03-20-2021, 11:35 PM
(03-20-2021, 09:36 PM)dragonfly2 Wrote: If you teach Americans to love morality, freedom, peace, and balanced budgets and then turn around and tell Americans to embrace immorality, tyranny, war, and debt, don't be surprised if people become insane.
Most people must sell out their dreams at some point just to survive. Many people recognize that the best thing that they can do to achieve life, liberty, and some pursuit of happiness is to make the great sacrifice of being overworked and underpaid under harsh management in a job that they hate so that they can convince the people who have the discretion to invest productively or indulge destructively that they will invest in the plant and equipment that allows one to earn a highly-compromised life, very limited liberty (severe poverty is a sick parody of liberty) and a limited opportunity to seek happiness (even if that is only getting a little break to watch some stupefying garbage on the Idiot Screen in one's awful flat.
Those who don't sell out their dreams have often dedicated (as Malcolm Gladwell estimates it) about ten thousand hours of rigorous preparation so that at a certain stage they can meet the standards reliable for not messing up at a critical moment. The pro athlete, the concert pianist or vioolinist, the high-powered attorney, the physician, the research scientist, the quality engineer, the actor or artist who isn't starving... that's where it is. Fall short and you will at best get mediocre results. Push too hard despite inadequate preparation and you will make a fool of yourself, and you may go from being a journalist to being a retail clerk.
The standards of excellent necessary for credible performance at many things keep rising.
But know well: it is the person who is overworked and underpaid, who toils to exhaustion (perhaps needing two jobs because neither pays adequately) under brutal management and does not turn against the system with crime or revolution who makes the real investment in business. That someone else reaps most of the reward -- well, that is how a sick capitalist order works, does it not?
My solution is Capitalism with a Human Face. Take the cruelty out of neoliberal capitalism (which means to ditch the neoliberal philosophy in which only a small proportion of American society matters), and even if people sell out their dreams (let us say becoming a well-paid garage mechanic instead of an actor) they will do well enough in life.
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.