03-17-2022, 09:04 AM
(03-16-2022, 11:56 PM)asonBlack Wrote:(03-15-2022, 10:31 AM)David Horn Wrote:(03-14-2022, 02:29 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: a real asshole is better than a fake Samaritan. (fixed it!)
In today's world, where gentile is considered b-o-r-i-n-g and an asshole can say for you what you are too timid to say yourself, that is all too true. On the other hand, no one loves it when it is directed at them. Trump made a classic mistake, assuming that his minions were both motivated (true enough) and dominant (not so true). Then there is the issue of overexposure. Even assholery loses its appeal when it's relentless and repetitive. Trump crossed that line a long time ago.
Don't get me wrong, I am getting very, very tired of how rude modern culture has gotten. Cantankerous boomers, gruff/surly Gen X, snarky/sarcastic millennials and passive-aggressive zoomers.....it's kinda gone the whole spectrum.
Different generations experiencing much the same stresses will act differently. Time of childhood is as much one's formative environment as are ethnicity, creed, region, and class. People are not better or worse for having experienced certain things because they could. None of us can undo the realities that shaped us. The generations make different assumptions based heavily upon what they knew in childhood. Even such a concept as "Suburbia" has changed; Boomers may recall suburbs still new that still had rural characteristics that people born around 2000 would have to reconstruct in their minds to fully understand. Post-secondary education that used to be inexpensive might have been done inexpensively by Boomers; people could use their college years for broadening their intellectual universe. Today any post-secondary education practically necessary for white-collar work comes with a huge load of debt, so life is all about preparing to pay back entitled loan-sharks. Housing is far from as inexpensive as it was in the 1970's because of under-investment in low-cost housing. , so people are obliged to pay slumlords dearly. Managerial style has largely developed in MBA schools which treat workers as mere tools for achieving the objectives of economic elites. The tax system fosters monopolization through the consolidation of industry and the cornering of markets, practices once scorned but now endorsed as the highest expression of material progress.
Economics do not explain everything. One might expect parallels between similar stages of the generational cycle, but mass culture today is very different from what it was eighty years ago. Technology is the least of it; people have more sophisticated devices for doing what they largely did even a century and a half ago. E-mail operates much like a telegraph, and reading books on line on a device shaped much like a book does not change that one is still reading. The Internet functions much like broadcasting, just as television in its early days was basically vaudeville. This said, the mass culture that we now know is not as uplifting as it was eighty years ago, when movies were made to code, and popular entertainers and pro athletes were obliged to act in ways that did not offend the devout. America pulled out of an economic meltdown analogous to that which began in the autumn of 1929 after a year and a half instead of after three withering years, which means that America did not experience the bank runs -- and the economic elites had the means of buying the political system by financing the rise of politicians who believe as those elites do -- that no human suffering can ever be undue so long as it enriches and indulges those elites while enforcing compliance with their will. If Americans got the New Deal to bring pervasive reforms in economic and political life to the benefit or working people, Americans got instead political leaders intent on imposing a New Serfdom of debt bondage and corporate gouging. It may surprise people that the Great Depression was in fact a good time for era of neolibberakstarting new mom-and-pop business to fill the interstices that the failed behemoths of the 1920's left behind; many entities Too Big to Fail may really been too corrupt to save,
We have come to accept an accounting and economic myth that prosperity is what people pay for what they get. By that criterion, a family that goes into destitution because of medical costs prospers because of its expenditures on ultimately-futile treatments. People paying 70% .of their post-tax income for rent for a slum flat are somehow more prosperous
than homeowners who were paying mortgage, insurance, and taxes limited to 35% of their income because such were the largely-sustainable level of expenditure for such. in accordance with underwriting standards of mortgage loans in the 1960's. Note well that people paying a mortgage were buying a house that would be fully paid-for by retirement.
It is hardly surprising that coarse situations bring out coarse language. Stories of the Holocaust and of life under Stalin are full of such language. Solzhenitsyn was in no ways a prissy writer. Obviously our recent era of neoliberal economics is far better than the Soviet and Nazi Hells, but it is still pure degradation of life for people not already well off. If I am to give advice to kids under the norms that have developed over the last forty years it is to say that the only reason for your existence to filthy-rich people who hold you in contempt because you are not one of them, it is that you exist solely to make people already filthy rich who by all reasonable measures can achieve any sybaritic excess possible is to make them even more filthy rich, make them able to indulge even more extravagantly (and destructively), or to enforce their will upon people helpless due to their poverty and limited opportunity. One must accept that such people are no better than feudal lords, Capone-era gangsters, or the old Soviet nomenklatura. Exploiters always sink to a level of moral depravity that they see as noble. They act without mercy because mercy is weakness to any exploiter. American elites largely seem to think that their tennis elbows are far worse than the pancreatic cancer or third-degree burns that proles endure.
Quote:Well, I know I'm guilty of it sometimes. I make an effort to cushion what I say at least a little bit with words like "frankly", "with respect", "if I may add", etc, but learning to be more polite has been an uphill battle for me, and even more so learning how to be polite and still assert my point with sufficient, controlled passion. I'm hoping the next turning sees an end to this "my voice must me heard!" nonsense that has everyone shouting over each other and escalating with greater and greater dramatic displays for attention.
tl;dr, your point is legitimate.
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It is difficult to be polite in a system that is grossly impolite toward anyone who does the real work to underpin the prosperity that largely goes to rapacious, demanding elites. ystem makes hypocrisy a survival skill even if it is merely "suffer but remember to smile". Undoing much of the rot in economic and cultural life will not be easy and it will not happen quickly. It will be necessary nonetheless if we are to achieve anything from the mitigation of poverty to the constraint of global warmong.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.