This is an interesting historical article but the thread so far is too shallow (i.e. reacting only to one controversial phrase in the title), generic (i.e. disengaged from any of the interesting details in the article), and ideological. Generic ideological tangents make for lame and repetitive threads (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
I've replaced the title with the subtitle in the hope that this may help.
In the debate between self made and team effort my opinion is “both.”
Nobody starts from zero. Everyone builds on the work of others with help from others.
At the same time, individuals can make unique contributions and are not just interchangeable parts. You see this over and over again in art, music, engineering, science, literature, etc., or really anything requiring skill. People aren’t interchangeable.
I think both positions, when argued exclusively, lead to a false devaluing of most human life. The “great man” theory leads to the idea that 99.999% of humans are mediocre at best and we all exist to serve a tiny number of greats. The “it takes a village” theory leads to the view that everything is a collective product and nobody is unique or special in any way. So you get the idea that 100% of humans are an undifferentiated mass of aggregate labor. That makes people just as disposable as if we are mere peons existing to serve the greats.
I think the reality is that we are an interdependent network of unique contributors.
It's just a restatement of 'nature vs nurture' isn't it? And as you say, both of those things are necessary. Broadly, greatness without circumstances likely leads to obscurity; circumstances without greatness likely leads to indolence. The latter being what often seems to happen in families with generational wealth - some family member makes the fortune, and some later generation, lacking the earlier drive, squanders it.
> Everyone builds on the work of others with help from others.
It is why we have societies. Coalitions.
In game theory a coalition is a group where the group's utility is greater than the sum of each member's utility. In other words: "we're stronger together".
The problem with the self-made man myth is that it frames things as if it is shameful to have help. Having had help does not diminish your accomplishments. Having had help just means you're human.
The same goes for luck. Just because you got lucky doesn't mean you didn't work hard nor deserve the rewards. There's a saying I like
The harder I work, the luckier I get.
The way I read that is "by working hard you are able to take advantage of lucky opportunities as they come by." We all require luck in this world. Some are luckier than others. But you have to "strike while the iron is hot" and if you don't work hard then you won't be able to strike in the right moment. Like the having had help part there is no shame in having had luck.
Being able to recognize these things helps us do better and help more people do better. But if we pretend we just did it all on our own then we can't actually recognize how things came to be. Which means we're going to have a hard time replicating that success. By pretending that everything is all on us and nothing else then we'll fail while trying to repeat the successful strategy, we'll fail when offering advice to others, and we'll just be blind to the world around us. We'll never recognize that we have to make the iron hot! Even the best blacksmith in the world can't hammer frozen iron into shape.
Again, having had luck or help doesn't mean you didn't work hard or that you don't deserve what you have. Things aren't binary. There's not a single causal factor to any complex phenomena. The problem is seeing things in black and white. There's a million things that go into success and while most of that will be on you, you can't ignore things like the environment and those that helped you along the way. After all, we're all in this together.
Is that it's a complete straw man. It's not about not having help - every great achiever has had a figurative (sometimes literal) army of supporters behind them. Including those in history.
What the "theory" actually posits seems trivially true - that the people who do super extraordinary things are extraordinary themselves. Whether it's talent, hard work, both, insanity, etc. The idea that these people are just normal and very lucky or whatever is absurd.
> people who do super extraordinary things are extraordinary themselves
Nothing I said contradicts this. I even agree.
The problem is the inverse. You imply that people who do not do extraordinary things are not themselves extraordinary.
You can be extraordinary but shit out of luck. You can't rise to the top by just being the best, you also need and the right support. Take for example any startup. Good luck getting to scale without that. Eventually someone needs to take a chance on you.
This is something VCs even know. They invest broadly because a small percentage will be big hits. It's because things fall along a power distribution rather than a normal. The upside is unbounded. Most will lose, for many reasons, including just bad luck.
Or I'll let Picard say it
> It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life
Its because random elements exist in life. It is not deterministic. If it was then VCs would exclusively invest in unicorns and take no losses.
Hindsight is useful but it's also easy to ignore subtle but critical variables
But what does that mean? What is attribution? What is ownership? How does our legal framework work? How does the media speak about reality?
The reason for "great men" isn't that its true, it's that that's how our society is structured. These ideas come from how our property is structured.
If a person can own as much wealth as millions and the media is on their side; great men exist.
Like kings. Kings made sense at the time, and were great, not because they were strong, admirable, and morally good individuals, they were great because they owned all the land and could chop your head off or let you rot in jail for saying otherwise.
The reality of which you speak is not compatible with the implications of the world we live in. This truth about the world cannot exist practically, materially.
> Kings made sense at the time, and were great, not because they were strong, admirable, and morally good individuals, they were great because they owned all the land
That depends on the society. The king in Achaemenid Persia owned all the land. His successors the Seleucid Greek kings didn't. A medieval European king didn't even come close.
I read something to the effect that (in one very early Mesopotamian city) the king owned about 1/3 of the land, another ~1/3 was owned by large landholders who numbered maybe a couple dozen (this group included the queen), and the final ~1/3 was owned by a very large number of small landholders.
> If a person can own as much wealth as millions and the media is on their side; great men exist.
Consider the alternatives to this.
The first is that great works are being accomplished without anyone being in charge of them. People invent alternating current and land on the moon in a completely decentralized manner with no one leading the effort and no one making a larger contribution than anyone else. Not the thing where everyone gets to try but only one out of a million succeeds but rather some other thing where everyone is a fungible cog and you can't identify anyone as being the lynchpin or anyone else as not pulling their weight, and yet the great works still happen.
The second is that great works are not being accomplished.
The first one seems implausible. The second one seems bad.
I don't think authority is bad. What we're talking about isn't purely organizational, its economical. Of course we need leaders, and groups, and hierarchy. What we don't need is structures that take from peoples labor.
Hierarchy can be an abstraction of group decision making and not a relationship to the products of labor (as it is now).
Or do you think people will only do things if others own the products of their labor?
Would it be impossible to exist as a society without a small group of people owning the products of millions of peoples labor?
Like I said with my original comment our current notion of great men is mostly a political fabrication by the rich. The rich being the people who own the media outlets we consume, the publishing houses, the internet, the people who own the vast majority of the things we need. They have the power to influence our morality through information culling, exposure and/or volume. Thus they have birthed the modern idea of "great men". "Great men" as they exist today are not great by us, they are great by them.
Do you think these forms that currently exist are the end form of human organization? These forms breed too many ills to be able to last forever, monetary corruption IS the real manifestation of these forms of human organization.
Hierarchy is someone being at the top. Who really freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln or all the people who elected him and then fought as solders to win the ensuing war?
> Of course we need leaders, and groups, and hierarchy. What we don't need is structures that take from peoples labor.
These are inherently synonyms for each other. As soon as you have anyone deciding how resources are allocated, they're taking them from whoever did the work to create them to begin with.
The best you can hope for is voluntary interactions, which is to say competitive markets rather than oligopolies or government central planning. And that is going to result in large companies and big personalities -- it's only a problem when they become so large that they no longer have adequate competition, which is something that happens well after the point that they have leaders whose names people know.
Someone at the top isnt necessarily autocratic. To preside is not autocracy. Both of them freed the slaves.
> These are inherently synonyms for each other. As soon as you have anyone deciding how resources are allocated, they're taking them from whoever did the work to create them to begin with.
Nah, this is a very wrong take. If that were true what are portfolio managers doing? If they ran away with your money what would happen? Thats just a tiny little example.
There are millions of other examples where trust is employed without theft because the consequences matter.
> The best you can hope for is voluntary interactions...
Thats the deep problem with capitalism. It intends to be free but its own laws allow it to quickly be dominated by a few. And then the rest of us are supposed to trust the very-corruptible government to aid us? Capitalism REALLY is just oligopoly with extra steps. They know this and count on it.
> Someone at the top isnt necessarily autocratic. To preside is not autocracy.
This is sort of like saying that an oligopoly isn't a monopoly. Technically true but not a solution to the problem.
The only way to have a large central government but not have a small handful of people with an outsized amount of power would be to make the decisions through direct democracy, which is the thing that doesn't scale to organizations that size.
> Both of them freed the slaves.
But only one of them ever gets credit for it.
> If that were true what are portfolio managers doing? If they ran away with your money what would happen?
There are two ways to frame this.
The first is, you're in charge of your portfolio and the manager is just your employee, so the one at the top is you, but then you're only in charge of your own money and not anyone else's.
The second is, retail investors are unsophisticated and lack the understanding necessary to hold portfolio managers to account, so the managers engage in shell games to steal from the investors and buy themselves yachts and otherwise act against the investors' interests. In which case they're at the top and they're autocrats.
> Thats the deep problem with capitalism. It intends to be free but its own laws allow it to quickly be dominated by a few. And then the rest of us are supposed to trust the very-corruptible government to aid us?
Nearly by definition the only types of organizations are public (i.e. government) and private (i.e. capitalism, any organization that isn't a government). If you don't like private organizations, and the government is corrupt, then what are you even proposing?
The inherent problem here is that if you have centralized power structures of any kind, Machiavellian opportunists will try to capture them for their own ends. What you need is a structure of government that prevents that from happening. It's nominally supposed to look like a government constrained in what it can do (checks and balances and enumerated powers) to prevent it from having the authority to issue competition-destroying regulations in the event it gets captured, and therefore reduce the incentive to capture it. But still having the authority to enforce antitrust rules, to prevent the same thing from happening in private markets.
We don't actually have that. A lot of the original checks and balances were removed by populists in the early 20th century so now the US federal government is thoroughly captured and in turn issues thousands of competition-destroying regulations and doesn't meaningfully enforce antitrust laws. But the only thing to do is fix that, because what else is there?
> The only way to have a large central government but not have a small handful of people with an outsized amount of power would be to make the decisions through direct democracy, which is the thing that doesn't scale to organizations that size.
Why not? Councils at different scale can certainly achieve direct democracy and if any conflicts arise the president would help determine the best course of action. There are many ways of organizing the fine details like majority or consensus, presidents decisions require voting or not, etc.
Most direct decisions don't even need to go all the way up. There could be a period of determination and direct voting, followed by a final plan that will be enacted and this is what is spread throughout the whole govt.
It could even be cryptographic voting and traceable blockchain finance (where applicable) could help undo many ills and corruption.
> Nearly by definition the only types of organizations are public (i.e. government) and private (i.e. capitalism, any organization that isn't a government). If you don't like private organizations, and the government is corrupt, then what are you even proposing?
I am proposing a world with an economic system that CANNOT overtake the government AND at the same time where the people are directly the government. So no capitalism, because like I said, and has been evidenced, capitalism is just oligopoly with extra steps.
So, yes to actual people ownership, but no to individual ownership. As individual or small group ownership leads to having interests that go against your society, incentivizing corruption for profits.
This way we can all benefit from the goods of production, we can all have an interest in keeping production going and making it better, as it increases our pay, and the corruption incentives are subdued by our collective vested interest.
This is logically the only way to solve this power imbalance which stems from the organization of production and not any mental faculties like morality or ideological leanings. This, of course, requires a culture of collective ownership if you want to keep your society free. This is also socialism.
> Councils at different scale can certainly achieve direct democracy and if any conflicts arise the president would help determine the best course of action. There are many ways of organizing the fine details like majority or consensus, presidents decisions require voting or not, etc.
The reason direct democracy doesn't work at national scale is that once you've diluted someone's vote by enough (i.e. there are 100 million voters instead of 100 voters), everyone knows their vote has a negligible effect on the outcome and therefore lacks the incentive to spend time researching every individual issue. And at the same time, a larger government is in charge of a wider jurisdiction, and then people in Florida care a lot about hurricane response but can't command a majority and people in Illinois or California have little reason to care about it.
The attempt to paper over this is to get some representatives whose job is supposed to be to do the caring for you, but then they become the privileged elite afflicted with the principal-agent problem and you get a corrupt/captured government.
> It could even be cryptographic voting and traceable blockchain finance (where applicable) could help undo many ills and corruption.
None of that is going to fix the problem that most people don't have time to read about all the details of fisheries rules or the economics of operating a power grid, and then the people who show up are the people with the goal of corrupting the process for their own interests.
Notice that this has nothing to do with capitalism. If the head of the computer science division -- a government department -- wants to do AI stuff, and the most expedient way to generate the power to do it right away is to bring decommissioned coal power plants back online, whether that happens depends on whether the bureau in charge of that has more political power than the one in charge of protecting the environment. There is no magic that makes the trade off go away or requires the alternative you would have preferred to be chosen when people who are better at political games want something else.
> I am proposing a world with an economic system that CANNOT overtake the government AND at the same time where the people are directly the government.
That isn't a thing.
Suppose you have a piece of property, like a house or a phone. If nobody actually owns anything then that isn't your house or your phone, it's everybody's. You come home and there is a stranger sleeping in your daughter's bed and you can't even object to it. If you have naked pictures of you and your spouse on your phone, those belong to everybody. Obviously this isn't the thing that anybody wants.
But as soon as you put anyone in charge of deciding who gets to use what, those people are the privileged elite. They go gerrymander the districts so they can stay in office even after doing things you don't like, or use their existing control over media outlets to convince people to vote for their continued control over media outlets etc.
"Socialism" does nothing against that. It makes it worse; it's why the USSR was a dystopia.
For markets to work you need them to be competitive, which requires you to limit government corruption, and the best way we know how to do that is limited government so that the government doesn't have the power to do the things most strongly associated with corruption, like imposing fixed mandatory fees/costs or onerous regulatory barriers to entry. And that mostly works when you actually do it.
For a command economy to work you need some way to limit government corruption even while the government is fully enmeshed in every aspect of the economy, which no one has ever managed to pull off and there is not even any apparent means to do it.
> ...people in Florida care a lot about hurricane response but can't command a majority and people in Illinois or California have little reason to care about it.
You mistake direct democracy for literally just majority decision making. You're presenting your absurd ideas and saying their mine. There are many, many ways of going around this. Mind you, states are somewhat independent within a federal system.
> ...get some representatives whose job is supposed to be to do the caring for you, but then they become the privileged elite...
Political parties are actually the BEST way to achieve this. A political party that consists of councils of workers who represent an industry. A socialist workers party whose aim is to increase worker control of the economy.
> If nobody actually owns anything then that isn't your house or your phone, it's everybody's.
This is the most childish take of socialism I have seen in a while, I'll still address it. Socialism is about productive property NOT personal property. Productive property being property that serves others. A house is personal property, even a mansion or a castle is personal property but a retail company that feeds 180 million people should not be personal property. But it is.
Take a retail store, the way I generally see it is these persons who work at these places of production would form councils and run it, generally, like any other retail store, but not for the service of private profits.
My most sincere take is that Socialism is about increasing production by unchaining it from private profits.
Production is limited by the profits of a few and ONLY socialism can unleash productions best side. With everyone employed we can satisfy most material human needs. Right now.
> it's why the USSR was a dystopia.
This is simply propaganda that can be dispelled by a simple look through CIA wires. And there's plenty of them. It's propaganda made for you as an American citizen. The CIA themselves claim the USSR wasn't a dictatorship in analysis they made in the late 60s. They then lied to the American people, such as yourself, because of the threat their ideology presented to the megacorps who rule america.
I do not believe the USSR was rainbows and sunshine tho. Do not misinterpret me. My point is not that I want to imitate a USSR, not even in the very slightest. It had flaws that caused its take over by capitalists. The USSR was a real country like any other with real flaws.
My point is that production can only be accelerated by socialism to go past the confines of capitalist ownership and into a realm of self satisfying production.
You don't strictly need money in order to produce, you need willing and able people.
These are, really, gestures towards socialism that I'm giving you. I'm just one guy, I don't represent much past me. But I know this, with the current technology that we have there should be much less needs in the world than there are now. And i know some people make money off others' needs.
> You mistake direct democracy for literally just majority decision making.
If you actually make individualized decisions by votes of the entire public, that's direct democracy. But it doesn't scale.
If you elect representatives, the rules of the elections process and thereby the seats become the target of capture efforts. And the more having a seat gives you the power to do, the stronger the capture efforts will be.
> A political party that consists of councils of workers who represent an industry. A socialist workers party whose aim is to increase worker control of the economy.
The premise here being that if the party becomes successful, its leaders would somehow be immune from the principal-agent problem. But what stops them from using the fact that most people don't have the bandwidth to pay attention to all the details to stuff their own pockets the same as Democrats and Republicans?
> Socialism is about productive property NOT personal property.
That isn't a discernible category. If you have a house that you can both live in and run a restaurant out of it, which one is it? If you have a computer that can both contain your personal documents and hosts your business website, which one is it? You're not describing a type of property, you're describing a use for it. And if you actually tried to create special rules for making productive use of existing property, expect that to be the first thing anyone tries to capture to secure a monopoly for themselves.
> Take a retail store, the way I generally see it is these persons who work at these places of production would form councils and run it, generally, like any other retail store, but not for the service of private profits.
I mean, there is no law against this right now. You can literally get your friends together, pool your resources and open your own retail store. The biggest existing barrier to this is raising the money for the real estate, which is the thing kept artificially scarce by government zoning restrictions.
> My most sincere take is that Socialism is about increasing production by unchaining it from private profits.
So how are you envisioning this working? You and your friends get together and open a retail store. You all work there and collectively control the company. Do you all get an equal share of the proceeds, even if one of you is the janitor and another is an engineer? If the store is successful and you could use more staff, by what means do you determine who is allowed to join and what they get in exchange for signing on? If the store is successful but you don't need more staff, e.g. because you're good at automating things, does that mean everybody who works there gets a bigger share and no one new is allowed to join? What if someone is already a member and they turn out to be a schmuck who refuses to do their part?
> This is simply propaganda that can be dispelled by a simple look through CIA wires.
The CIA sucks but the USSR actually was a dystopia. You can ask the people who used to live under it, many of them are still alive. Bread lines and the Stasi were both actually a thing.
> You don't strictly need money in order to produce, you need willing and able people.
Money is a proxy. To produce you need labor and materials. But where do they come from? What gives someone the incentive to grow food for other people or build tractors or mine copper?
For this to work it requires a culture of active democracy, not just, often rich, representatives estimating what we need from their detached lives.
It may answer your logistical questions, though i suspect it won't ease your power-dynamic worries.
> If you have a house that you can both live in and run a restaurant out of it, which one is it? If you have a computer that can both contain your personal documents and hosts your business website, which one is it? You're not describing a type of property, you're describing a use for it.
You're right as well. In many cases the type is defined by its use. In many socialist practices local councils barred individuals or group of individuals from employing others for production. This settled that distinction. While at the same time using your own property to produce yourself (or your family) is fine. The point of socialism is recognizing that capitalist production becomes a social illness, not individual production.
Another way of putting it is that socialized production for private profits creates a power imbalance.
If you are an employee at MY food farm, helping produce the same food you consume, then I have leverage. This is a very very simplified view of capitalism.
> And if you actually tried to create special rules for making productive use of existing property, expect that to be the first thing anyone tries to capture to secure a monopoly for themselves.
True, this is what lead to the fall of the USSR. There was a conspiracy to destroy it from within. When it fell what happened next is national assets worth billions were bought by individuals for literally next to nothing.
And this same thing you point out is also what is causing so much corruption and de-regulation in all capitalist economies.
> So how are you envisioning this working?...........
These are things that would be worked out by the people in that job. The point is to keep the place running and everyone satisfied. Generally, people are paid according to how much they work. You don't work you don't get paid. If the place is running efficiently the people keeping it operational reap more benefits.
Look at it this way. In capitalism efficiency is kind of terrible for workers because they get laid off. In socialism efficiency means less work for more benefit. And if you automated it, great, the world is a better place, go find another thing to do. There's always shit to be done, no need to limit work to profit-generation.
It's self sustaining, actual social benefit.
> The CIA sucks but the USSR actually was a dystopia. You can ask the people who used to live under it, many of them are still alive. Bread lines and the Stasi were both actually a thing.
Many people who lived through it remember it fondly. Especially when they're comparing it to their now capitalist countries. The CIA actually recognizes that at one point the USSR had similar or greater avg caloric intake per person than the US. Sure, there were downturns, sure there was Stasi (Stasi is a CIA/FBI). But a lot of it is bogey man propaganda.
People are people, you can't run a country with absolute abject repression anywhere in the world. Sure, there are always periods of repression in any country. The US has had its periods as well: the great depression, the red scare, the extreme racism, the deep classism, the defense of megacorp theft, the war-mongering at the cost of its youth, the US also has the most people in jail, more than any country on earth (this gets spun as tough-on-crime).
I'm sure the USSR was a tough place during the civil war and during WW2. The US benefited from not having a civil war in the 1910s, and it benefited from not having a world war fought on its soil. The Germans were literally trying to annihilate the USSR, where more than 2 times more Slavs than Jews died during WW2. These things objectively made the USSR rougher to live in.
Even then, socialism, to me, is only tangentially related to the USSR. I am not a fanatic or anything like that. The USSR was a country who tried to do it and failed, plain and simple. They made terrible mistakes leading to massive loss of life AND also had terrible conditions to work with. In my mind it is similar to how the US has lead to terrible loss of life inside its own borders and through out the world due to policies and wars that have only made a few people rich.
What I'm saying is that for socialists the USSR, in and of itself, is never the point.
> What gives someone the incentive to grow food for other people or build tractors or mine copper?
The satisfaction of their own needs. A council of workers can abstract resource distribution in an even better way than money ever could. Money is like the lamest proxy for work with too many exploitable flaws.
Many kings were strong and admirable. Not sure why you are so down on individual kings even if monarchy is not a great system of governance and prone to tyranny.
Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.
Ascribing only vices (chopping heads off) to monarchs is wrong.
To be clear, I am a staunch republican and believe king Charles and other European monarchs need to step down. However you are engaging in revisionism
> Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.
Are you having some concrete historical personalities in mind or are you actually just making up imaginary kings who simultaneously created a common legal framework, fought against invaders while not invading others, eased commers and also enhanced "human flourishing"? And did all that while other people in kingdom and surrounding kingdoms were basically unimportant to all that and the king was the center person to all of that?
Cause I am going to argue that whatever benefits and disadvantages of monarchy, your king is imaginary. Despite being powerful, kings were very much limited by what went on around them and what they could not control.
There is no country which matches your requirements for good king. This is not a serious question. Yes there have been many just kings throughout history.
Why not compare them to their modern equivalents? They seem mostly the same as politicians today, except some actually cared about the people the ruled.
3. The ones that don't actually have a lot of power.
> Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.
"Good kings" did not "provide protection". The army did. They also did not provide "protection" to everybody, regular peasants usually couldn't care less about their current king.
Many of the long dead ones did good things. In a manner of speaking there shouldn't have been kings in the past, but we can extend that statement to say that the past should have been modern times, which it couldn't be. Any moral judgment has to take into account what can reasonably be expected. Charlemagne, then, who (at least in his capacity as a cultural focal point) standardized Latin and founded schools and reformed the illegible script into miniscule, was reasonably good, for a king. The Persian, Roman, and Indian emperors, who started postal services, were doing it for espionage and warfare, but as it happens, they were also doing some good.
And why? Perhaps a good king could have worked at creating institutions rather than "uniting Europe" or other such nonsense?
If you study history, then you'll notice how preciously few people were focused on making the lives of regular people better. With kings and other nobles, the "good things" also tend to be historical accidents. Something that was typically done to gain more power and influence but accidentally ended up being a positive influence.
Regarding Charlemagne, right in the Wikipedia:
> Charlemagne's reign was one of near-constant warfare, participating in annual campaigns, many led personally.
> Any moral judgment has to take into account what can reasonably be expected.
Then why do we worry about slavery, colonialism, racism, and so on?
> If you study history, then you'll notice how preciously few people were focused on making the lives of regular people better.
If you study modern politics, then you'll notice how preciously few people are focused on making the lives of regular people better. I don't actually believe, if you were to do a deep dive on all of the kings of the past few hundred years and not just the most famous ones, that the ratio would be meaningfully worse. I do suspect fame will negatively correlate with "goodness", since people who do their job quietly are less notable than people who cause a commotion.
Fair point, it would have been physically possible to suddenly implement the electronic age in the 800s. So it could have been, technically, but this is a lot to expect from people steeped in their times.
I don't know why we worry about historical bad deeds, and seek reparations from people's descendents. If the idea is "I should have been born into better circumstances" - well, the meaning of "should" there is very complicated, in how it relates to blame and justice. More generally, we worry about the past bad deeds by modern standards just to assert what our standards are.
Reparations can make sense sometimes. If you can identify the individual descendants who still have the resources stolen from others, returning it to the victim's descendants seems like a good thing. Stolen goods don't lose their stink just because the original thief dies.
A recent example would be art looted by the Nazis being returned to the families it was looted from.
As time passes this becomes more and more difficult, of course.
How about abolishing slavery? A representative government? Right to a fair trial?
> I don't know why we worry about historical bad deeds, and seek reparations from people's descendents.
The idea is that some things are just bad and can't be excused by mere history. It doesn't mean that we should automatically pay reparations, but it DOES mean that pretty much all historical leaders should be considered tainted.
Charlemagne is not a great king that united France and made sure education prospered. He was a warmonger who accidentally ended up improving education. And so on.
Much the same applies to moral advances, like other ideas they're produced by the zeitgeist rather than "made from whole cloth". So it's a valid defense to say that they didn't know any better. What purpose does considering them tainted serve? They're bad by modern standards, yes, and good by historical standards, and we ourselves are bad by future standards.
So what is this even about, something to do with level of respect? Throwing the statue of Big Charlie into the Seine, maybe, because he belongs to the past when everybody's morality was, in the light of our present wisdom, rotten?
I rather think it's good to praise the most enlightened assholes of the past. Sort of like sticking terrible toddler paintings to the fridge.
Re-reading: you might be questioning how much credit is due to the king himself, and to what extent he's a figurehead. But if the good ideas are due to the culture really, it's still the figurehead who represents the culture, and "the culture" would make a very abstract and confusing statue.
Re-thinking: you might also be saying that any celebration of even a long-dead king might really be jingoism. But then I think it's the jingoism itself that should be done away with, not the celebration.
> Re-thinking: you might also be saying that any celebration of even a long-dead king might really be jingoism. But then I think it's the jingoism itself that should be done away with, not the celebration.
I think that we should celebrate people who advanced the society _on_ _purpose_ and not accidentally. Intentionality matters.
Such people were rarely in positions of power, and I'm not aware of any "good kings". Partly because effecting changes is never easy and partly because "good kings" could never grow when surrounded by rotten institutions.
But there have always been a lot of good people! Yet most are unknown to the public. For example, Thomas Paine or John Locke in the US history. There were even more fascinating stories, like this one about Beccaria: https://www.exurbe.com/on-crimes-and-punishments-and-beccari...
Edit: when talking dismissively about "good kings" I mean the ones that held absolute power. Not the modern European monarchs that are either figureheads or hold very little direct power.
OK, but what does advancing society on purpose look like, in the 800s? This is before the invention of the concept of progress. People could only aspire to be good in a way that equated loosely to "holy", which for Charlemagne seems to have included "scholastic", and I think that's as reasonably close to intentionally advancing society as you're going to get, at that time. You may prefer to venerate some Frankish monk instead, who valued scholarship without also killing thousands of Saxons, but such a person would be less influential and would probably also approve of mass slaughter of pagans anyway.
Beccaria is interesting, it's true. Nothing wrong with digging up the underrated and overlooked, if you can find them.
I suggest reading the blog article about Beccaria. This is a great example.
> You may prefer to venerate some Frankish monk instead, who valued scholarship without also killing thousands of Saxons, but such a person would be less influential and would probably also approve of mass slaughter of pagans anyway.
You're not making a good argument about why we should venerate mass murderers. It basically boils down to "sometimes it results in good things".
I'm on the side of "some kings deserve credit", but I think:
>Much the same applies to moral advances, like other ideas they're produced by the zeitgeist rather than "made from whole cloth".
is a rather weak argument. Moral advances actually are "made from whole cloth". Morality is objective[1] and can be reasoned from first principles. For example, murder. Murder is not wrong because Yahweh says so. Murder is wrong because the murderer stands to gain virtually nothing, while the murdered loses everything. This discrepancy in gain vs. loss results in a massively net negative impact to society and is therefore objectively bad. However, there are other scenarios where killing someone results in a net positive (or at least less negative than the alternative) to society, for example self-defense against a criminal would-be murderer, and these cases we understand to not be murder.
People have been capable of complex reasoning for as long as we have history. Our predecessors had less information than us available to them, but they still had the same capacity for intelligence and there are plenty of examples of impressive reasoning performed by people thousands of years ago.
So talking about, say, slavery, particularly the exceptionally vile race-based slavery practiced by Americans... it did not take a zeitgeist to understand it was bad. Plenty of people were capable of reasoning about the absolute hypocrisy of the slave-owning founding fathers proclaiming all men born equal from the day America proclaimed its independence. The zeitgeist that ended slavery in America was enough people feeling compelled to take action rather than let the status quo be; even if you understand slavery is bad, it's easier to simply selfishly benefit from it, or even if you don't benefit from it, doing nothing is yet still awfully more appealing than fighting and dying in a civil war over it.
Under that lens, I will absolutely judge historical figures. The slave-owning founding fathers, for instance, are scum who should not be revered. They especially had the education and the experience of perceived tyranny, yet maintained and benefitted from a system they were perfectly capable of reasoning to be worse than the one they revolted against. In fact, they manufactured their own zeitgeist from scratch. If they had wanted to, they certainly could have made the abolition of slavery part of it.
[1] Stating "morality is objective" can come across as arrogant (it may be read as "my moral perspective is the objectively correct one"), so I want to elaborate a bit in a digression. Morality is objective, but not necessarily easy. There are many complex situations, reasoning is actually often quite challenging, and lack of information can confound attempts at reasoning. There are many cases where if you asked me if something was moral, my answer would be "I don't know" rather than baselessly asserting one way as objectively correct. However, many cases like the morality of race-based slavery are trivially easy to reason about, and we have a rich historical record of writing produced by people hundreds of years ago preserved showing they were capable of conducting this reasoning with the information available to them long before the zeitgeist that compelled action to end it.
I'm totally down with the arrogant "morality is objective" viewpoint. However, I don't think it can be reasoned from first principles: I think "from first principles" gives a bad smell to almost any reasoning. I see knowledge as web-like in structure, not hierarchical, and I see moral ideas as belonging to a separate realm where they're supported by other moral ideas. (Consider that "gain" entails values, which are moral.) Some of these ideas are basal urges, but that doesn't make them superior. So, I can't agree with making historical figures at fault for their failure to arrive at a present-day state of morality by figuring everything out from first principles, because I do think it's something the culture does, gradually, as a group effort, with individuals considered "bad" only for failing to be up to speed by the standard of the time.
Incidentally, if they are to be blamed for failing to arrive at future morality by using the first-principle building blocks you suppose it to be made from, then so are we, and so are all future people, since morality is open-ended and there's always more to learn. We're all terribly guilty for not belonging to the infinitely far future, apparently.
Well, I suppose you can say "that whole society, in that place at that time, went down a morally wrong-headed path". I'm not very knowledgeable about Aztecs, for instance, but I believe they had some nasty traditions, as well as a cyclic world-view. Yet there must have been good Aztecs. (Even objectively, we have to consider things in context.)
If we were to leap 300 years into the future, I don't think it'd be very surprising what they look down on us for, presuming they've advanced in a logic-oriented direction and not, say, a relapse into purely religious doctrine, which is by no means a given to occur. We will certainly be condemned, at minimum, for our utterly inhumane treatment of animals, for our relentless exhaustion and destruction of natural resources, for our abuse of the scientific method to proclaim things as factual with studies that can't actually be replicated, and for much more.
Perhaps it would be surprising to some people who haven't thought much about it that we will likely be viewed poorly for wasting non-replenishable helium, necessary for advanced medical technology, on party balloons. But I don't think there is anything we do that we can't currently reason about being considered immoral for. I have absolutely zero doubt that George Washington would not be surprised to leap to 2025 and see someone condemning him for his slave ownership. There is nothing about living in the 1700s that would prevent him from reasoning that what he did was immoral, and indeed, many people in the 1700s did reason that.
Cultural adoption of morality moves significantly slower than reason about morality. This is because cultural adoption requires action. Humans will behave immorally even if they know their actions are immoral, for their own benefit. To counteract this requires coordinated group effort, which is an extremely slow process because, for example, convincing people that it's worth them risking death in a bloody war to stop other people from owning slaves, when they are not themselves ever at risk of being treated as a slave, is a very challenging task. That one participates in selfish, immoral actions for one's own benefit because one's society does not yet coerce one through collective threat of violence to behave morally does not absolve one of one's actions, which can already be reasoned through even if the collective will to enforce it does not yet exist.
Cultural adoption can also diverge from reason about morality completely, of course. This is because selfish people with power can use their power to enforce immoral values like absolute service to themselves, for their own benefit. If a society does not collectively overcome powerful individuals acting selfishly, then the culture's apparent morality will be warped in the service of what benefits a specific individual at the greater expense of society. However, even in such a state, people can and do reason about morality. Human history is a long, long tale of people defying immoral abuse of authority.
Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin
Suggesting that she indeed thinks of the self-made myth itself as a product of many cooks.
I'm more skeptical of her framing this mythmaking as an early but enduring model for populist strategy that was (initially) opposed by the elites of the time.
For context, a review of hers of antitax historiography asks:
How do the privileged rule a democracy without triggering a populist revolt? Scholars Steve Fraser, Gary Gerstle, and their colleagues in Ruling America (2005) see historical continuity in the exercise of the founts of riches and power at elites' disposal. The Power to Destroy astutely addresses this question without asking it directly. Even so, a longer historical perspective would have enriched Graetz's approach to analyzing a populist revolt and its destructiveness. The revolt he tracks was not triggered against the rich and powerful, but on their behalf against the progressive state. His analysis provides an invaluable and distressing new twist on the long-standing question of how the privileged rule in a democracy
My own derived question is whether there are historical examples of directed-myth-making (fully adopting your balanced perspective on "individual VS communal values") servicing political goals _orthogonal_ to the populism/elitism axis
> The “great man” theory leads to the idea that 99.999% of humans are mediocre at best and we all exist to serve a tiny number of greats
I feel this take says more about the person saying it then it does about the great men theorists.
Believing that revolutions often happen due to a few individuals does not mean that you believe most people are there to serve anyone. That's a non sequitur
I think you missed OP's point. "Leads to" is the key phrase, and they're talking about how both ("Great Man" and "Inevitable Forces") theories end up being used as propaganda to support political purposes. Both (as you point out) have some truth to them, and (as you do) can be addressed objectively, but both can be transmuted into ideology,
Few myths in our society are as dangerous and as anti-social as the “self made man”. No one is self made and all achievements are the result of groups of people working together.
Certainly. But I can't think of anyone using an idiom like "just another cog, so don't try to do anything".
"Self-made man", "maverick", and various myths about lone geniuses and innovators without collaboration and supporters are heavily supported by (at least) American politicians and pundits.
It's obviously true that nobody achieves things in a vacuum, since we all have some level of "privilege" given to us by our economic circumstances, the level of education available to us, our luckier heritable traits, etc. But for every successful person, there are countless others born to a similar level of privilege who squandered it. The claim that everyone owes their successes to the group ignores this.
The degree to which an individual is responsible for his own success, and the degree to which fortune enables it, is as old as time. In ancient Greek philosophy (and poetry), a person's life is divided into soul, body, and fortune: one exerts control over one's soul and body, but not over one's fortune, the sum total of things external to him, such as his family and friends and money. Virtues reside in the soul, and external blessings like wealth and the support of others outside the body, and the ancient Greeks were clear in this distinction, of which both halves are necessary but insufficient to achieve great benefits for one's people. Hence the idea that happiness is the exercise of vital powers along lines of virtue within a life affording them scope: the "lines of virtue" are internal elements of character, but "a life affording them scope" is the external support necessary. A virtuous hermit living in poverty alone on an island and a ruinously depraved criminal in the midst of civilization, the one virtuous but lacking fortune and the other fortunate but lacking virtue, are equally ill-suited to achieving great benefits for mankind.
Owing your success to the group does not imply that the success itself is a guarantee. Just that without the group, the odds are many many times worse.
I would argue that the degree to which you owe something credit for your success is the degree to which it guarantees that success. If my society/group/family guarantees my success, no matter my actions, I owe it everything. If it makes no difference at all, I owe it nothing.
If it merely improves my odds, then I owe it something, but there must have been at least one other factor at play, and that factor is also owed credit. I presume you would call that factor something like "luck". No doubt that that plays a role, but credit for luck belongs neither to the society nor the individual. All that is left, then, is individual choice, and so the rest of the credit belongs to the individual.
For the purposes of this thread we are obviously assuming free will exists. If it doesn't then achievements have no meaning and credit belongs to no one, making the whole conversation moot.
If you were to truly do a science of people would you not take into account all of the circumstances that person was in, in order to understand them?
You say: "One achieved it, but the other person in similar circumstances didn't achieve it"
Well how do their circumstances differ? Don't you think it's important how they differ? Actually, couldn't how they differ be the key?
Why, then, do you draw the line at an incomplete analysis? Maybe because it is convenient? Maybe because we'd rather not destroy our illusions of ourselves? Maybe its convenient not to understand others?
What is real in regards to ones self and others? There shouldn't be a loss of pride with understanding.
What level of analysis would you consider "complete"? Certainly if we accounted for every neuron in their brain we could reduce their achievements to whatever configuration of gray matter produced the thoughts and actions that led to their success, and whatever external events produced that configuration. But then we would be at a level of analysis that regards us all as automatons, where nobody, including the group, is accountable for anything at all. This may or may not be technically correct, but I would argue that it is not useful. The question of who gets "credit" for an achievement would be entirely moot, as would the achievement itself and everything else any human has ever done.
I would think the correct level of analysis for this conversation is the lowest one that still allows people to be accountable for their own actions. Lower than that, and the central question of this thread is irrelevant.
> could reduce their achievements to whatever configuration of gray matter
Even if we could do that it would not "reduce" any personal value. I think these are biases you may have. Accountability can be defined, even in that total view.
And right now, even in the incomplete view that we have, it is defined socially and politically. And that's what my real take is:
That the ideas that most people have of self, person-hood, achievement, merit and value, are political ideas.They are not necessarily true/accurate ideas. They serve a political purpose.
> What level of analysis would you consider "complete"?
We can go further than what we have now. In fact I think we MUST go further in order to make the world a better place.
Our current analysis is really just a cheap political tool that serves to preserve a sort of caste-system, most employed for classism and racism. That vague notion that "some people are just different" is the base for many political violations.
If anything the ideal, final form of what I am saying is this: Real Incorruptible Democracy.
So we don't need a scientific model describing of a persons thoughts in real, chemical, atomic detail, we need a world that can take peoples individual circumstance into real political consideration and action.
> That vague notion that "some people are just different" is the base for many political violations.
As is the idea that everyone is an interchangeable unit of labor, all producing the same outputs if only they were given the same inputs.
> If anything the ideal, final form of what I am saying is this: Real Incorruptible Democracy.
I don't know what you mean by this, but I am highly skeptical of anything that claims a title like "incorruptible". Such things are usually the exact opposite, sort of like countries with "Democratic Republic" in their name or ships billed as "unsinkable".
> As is the idea that everyone is an interchangeable unit of labor, all producing the same outputs if only they were given the same inputs.
Agreed. That's why I don't believe in that. And actually that's kind of what I'm criticizing: the fake science used to judge peoples behavior.
But I do know we're way WAY more similar than our cultures would have us believe.
> I don't know what you mean by this, but I am highly skeptical of anything that claims a title like "incorruptible". Such things are usually the exact opposite, sort of like countries with "Democratic Republic" in their name or ships billed as "unsinkable".
I'm saying we can devise a political system that is incorruptible. Just like we generate mathematical proofs that underpin technologies which handle our worlds economy. But the creation of an incorruptible democracy can ONLY be done by the people who benefit from it. As in, the rich would never help us do it, only the poor. In fact, the rich would probably view us as enemies if we seriously tried.
Could cryptographic voting/blockchain, which is already a reality, be a part of this new system?
I believe it will, or something similar at least.
But I am a programmer, not a cryptographer. I'm not THE guy. I'm just some random bloke trying to think about something other than making money.
if this is a possibility then we as a people should start taking it seriously. Get open source standards, software and hardware (open chips) and put it to practice.
Though I'm sure the rich would hate this. So would anyone else who has a lot to gain from controlling public offices.
A big hurdle to proper analysis is that people are unreliable narrators.
Let's take a person who made it rich betting big on bitcoin early on. Were they a savvy investor who made their own fortune, did they merely think it sounded cool and thought why not while bitcoin prices were so low that snatching them up was super cheap, did they rely on a tip or tips from friends/family, or was it some other reason?
If you come back and ask them years later after they've become worth 10^7 or better, how likely is the person who merely got lucky to admit it was dumb luck in an environment that lionizes the wealthy as self-made superhumans?
I have seen quite a few Americans saying "nobody ever gave me anything" while they were literally from upper class and their parents/families gave them a lot. And actually most people who are born rich stay rich. Some do squander it, but it takes a lot more effort to squander stuff for them then for someone who starts poor.
The "failing upwards" is an actual thing and who is around you massively influences whether you are failing upwards or downwards.
Disputing the notion of "self-made" is generally an attempt to deliberately misunderstand the point in order to derail the discussion, thus making discourse impossible.
No one who uses the term "self-made" literally believes that Howard Schultz never hired any employees at Starbucks, they mean to say that for someone who was born in the projects, he did very well for himself. Pointing out he hired employees adds no value to the discussion, so it's not why people point it out.
By "owe" I mean that the credit for their success belongs to the group and not the individual, because the individual was merely a product of good circumstances provided by the group. I believe this is the sentiment intended by the "no such thing as a self made man" crowd--no individual is special, and anyone else would achieve similar things under similar circumstances. This ignores the fact that many others DO enjoy similar circumstances but achieve nothing.
I see - some attribute of themselves has set them apart from the ones who had similar circumstances but squandered the opportunity. I guess it depends on how fine you track those circumstances. Did they all have that super-supportive friend named Trey that always knew then correct supportive thing to say? Personally, I can point to many times in my life where a teacher, grandparent, pastor made overt attempts to derail me. Maybe I wasn't completely derailed, but it slowed my progress and may have taken me along a less successful track for awhile. Looking back, I'm surprised I've done what I have. But I do wonder what kind of success I might have had if those naysayers had actually provided support.
Owing your success to something is not the same as saying that having the something guarantees success. I owe my love of Korean food to my time spent living in South Korea; others may live there and come away hating it.
"Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand."
- Karl Marx
My last few comments on this site have been precisely about these ideas. These ideas, in my view, are inherent flaws of philosophical liberalism, of which modern liberalism and conservatism stem. This ideology places itself at the forefront of morality, but can't even seriously analyze the conditions of the individual.
A rich heir is self made, but a poor man is morally and spiritually bankrupt. This is how far this modern ideology goes. Totally unscientific and is also the birthplace of modern racism.
This is how far the equality goes, that is, not very far at all. The liberal revolutions of the last ~400 years must be called the aristocratic revolutions. One where the organized aristocracy came into power, and so did their morals.
One thing I noticed about marxists is that they themselves have a hierarchy surrounding the rich and poor which they imagine exists in everyone else.
In reality, hardly anyone thinks a poor man is 'spiritually bankrupt'. The main religion of the Western world says the poor man is in fact inherently better.
IDK, man, I hear Christians talk about people being misguided (spiritually) all the time. In fact I think they're the ones who say it the most.
But I actually meant it as a sort of drive (spirit), not wholly about belief (spiritual).
But also, you must take into consideration all the ill effects of poverty. Such as crime, lack of education, lack of opportunities, the emotional faults of poverty, unchecked mental health problems, anger, frustration, ills with socialization, etc. All of the effects derived from poverty. All of these get bunched up into a single shallow view of the poor: "they're just like that" - kinda tone.
While the rich get the material wealth and the status-privilege of their families, the rich are assumed to be valuable.
This is literally what the article is talking about, albeit within a more aristocratic context.
Unfortunately one thing being homeless can do to you (or being a drug addict can do to you) is give you permanent brain injuries, at which point you are stuck that way.
Go back a few generations for just about every wealthy family in the US, and it's nothing but slave (or highly exploitative) labor building on land and resources stolen from the indians. It's the uncomfortable answer behind the question of "Why do WASPs own everything?". The whole "self-made" myth is nothing but a byproduct of white guilt all the way down.
Hang on, from a quick scan I see Koch is German in origin, Lauder is Hungarian Jewish, Pritzker is Ukranian.
[edit] and DuPont is French … etc. I think you meant white, not WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant).
The very first example on your list is the Walton family. Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, grew up in nowhere Oklahoma as the child of farmers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Walton.
Show me where it says his wealth was built on your “WASP slavery money?”
Do you know anything about it? Walton’s family wasn’t wealthy plantation owners. Whites who didn’t own slaves—which were the vast majority of them—were hurt by slavery.
Owning a lot of things and owning most of the things is a completely different thing . Obviously people who have more history in a place will be richer. This is hardly surprising.
Not all land was stolen. Much of it was bartered and sold. Tribes also vied for the pelt trade and would drive competing tribes out. The land we took from Mexico was only Spanish and Mexican on paper. Either one had as much control over the Apache/Comanche territory as Russia had over Alaska. Also the Apaches were driven out and nearly exterminated by the Comanche who remembered that they were nearly exterminated by the Apache when they got some stray horses and learned to ride them a century or so prior. The Mexican govt, wanting a buffer against Comanches, invited colonists from eastern states to colonize Texas in order prevent the raiding the Comanches were doing.
That is most of the territory was not under any tribe’s permanent control, nor was land in the west under control of Spain or Mexico before the Americans colonized it. Also lots of tribes were sworn enemies with each other and more than happy to collaborate with Europeans to drive out their enemy tribes with fewer losses to themselves.
Native Americans were here for tens of thousands of years. If it was so easy to use Indians’ resources to build a civilization, why didn’t the Indians do it?
Your attitude is illogical cope. How could “WASPs” have gotten rich from stealing from a group of people they vastly outnumbered and who were primitive in comparison?
They did build a civilization. Which was then ravaged by diseases brought from Europe by the early explorers. By the time Europeans started settling what became the United States the native population was living in what was essentially a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Given all the raping, enslaving, pillaging, and general genociding europeans did upon arrival to North America I don’t think we can say it was the First Nations that were “primitive”
The local tribes were mostly one of two types, the nomadic (ex. Comanche) and the agricultural (Apache). The former would often raid the latter, killing many of the men and taking the women and children --often, but not always, they'd end up being their slaves. So the behavior of the Europeans you describe of the time was not out of the ordinary for the locals.
They had own civilization. They lost war and were genocided out. And for the record, they had wars against themselves too, just like Europeans had wars against other Europeans.
Both slavery and territorial expansion by force were wealth builders. Both took quite a lot of time too. Both were quite barbaric from our point of view, but cruelty and violence can be wealth builder. After all, Putin is super wealthy too. Stalin ended up wealthy too. Hitler same deal. There is not much difference in there.
> Both slavery and territorial expansion by force were wealth builders.
It’s mathematically impossible for American settlers as a group to have become wealthy by expropriating wealth from Indians. Individual Indians had almost nothing—they were hunter gatherers with a small number of subsistence farmers. Nor did they have much wealth in the aggregate—their population was quite small even pre-contact. The America population in the first census was almost 4 million, which is higher than most estimates of even the pre-contact north america population. A more populous society can’t become rich by expropriating wealth from a poor, less populous society. That’s just math.
What actually happened is that the American settlers built a civilization that utilized the resources of the continent vastly more productively than the Indians had. That’s entirely different.
> I can’t think of a single WASP billionaire though
Gates, Buffett, Musk ... all spring to mind.
White certainly. Anglo-Saxon doesn't mean much more than "of western/northern european ancestry" any more. Protestant as much as any other non-Catholic Christian sect.
But WASP doesn't mean literally what it means any more, so maybe I'm missing the reason you overlooked the most famous modern American-citizen billionaires?
OP meant “WASP” in the conventional sense, otherwise his point about slavery wealth doesn’t make sense. There weren’t a lot of German or Italian immigrant slave plantation owners.
If OP had asked "why do white people hold most of the wealth in the US", the answer would be the same:
Because they arrived (first) with superior technology and made slaves or serfs (or corpses) out of the indigenous population, and seized the indigenous de facto "ownership" (or at least possession, as de jure is contextually meaningless) of vast natural resources which had previously not been exploited fully due to lack of will or ability.
That plus generational wealth and the miracle of compound interest. (And, critically, the socio-econonomic-political skills for organizing large populations!)
"WASP" was always a pejorative, meaning basically "person from one of the usual countries/cultures". It's a distinctly (originally) American label, and it has always represented the massively-entrenched established power structure.
It has evolved to mean less and less over the years. It now basically means "white, with English-speaking or adjacent ancestry".
It's also less true that true WASPs, or even white people, are the American aristocracy today than it was then. But the echoes are long and deep and hard to miss. I stand by Gates, Buffett, and Musk as modern WASPs, to the extent that the label means anything at all.
My white grandparents were poor Norwegian farmers that immigrated to North Dakota.
They benefitted about as much from what you’re describing as a modern day Nigerian immigrant was punished by it.
This is why racism is stupid and boring, because it tells you nothing useful. It’s a pointlessly broad brush to vilify or prop up someone.
Which is exactly why racism is stupid and bad. And why WASP as it is being used in this thread is self-contradictory and doesn’t even mean anything concrete except ‘white’, as has been demonstated with the various replies.
All this does is just prop up the Nazi types who can point to this kind of stupidity and go ‘see, this is why it’s good we fight back - white power’.
You appear to be on some kind of crusade here. I don't understand it, or your goals or intentions.
We can agree that racism is stupid and boring. But it's still real, and has had a great deal of influence.
If you think I'm propping up Nazis by acknowledging that "WASP" and general white privilege exist, then well, all I can say is that we live on different comprehensive planets.
Your plan here is to lump a bunch of people together by skin color (but with labels theoretically only tangentially related to skin color), and blame them for a bunch of stuff most don’t really benefit from - near as I can tell, for instance, Musk made his fortune by having rich parents and being a manipulative asshole, and being white only helped a little bit - and you don’t expect a portion of them to lose their minds and fight back.
And those people, by your assertion, have most of the guns, power, and money.
How do you think that is going to work out? Do you think it is helping to calm anything down, or result in a more reasonable outcome?
And do you think that regardless of the size or quantity of bodies fed into the resulting meat grinder that Musk would suffer one bit for it, for example?
Or is this not actually helping him? By turning idiots to his side?
I have no plan. I didn't create the label. And it's not a robustly defined sociological group anyway. It's just a popular label that got applied to real and very visible thing.
Musk was born in South Africa under apartheid. Do you think his life would not be very different if he was born with different skin?
Historically, yes, white males of (select) Euro descent have wielded disproportionate power in America. Do you disagree?!?
Your plan, then, is to hide from that obvious truth because some Nazi nitwits will be so stupid as to either a) use that historical fact as a basis for their belief of how things should be now, or b) use the fact that some people are still living the effects of that history, and their lack of enthusiasm for that fact, as reason to "fight back"?
Honestly I think either of those reactions would be to coddle the Nazis. No one is served by lying about history.
Some nitwits will always interpret history in a way that serves their purposes. But their purposes are more demanding than the facts that they use to support them, and they don't care. There will always be Nazis (or adherents to some similarly absurd and evil system with a different name). Their justification for their beliefs is the only thing that will change.
Sounds like you should start working on a plan, since the same folks you seem insistent on antagonizing are the same people whose protection you are probably dependent on.
I'm not antagonizing anyone, except possibly you (and in ways I have not been able to figure out -- What's your damage, Heather?).
If "white people have done bad things" is enough to start a race war (or whatever you are obliquely suggesting), than it's not I who will be the trigger.
I get the sense that you are hyper hyper sensitive to the word WASP. It never meant much, and isn't worth your time.
Musk was born in South Africa to a wealthy diamond mine owner (Dad) and Canadian model+dietician (Mom), and is a ‘confirmed non believer’ per his own public statements. His whole family seems not particularly religious.
The extended musk family is from all over, however, including Canada, England, American, etc. but he seems pretty clearly a mongrel.
> Musk was born in South Africa to a wealthy diamond mine owner (Dad)
This is something like ~4 steps away from what happened, to the point it's not true at all. (He was a part owner in an emerald mining operation in another country, it wasn't his main business, and they were middle class.)
Btw when I say from Northern England, I mean by descent, not where he grew up.
Not that I want to get into defending him since he's killed 600k people this year.
> and is a ‘confirmed non believer’ per his own public statements.
That's as Anglican as it gets. It's like a version of Protestantism you're not supposed to believe in.
It's not important that the specimen is an active Protestant. The point is that their ancestry (with some decent adjacency to: white, anglo-saxon, protestant) landed them in a place of general privilege.
Musk is a WASP by any definition.
But it's always been a pejorative, and always used as a cudgel. Musk is not responsible for his ancestry. But he certainly benefited from it.
WASP was always a pejorative way of saying "established white European-ancestry American aristocracy".
It never applied to poor white people. It is just a label for the most common and most established phenotype in early America, up to and including the mid-20th century.
The label has lost salience over the intervening decades, but it has not faded down to be lost in the ambient level of population wealth and power.
AFAICT, you intentionally goaded this thread into a dissection of WASP-vs-white, which serves zero purpose except to give you a chance to espouse something which you still haven't done, but strikes me as likely to be pretty boring after all of this.
Anyone who claims to be self made is dishonest to themselves. "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main" -John Donne
This is an interesting historical article but the thread so far is too shallow (i.e. reacting only to one controversial phrase in the title), generic (i.e. disengaged from any of the interesting details in the article), and ideological. Generic ideological tangents make for lame and repetitive threads (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
I've replaced the title with the subtitle in the hope that this may help.
Thank you!
In the debate between self made and team effort my opinion is “both.”
Nobody starts from zero. Everyone builds on the work of others with help from others.
At the same time, individuals can make unique contributions and are not just interchangeable parts. You see this over and over again in art, music, engineering, science, literature, etc., or really anything requiring skill. People aren’t interchangeable.
I think both positions, when argued exclusively, lead to a false devaluing of most human life. The “great man” theory leads to the idea that 99.999% of humans are mediocre at best and we all exist to serve a tiny number of greats. The “it takes a village” theory leads to the view that everything is a collective product and nobody is unique or special in any way. So you get the idea that 100% of humans are an undifferentiated mass of aggregate labor. That makes people just as disposable as if we are mere peons existing to serve the greats.
I think the reality is that we are an interdependent network of unique contributors.
It's just a restatement of 'nature vs nurture' isn't it? And as you say, both of those things are necessary. Broadly, greatness without circumstances likely leads to obscurity; circumstances without greatness likely leads to indolence. The latter being what often seems to happen in families with generational wealth - some family member makes the fortune, and some later generation, lacking the earlier drive, squanders it.
In game theory a coalition is a group where the group's utility is greater than the sum of each member's utility. In other words: "we're stronger together".
The problem with the self-made man myth is that it frames things as if it is shameful to have help. Having had help does not diminish your accomplishments. Having had help just means you're human.
The same goes for luck. Just because you got lucky doesn't mean you didn't work hard nor deserve the rewards. There's a saying I like
The way I read that is "by working hard you are able to take advantage of lucky opportunities as they come by." We all require luck in this world. Some are luckier than others. But you have to "strike while the iron is hot" and if you don't work hard then you won't be able to strike in the right moment. Like the having had help part there is no shame in having had luck.Being able to recognize these things helps us do better and help more people do better. But if we pretend we just did it all on our own then we can't actually recognize how things came to be. Which means we're going to have a hard time replicating that success. By pretending that everything is all on us and nothing else then we'll fail while trying to repeat the successful strategy, we'll fail when offering advice to others, and we'll just be blind to the world around us. We'll never recognize that we have to make the iron hot! Even the best blacksmith in the world can't hammer frozen iron into shape.
Again, having had luck or help doesn't mean you didn't work hard or that you don't deserve what you have. Things aren't binary. There's not a single causal factor to any complex phenomena. The problem is seeing things in black and white. There's a million things that go into success and while most of that will be on you, you can't ignore things like the environment and those that helped you along the way. After all, we're all in this together.
> The problem with the self-made man myth
Is that it's a complete straw man. It's not about not having help - every great achiever has had a figurative (sometimes literal) army of supporters behind them. Including those in history.
What the "theory" actually posits seems trivially true - that the people who do super extraordinary things are extraordinary themselves. Whether it's talent, hard work, both, insanity, etc. The idea that these people are just normal and very lucky or whatever is absurd.
The problem is the inverse. You imply that people who do not do extraordinary things are not themselves extraordinary.
You can be extraordinary but shit out of luck. You can't rise to the top by just being the best, you also need and the right support. Take for example any startup. Good luck getting to scale without that. Eventually someone needs to take a chance on you.
This is something VCs even know. They invest broadly because a small percentage will be big hits. It's because things fall along a power distribution rather than a normal. The upside is unbounded. Most will lose, for many reasons, including just bad luck.
Or I'll let Picard say it
Its because random elements exist in life. It is not deterministic. If it was then VCs would exclusively invest in unicorns and take no losses.Hindsight is useful but it's also easy to ignore subtle but critical variables
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1TCX90yALsI
Yes, facts make it necessarily both.
But what does that mean? What is attribution? What is ownership? How does our legal framework work? How does the media speak about reality?
The reason for "great men" isn't that its true, it's that that's how our society is structured. These ideas come from how our property is structured.
If a person can own as much wealth as millions and the media is on their side; great men exist.
Like kings. Kings made sense at the time, and were great, not because they were strong, admirable, and morally good individuals, they were great because they owned all the land and could chop your head off or let you rot in jail for saying otherwise.
The reality of which you speak is not compatible with the implications of the world we live in. This truth about the world cannot exist practically, materially.
> Kings made sense at the time, and were great, not because they were strong, admirable, and morally good individuals, they were great because they owned all the land
That depends on the society. The king in Achaemenid Persia owned all the land. His successors the Seleucid Greek kings didn't. A medieval European king didn't even come close.
I read something to the effect that (in one very early Mesopotamian city) the king owned about 1/3 of the land, another ~1/3 was owned by large landholders who numbered maybe a couple dozen (this group included the queen), and the final ~1/3 was owned by a very large number of small landholders.
> If a person can own as much wealth as millions and the media is on their side; great men exist.
Consider the alternatives to this.
The first is that great works are being accomplished without anyone being in charge of them. People invent alternating current and land on the moon in a completely decentralized manner with no one leading the effort and no one making a larger contribution than anyone else. Not the thing where everyone gets to try but only one out of a million succeeds but rather some other thing where everyone is a fungible cog and you can't identify anyone as being the lynchpin or anyone else as not pulling their weight, and yet the great works still happen.
The second is that great works are not being accomplished.
The first one seems implausible. The second one seems bad.
What are you talking about?
I don't think authority is bad. What we're talking about isn't purely organizational, its economical. Of course we need leaders, and groups, and hierarchy. What we don't need is structures that take from peoples labor.
Hierarchy can be an abstraction of group decision making and not a relationship to the products of labor (as it is now).
Or do you think people will only do things if others own the products of their labor? Would it be impossible to exist as a society without a small group of people owning the products of millions of peoples labor?
Like I said with my original comment our current notion of great men is mostly a political fabrication by the rich. The rich being the people who own the media outlets we consume, the publishing houses, the internet, the people who own the vast majority of the things we need. They have the power to influence our morality through information culling, exposure and/or volume. Thus they have birthed the modern idea of "great men". "Great men" as they exist today are not great by us, they are great by them.
Do you think these forms that currently exist are the end form of human organization? These forms breed too many ills to be able to last forever, monetary corruption IS the real manifestation of these forms of human organization.
Hierarchy is someone being at the top. Who really freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln or all the people who elected him and then fought as solders to win the ensuing war?
> Of course we need leaders, and groups, and hierarchy. What we don't need is structures that take from peoples labor.
These are inherently synonyms for each other. As soon as you have anyone deciding how resources are allocated, they're taking them from whoever did the work to create them to begin with.
The best you can hope for is voluntary interactions, which is to say competitive markets rather than oligopolies or government central planning. And that is going to result in large companies and big personalities -- it's only a problem when they become so large that they no longer have adequate competition, which is something that happens well after the point that they have leaders whose names people know.
Someone at the top isnt necessarily autocratic. To preside is not autocracy. Both of them freed the slaves.
> These are inherently synonyms for each other. As soon as you have anyone deciding how resources are allocated, they're taking them from whoever did the work to create them to begin with.
Nah, this is a very wrong take. If that were true what are portfolio managers doing? If they ran away with your money what would happen? Thats just a tiny little example.
There are millions of other examples where trust is employed without theft because the consequences matter.
> The best you can hope for is voluntary interactions...
Thats the deep problem with capitalism. It intends to be free but its own laws allow it to quickly be dominated by a few. And then the rest of us are supposed to trust the very-corruptible government to aid us? Capitalism REALLY is just oligopoly with extra steps. They know this and count on it.
> Someone at the top isnt necessarily autocratic. To preside is not autocracy.
This is sort of like saying that an oligopoly isn't a monopoly. Technically true but not a solution to the problem.
The only way to have a large central government but not have a small handful of people with an outsized amount of power would be to make the decisions through direct democracy, which is the thing that doesn't scale to organizations that size.
> Both of them freed the slaves.
But only one of them ever gets credit for it.
> If that were true what are portfolio managers doing? If they ran away with your money what would happen?
There are two ways to frame this.
The first is, you're in charge of your portfolio and the manager is just your employee, so the one at the top is you, but then you're only in charge of your own money and not anyone else's.
The second is, retail investors are unsophisticated and lack the understanding necessary to hold portfolio managers to account, so the managers engage in shell games to steal from the investors and buy themselves yachts and otherwise act against the investors' interests. In which case they're at the top and they're autocrats.
> Thats the deep problem with capitalism. It intends to be free but its own laws allow it to quickly be dominated by a few. And then the rest of us are supposed to trust the very-corruptible government to aid us?
Nearly by definition the only types of organizations are public (i.e. government) and private (i.e. capitalism, any organization that isn't a government). If you don't like private organizations, and the government is corrupt, then what are you even proposing?
The inherent problem here is that if you have centralized power structures of any kind, Machiavellian opportunists will try to capture them for their own ends. What you need is a structure of government that prevents that from happening. It's nominally supposed to look like a government constrained in what it can do (checks and balances and enumerated powers) to prevent it from having the authority to issue competition-destroying regulations in the event it gets captured, and therefore reduce the incentive to capture it. But still having the authority to enforce antitrust rules, to prevent the same thing from happening in private markets.
We don't actually have that. A lot of the original checks and balances were removed by populists in the early 20th century so now the US federal government is thoroughly captured and in turn issues thousands of competition-destroying regulations and doesn't meaningfully enforce antitrust laws. But the only thing to do is fix that, because what else is there?
> The only way to have a large central government but not have a small handful of people with an outsized amount of power would be to make the decisions through direct democracy, which is the thing that doesn't scale to organizations that size.
Why not? Councils at different scale can certainly achieve direct democracy and if any conflicts arise the president would help determine the best course of action. There are many ways of organizing the fine details like majority or consensus, presidents decisions require voting or not, etc.
Most direct decisions don't even need to go all the way up. There could be a period of determination and direct voting, followed by a final plan that will be enacted and this is what is spread throughout the whole govt.
It could even be cryptographic voting and traceable blockchain finance (where applicable) could help undo many ills and corruption.
> Nearly by definition the only types of organizations are public (i.e. government) and private (i.e. capitalism, any organization that isn't a government). If you don't like private organizations, and the government is corrupt, then what are you even proposing?
I am proposing a world with an economic system that CANNOT overtake the government AND at the same time where the people are directly the government. So no capitalism, because like I said, and has been evidenced, capitalism is just oligopoly with extra steps.
So, yes to actual people ownership, but no to individual ownership. As individual or small group ownership leads to having interests that go against your society, incentivizing corruption for profits.
This way we can all benefit from the goods of production, we can all have an interest in keeping production going and making it better, as it increases our pay, and the corruption incentives are subdued by our collective vested interest.
This is logically the only way to solve this power imbalance which stems from the organization of production and not any mental faculties like morality or ideological leanings. This, of course, requires a culture of collective ownership if you want to keep your society free. This is also socialism.
> Councils at different scale can certainly achieve direct democracy and if any conflicts arise the president would help determine the best course of action. There are many ways of organizing the fine details like majority or consensus, presidents decisions require voting or not, etc.
The reason direct democracy doesn't work at national scale is that once you've diluted someone's vote by enough (i.e. there are 100 million voters instead of 100 voters), everyone knows their vote has a negligible effect on the outcome and therefore lacks the incentive to spend time researching every individual issue. And at the same time, a larger government is in charge of a wider jurisdiction, and then people in Florida care a lot about hurricane response but can't command a majority and people in Illinois or California have little reason to care about it.
The attempt to paper over this is to get some representatives whose job is supposed to be to do the caring for you, but then they become the privileged elite afflicted with the principal-agent problem and you get a corrupt/captured government.
> It could even be cryptographic voting and traceable blockchain finance (where applicable) could help undo many ills and corruption.
None of that is going to fix the problem that most people don't have time to read about all the details of fisheries rules or the economics of operating a power grid, and then the people who show up are the people with the goal of corrupting the process for their own interests.
Notice that this has nothing to do with capitalism. If the head of the computer science division -- a government department -- wants to do AI stuff, and the most expedient way to generate the power to do it right away is to bring decommissioned coal power plants back online, whether that happens depends on whether the bureau in charge of that has more political power than the one in charge of protecting the environment. There is no magic that makes the trade off go away or requires the alternative you would have preferred to be chosen when people who are better at political games want something else.
> I am proposing a world with an economic system that CANNOT overtake the government AND at the same time where the people are directly the government.
That isn't a thing.
Suppose you have a piece of property, like a house or a phone. If nobody actually owns anything then that isn't your house or your phone, it's everybody's. You come home and there is a stranger sleeping in your daughter's bed and you can't even object to it. If you have naked pictures of you and your spouse on your phone, those belong to everybody. Obviously this isn't the thing that anybody wants.
But as soon as you put anyone in charge of deciding who gets to use what, those people are the privileged elite. They go gerrymander the districts so they can stay in office even after doing things you don't like, or use their existing control over media outlets to convince people to vote for their continued control over media outlets etc.
"Socialism" does nothing against that. It makes it worse; it's why the USSR was a dystopia.
For markets to work you need them to be competitive, which requires you to limit government corruption, and the best way we know how to do that is limited government so that the government doesn't have the power to do the things most strongly associated with corruption, like imposing fixed mandatory fees/costs or onerous regulatory barriers to entry. And that mostly works when you actually do it.
For a command economy to work you need some way to limit government corruption even while the government is fully enmeshed in every aspect of the economy, which no one has ever managed to pull off and there is not even any apparent means to do it.
> ...people in Florida care a lot about hurricane response but can't command a majority and people in Illinois or California have little reason to care about it.
You mistake direct democracy for literally just majority decision making. You're presenting your absurd ideas and saying their mine. There are many, many ways of going around this. Mind you, states are somewhat independent within a federal system.
> ...get some representatives whose job is supposed to be to do the caring for you, but then they become the privileged elite...
Political parties are actually the BEST way to achieve this. A political party that consists of councils of workers who represent an industry. A socialist workers party whose aim is to increase worker control of the economy.
> If nobody actually owns anything then that isn't your house or your phone, it's everybody's.
This is the most childish take of socialism I have seen in a while, I'll still address it. Socialism is about productive property NOT personal property. Productive property being property that serves others. A house is personal property, even a mansion or a castle is personal property but a retail company that feeds 180 million people should not be personal property. But it is.
Take a retail store, the way I generally see it is these persons who work at these places of production would form councils and run it, generally, like any other retail store, but not for the service of private profits.
My most sincere take is that Socialism is about increasing production by unchaining it from private profits.
Production is limited by the profits of a few and ONLY socialism can unleash productions best side. With everyone employed we can satisfy most material human needs. Right now.
> it's why the USSR was a dystopia.
This is simply propaganda that can be dispelled by a simple look through CIA wires. And there's plenty of them. It's propaganda made for you as an American citizen. The CIA themselves claim the USSR wasn't a dictatorship in analysis they made in the late 60s. They then lied to the American people, such as yourself, because of the threat their ideology presented to the megacorps who rule america.
I do not believe the USSR was rainbows and sunshine tho. Do not misinterpret me. My point is not that I want to imitate a USSR, not even in the very slightest. It had flaws that caused its take over by capitalists. The USSR was a real country like any other with real flaws.
My point is that production can only be accelerated by socialism to go past the confines of capitalist ownership and into a realm of self satisfying production.
You don't strictly need money in order to produce, you need willing and able people.
These are, really, gestures towards socialism that I'm giving you. I'm just one guy, I don't represent much past me. But I know this, with the current technology that we have there should be much less needs in the world than there are now. And i know some people make money off others' needs.
> You mistake direct democracy for literally just majority decision making.
If you actually make individualized decisions by votes of the entire public, that's direct democracy. But it doesn't scale.
If you elect representatives, the rules of the elections process and thereby the seats become the target of capture efforts. And the more having a seat gives you the power to do, the stronger the capture efforts will be.
> A political party that consists of councils of workers who represent an industry. A socialist workers party whose aim is to increase worker control of the economy.
The premise here being that if the party becomes successful, its leaders would somehow be immune from the principal-agent problem. But what stops them from using the fact that most people don't have the bandwidth to pay attention to all the details to stuff their own pockets the same as Democrats and Republicans?
> Socialism is about productive property NOT personal property.
That isn't a discernible category. If you have a house that you can both live in and run a restaurant out of it, which one is it? If you have a computer that can both contain your personal documents and hosts your business website, which one is it? You're not describing a type of property, you're describing a use for it. And if you actually tried to create special rules for making productive use of existing property, expect that to be the first thing anyone tries to capture to secure a monopoly for themselves.
> Take a retail store, the way I generally see it is these persons who work at these places of production would form councils and run it, generally, like any other retail store, but not for the service of private profits.
I mean, there is no law against this right now. You can literally get your friends together, pool your resources and open your own retail store. The biggest existing barrier to this is raising the money for the real estate, which is the thing kept artificially scarce by government zoning restrictions.
> My most sincere take is that Socialism is about increasing production by unchaining it from private profits.
So how are you envisioning this working? You and your friends get together and open a retail store. You all work there and collectively control the company. Do you all get an equal share of the proceeds, even if one of you is the janitor and another is an engineer? If the store is successful and you could use more staff, by what means do you determine who is allowed to join and what they get in exchange for signing on? If the store is successful but you don't need more staff, e.g. because you're good at automating things, does that mean everybody who works there gets a bigger share and no one new is allowed to join? What if someone is already a member and they turn out to be a schmuck who refuses to do their part?
> This is simply propaganda that can be dispelled by a simple look through CIA wires.
The CIA sucks but the USSR actually was a dystopia. You can ask the people who used to live under it, many of them are still alive. Bread lines and the Stasi were both actually a thing.
> You don't strictly need money in order to produce, you need willing and able people.
Money is a proxy. To produce you need labor and materials. But where do they come from? What gives someone the incentive to grow food for other people or build tractors or mine copper?
> If you actually make individualized decisions by votes of the entire public, that's direct democracy. But it doesn't scale.
You're right. I was making a mistake.
What I'm actually talking about is delegate democracy. Where representatives act only as mouth pieces for their directly involved constituents.
The title of this wiki article may make you cringe but its a good, short summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_democracy
For this to work it requires a culture of active democracy, not just, often rich, representatives estimating what we need from their detached lives.
It may answer your logistical questions, though i suspect it won't ease your power-dynamic worries.
> If you have a house that you can both live in and run a restaurant out of it, which one is it? If you have a computer that can both contain your personal documents and hosts your business website, which one is it? You're not describing a type of property, you're describing a use for it.
You're right as well. In many cases the type is defined by its use. In many socialist practices local councils barred individuals or group of individuals from employing others for production. This settled that distinction. While at the same time using your own property to produce yourself (or your family) is fine. The point of socialism is recognizing that capitalist production becomes a social illness, not individual production.
Another way of putting it is that socialized production for private profits creates a power imbalance.
If you are an employee at MY food farm, helping produce the same food you consume, then I have leverage. This is a very very simplified view of capitalism.
> And if you actually tried to create special rules for making productive use of existing property, expect that to be the first thing anyone tries to capture to secure a monopoly for themselves.
True, this is what lead to the fall of the USSR. There was a conspiracy to destroy it from within. When it fell what happened next is national assets worth billions were bought by individuals for literally next to nothing.
And this same thing you point out is also what is causing so much corruption and de-regulation in all capitalist economies.
> So how are you envisioning this working?...........
These are things that would be worked out by the people in that job. The point is to keep the place running and everyone satisfied. Generally, people are paid according to how much they work. You don't work you don't get paid. If the place is running efficiently the people keeping it operational reap more benefits.
Look at it this way. In capitalism efficiency is kind of terrible for workers because they get laid off. In socialism efficiency means less work for more benefit. And if you automated it, great, the world is a better place, go find another thing to do. There's always shit to be done, no need to limit work to profit-generation.
It's self sustaining, actual social benefit.
> The CIA sucks but the USSR actually was a dystopia. You can ask the people who used to live under it, many of them are still alive. Bread lines and the Stasi were both actually a thing.
Many people who lived through it remember it fondly. Especially when they're comparing it to their now capitalist countries. The CIA actually recognizes that at one point the USSR had similar or greater avg caloric intake per person than the US. Sure, there were downturns, sure there was Stasi (Stasi is a CIA/FBI). But a lot of it is bogey man propaganda.
People are people, you can't run a country with absolute abject repression anywhere in the world. Sure, there are always periods of repression in any country. The US has had its periods as well: the great depression, the red scare, the extreme racism, the deep classism, the defense of megacorp theft, the war-mongering at the cost of its youth, the US also has the most people in jail, more than any country on earth (this gets spun as tough-on-crime).
I'm sure the USSR was a tough place during the civil war and during WW2. The US benefited from not having a civil war in the 1910s, and it benefited from not having a world war fought on its soil. The Germans were literally trying to annihilate the USSR, where more than 2 times more Slavs than Jews died during WW2. These things objectively made the USSR rougher to live in.
Even then, socialism, to me, is only tangentially related to the USSR. I am not a fanatic or anything like that. The USSR was a country who tried to do it and failed, plain and simple. They made terrible mistakes leading to massive loss of life AND also had terrible conditions to work with. In my mind it is similar to how the US has lead to terrible loss of life inside its own borders and through out the world due to policies and wars that have only made a few people rich.
What I'm saying is that for socialists the USSR, in and of itself, is never the point.
> What gives someone the incentive to grow food for other people or build tractors or mine copper?
The satisfaction of their own needs. A council of workers can abstract resource distribution in an even better way than money ever could. Money is like the lamest proxy for work with too many exploitable flaws.
Many kings were strong and admirable. Not sure why you are so down on individual kings even if monarchy is not a great system of governance and prone to tyranny.
Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.
Ascribing only vices (chopping heads off) to monarchs is wrong.
To be clear, I am a staunch republican and believe king Charles and other European monarchs need to step down. However you are engaging in revisionism
> Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.
Are you having some concrete historical personalities in mind or are you actually just making up imaginary kings who simultaneously created a common legal framework, fought against invaders while not invading others, eased commers and also enhanced "human flourishing"? And did all that while other people in kingdom and surrounding kingdoms were basically unimportant to all that and the king was the center person to all of that?
Cause I am going to argue that whatever benefits and disadvantages of monarchy, your king is imaginary. Despite being powerful, kings were very much limited by what went on around them and what they could not control.
There is no country which matches your requirements for good king. This is not a serious question. Yes there have been many just kings throughout history.
You know, I am not a historian. And I'm not gonna talk as if I know anything about how kings were viewed by the people.
But in my mind kings can be "good" in the same way slave owners can be "good". Not that much, if any at all, contextually.
Why not compare them to their modern equivalents? They seem mostly the same as politicians today, except some actually cared about the people the ruled.
Nah, I think the rich are the kings, politicians are their court.
We have a bunch of little kings with a public court that theyre all trying to use for themselves.
IDK you but I think you cant get rich by being a good person. You actively have to ignore others' needs to focus on growth, to use people.
The only "good kings" are:
1. The ones that are long dead.
2. The ones that have their head chopped off.
3. The ones that don't actually have a lot of power.
> Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.
"Good kings" did not "provide protection". The army did. They also did not provide "protection" to everybody, regular peasants usually couldn't care less about their current king.
Many of the long dead ones did good things. In a manner of speaking there shouldn't have been kings in the past, but we can extend that statement to say that the past should have been modern times, which it couldn't be. Any moral judgment has to take into account what can reasonably be expected. Charlemagne, then, who (at least in his capacity as a cultural focal point) standardized Latin and founded schools and reformed the illegible script into miniscule, was reasonably good, for a king. The Persian, Roman, and Indian emperors, who started postal services, were doing it for espionage and warfare, but as it happens, they were also doing some good.
> which it couldn't be.
And why? Perhaps a good king could have worked at creating institutions rather than "uniting Europe" or other such nonsense?
If you study history, then you'll notice how preciously few people were focused on making the lives of regular people better. With kings and other nobles, the "good things" also tend to be historical accidents. Something that was typically done to gain more power and influence but accidentally ended up being a positive influence.
Regarding Charlemagne, right in the Wikipedia:
> Charlemagne's reign was one of near-constant warfare, participating in annual campaigns, many led personally.
> Any moral judgment has to take into account what can reasonably be expected.
Then why do we worry about slavery, colonialism, racism, and so on?
> If you study history, then you'll notice how preciously few people were focused on making the lives of regular people better.
If you study modern politics, then you'll notice how preciously few people are focused on making the lives of regular people better. I don't actually believe, if you were to do a deep dive on all of the kings of the past few hundred years and not just the most famous ones, that the ratio would be meaningfully worse. I do suspect fame will negatively correlate with "goodness", since people who do their job quietly are less notable than people who cause a commotion.
Fair point, it would have been physically possible to suddenly implement the electronic age in the 800s. So it could have been, technically, but this is a lot to expect from people steeped in their times.
I don't know why we worry about historical bad deeds, and seek reparations from people's descendents. If the idea is "I should have been born into better circumstances" - well, the meaning of "should" there is very complicated, in how it relates to blame and justice. More generally, we worry about the past bad deeds by modern standards just to assert what our standards are.
Reparations can make sense sometimes. If you can identify the individual descendants who still have the resources stolen from others, returning it to the victim's descendants seems like a good thing. Stolen goods don't lose their stink just because the original thief dies.
A recent example would be art looted by the Nazis being returned to the families it was looted from.
As time passes this becomes more and more difficult, of course.
Nope. I'm not talking about technical advances.
How about abolishing slavery? A representative government? Right to a fair trial?
> I don't know why we worry about historical bad deeds, and seek reparations from people's descendents.
The idea is that some things are just bad and can't be excused by mere history. It doesn't mean that we should automatically pay reparations, but it DOES mean that pretty much all historical leaders should be considered tainted.
Charlemagne is not a great king that united France and made sure education prospered. He was a warmonger who accidentally ended up improving education. And so on.
Much the same applies to moral advances, like other ideas they're produced by the zeitgeist rather than "made from whole cloth". So it's a valid defense to say that they didn't know any better. What purpose does considering them tainted serve? They're bad by modern standards, yes, and good by historical standards, and we ourselves are bad by future standards.
So what is this even about, something to do with level of respect? Throwing the statue of Big Charlie into the Seine, maybe, because he belongs to the past when everybody's morality was, in the light of our present wisdom, rotten?
I rather think it's good to praise the most enlightened assholes of the past. Sort of like sticking terrible toddler paintings to the fridge.
Re-reading: you might be questioning how much credit is due to the king himself, and to what extent he's a figurehead. But if the good ideas are due to the culture really, it's still the figurehead who represents the culture, and "the culture" would make a very abstract and confusing statue.
Re-thinking: you might also be saying that any celebration of even a long-dead king might really be jingoism. But then I think it's the jingoism itself that should be done away with, not the celebration.
> Re-thinking: you might also be saying that any celebration of even a long-dead king might really be jingoism. But then I think it's the jingoism itself that should be done away with, not the celebration.
I think that we should celebrate people who advanced the society _on_ _purpose_ and not accidentally. Intentionality matters.
Such people were rarely in positions of power, and I'm not aware of any "good kings". Partly because effecting changes is never easy and partly because "good kings" could never grow when surrounded by rotten institutions.
But there have always been a lot of good people! Yet most are unknown to the public. For example, Thomas Paine or John Locke in the US history. There were even more fascinating stories, like this one about Beccaria: https://www.exurbe.com/on-crimes-and-punishments-and-beccari...
Edit: when talking dismissively about "good kings" I mean the ones that held absolute power. Not the modern European monarchs that are either figureheads or hold very little direct power.
OK, but what does advancing society on purpose look like, in the 800s? This is before the invention of the concept of progress. People could only aspire to be good in a way that equated loosely to "holy", which for Charlemagne seems to have included "scholastic", and I think that's as reasonably close to intentionally advancing society as you're going to get, at that time. You may prefer to venerate some Frankish monk instead, who valued scholarship without also killing thousands of Saxons, but such a person would be less influential and would probably also approve of mass slaughter of pagans anyway.
Beccaria is interesting, it's true. Nothing wrong with digging up the underrated and overlooked, if you can find them.
I suggest reading the blog article about Beccaria. This is a great example.
> You may prefer to venerate some Frankish monk instead, who valued scholarship without also killing thousands of Saxons, but such a person would be less influential and would probably also approve of mass slaughter of pagans anyway.
You're not making a good argument about why we should venerate mass murderers. It basically boils down to "sometimes it results in good things".
I'm on the side of "some kings deserve credit", but I think:
>Much the same applies to moral advances, like other ideas they're produced by the zeitgeist rather than "made from whole cloth".
is a rather weak argument. Moral advances actually are "made from whole cloth". Morality is objective[1] and can be reasoned from first principles. For example, murder. Murder is not wrong because Yahweh says so. Murder is wrong because the murderer stands to gain virtually nothing, while the murdered loses everything. This discrepancy in gain vs. loss results in a massively net negative impact to society and is therefore objectively bad. However, there are other scenarios where killing someone results in a net positive (or at least less negative than the alternative) to society, for example self-defense against a criminal would-be murderer, and these cases we understand to not be murder.
People have been capable of complex reasoning for as long as we have history. Our predecessors had less information than us available to them, but they still had the same capacity for intelligence and there are plenty of examples of impressive reasoning performed by people thousands of years ago.
So talking about, say, slavery, particularly the exceptionally vile race-based slavery practiced by Americans... it did not take a zeitgeist to understand it was bad. Plenty of people were capable of reasoning about the absolute hypocrisy of the slave-owning founding fathers proclaiming all men born equal from the day America proclaimed its independence. The zeitgeist that ended slavery in America was enough people feeling compelled to take action rather than let the status quo be; even if you understand slavery is bad, it's easier to simply selfishly benefit from it, or even if you don't benefit from it, doing nothing is yet still awfully more appealing than fighting and dying in a civil war over it.
Under that lens, I will absolutely judge historical figures. The slave-owning founding fathers, for instance, are scum who should not be revered. They especially had the education and the experience of perceived tyranny, yet maintained and benefitted from a system they were perfectly capable of reasoning to be worse than the one they revolted against. In fact, they manufactured their own zeitgeist from scratch. If they had wanted to, they certainly could have made the abolition of slavery part of it.
[1] Stating "morality is objective" can come across as arrogant (it may be read as "my moral perspective is the objectively correct one"), so I want to elaborate a bit in a digression. Morality is objective, but not necessarily easy. There are many complex situations, reasoning is actually often quite challenging, and lack of information can confound attempts at reasoning. There are many cases where if you asked me if something was moral, my answer would be "I don't know" rather than baselessly asserting one way as objectively correct. However, many cases like the morality of race-based slavery are trivially easy to reason about, and we have a rich historical record of writing produced by people hundreds of years ago preserved showing they were capable of conducting this reasoning with the information available to them long before the zeitgeist that compelled action to end it.
I'm totally down with the arrogant "morality is objective" viewpoint. However, I don't think it can be reasoned from first principles: I think "from first principles" gives a bad smell to almost any reasoning. I see knowledge as web-like in structure, not hierarchical, and I see moral ideas as belonging to a separate realm where they're supported by other moral ideas. (Consider that "gain" entails values, which are moral.) Some of these ideas are basal urges, but that doesn't make them superior. So, I can't agree with making historical figures at fault for their failure to arrive at a present-day state of morality by figuring everything out from first principles, because I do think it's something the culture does, gradually, as a group effort, with individuals considered "bad" only for failing to be up to speed by the standard of the time.
Incidentally, if they are to be blamed for failing to arrive at future morality by using the first-principle building blocks you suppose it to be made from, then so are we, and so are all future people, since morality is open-ended and there's always more to learn. We're all terribly guilty for not belonging to the infinitely far future, apparently.
Well, I suppose you can say "that whole society, in that place at that time, went down a morally wrong-headed path". I'm not very knowledgeable about Aztecs, for instance, but I believe they had some nasty traditions, as well as a cyclic world-view. Yet there must have been good Aztecs. (Even objectively, we have to consider things in context.)
If we were to leap 300 years into the future, I don't think it'd be very surprising what they look down on us for, presuming they've advanced in a logic-oriented direction and not, say, a relapse into purely religious doctrine, which is by no means a given to occur. We will certainly be condemned, at minimum, for our utterly inhumane treatment of animals, for our relentless exhaustion and destruction of natural resources, for our abuse of the scientific method to proclaim things as factual with studies that can't actually be replicated, and for much more.
Perhaps it would be surprising to some people who haven't thought much about it that we will likely be viewed poorly for wasting non-replenishable helium, necessary for advanced medical technology, on party balloons. But I don't think there is anything we do that we can't currently reason about being considered immoral for. I have absolutely zero doubt that George Washington would not be surprised to leap to 2025 and see someone condemning him for his slave ownership. There is nothing about living in the 1700s that would prevent him from reasoning that what he did was immoral, and indeed, many people in the 1700s did reason that.
Cultural adoption of morality moves significantly slower than reason about morality. This is because cultural adoption requires action. Humans will behave immorally even if they know their actions are immoral, for their own benefit. To counteract this requires coordinated group effort, which is an extremely slow process because, for example, convincing people that it's worth them risking death in a bloody war to stop other people from owning slaves, when they are not themselves ever at risk of being treated as a slave, is a very challenging task. That one participates in selfish, immoral actions for one's own benefit because one's society does not yet coerce one through collective threat of violence to behave morally does not absolve one of one's actions, which can already be reasoned through even if the collective will to enforce it does not yet exist.
Cultural adoption can also diverge from reason about morality completely, of course. This is because selfish people with power can use their power to enforce immoral values like absolute service to themselves, for their own benefit. If a society does not collectively overcome powerful individuals acting selfishly, then the culture's apparent morality will be warped in the service of what benefits a specific individual at the greater expense of society. However, even in such a state, people can and do reason about morality. Human history is a long, long tale of people defying immoral abuse of authority.
Is that the traditional meaning of 'great' in "great men theory"?
If so, why not just say "strong men" or "powerful men" instead?
> Is that the traditional meaning of 'great' in "great men theory"?
It isn't, though I may be tangentially speaking about Great Man Theory, I wasn't focusing on it.
> If so, why not just say "strong men" or "powerful men" instead?
I thought using "great men" gives space for virtue and a spiritual/intellectual worth, not just a morally ambiguous "power".
Blurb points to the author's other book
Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin
Suggesting that she indeed thinks of the self-made myth itself as a product of many cooks.
I'm more skeptical of her framing this mythmaking as an early but enduring model for populist strategy that was (initially) opposed by the elites of the time.
For context, a review of hers of antitax historiography asks:
How do the privileged rule a democracy without triggering a populist revolt? Scholars Steve Fraser, Gary Gerstle, and their colleagues in Ruling America (2005) see historical continuity in the exercise of the founts of riches and power at elites' disposal. The Power to Destroy astutely addresses this question without asking it directly. Even so, a longer historical perspective would have enriched Graetz's approach to analyzing a populist revolt and its destructiveness. The revolt he tracks was not triggered against the rich and powerful, but on their behalf against the progressive state. His analysis provides an invaluable and distressing new twist on the long-standing question of how the privileged rule in a democracy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955278
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691225562/th...
My own derived question is whether there are historical examples of directed-myth-making (fully adopting your balanced perspective on "individual VS communal values") servicing political goals _orthogonal_ to the populism/elitism axis
> The “great man” theory leads to the idea that 99.999% of humans are mediocre at best and we all exist to serve a tiny number of greats
I feel this take says more about the person saying it then it does about the great men theorists.
Believing that revolutions often happen due to a few individuals does not mean that you believe most people are there to serve anyone. That's a non sequitur
I think you missed OP's point. "Leads to" is the key phrase, and they're talking about how both ("Great Man" and "Inevitable Forces") theories end up being used as propaganda to support political purposes. Both (as you point out) have some truth to them, and (as you do) can be addressed objectively, but both can be transmuted into ideology,
Excellent essay
Few myths in our society are as dangerous and as anti-social as the “self made man”. No one is self made and all achievements are the result of groups of people working together.
While that may be true, there are people that move the needle more than others.
Certainly. But I can't think of anyone using an idiom like "just another cog, so don't try to do anything".
"Self-made man", "maverick", and various myths about lone geniuses and innovators without collaboration and supporters are heavily supported by (at least) American politicians and pundits.
It's obviously true that nobody achieves things in a vacuum, since we all have some level of "privilege" given to us by our economic circumstances, the level of education available to us, our luckier heritable traits, etc. But for every successful person, there are countless others born to a similar level of privilege who squandered it. The claim that everyone owes their successes to the group ignores this.
The degree to which an individual is responsible for his own success, and the degree to which fortune enables it, is as old as time. In ancient Greek philosophy (and poetry), a person's life is divided into soul, body, and fortune: one exerts control over one's soul and body, but not over one's fortune, the sum total of things external to him, such as his family and friends and money. Virtues reside in the soul, and external blessings like wealth and the support of others outside the body, and the ancient Greeks were clear in this distinction, of which both halves are necessary but insufficient to achieve great benefits for one's people. Hence the idea that happiness is the exercise of vital powers along lines of virtue within a life affording them scope: the "lines of virtue" are internal elements of character, but "a life affording them scope" is the external support necessary. A virtuous hermit living in poverty alone on an island and a ruinously depraved criminal in the midst of civilization, the one virtuous but lacking fortune and the other fortunate but lacking virtue, are equally ill-suited to achieving great benefits for mankind.
Owing your success to the group does not imply that the success itself is a guarantee. Just that without the group, the odds are many many times worse.
I would argue that the degree to which you owe something credit for your success is the degree to which it guarantees that success. If my society/group/family guarantees my success, no matter my actions, I owe it everything. If it makes no difference at all, I owe it nothing.
If it merely improves my odds, then I owe it something, but there must have been at least one other factor at play, and that factor is also owed credit. I presume you would call that factor something like "luck". No doubt that that plays a role, but credit for luck belongs neither to the society nor the individual. All that is left, then, is individual choice, and so the rest of the credit belongs to the individual.
Assuming free will actually exists, and that everything is not actually just cause and effect back to the big bang.
For the purposes of this thread we are obviously assuming free will exists. If it doesn't then achievements have no meaning and credit belongs to no one, making the whole conversation moot.
If you were to truly do a science of people would you not take into account all of the circumstances that person was in, in order to understand them?
You say: "One achieved it, but the other person in similar circumstances didn't achieve it"
Well how do their circumstances differ? Don't you think it's important how they differ? Actually, couldn't how they differ be the key?
Why, then, do you draw the line at an incomplete analysis? Maybe because it is convenient? Maybe because we'd rather not destroy our illusions of ourselves? Maybe its convenient not to understand others?
What is real in regards to ones self and others? There shouldn't be a loss of pride with understanding.
What level of analysis would you consider "complete"? Certainly if we accounted for every neuron in their brain we could reduce their achievements to whatever configuration of gray matter produced the thoughts and actions that led to their success, and whatever external events produced that configuration. But then we would be at a level of analysis that regards us all as automatons, where nobody, including the group, is accountable for anything at all. This may or may not be technically correct, but I would argue that it is not useful. The question of who gets "credit" for an achievement would be entirely moot, as would the achievement itself and everything else any human has ever done.
I would think the correct level of analysis for this conversation is the lowest one that still allows people to be accountable for their own actions. Lower than that, and the central question of this thread is irrelevant.
> could reduce their achievements to whatever configuration of gray matter
Even if we could do that it would not "reduce" any personal value. I think these are biases you may have. Accountability can be defined, even in that total view.
And right now, even in the incomplete view that we have, it is defined socially and politically. And that's what my real take is:
That the ideas that most people have of self, person-hood, achievement, merit and value, are political ideas.They are not necessarily true/accurate ideas. They serve a political purpose.
> What level of analysis would you consider "complete"?
We can go further than what we have now. In fact I think we MUST go further in order to make the world a better place.
Our current analysis is really just a cheap political tool that serves to preserve a sort of caste-system, most employed for classism and racism. That vague notion that "some people are just different" is the base for many political violations.
If anything the ideal, final form of what I am saying is this: Real Incorruptible Democracy.
So we don't need a scientific model describing of a persons thoughts in real, chemical, atomic detail, we need a world that can take peoples individual circumstance into real political consideration and action.
This could be what a real science of people is.
> They serve a political purpose.
Indeed.
> That vague notion that "some people are just different" is the base for many political violations.
As is the idea that everyone is an interchangeable unit of labor, all producing the same outputs if only they were given the same inputs.
> If anything the ideal, final form of what I am saying is this: Real Incorruptible Democracy.
I don't know what you mean by this, but I am highly skeptical of anything that claims a title like "incorruptible". Such things are usually the exact opposite, sort of like countries with "Democratic Republic" in their name or ships billed as "unsinkable".
> As is the idea that everyone is an interchangeable unit of labor, all producing the same outputs if only they were given the same inputs.
Agreed. That's why I don't believe in that. And actually that's kind of what I'm criticizing: the fake science used to judge peoples behavior.
But I do know we're way WAY more similar than our cultures would have us believe.
> I don't know what you mean by this, but I am highly skeptical of anything that claims a title like "incorruptible". Such things are usually the exact opposite, sort of like countries with "Democratic Republic" in their name or ships billed as "unsinkable".
I'm saying we can devise a political system that is incorruptible. Just like we generate mathematical proofs that underpin technologies which handle our worlds economy. But the creation of an incorruptible democracy can ONLY be done by the people who benefit from it. As in, the rich would never help us do it, only the poor. In fact, the rich would probably view us as enemies if we seriously tried.
> I'm saying we can devise a political system that is incorruptible.
Please show your work. All human history says this can't be done.
Could cryptographic voting/blockchain, which is already a reality, be a part of this new system?
I believe it will, or something similar at least.
But I am a programmer, not a cryptographer. I'm not THE guy. I'm just some random bloke trying to think about something other than making money.
if this is a possibility then we as a people should start taking it seriously. Get open source standards, software and hardware (open chips) and put it to practice.
Though I'm sure the rich would hate this. So would anyone else who has a lot to gain from controlling public offices.
A big hurdle to proper analysis is that people are unreliable narrators.
Let's take a person who made it rich betting big on bitcoin early on. Were they a savvy investor who made their own fortune, did they merely think it sounded cool and thought why not while bitcoin prices were so low that snatching them up was super cheap, did they rely on a tip or tips from friends/family, or was it some other reason?
If you come back and ask them years later after they've become worth 10^7 or better, how likely is the person who merely got lucky to admit it was dumb luck in an environment that lionizes the wealthy as self-made superhumans?
I have seen quite a few Americans saying "nobody ever gave me anything" while they were literally from upper class and their parents/families gave them a lot. And actually most people who are born rich stay rich. Some do squander it, but it takes a lot more effort to squander stuff for them then for someone who starts poor.
The "failing upwards" is an actual thing and who is around you massively influences whether you are failing upwards or downwards.
I only argued that legitimate cases of individual achievement exist. The fact that trust fund babies also exist does not contradict that.
I agree, but many will say that the ones who didn't squander it were simply lucky.
Disputing the notion of "self-made" is generally an attempt to deliberately misunderstand the point in order to derail the discussion, thus making discourse impossible.
No one who uses the term "self-made" literally believes that Howard Schultz never hired any employees at Starbucks, they mean to say that for someone who was born in the projects, he did very well for himself. Pointing out he hired employees adds no value to the discussion, so it's not why people point it out.
> for every successful person, there are countless others born to a similar level of privilege who squandered it.
Indeed.
> The claim that everyone owes their successes to the group ignores this.
This doesn't follow. Can you elaborate?
By "owe" I mean that the credit for their success belongs to the group and not the individual, because the individual was merely a product of good circumstances provided by the group. I believe this is the sentiment intended by the "no such thing as a self made man" crowd--no individual is special, and anyone else would achieve similar things under similar circumstances. This ignores the fact that many others DO enjoy similar circumstances but achieve nothing.
I see - some attribute of themselves has set them apart from the ones who had similar circumstances but squandered the opportunity. I guess it depends on how fine you track those circumstances. Did they all have that super-supportive friend named Trey that always knew then correct supportive thing to say? Personally, I can point to many times in my life where a teacher, grandparent, pastor made overt attempts to derail me. Maybe I wasn't completely derailed, but it slowed my progress and may have taken me along a less successful track for awhile. Looking back, I'm surprised I've done what I have. But I do wonder what kind of success I might have had if those naysayers had actually provided support.
Owing your success to something is not the same as saying that having the something guarantees success. I owe my love of Korean food to my time spent living in South Korea; others may live there and come away hating it.
https://archive.ph/qcQMO
As if the enemies of any person wouldn’t have a less charitable account. He may have gone too far but it’s not new at all.
"Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand." - Karl Marx
My last few comments on this site have been precisely about these ideas. These ideas, in my view, are inherent flaws of philosophical liberalism, of which modern liberalism and conservatism stem. This ideology places itself at the forefront of morality, but can't even seriously analyze the conditions of the individual.
A rich heir is self made, but a poor man is morally and spiritually bankrupt. This is how far this modern ideology goes. Totally unscientific and is also the birthplace of modern racism.
This is how far the equality goes, that is, not very far at all. The liberal revolutions of the last ~400 years must be called the aristocratic revolutions. One where the organized aristocracy came into power, and so did their morals.
One thing I noticed about marxists is that they themselves have a hierarchy surrounding the rich and poor which they imagine exists in everyone else.
In reality, hardly anyone thinks a poor man is 'spiritually bankrupt'. The main religion of the Western world says the poor man is in fact inherently better.
IDK, man, I hear Christians talk about people being misguided (spiritually) all the time. In fact I think they're the ones who say it the most.
But I actually meant it as a sort of drive (spirit), not wholly about belief (spiritual).
But also, you must take into consideration all the ill effects of poverty. Such as crime, lack of education, lack of opportunities, the emotional faults of poverty, unchecked mental health problems, anger, frustration, ills with socialization, etc. All of the effects derived from poverty. All of these get bunched up into a single shallow view of the poor: "they're just like that" - kinda tone.
While the rich get the material wealth and the status-privilege of their families, the rich are assumed to be valuable.
This is literally what the article is talking about, albeit within a more aristocratic context.
Read any thread in HN about the unhoused and it is very clear many many people think the poor deserve their condition and are lesser for being so.
Unfortunately one thing being homeless can do to you (or being a drug addict can do to you) is give you permanent brain injuries, at which point you are stuck that way.
So there's circularity.
> Andrew Jackson, the first president from the western territories and the only general to be elected president since George Washington
Do they mean up to that point? Eisenhower was elected twice
Maybe awkwardly worded but that's implied by the phrasing "since"
"Andrew Jackson is the US's best president and it's not even close" - MZ
To the downvoter: that's a direct quote from SWW's book
Go back a few generations for just about every wealthy family in the US, and it's nothing but slave (or highly exploitative) labor building on land and resources stolen from the indians. It's the uncomfortable answer behind the question of "Why do WASPs own everything?". The whole "self-made" myth is nothing but a byproduct of white guilt all the way down.
> It's the uncomfortable answer behind the question of "Why do WASPs own everything?"
The correct answer to that question is "they don't".
>The correct answer to that question is "they don't
Read the list and try to find a single non-WASP family: https://www.forbes.com/families/list/
Hang on, from a quick scan I see Koch is German in origin, Lauder is Hungarian Jewish, Pritzker is Ukranian. [edit] and DuPont is French … etc. I think you meant white, not WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant).
The very first example on your list is the Walton family. Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, grew up in nowhere Oklahoma as the child of farmers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Walton.
Show me where it says his wealth was built on your “WASP slavery money?”
Do you know anything about how Oklahoma was colonized by white farmers?
Do you know anything about it? Walton’s family wasn’t wealthy plantation owners. Whites who didn’t own slaves—which were the vast majority of them—were hurt by slavery.
Owning a lot of things and owning most of the things is a completely different thing . Obviously people who have more history in a place will be richer. This is hardly surprising.
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Not all land was stolen. Much of it was bartered and sold. Tribes also vied for the pelt trade and would drive competing tribes out. The land we took from Mexico was only Spanish and Mexican on paper. Either one had as much control over the Apache/Comanche territory as Russia had over Alaska. Also the Apaches were driven out and nearly exterminated by the Comanche who remembered that they were nearly exterminated by the Apache when they got some stray horses and learned to ride them a century or so prior. The Mexican govt, wanting a buffer against Comanches, invited colonists from eastern states to colonize Texas in order prevent the raiding the Comanches were doing.
That is most of the territory was not under any tribe’s permanent control, nor was land in the west under control of Spain or Mexico before the Americans colonized it. Also lots of tribes were sworn enemies with each other and more than happy to collaborate with Europeans to drive out their enemy tribes with fewer losses to themselves.
Native Americans were here for tens of thousands of years. If it was so easy to use Indians’ resources to build a civilization, why didn’t the Indians do it?
Your attitude is illogical cope. How could “WASPs” have gotten rich from stealing from a group of people they vastly outnumbered and who were primitive in comparison?
They did build a civilization. Which was then ravaged by diseases brought from Europe by the early explorers. By the time Europeans started settling what became the United States the native population was living in what was essentially a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Given all the raping, enslaving, pillaging, and general genociding europeans did upon arrival to North America I don’t think we can say it was the First Nations that were “primitive”
The local tribes were mostly one of two types, the nomadic (ex. Comanche) and the agricultural (Apache). The former would often raid the latter, killing many of the men and taking the women and children --often, but not always, they'd end up being their slaves. So the behavior of the Europeans you describe of the time was not out of the ordinary for the locals.
If you think those things didn't happen before the Europeans arrived, you need to think again.
They had own civilization. They lost war and were genocided out. And for the record, they had wars against themselves too, just like Europeans had wars against other Europeans.
Both slavery and territorial expansion by force were wealth builders. Both took quite a lot of time too. Both were quite barbaric from our point of view, but cruelty and violence can be wealth builder. After all, Putin is super wealthy too. Stalin ended up wealthy too. Hitler same deal. There is not much difference in there.
> Both slavery and territorial expansion by force were wealth builders.
It’s mathematically impossible for American settlers as a group to have become wealthy by expropriating wealth from Indians. Individual Indians had almost nothing—they were hunter gatherers with a small number of subsistence farmers. Nor did they have much wealth in the aggregate—their population was quite small even pre-contact. The America population in the first census was almost 4 million, which is higher than most estimates of even the pre-contact north america population. A more populous society can’t become rich by expropriating wealth from a poor, less populous society. That’s just math.
What actually happened is that the American settlers built a civilization that utilized the resources of the continent vastly more productively than the Indians had. That’s entirely different.
However, I think the Spanish can certainly be blamed
Some incredibly harrowing stories in Wade Davis's One River
There is also a chance some of the disease giving unto the native americans was by accident, not intentional
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Wait, I thought it was the Jews that owned everything?
Or was it the Freemasons?
I can’t even keep track anymore.
I can’t think of a single WASP billionaire though - maybe that’s the mind control at work?
> I can’t think of a single WASP billionaire though
Gates, Buffett, Musk ... all spring to mind.
White certainly. Anglo-Saxon doesn't mean much more than "of western/northern european ancestry" any more. Protestant as much as any other non-Catholic Christian sect.
But WASP doesn't mean literally what it means any more, so maybe I'm missing the reason you overlooked the most famous modern American-citizen billionaires?
OP meant “WASP” in the conventional sense, otherwise his point about slavery wealth doesn’t make sense. There weren’t a lot of German or Italian immigrant slave plantation owners.
So the only thing out of it they actually are is… white?
Hahahaha
I guess it depends on the original poster's intention.
If your point is that people have colloquialized "WASP", and that I fell into your trap, then OK you got me. :)
My point is that the only actual applicability I can see in its usage is just racism.
Your point is kind of boring though.
If OP had asked "why do white people hold most of the wealth in the US", the answer would be the same:
Because they arrived (first) with superior technology and made slaves or serfs (or corpses) out of the indigenous population, and seized the indigenous de facto "ownership" (or at least possession, as de jure is contextually meaningless) of vast natural resources which had previously not been exploited fully due to lack of will or ability.
That plus generational wealth and the miracle of compound interest. (And, critically, the socio-econonomic-political skills for organizing large populations!)
"WASP" was always a pejorative, meaning basically "person from one of the usual countries/cultures". It's a distinctly (originally) American label, and it has always represented the massively-entrenched established power structure.
It has evolved to mean less and less over the years. It now basically means "white, with English-speaking or adjacent ancestry".
It's also less true that true WASPs, or even white people, are the American aristocracy today than it was then. But the echoes are long and deep and hard to miss. I stand by Gates, Buffett, and Musk as modern WASPs, to the extent that the label means anything at all.
My white grandparents were poor Norwegian farmers that immigrated to North Dakota.
They benefitted about as much from what you’re describing as a modern day Nigerian immigrant was punished by it.
This is why racism is stupid and boring, because it tells you nothing useful. It’s a pointlessly broad brush to vilify or prop up someone.
Which is exactly why racism is stupid and bad. And why WASP as it is being used in this thread is self-contradictory and doesn’t even mean anything concrete except ‘white’, as has been demonstated with the various replies.
All this does is just prop up the Nazi types who can point to this kind of stupidity and go ‘see, this is why it’s good we fight back - white power’.
You appear to be on some kind of crusade here. I don't understand it, or your goals or intentions.
We can agree that racism is stupid and boring. But it's still real, and has had a great deal of influence.
If you think I'm propping up Nazis by acknowledging that "WASP" and general white privilege exist, then well, all I can say is that we live on different comprehensive planets.
So let me recap.
Your plan here is to lump a bunch of people together by skin color (but with labels theoretically only tangentially related to skin color), and blame them for a bunch of stuff most don’t really benefit from - near as I can tell, for instance, Musk made his fortune by having rich parents and being a manipulative asshole, and being white only helped a little bit - and you don’t expect a portion of them to lose their minds and fight back.
And those people, by your assertion, have most of the guns, power, and money.
How do you think that is going to work out? Do you think it is helping to calm anything down, or result in a more reasonable outcome?
And do you think that regardless of the size or quantity of bodies fed into the resulting meat grinder that Musk would suffer one bit for it, for example?
Or is this not actually helping him? By turning idiots to his side?
I have no plan. I didn't create the label. And it's not a robustly defined sociological group anyway. It's just a popular label that got applied to real and very visible thing.
Musk was born in South Africa under apartheid. Do you think his life would not be very different if he was born with different skin?
Historically, yes, white males of (select) Euro descent have wielded disproportionate power in America. Do you disagree?!?
Your plan, then, is to hide from that obvious truth because some Nazi nitwits will be so stupid as to either a) use that historical fact as a basis for their belief of how things should be now, or b) use the fact that some people are still living the effects of that history, and their lack of enthusiasm for that fact, as reason to "fight back"?
Honestly I think either of those reactions would be to coddle the Nazis. No one is served by lying about history.
Some nitwits will always interpret history in a way that serves their purposes. But their purposes are more demanding than the facts that they use to support them, and they don't care. There will always be Nazis (or adherents to some similarly absurd and evil system with a different name). Their justification for their beliefs is the only thing that will change.
Sounds like you should start working on a plan, since the same folks you seem insistent on antagonizing are the same people whose protection you are probably dependent on.
There is such a thing as being ‘dead right’, eh?
So, what is your plan?
Seriously, what the hell are you talking about?
I'm not antagonizing anyone, except possibly you (and in ways I have not been able to figure out -- What's your damage, Heather?).
If "white people have done bad things" is enough to start a race war (or whatever you are obliquely suggesting), than it's not I who will be the trigger.
I get the sense that you are hyper hyper sensitive to the word WASP. It never meant much, and isn't worth your time.
Surely Musk isn't a WASP. I think he's from Northern England (don't know why I know this.) You might as well call Paul McCartney a WASP billionaire.
Musk was born in South Africa to a wealthy diamond mine owner (Dad) and Canadian model+dietician (Mom), and is a ‘confirmed non believer’ per his own public statements. His whole family seems not particularly religious.
The extended musk family is from all over, however, including Canada, England, American, etc. but he seems pretty clearly a mongrel.
> Musk was born in South Africa to a wealthy diamond mine owner (Dad)
This is something like ~4 steps away from what happened, to the point it's not true at all. (He was a part owner in an emerald mining operation in another country, it wasn't his main business, and they were middle class.)
Btw when I say from Northern England, I mean by descent, not where he grew up.
Not that I want to get into defending him since he's killed 600k people this year.
> and is a ‘confirmed non believer’ per his own public statements.
That's as Anglican as it gets. It's like a version of Protestantism you're not supposed to believe in.
Cite? I’m just going off publicly available info. If Wikipedia and everything else I’ve read is that far off, I’d love to hear it!
https://xpresstime.com/was-elon-musk-born-rich-a-complete-20...
That's as WASPy as WASPy gets.
It's not important that the specimen is an active Protestant. The point is that their ancestry (with some decent adjacency to: white, anglo-saxon, protestant) landed them in a place of general privilege.
Musk is a WASP by any definition.
But it's always been a pejorative, and always used as a cudgel. Musk is not responsible for his ancestry. But he certainly benefited from it.
Bwahaha. So not Anglo-Saxon. Not Protestant. But somehow he is. But white.
How is this not just blatant racism again?
WASP was always a pejorative way of saying "established white European-ancestry American aristocracy".
It never applied to poor white people. It is just a label for the most common and most established phenotype in early America, up to and including the mid-20th century.
The label has lost salience over the intervening decades, but it has not faded down to be lost in the ambient level of population wealth and power.
What's your point here?
Read the thread. People definitely are applying it to white as a race, and trying to portray everyone (including poor whites) as benefitting.
It’s part of the general race war type rhetoric which has been building for awhile.
What do you think my point is?
I have no idea what your point is.
AFAICT, you intentionally goaded this thread into a dissection of WASP-vs-white, which serves zero purpose except to give you a chance to espouse something which you still haven't done, but strikes me as likely to be pretty boring after all of this.
Anyone who claims to be self made is dishonest to themselves. "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main" -John Donne