[varvar]

The myths are promoted as means to raise hope in the "little man" and to attract new blood (workers) to the specific industries, thinking they can also become as big as the stars of that industry, starting with very little.

This is very deceptive, and probably gets people into trouble more often than not, changing their long term orbits based on fantasies built on selective factology about what is enough for success.

[scythe]

>The myths are promoted as means to raise hope in the "little man" and to attract new blood (workers) to the specific industries, thinking they can also become as big as the stars of that industry, starting with very little.

Why invoke conspiracy when mere venality will suffice? Optimism sells. Hollywood has warmed its benches with a never-ending stream of would-be stars and filmmakers despite the fact that the image of the struggling Hollywood hopeful is as cliche as that of the morally intermittent lawyer.

Perhaps one of the strangest things about our psychology-and-PR-dominated world is that psychology is so subtle and powerful that it affects us even when it is not affecting us, making us see ghosts in the shadows of folklore. What would be so nice is a list of criteria for determining when a meme may have been designed for cultural impact. Surely cui bono is not enough -- it implicates nearly everything!

[mikojan]

You are making this out to be a conspiracy. It's perfectly possible people are just unconsciously working together towards this end.

Let's say I grow up in a poor working-class environment. Years later I find myself CEO of a multi-national corporation and the people working for me are poor working-class people. - And most companies are set up like this. There's very few people at the top and they have all the power while the subordniate masses have none. You give orders. They take orders. - One way to justify my own place in this system is to convince myself that my sucesses have some special property rather than just coincidence: "You can make it if you work hard like me."

And if you're a media company one might suspect that because of this you would tend to tell stories of individual endeavor. And one might suspect the same would be true for a marketing company.

[amw]

There's a difference between "conspiracy" and "class solidarity among the wealthy". You're totally right that it's probably silly to attribute this to all management/ownership explicitly collaborating together on a scheme they're keeping secret from the workers, but I'd argue that the comment you're responding to is also totally right to point out that things can structurally support each other in a way that ultimately ends up being a small group of rich people working to keep a larger group of poor people poor, simply because all the small incentives for the individual decisions can support the larger structural whole. We can still attribute that as "wealthy people promulgate a narrative to inspire false hope" in a meaningful way, as long as we don't take it from an individualist frame.

[mikojan]

I agree!