Archive for the ‘Sociology’ Category
Entry 999 — Meritocracy Versus Government?
Wednesday, January 30th, 2013
No, Credentiocracy Versus Meritocracy. What am I talking about? A column by David Brooks (he’s so blandly mediocre a writer, I’m surprised he hasn’t gotten a MacArthur–or has he?) in which he muses that, “One of the features of the Obama years is that we get to witness an enormous race, which you might call the race between meritocracy and government. On the one side, there is the meritocracy, which widens inequality. On the other side, there is President Barack Obama’s team of progressives, who are trying to mitigate inequality. The big question: which side is winning?”
A minor comment to begin with: when people like Brooks talk about “inequality,” they mean “inequality of either taxable income or apparent monetary value of material possessions.” Neither has much to do with true inequality, or even mere material inequality. But that’s a subject I’ve already touched on elsewhere and will probably discuss at length in the future, but am not interested in right now. What I’m interested in now is Brooks’s silly idea of what a meritocracy is. In his article he claims, with reasonably good evidence, that in this country those with college degrees, especially advanced degrees, from the top 11 schools (like Harvard and Yale), make the most money and live in the nicest neighborhoods. All that is true. But he goes on to blithely assume that this makes the country a meritocracy–i.e., a country in which advancement is won by those whose contributions to the betterment of humanity, or whatever, is most meritorious. That most definitely is not the case. These successful people he’s speaking of are the best credentialed people, not the most culturally valuable; our country is not a meritocracy (like it came closest to being in the nineteenth century) but a credentiocracy (kruh DEHN shee AH kruh see). That is what the government wants, because the government consists of mediocrities protecting themselves and people like them from their betters.
Brooks goes on to the further silliness of opining that because all these credential-achieving conformists are moving to the cities that the cities are where cultural progress is being made. He’s ignoring the Internet. The cities are culturally dead because the Internet’s potential to give everyone equal access to information and equal power to disseminate his writings or the equivalent to everyone interested no matter where he lives. True, that’s far from the case now, but I can’t see how it can fail to happen eventually. Probably via virtual realities that allow two people hundreds of miles apart to physically interact as completely as they could if inches apart.
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Entry 998 — An Eighth Human Activity
Tuesday, January 29th, 2013
Yesterday, I suddenly realized that the activity I most pursue isn’t on my list of human activities. It’s subsusteniation. It’s the activity of doing nothing worthwhile whatever. It does not include sleep, an important recreation, in my book, but also both susteniation and utilitry, nor is it rest, which it most resembles. Rest is also recreation, susteniation and utilitry. It is often accompanied by stray thinking of potential value. My impression is that one can’t completely turn off one’s brain, but that the mental flow (I’m sure I have some name for it, but I forget what it is) going on when one is absorbed in subsusteniation is nearly pure blah, nowhere-going nothing emotions, pseudo-cognitive nullity. All of which I am a master of.
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Entry 996 — Notes on Class Warfare
Sunday, January 27th, 2013
While thinking about the current class warfare going on in America–thanks mainly to the imbecilic democrats–I slopped into a few ideas I thought interesting enough to plant here in hopes I (and/or others) might develop into something better. One idea has to do with the usefulness of my list of human activities, intelligently used, in considerations of class conflicts–which really aren’t between haves and have-nots but between different kinds of haves and have-nots.
Let me back up, first, to another idea of mine: that classes can be most usefully defined by what their main activity or group of activities is. Make that, by what they conceive to be the activities most important to them. Certainly there are the dominantry-centered classes–the ins and outs. Then there are the true haves and have-nots, the susteniation-centered classes. Or were (theoretically, at any rate) long, long ago. Maybe there still are such classes in isolation parts of the third world. One group of people with enough money, of the equivalent thereof, to survive, in a life-or-death struggle with another group without the means to stay alive .
What we call the haves and have-nots are something entirely different–a class of two groups, one without the means for a genuine contentment, the other with it–or (more likely) perceived by the first group to have it.
A major question is just who are taking on the role of the have-nots, who are taking on, or being given, the role of the haves. The first are those who would tell you, I believe, that they have unfairly too little money; the haves, for them, would be simply those with more money than they. There are confusingly many things stupid about this way of looking at the matter. The biggest is that almost no one in either group is, properly speaking, even close to being a genuine have-not, by which I mean unable to afford the absolute necessities of life. That is important because the discussion if invariably severely contaminated by pro-have-not propaganda implying that one group is callously letting the members of another group die when (forgive my bias) all the first group is doing is requiring the members of the second group to earn the material things (unrelated to susteniation) that they are mostly complaining about not having.
Secondly, if those identifying themselves as have-nots, focused on just what their complaints are, they might have a better chance of improving their lot instead of (mostly) just pulling those who work harder and/or more intelligently, or are just luckier, than they down to their level.
I think the Occupy Wall Street Crowd are bothered most by what they believe to be their inferior recreation, and to a lesser degree, by their lack of success at dominantry (in other words, unhappy not to be able to tell others what to do as much as they’d like to, or get the government to do that; and not having the social status they believe they merit, badges and the like being important to them).
Outside the country’s main have vs. have-not conflict is the productive class–those for whom some combination of art, versosophy and utilitry are much more important than any other human activity.
My impression is that the largest group in America–call it “the masses”–cares about little other than susteniation, quotidiation and recreation. Then there is the group whose members consider their chief activity dominantry.
Freewenders, milyoops and rigidniks, according to my theory of temperaments. The masses form the classes in conflict, with the dominantry-centered taking sides in accordance with their estimation of which is most likely to win, and elevation them. Not that there aren’t verosophers (like me, right now) contributing commentary which may have influence.
Complex subject, this–that I may have scratched the beginnings of a few paths toward an understanding of so far, but am too weary to keep working on at the moment.
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