tech based economy Wall St went nuts buying up companies that were weak and dying and breaking them up and selling the pieces. As the nation endured the pain of transition, wall st. (Like tube sites today) gave an entire nation a bad guy to blame and suddenly "success" became synonymous with "greed".
At the same time, we headed down the insane path of political correctness. All of the sudden, you couldn't call a midget a midget, you couldn't call an Asian person "oriental".... In fact, you could do or say anything that might offend anyone. Then taking that further, we started all this bullshit about raisin the self esteem of kids. We started grading on the curve, we started dumbing down schools, we started giving everyone a participation trophy.
So what happened? Now we have a whole he generation of narcissistic fuckwits who think "success" = "greed" and have a very poor concept of hard work, sacrifice, determination and what it means to work 80hrs a week for success. They have a poor sense of personal accountability because they've been brought up to believe they're awesome and deserve a trophy no matter what. The problem is these notions don't easily reconcile with reality. So then the frustration builds and of course, someone needs to be blamed.
You can tell in these discussions who's been successful (mid 6 figure income to 7 or 8) and who hasn't (mid 5 figure and down). You can always tell because those who have never sweat 100hrs a week into something to make it succeed can't understand why that person doesn't just want to hand it over to them. They're angry, frustrated and confused by that fact - left to their final refuge of shame, being forced to label everyone more successful than them as greedy and then compare them to the 1:100,000 occurrences of wholesale corruption.
I agree with you. We're fucked. The problems are not economic, they're cultural and that is not likely to change in our lifetimes. This nation is doomed to a France-like existence in the near future. Marginalized, irrelevant and bitching day in and day out about what's "fair" while enjoying their 30hr work week and two months paid vacation, simultaneously blaming politicians for their ever decreasing productivity and failing economy.