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Today’s privileged are the oppressed. This creates problems.
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It used to be that the privileged were those from wealthy families—those who had greater opportunities for education, better connections for jobs, and so on. One reason to work hard to succeed was to attempt to make your children members of the privileged class. The way to success was through success.
Now the privileged are “the oppressed.” The way to get greater opportunities for education, better connections for jobs, and so on, is by demonstrating one’s victimhood. Affirmative action and DEI have converted perceived oppression into real advantages. Now, the way to success is through failure.
The first model had its problems. But at least people were competing to be more successful. Now, people are competing at being bigger victims than others, which has created a race to the bottom and has contributed to social degeneration. Of course. If successful people are evil, and unsuccessful people are admirable, and oppressed people are privileged, then what will people do? And what will society look like in one generation? Two generations?
Affirmative action creates lots of problems for individuals, obviously. Putting students into schools that they can’t handle, creating resentment among classmates and coworkers, moving people out of things that they’re good at and moving them toward things they’re not good at, etc.
Even Elizabeth Warren could’ve done something productive with her life, if she hadn’t used her oppression as a Native American to get into Harvard and then into politics. (Shutterstock/David Garcia)
But affirmative action’s destructive impact on society should be a bigger point of emphasis.
We’re destroying the greatest civilization the world has ever seen so that we can feel superior to others and feel better about ourselves.
Creating misery through vanity. Humans are good at this.
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Tall poppy gets cut down first.
I don’t know. Productive? Maybe with a lobotomy.
A friend who worked for the IRS for 2 decades and has done independent CPA work on taxes for another 15 years was discussing how well off foreigners are.
Pull a muscle on the job, find a doctor of your ethnicity who has been friendly to such a life threatening ailment in the past, and within months, a Soc Security disability check is yours for the asking.
If you were born here, it often takes years to overcome the bureaucratic resistance to being approved.
He saw this quite often.
One household of people who had all been here less than ten years had an income of over 6,600 bucks each month. Remember, these are tax-free monies. There was only one person in the household who worked, and that individual bragged about how happy he was to know that should he get tired of his job, he had an easy out.
Idiocracy !
However, the true elites will still be pulling the strings . Only with a lot more manipulable underlings .
Definitely true. It’s how the left reconciled its abandonment of workers in favor of racial minorities and then, when they began to be too successful, sexual minorities.
And you have the peculiar phenomenon of very, very privileged people claiming to be oppressed because they’re “non-binary.” It’s essentially meaningless, but it gives a white male or white female from a fabulously wealthy household, with an ivy-league education, a toehold in the all-important victimhood Olympics.
It also allows institutions to pretend to “diversity” by admitting or hiring such people. A UU church of my acquaintance agonized over the dreadful but ineluctable fact that the last three “settled” ministers had been white men. Despite this, given the chance, the search committee interviewed a number of women, but hired another white man…who had decided, the previous year, that he was “non-binary.” Ta-dah!
That’s right magical.
Just a wild thought I can’t quite suppress. If they want diversity so badly, would they go so far as to hire a Trinitarian?
I am worried about the vicious cuts of NPR/PBS. Without generous tax-payer support, how will the people partake in the drama of Downton Abbey or the culinary delights of Cooking with Martha Stewart or the practical old-money mansion maintenance tips of This Old House? Trump is simply ghastly!
As for what happens when a society embrace victim-hood, you get a commie hellhole.
I’ll share a story with you guys (yah’all) that I’ve mainly kept to myself. I’ve been here long enough to know I can say it even if some don’t like it.
About 25 years ago I was told of a job opening in my controls field at Allen Bradley in Marlboro, MA. It was to run the office, and I was really getting tired of big projects and not being able to sleep at night. It sounded perfect.
I applied and was granted an interview along with a dozen other folks. I was sitting in the office next to a black gentleman. We were joking and passing the time. He said you should probably just go home. This job is already mine. I laughed. He was just ruffling his feathers.
I went in for my interview before him. The interviewer said, holy smokes (with a bit more emphasis). He didn’t know I was applying. He said I’m sorry, but the job was already promised to the guy you were talking to. “You can have the Buffalo office and we will pay for all your moving expenses if you want it!” Heck no (with a bit more emphasis).
All of us were there for nothing. I suspect it was because he was black, and they were filling a quota. He probably suspects that too. He could have been far better than me at that age. I don’t know. I didn’t like being an extra in a pre-written script.
Government meddling in markets distorts ‘signal’, preventing people from knowing the actual value of goods, money, and yes even the value of a given employee.
The OP needed to go farther on the question of cui bono? The minority kid with SATs 400 points below his peers at at elite college can’t survive in STEM classes pitched to kids at the top of the class in AP programs. So they wind up changing majors to something useless like DEI Studies when they probably could have complete a substantive degree program had they gone to a less competitive school. As it is they are only suited for career in HR and only as long as the left is in control. Many are more victims than beneficiaries.
The real beneficiaries are those who get to dole out the preferences. Hiring a physics professor would presumably be done by people who were really good at physics and thus earned a position of administrative authority. But DEI pushes competence aside and transfers power to the new political commissars. Like the old Soviet communist versions, the new politruks not only regulate the expressions and behaviors of the rank and file but have the authority to bring down those higher in the chain of command with a mere accusation of heresy.
There is also a built-in incentive to crush out competence–a student or new faculty hire with the chops to excel if there were a return to a merit-based environment does not need the politruk and is likely inclined to reject DEI if the opportunity arose. In contrast, the utterly mediocre individual whose only qualification is some combination of intersectional demographic factors and a correct ideological disposition knows she completely dependent on DEI and those who control it.
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As far as some real beneficiaries, and a fact to counter the idea often espoused here that DEI degrees on gender studies don’t get the student a nice salary once out of school:
I was amazed to find out that there are oodles of job titles that have to be filled inside the US military each year for any people who can do oversight on hiring protocols and hiring selections as well as handle disputes when a non-binary person in the service feels there is prejudice against them. Not only are there many jobs for the gender studies crowd, they pay well too. $ 125K a year is not an unheard of figure.
fwiw, some schools are concentrating on teaching kids to work in groups. otoh great training for working in white collar set tons, otoh it is also great training for not trying too hard or for letting the many take credit for the efforts of the few.
Re the bolded: When I tried assigning group projects/reports in college-level business law classes, in addition to the final presentation and written product, I also had each member turn in a confidential assessment of the contributions made by each member of his/her group. This allowed me to grade the group product as a whole and also to make individual adjustments to each member’s grade. Without exception, each group had a freeloader problem.
If only you could put all the freeloaders together into their own groups.
Sounds like government.
Sounds like Golgafrinchans.
This was my experience in grad school, for an MBA – some classes had group/project deliverables, weekly and for the semester. Inevitably there was 1 freeloader in any group of 4-6 people. Inevitably.
After a couple of classes, I’d reach out to people in my cohort that I liked to work with (there were a lot) and tried to line them up as fellow group members for the next set of classes. People you could rely on to get the work done – that’s all it is.
I got the MBA part time, I had a full time job, a 2nd part time job, and was taking 2 classes a quarter/semester (they switched at some point, I forget the details), to accelerate the degree and get the hell out of the gig I was in. In other words, I didn’t have time for people who refused to pull their weight or were unreliable.
I can do their work for them, but I shouldn’t have to, in order to maintain my A.
Typically, less insane hiring managers don’t queue up the candidates in a room together for just these reasons. If they have already decided on a candidate and are just going through the motions, it doesn’t help for candidates to discover this minutes before the interview.
First question that might have been asked, once Mr. Chowder was allowed to speak to the hiring manager: “Does the guy waiting outside already have the gig?” See what kind of answer you get. That’ll tell you if you want the job.
Actually, This Old House and Victory Garden are about as middle class, anti-communist as you could possibly find anywhere in the mass media. :) :) They may have been partly responsible for the do-it-yourself movement. The properties these shows worked on were modest.
How did the middle class create such tremendous wealth in the second half of the twentieth century? By homeowners working in their spare time on their own properties and improving them and making them more valuable than they were when they bought them.
It’s a Wonderful Life describes this economic principle better than I can. It’s what made America great. :) :)
It was only the second time in my life I went on an interview with a whole group of people. The first was when I was in college and went for a job at UPS. I walked in, turned around, and walked out.
The whole thing was a setup and I was just a pawn. People told me for years after I was lucky. Rockwell Automation (AB) is a terrible company to work for. Looking back it’s kinda sad that this multi-billion dollar company has fallen so low. They were the king of automation for most of my career. They have been getting worse every year and are on a severe downward slope. I hate to say it but Koyo, Yaskawa, and anything from Automation Direct(China) is far better.
Modest? I only seem to remember “This Old House” when they’re installing a complicated $150,000 heating system in a house from Civil War times or whatever.
Among those oligarch PBS viewers, $150,000 is in the household petty cash drawer level.
Professional beggars do not like it when you take away their funding – (see the “Old Weekly Standard” now at the Bulwark)