Moderating
I am not sure what’s going on, but this isn’t appropriate as a response to a moderator in this forum, or maybe any forum. ATMB is the place for moderator discussion. This is an official warning.
I kind of feel like those are symptoms, not causes. We wouldn’t need a Civil Rights movement if Americans didn’t act so shitty. And Vietnam demonstrated that the United States wasn’t invincible.
I don’t think the average American cares about being a “millionaire”. But there is this concept of the “American Dream” where if you basically do the right things (study hard, work hard, stay out of trouble) you should be able to afford a comfortable middle class lifestyle.
There is also the notion that people of extraordinary ability, ambition, innovation, and/or drive can create massive wealth and success through their personal ventures.
Somehow this has been perverted into this concept that the only thing that matters is wealth and superficial fame and everyone else can fuck themselves.
The U.S. has a culture of valuing individual freedoms and individual prosperity over the common good. Some of the freedoms embraced are guaranteed by our constitution but some are kind of imaginary freedoms because “This is America!” This is why people march into state capitols and areas with civil unrest with semi-automatic rifles playing “army man.”
It’s why the affluent don’t want to help pay for health care to keep those less fortunate alive and healthy. Yes, less fortunate. Many affluent people are under the illusion that their success is the result only of their own talent and hard work with no self-reflection on the fact that they were born into a situation where they were bound to be successful if they didn’t totally screw up. Some people are born into situations where chances of success are very small no matter how hard they work. Those who have it want to keep it all.
I am not knowledgeable about sociology but my layman’s take is that many of our ancestors were people who were ambitious immigrants who came with little and worked hard to be successful, and by pioneers who went west with little and worked hard with no help from a government. Even though those years are long behind us the values seem to stick around of rugged individualism and the false belief that anyone can make it here. Sure, there are rags-to-riches success stories but those are exceptional and study of the facts shows that the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. The U.S. ranks #27 in economic mobility, with northern European countries taking the first five slots.
I’m currently reading “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America” and while I think there is a little more cultural mixing, I agree that there is not really a single American culture - the culture/attitudes of Appalachia are very different than the Left Coast, which is different than New York which is different than the West, which is different that New England. Anyway, most large cultures/nations/countries have produced terrible people; American isn’t close to being unique in this instance.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.?
And generally more honest than all those others!
But is this really true? I happen to know of at least 9 people whose wealth is in the tens or hundreds of millions. Of the 9 I can think of, one of them had a pretty clever idea at the right time and as far as I know worked fairly hard on it, but had acquired their wealth by their mid thirties when I met them and just seems to be living the high life since. The rest are wealthy because their ancestors were wealthy. Every one of them is a white American who got a college education and comes from a stable family.
The meritocratic idea that people are wealthy because they deserve to be does seem very popular with wealthy people, but I doubt it’s true and would like to hear any research on the question.
Most “wealthy” people I’ve known - and I’ve known many - are people who don’t look wealthy but have loaded bank accounts. I’ve known a lot of people who look wealthy, might even own property and assets, but also aren’t that wealthy on paper (kinda like a certain president we know). I can assure you that the former work their asses off, or did until they turned their biz over to their children or a trusted general manager. An observation I’ve made is that people who inherit wealth tend to be less capable at managing it than those who knew what it took to get there.
Of course there’s also a third category: people who inherit with or grow up in a wealthy household and who were similarly imbued with good work ethic. There’s no doubt they were born with an advantage, but to their credit, they recognize it and put in the effort to capitalize on it. The difference between them and the rest of us is that they have more resources to waste on failure and bad ideas. A blue collar guy or gal has less margin for error while in the process of building wealth. And that’s what I’d like to see changed, at least partially - take some of the wealth from the wealthy and invest it in resources that would give some people a cushion if they fall on their ass. A cushion to soften the fall, not a hammock to rest in.
Excellent comments on wealth issues.
I believe religious issues have undermined our culture. The Constitutional separation of church and state allows the government to be secular. But. it has failed to do so. Religion pervades our mythology, our identity and our legislative process. Religion pollutes the public school system suppressing the correct teaching of history and science. Functional religion provides a comforting retreat on a sabbath morning. It has no place in the public square.
Also, we lack purpose. What is the goal of the United States? What is the mission of government? By what standard do we measure our success. If it’s fat guys with guns, we have failed.
It got out of whack when people who benefited from societal inequities started seeing that non-white, non-Christian, non-straight, non-cisgender, non-male people might also be treated as equals.
According to one official document, to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty”.
According to an earlier vision statement manifesto, “to secure these rights [to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness], Governments are instituted among Men”.
The problem is that as we have heard and read many people recently, there is a large segment of American Social culture for whom “Liberty” means “doing what I damn well please to increase my own perceived well-being, and not have to care about anyone else’s, unless someone stronger can physically force me otherwise”.
And that really is one of the fundamental problems we have as a country and as a society right now. A society that wants to govern itself has to be capable of governing itself, which necessarily involves not just the invocation of certain inalienable rights but also fulfilling certain responsibilities and duties, whether they are explicitly stated in a constitution or federal code, or are merely implicit. It is these implicit, unspoken responsibilities that are just as important to acknowledge if we want to continue to function as a stable, self-governing society and political system.
The idea that the wealthy can wall themselves off as a separate class, take disproportionate amounts of wealth, and disrupt or obstruct politics to make it extremely difficult to enact meaningful legislation that promotes public welfare…that just won’t fly. We’ll end with…well, what we have now, which is a society in which groups or factions of people grow ever more fearful and distrustful of ‘the other’, resorting to extreme rhetoric and behavior to gain political leverage. And it’s inevitable that when one side suffers the consequences of being marginalized or being politically neutered long enough, the desperation grows more extreme, as does the behavior in pursuit of ‘justice.’
In American culture, there are winners and losers, and not only do losers not get a helping hand, they essentially get a boot to the face. The idea is that if you just kick criminals, homeless or indebted people hard enough, they’ll learn the error of their ways.
Posters such as asahi here have acknowledged the role of luck in becoming mega rich. But luck is very important at the bottom too, as someone living hand to mouth is rolling the dice every day. The day they get sick, or their car is finally beyond repair, or any of a bunch of other mishaps, they can start falling down a very deep, very long spiral.
If you’re middle class or higher and get in trouble with the law, it’s no biggie for minor crimes. If you’re poor and do the same, you can be done for; since you can’t defend yourself very well, your bills still accumulate while you can’t work, the justice system itself includes a perverse set of costs, and then you may be unable to find work afterwards.
On the mass shootings part specifically, obviously gun culture is the prime problem. With a secondary role for individualism and the US’ cult-like relationship with religion.
Bezos makes billions while the many pickers in Amazon’s warehouses work in terrible conditions. Allegations of wage theft and such severe time constraints to where employees do not have time to take a leak during their shift have been in the news for the last couple of years. Maybe Bezos doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as serial killers or white supremacist, but there’s something fundamentally wrong when Bezos could improve the lives of his workers without degrading the quality of his own life one bit.
As far as linking health and strength, there is a very long running metaphor that suggests a link between conscious battles and military actions along with being deserving, and self reliant.
You can read this opnion piece as an article about Covid, or as a much wider one that connects racism, eugenics and superiority of individuals.
Hard work by smart people does not guarantee wealth. You are much more likely to become wealthy in the U.S. if you came from a wealthy family. This is not because of inherited wealth but because you will get opportunities that other people don’t have. Do you really think that a Black child born into poverty had the same potential for amassing wealth as Donald Trump?
I never suggested that hard work by itself guarantees wealthy, and yes, being born into wealth is a major advantage - no disagreement. But I know plenty of people who were born middle class who became wealthy.
In a lot of cases, you wouldn’t know it by looking at them: they’re probably white, barely college educated (and in some cases not), drive pickup trucks, and live in small to midsize towns or suburbs. And yes, they very likely voted for Trump.
This is missing the main point about opportunity because you are only looking at those who have been successful.
It’s also important to look at those who tried perhaps multiple times, maybe achieving success and maybe not.
When you are in the lower orders of society, you know you have little or no chance, therefore you don’t even give it a go - you will not find support or backers.
I wonder how many folk never even tried to try for more and I wonder what the racial make up is of the various groups - tried and succeded, tried and failed, never tried
I dunno, ISTM the thing is that yes, in this discussion asahi IS talking specifically about the so-called “succesful”. The statement is that in their experience many of not most of the wealthy do work hard (or, may I riff on it, work smart) on the way there or in the process of staying there.
That is in and of itself value-neutral, except in that, to address the thread theme, the culture has adopted that as both a per-se virtue and a fallacious justification for the uppermost tiers of the wealthy to believe they earned it and deserve is and should be able to “wall themselves off as a separate class, take disproportionate amounts of wealth, and disrupt or obstruct politics to make it extremely difficult to enact meaningful legislation that promotes public welfare”, and that everyone else are losers and must have failed to do what they had to. That is the cultural problem as Mijin puts it, the notion that there’s winners and losers and the losers deserve to suffer.
I agree with this.
American capitalism has always been intertwined with Protestant ethos. If you work hard, God will favor you. If you are a lay-about, God will ignore your pleas and allow the wolves to eat you. If you’re broke, that means you aren’t working hard enough and God only helps those who help themselves. If you’re rich, good news! You’re a member of the elect, which means you’ve inherited the kingdom, both earthly and heavenly. If you’re happy and grateful for your lot, not harboring ill-feelings towards your “betters”, God will reward you. If you’re miserable and resentful of those who are more successful than you are, God will not be pleased one little bit, you ingrateful slave you.
When you tie financial success with individual morality, you not only promote classism and turn a blind eye to exploitative labor practices, but you also go all in on “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” rugged individualism–a toxic belief system if there ever was one:
Suicide prevention for farmers starts in their own communities - CSMonitor.com>
“Farmers as a whole – they’re very independent, pull myself up by the bootstraps, put my head down, work harder and we’ll get through this,” says Rick Hummell, spokesperson for the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. “Well, that just hasn’t been working anymore. For four or five years, [they’re] not even earning enough money to pay for the work [they’re] doing. And for a lot of them, their father and their grandfather and their great-grandfather were doing it – it’s multigenerational. They don’t want to be the one who lost the farm. Hence the depression and the suicide we’ve been hearing about.”