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I believe it's a variation on Marxist dialectic theory. I've read enough Lenin (prolific author!), Stalin, Marx, and Engels to know the line of thinking and where it leads.
It doesn't track to reality, but sure makes a person "feel" good that some shadowy enemy like "coercive decadent Imperialist running dogs" or whatnot is/are the "real" culprits behind miserable failure to achieve.
What most baffles me about the American class-strata, is the almost complete lack of an "intelligentsia". This would prototypically be the set of persons who for example fluently speak 3 foreign languages, have published dozens of technical articles, have a patent or two, spent a half-decade working or studying in Europe, own fine-china and hand-made furniture passed down across 6 generations, can claim an ancestor who fought in the English civil war (on the Royalist side, no less), but who really never rose much above their 900 square-foot bungalow in the middling part of town, and who depend on TIAA-CREF for their retirement.
And what is the ROI of being what you define as a member of the "intelligentsia"?
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And following (tangentially) what Submariner noted, I'm frequently amused (and bemused) in dealings with near-1% small-business types, in how these worthy gentlemen (most are men) retain the manner, diction, vocabulary and limited education of their humble roots. Exquisitely adroit in the lingo of precision-machining or welding or whatnot, they think that Chaucer is a late-night sitcom character, and Marcus Aurelius is a rapper.
And what is the ROI on "holding Salon" to discuss Chaucer and Marcus Aurelius ?
In the case of my brother, the failure belongs to him and him alone. He squandered the opportunity to graduate from an Ivy League. He's so ridiculous that he constantly complains that if he had a college degree he could get the job he really wants. He, of course, fails to recognize that him getting a degree was the point of my parents shelling out for 5 1/2 years of school! He screwed around, couldn't be bothered to go to class and never graduated. It was all there for him to take advantage of and he FAILED. No the school, not my parents, not society, HIM.
College is not for everyone. Very true. But, given that he made straight As in HS, a 1600 on the SAT, was fully engaged in applying to schools, was admitted to more than one Ivy, chose which to attend, chose his own major and class schedule, it's hard to see where the school failed him instead of the other way around.
And trust me, if he gave you 5K (of my mother's money of course) to mentor him, at the end of a couple of months he'd still have nothing and you'd have a lot more gray hair. Some people cannot be saved from themselves.
Well, I have come across entire families who subscribe to "its everyone else's fault". Try to deprogram any of them can be dangerous. Trying to reason with them is useless. One might wonder, however, where and why your brother came to embrace such a perspective on accountability.
Don't ignore the road less traveled. Just a couple examples I'm familiar with:
One neighbor of mine went to trade school to become a pipe fitter and licensed plumber. Fast forward 30 years and he now owns a plumbing business that focuses on residential water heater replacement. He has over 30 employees and a dozen trucks. He's built a successful business. He's a millionaire many times over.
Another neighbor of mine found himself at age 19 married with 2 young daughters. His wife abandoned them. He raised his daughters by himself, never remarrying. With no education, he landed a grunt job working for an insurance salesman. After a while, he learned enough to become an insurance salesman himself, and then started his own business selling annuities to retirees. At age 50, he now has about 50 employees and is a multimillionaire many times over.
A high school classmate of my daughter, quite gifted, was set to go to college... but Facebook made him an offer he couldn't refuse. They offered this 18 year old $125K/year to join Facebook instead of going to college. He's now mid 20s earning about a quarter million a year.
Far too many people view college as the *only* way. It isn't the only way.
Cos the scary College Degree Salesmenz can be veery convincing. At the same time, I have come across a number of street pharmacists who made plenty of money to afford training toward professional certifications who couldn't be 'insulted' by learning something like project management, computer security, welding or even horology. A marine welder can pull $300K+ a year with paid travel around the planet.
Last edited by CaptainCommander; 05-27-2016 at 12:23 PM..
So, I guess we can make some arithmetic estimates of "working hard". A millionaire works 20 times as hard as a 50k grunt, a billionaire is 20,000 times as hard working. You are not laughing yet? I dont really know why people use this oxymoron rationalization. A society/economy is a parasitic coercive pyramid extracting labor and resources from many to reward few with disproportioned share of the collective output. You can use whatever rationale, from "hard work" to the will of the Universe, to justify why some should fleece 200,000 times more than the others, but sad truth is that free, independent people would never allow 20,000 ratios of "hard work" to happen. It is not about you or hard work, it is all about "the coercive system" that allows parasitic relationships of 200,000 kind.
It's akin to those few who God let win an Oscar. The losers also had that same speech ready to go incase they won.
And what is the ROI of being what you define as a member of the "intelligentsia"?
And what is the ROI on "holding Salon" to discuss Chaucer and Marcus Aurelius ?
Not everything devolves to return on investment, in a narrowly pecuniary sense. The Anglo-American psyche seems to be particularly influenced by the view that education must be practical, that it must lead to a quantifiable self-betterment – and even more importantly, to a self-betterment that increases one's capacity to turn a buck. This is very different from the Continental European view, the Russian view, the Indian view and so forth.
The "Intelligentsia" isn't starving (except now, in post-Soviet Russia) or living off of welfare. It is generally comfortable materially, but rarely in the upper echelons of wealth… in modern America, it would be say in the top quintile, but outside of the top few percentages. This group, I contend, in America is remarkably small.
For me personally, a large part of quality of life is contingent upon being in the frequent and abiding company of such people. Locally they are almost entirely absent. We have a smattering of affluence locally; it's not all meth and Section-8. But the successful locals are mostly like SportyandMisty's hustling tradesmen.
Well, I have come across entire families who subscribe to "its everyone else's fault". Try to deprogram any of them can be dangerous. Trying to reason with them is useless. One might wonder, however, where and why your brother came to embrace such a perspective on accountability.
Given my mother's enabling him to avoid accountability by funneling him money for decades, I would have to say she did. I think I'm lucky I was not her favorite. Or even 2nd runner up in a family of 2 kids.
The irony here is that all of this negative energy that you put towards proving why you can't be rich could be the source of your wealth if only your attitude would change.
My father worked his butt off to put himself through college and law school and ultimately became very, very wealthy at a major corporation. I'm following in his footsteps and spent nearly 10 years of my life working 40-70 hour weeks, four of those years including going to law school at night while also working those hours, and even though I'm only in my very early thirties, I'm now earning lots of money.
I will certainly have $3m of investable assets by the time I'm 40 as long as I keep up my current level of career intensity. However, rather than rest on my laurels, I'm also working on studying for the GMAT in my spare time in order to get a top MBA so that hopefully I can add another zero (or two) to that figure by the time I retire.
I'm surrounded by naysayers such as yourself who think that only the lucky get rich (and then those naysayers go home at 5pm while there is still work to do or claim that something "isn't in my job description"); I just ignore them and keep on working towards success.
The amount that you are paid has nothing to do with how hard you work- it's all about how much value you provide. I CERTAINLY intend to provide 200,000x the value per year by the time I'm in my 50's as compared to the lowest-paid individual at my future employer. I won't be providing 200,000x the units of effort; I will be providing 200,000x the units of value.
The "Intelligentsia" isn't starving (except now, in post-Soviet Russia) or living off of welfare. It is generally comfortable materially, but rarely in the upper echelons of wealth… in modern America, it would be say in the top quintile, but outside of the top few percentages. This group, I contend, in America is remarkably small.
They are known as "professors" and there are quite a few of them.
"According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 1.7 million post-secondary teachers in the US, of whom all are college or university faculty except for 159,700 graduate teaching assistants. Excluding graduate TAs, the number of faculty in the US is therefore 1.54 million."
Most high net Americans say they worked their way up from lower class Most high net worth Americans or either Lying, or they are delusional. Most have had some help in some form or another.
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