Very interesting self-reflective
article about the upper 9.9% percent (discluding the top .01).
Quote:
Jay Gatsby might have understood. Life in West Egg is never as serene as it seems. The Princeton man—that idle prince of leisure who coasts from prep school to a life of ease—is an invention of our lowborn ancestors. It’s what they thought they saw when they were looking up. West Eggers understand very well that a bad move or an unlucky break (or three or four) can lead to a steep descent. We know just how expensive it is to live there, yet living off the island is unthinkable. We have intuited one of the fundamental paradoxes of life on the Gatsby Curve: The greater the inequality, the less your money buys.
We feel in our bones that class works only for itself; that every individual is dispensable; that some of us will be discarded and replaced with fresh blood. This insecurity of privilege only grows as the chasm beneath the privileged class expands. It is the restless engine that drives us to invest still more time and energy in the walls that will keep us safe by keeping others out.
Perhaps the best evidence for the power of an aristocracy is the degree of resentment it provokes. By that measure, the 9.9 percent are doing pretty well indeed.
Here’s another fact of life in West Egg: Someone is always above you. In Gatsby’s case, it was the old-money people of East Egg. In the Colonel’s case, it was John D. Rockefeller Jr. You’re always trying to please them, and they’re always ready to pull the plug.
The source of the trouble, considered more deeply, is that we have traded rights for privileges. We’re willing to strip everyone, including ourselves, of the universal right to a good education, adequate health care, adequate representation in the workplace, genuinely equal opportunities, because we think we can win the game. But who, really, in the end, is going to win this slippery game of escalating privileges?
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This is interesting to me as I've stopped sitting on my ass reading and playing games since my expungement went through. I reminded of what a pain in the ass it is to be above average.
No amount of security I can amass will change my mind about the necessity of a more dignified and firmer bottom of the economy. With better workers rights, wages, educational and advancement opportunity.
Edit:
The author doesn't understand modern anti-intellectualism. Few intellectuals do. It's not about abandoning reason. It's about opposing the intellectual authority that certain institutions and individuals espouse because of consensus...we know that University consensus on certain issues is kind of like a politburo consensus where everyone is supposed to support the most prestigious men in the room. We know that think tanks are funded to come up with arguments and information that support a certain predetermined viewpoint (generally libertarian or "centrist"). We may not know exactly why these two groups are wrong, but there is a strong and almost certainly correct sense that they often are. That is Anti-intellectualism since the turn of the millennium.
05-18-2018, 08:57 PM
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