I have a friend that got engaged a year ago. He’s getting married this October. Him and I used to have friendly debates, but I think overall we had pretty similar opinions on most things.
The family he is marrying into is conservative and quite wealthy. He gets taken out on vacations and gets lavish gifts from his fiancee thanks to her rich daddy (she just finished college, parents support her). Since up until now, he’s spent the better part of seven years supporting/bailing out his worthless flake of a roomate/ex girlfriend, Im not jealous about the good life he’s got now, if anything I think he’s earned it given what he had to deal with in the past.
What does bother me, though, is his very sudden shift in attitude. He’s suddenly become incredibly Libertarian, anti-regulation, anti-union (and given that I’m in a union that I fairly like, pisses me off :mad: ) just all-round fiscally and socially conservative. He whines about taxes and thinks its ‘unfair’ that someone that makes 100k+ has to pay so much in taxes.
Its rather baffling; he only started acting like this once things got serious between him and his fiancee, but she herself avoids debates, particularly political ones. So its weird to think he got it from her, unless their conversations in private are very different than her conversations with other people. Her parents are wealthy because her dad co-leads a startup that actually really took off and is very profitible in the midst of our recession. I could suppose my friend basically drank their family’s kool-aid in that regard, and became assimilated into their attitudes- money-driven, materialistic, hypercompetitive, anybody unable to pull their weight is dragging everyone down and must be discarded, etc.
What probably bugs me the most about it is that him and I are in a similar state in our lives- we’re both in career-oriented jobs, both make about the same amount of money ($70,000/year) and have a similar amount of assets. He has more debt than I, though on the flip side he’s got considerably more retirement saved up so far since he’s been working full-time much longer than I have. So the whole bitching about taxes he himself doesn’t have to pay gets really stupid.
When you’re very young, you sort of inherit your parents’ politics, as it’s all you know.
Then you become a late-teenager early-twentysomething and you develop your own politics and want to debate them endlessly.
Then you get older and tired, having your own ideals is a lot of work, so you tend to just borrow them from someone else. For most people, they borrow them from the people on whatever cable tv faction they subscribe to. In your friend’s case, he may have discovered that his soon-to-be fatherinlaw is very firm in his political ideals (which he probably gets from Rich White People Monthly), and decided to just borrow his.
I could probably hold an entire argument from the perspective of a satanist or khmir rouge supporter. It’s really not that hard to change your political barometer once you’re familiar with the basics of one side’s arguments.
I had heard some time ago that people tend to be liberal when young, but shift toward the conservative end of the spectrum as they grow older. I’ve heard this expressed as a natural life course thusly:
If you’re not a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart.
if you’re not a conservative when you’re old, you have no brain.
Perhaps the OP’s friend was overdue for a shift in personal ideology, and the exposure to his future father-in-law’s perspective was something of an eye-opener.
Just getting a pile of money can do that to your attitudes, at any age. It’s easy to convince yourself that you’re entitled to it due to your own natural superiority.
It’s also possible that he’s been surrounded by like-minded individuals all his life and hasn’t ever needed to stand his ideological ground before.
Once upon a time, my libertarian-ish boyfriend was promoted to a management position, and all of a sudden he was surrounded by conservatives and in a position where he was responsible for the productivity of his underlings. Out of nowhere, he starts talking about how pulling credits reports on potential employees is completely justifiable for any business, and drug testing should be mandatory for practically any business that pretends to be responsible to its customers.
When I pointed out how much this completely contradicted his views on personal freedom, we had a long arguement, but he eventually realized that he had been absorbing the mindset at work without really thinking about it. At the end of the day, he decided that credit reports made some sense for this business, because what they were doing had an inherently high risk of inside stock trading, and drug testing should only be performed when someone is visibly incapacitated. So, pretty much back where we had been.
I guess what I’m saying is that you should continue to argue with him and point out before-and-after contradictions, and he can find his way to his true beliefs (which might or might not be ones you like).
He may feel he needs to say these things to impress her father. My boyfriend, for instance, now has an intense desire to go hunting and fishing because that is the kind of thing my dad is into despite the fact that he and I are more museum and theater people than hunting and fishing people. After enough time he will realize my dad likes him because he makes me happy and will probably calm down a bit on that kind of thing.
You’re probably right. His wedding is probably a factor, too since it is costing 30 grand and his father in law is picking up the tab. Not to mention being able to ‘borrow’ his parents-in-law’s house (expense free) while they live in Nevada for two years. I imagine he might feel like he owes his father-in-law a lot for his generosity, and realistically the only thing he can repay him in is loyalty.
So he should only have an opinion on political issues that directly affect him?
Anyway, one possibility is that it’s a lot easier to support heavily taxing the rich when they’re just an absurd stereotype consisting of faceless fat-cat bastards who probably got their ill-gotten gains by exploiting the less fortunate and engaging in illegal backroom deals. Given that his future father-in-law’s money comes from a recent startup, it’s quite possible that he’s seeing how much work went into the future father-in-law’s success.
Some of us think we’re entitled to it because we worked our asses off to get it, and we’re a little shocked that other people think they are entitled to so much of our money.
The OP’s friend’s future father-in-law successfully copiloted a startup to fruition. Startups, by all accounts, are labor-intensive, high-risk endeavors: you put in 80-hour weeks for a few years, earning peanut wages, living on mac-and-cheese and ramen, hoping for the big payoff; IF that payoff ever does arrive, it can be disheartening to see Uncle Sam carting off nearly 35 percent of the wealth you’ve worked so bloody hard to obtain. As Erasmus Darwin has suggested, experiencing that - or being exposed to someone who has experienced that - will do much to disabuse one of the notion that “rich people” are all greedy selfish bastards who don’t deserve the wealth they have.
To a great extent people’s political opinions can be summed up by “where you stand depends on where you sit.” IMHO it’s hardly worth listening to anyone’s political opinions unless they contradict that, because they so rarely reflect any reasoning (as opposed to rationalization). Your friend just had the occasion to change where he sits, where he’s decided to stand just got dragged along for the ride.
Would the successful start-up have made the same amount of profit if it was started up in, say, Mozambique? Probably not. Since his hard work only materialized in significant profits due to the ability of our society to purchase his product, it’s only fair that he contribute a portion of it to help maintain or improve the society…so that someone else can have a successful start-up as well. The idea that we’re all greedy and selfish is one of the tenets of capitalism. If you believe in capitalism, you have to understand why taxes are necessary.
But I agree that, in general, where you stand depends on where you sit. But I understand the OP’s frustration with his friend’s intellectual dishonesty.
And some folks with money think they’re entitled to it because they married the daughter of a guy who worked his ass off. If it’s all about getting money because you earned it, then this fellow shouldn’t be getting anything.
People with thin ideals can easily have them sand-blasted away when surrounded by and dependent on those with a more strident ideology. This is human nature, and the history of pretty much every movement in history.
So the fact that the guy may have simply changed his mind automatically equals intellectual dishonesty? It’s very possible that he’s really never been exposed to this point of view before, in a serious way. It’s also very possible that he took a look at things, did some thinking, and decided he’d been wrong about a few things.
I don’t know why he’s changed, and neither do you. Apparently, neither does Incubus. But I’m not jumping to conclusions.
It may well be that he was more diffident about his political views earlier, and now has greater confidence in them after associating with like-minded people.
Know what? A helluva lot of poor people work just as hard, or even harder, and stay poor anyway. Situational specifics and just plain luck play a large part in financial gain too, you might acknowledge.
But the guy in the OP is looking down his nose on the hard-working unlucky essentially because he won the Girlfriend’s Dad Lottery. His “entitlement” is based on even less of his own efforts than his girlfriend’s herself.
It’s true that no one really knows why he’s changed. You can’t really ever know his motives, since motives are by definition unknowable. However, as long as the OP isn’t leaving anything out, the “sudden shift” in philosophy is a dead giveaway. I don’t buy the idea that he’s never been exposed to this point of view before. He’s a young, seemingly educated, professional. He’s not a high school student. Yeah, he did some thinking alright…:rolleyes:
