| > you you can be anything you want to be, if you're good enough. Of
course, most people are never going to get anything good I mentioned this devastating mismatch between promises and realistic
opportunities in a comment yesterday. It's baked into the education
system now, which has become something of a racket for selling broken
dreams. > And, if 99.9% of people who try to do something suck at it, it's just
reasonable to assume a high probability that you also suck. I pause to ever mention Jordan Peterson here (because usually that
leads to massive down-votes), but anyway, he has a major blind-spot in
assuming dominance hierarchies are congruent with competence
hierarchies. People who laud meritocracies often forget this. > worldly success, rare as it is in anything worth doing, is not
indicative of skill or talent "The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong...." Getting
over this is an important part of growing up, and I think some people
don't quite get that. > The other possibility is that society is deeply and thoroughly
corrupt What I think happened is that our shared "noble lies" became
embarrassing sordid tales of uncle Bob screwing the pooch. After your
prime minister has fucked a pig's face it's almost impossible to
recover and re-orientate. Is there still an institution that hasn't
been utterly razed by scandal? > because how good can you be if you don't even know whether you're
good? Without objective measures and exposure to genuine competence you can
respect and aspire to there is no yardstick. The demise of
recognisable institutions took this away. > bitterness, at least in the US, is extremely socially unacceptable,
especially when one is right. That's a bit weird. A WASP thing? British culture allows more for a
general sourness around class resentments. We know our leaders are
over-privileged incompetents and make light of it openly. But not to
the extent of utter nihilistic cynicism as Russians. I want to say that US Americans don't have the quiescent injustice of
class hanging over everything... but I am not sure that's true. You
just deal with it differently across the pond. |