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Should societal influencers tout the benefits of the values below? What would be the outcome if these values were taught starting at the grade school level? What is the down side of a society embracing these attributes?
Bougie values:
get married before having children
getting the education needed for a good job
working hard
going the extra mile for your employer
being a patriot
being respectful of authority
avoiding drug
avoiding criminal acts.
Quote:
The loss of bourgeois habits seriously impeded the progress of disadvantaged groups.
“That trend also accelerated the destructive consequences of the growing welfare state, which, by taking over financial support of families, reduced the need for two parents. A strong pro-marriage norm might have blunted this effect. Instead, the number of single parents grew astronomically, producing children more prone to academic failure, addiction, idleness, crime, and poverty.”
Adults with influence over the culture, for a variety of reasons, abandoned their role as advocates for respectability, civility, and adult values. As a consequence, the counterculture made great headway, particularly among the chattering classes — academics, writers, artists, actors, and journalists — who relished liberation from conventional constraints and turned condemning America and reviewing its crimes into a class marker of virtue and sophistication.
The loss of bourgeois habits seriously impeded the progress of disadvantaged groups. That trend also accelerated the destructive consequences of the growing welfare state, which, by taking over financial support of families, reduced the need for two parents.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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The very nature of a social influencer means that this won't happen. Instead of getting the education needed for a good job,
working hard and going the extra mile for their employer, they have discovered a way to make money by just being themselves on internet social media, with gullible followers who patronize their sponsors. Ask elementary school kids what they want to do when they grow up, and I bet many or most will mention Youtube or Tik Tok.
What you are describing is a set of traditional American values. Yes, these should be taught in grade school, or earlier, and these are probably taught in some places in "flyover country."
Don't count on the influencers to do that. They wouldn't be influencers if they preached those values. They want to famous for destroying, not preserving.
Last edited by Rachel NewYork; 05-02-2022 at 03:13 PM..
Reason: Removed emotionally charged language. Please read rules for Great Debates.
These have already been taught. There's some good outcomes and some bad ones that have resulted. I'll start from bottom up.
8. Yes, most people do. Except for the 2020 weirdness crime had been trending downward for quite some time
7. Eh, drugs aren't bad, using them all the time is. Temperance rather than abstinence I think is the better option. Alcohol and sugar without restraint are worse than trying the other substances occasionally.
6. As long as it's not blind following, sure
5. Most people already want to see their nation improved, otherwise they wouldn't give a crap about politics or world affairs.
4, 3, 2: People follow this, and this is partly why we have a fertility crisis. They worry so much about getting their ducks in a row that by the time they are 35 and have them all lined up, they have to speed rush into dating before they have fertility issues of their own. Moderation again. Instead of being taught to shoot for the stars, people should be taught to get the career they need to have a stable and comfortable life and then focus on relationships AND achievement. Income maximization can be just as problematic as being a lazy sloth.
1: Yes. And I believe this is improving, more children are born to married or de facto married couples than was the case years ago.
Should societal influencers tout the benefits of the values below? What would be the outcome if these values were taught starting at the grade school level? What is the down side of a society embracing these attributes?
A boojjhee value would be like hating people because they live in a poor zip code or drive a cheap car.
This isn't about hate. It isn't even about other people. It's a matter of personal responsibility for your own life. Personally doing things that give you a shot at a more rewarding existence.
Should societal influencers tout the benefits of the values below? What would be the outcome if these values were taught starting at the grade school level? What is the down side of a society embracing these attributes?
Bougie values:
get married before having children
getting the education needed for a good job
working hard
going the extra mile for your employer
being a patriot
being respectful of authority
avoiding drug
avoiding criminal acts.
Basically, these are the values of the upper-middle class in America today. Most people in this category know that the choices you make and the habits you form early on in life have a strong correlation with how well you live and how successful you are during most of your adult life. This is what they teach their children.
I believe these are the values that should be taught to all children, especially those who are born into lower income families. The United States would become a richer and more orderly society if all Americans embraced these values. And there would be a lot less crime.
Should societal influencers tout the benefits of the values below? What would be the outcome if these values were taught starting at the grade school level? What is the down side of a society embracing these attributes?
Bougie values:
[LIST=1]get married before having children
[*]getting the education needed for a good job[*]working hard [*]going the extra mile for your employer [*]being a patriot [*]being respectful of authority [*]avoiding drug[*]avoiding criminal acts.[/LIST]
I was with you until 5 & 6, which are just too tied to political partisanship for my comfort, and even 4 is shaky. It's all good when there is equal respect for the employee from the employer, but I've seen too many examples of employers taking egregious advantage of those who work for them recently. And I live near a city with a notoriously corrupt police force, so I'm not fully onboard with unthinkingly respect of authority.
Get married before having children? Agree completely. I was married for ten years before having children, and it made all the difference in our financial and emotional preparation for raising them.
Work hard? Eh, I prefer the adage "Work smart," but okay.
Avoid drugs? I'll assume that you mean illegal drugs rife for abuse, and I agree.
Avoid criminal acts? Well, this seems obvious.
Last edited by kj1065; 05-04-2022 at 10:12 AM..
Reason: Clarification
I've never understood the view that legal marriage is the One Thing that will make THE difference in terms of families and kids. I wasn't legally married for the first ten years of my relationship with my first husband and both of our kids were born prior to us making it official.
But we were faithful to one another, we were not going anywhere, both kids were his and mine. He begged and begged for me to marry him. As far as I could tell, the only thing that would change other than my last name was that we'd lose about $5K a year in tax refunds. We weren't well off enough to where that made any kind of sense to do. (Tax code reform so that such things don't happen, might help. A couple should not be getting more back for simply claiming to be a Head of Household single parent + a Single adult filer, living together with their kids, but then if they get married suddenly they have to pay.) We did work hard, we climbed out of poverty into the middle class. But in the end, it was not our married/unmarried state that made any difference to anything, and our socioeconomic status did not save our youngest from falling into a bad life as a young adult. It didn't keep my ex husband from losing his mind and threatening our lives, either. In fact that was really the breaking point for us...when we'd finally "made it" and he was behaving worse than ever.
Now I am doing fairly well, I'd say that I am middle class. He on the other hand, is living with an old Army buddy, living off his VA disability and can't hold a job. I'm sober, he's hooked on drugs. Go back a step, what was our upbringing if I'm doing well and he isn't? His parents were upper middle class and stayed married through his growing up years (though later when he and his brother we well into adulthood, they did split.) He grew up in a wholesome small town in Iowa. My parents though...one is an alcoholic and adulterer who was gone as much as he could be, the other was a temperamental crazy lady, and they divorced when I was 9. Yet both of them had parents who stayed married, worked hard, made a decent living, and at least in my Mom's case, were middle class and prosperous. In my Dad's, church going, but poor.
I could find many, many other examples from the thousands of people I've come into contact with, of those being "raised right" but going wrong, those having a rough home life but fighting their way out and up...and all sorts of permutations in between. I don't actually think that there is any way to raise a child that will guarantee that they'll do well. I mean, even the richest people with unlimited resources to throw at this, sometimes have wild kids who become wild adults.
Really, the most "bourgeois" thing about your list, OP, is the snooty, looking down one's nose notion that all good fortune is due to hard work and deserving it, and all misfortune is a matter of poor choices, poor values, and general inferiority. Prosperity gospel, is what this is. People who inherit fortunes still want to hold themselves as though they are hard working and self made and deserve everything that they have because they're better. You really asking if it's true? Occasionally it might be in some ways, but a lot of the time it isn't.
Thing is though, a lot of the religious fundamentalism also falls back on the idea that if you follow all of these rules but still suffer, you're at least doing the Lord's good work and don't you worry, you'll get your reward in heaven. There are plenty of poor people throughout every society, every nation, and every point of history, who lived righteous lives and yet never came close to upward mobility. And plenty of rich ones who are flat out immoral scoundrels who never worked hard a day in their lives. So the only way to reconcile that and keep the peasants from rising up, I guess, is to claim that if there's no just world in this life, it'll all get squared up by God in the next.
I know, as a parent, we'd all love to think that our kids will, of course, do well because we "raised them right." That if only we do all the right things, then good things will be the only possible result. But I think that life is far, far more complicated and chaotic than that, and ultimately sooner or later... Luck, good or bad, rears its head.
Last edited by Sonic_Spork; 05-05-2022 at 02:13 PM..
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