Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id592412900
“I suffered, so why should anyone else feel entitled to not suffer?”
✏️ This represents a certain value maybe that the US society has. It pops up whenever there are efforts to help segments of people get uplifted, get a burden removed, get debt cancelled, or basically get any form of assistance that’s not born of individual hard work and rather a helping hand from above. More highlights below… 🔗 View Highlight
id592413093
it somewhat poses as an argument about justice. That is, it’s not fair for these people to get their student debt paid off when I had to go through years and years of struggling to try and pay off my mine. But you have a sense that it’s not grounded in a deep theory of justice.
✏️ People bring it up as a form of justice.. that it’s somehow unjust to allow some people to be relieved of suffering, while others suffered in the past for the same reason. 🔗 View Highlight
id592413234
it’s very hard to accept that you live in a world where many people experience extremely unfair things that they don’t deserve, then die, and nobody ever fixed it. The wrong was never righted.
✏️ People subscribe to this Just World theory.. and so on the extreme end of it, if they see someone suffering, they think that person must’ve deserved it for some reason not apparent at the moment. They can’t/don’t want to accept the idea of a world where bad things happen to innocent people. Poor and homeless people somehow deserve the situation they’re in.. while rich people obviously must’ve done good things to get where they are. It’s the ultimate propaganda machine, where we experience the output of it all the time without needing the process itself. 🔗 View Highlight
id592413974
“pull yourself up by your bootstraps” is intended to be an absurdity because you literally can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
id592413976
There’s nothing more American than having this extreme capitalism understood as absurdity until it’s understood as rich—the perfect progress.
id592414032
meritocracy, invented as a satirical term. The guy who invented the term wrote this book about this absurd, dystopian idea of the meritocracy,
✏️ followup on this bit of satire turned propaganda 🔗 View Highlight
id592414269
this entire narrative is called the “Horatio Alger story,” meaning something totally different: “rags to riches,” “surviving on their own two feet,” and the cleverness of these young men.
✏️ I guess another satire to propaganda is the Horatio Alger stories.. where the books show a young man getting help from rich older men (who may or may not be wanting sexual favors).. and yet now the stories are held up as rags to riches stories. 🔗 View Highlight
id592414717
we all depend on other people, and none of us actually do make it on our own. We’re not saying you should have made it on your own. But as you point to throughout, there’s something quite cruel about making people feel as if their failures are their own fault, and that if they had been better and worked harder, everything would have been different.
✏️ Dependence is not bad. It’s interdependence really.. we all rely on each other and that’s a good thing. 🔗 View Highlight
id592415228
the “dystopian social safety net,” which you’ve defined as “things that help people out of their situations, but shouldn’t have to exist in the first place.”
✏️ Things like how one third of gofundme campaigns are for medical expenses.. how 12 million Americans are trying to help thru this campaigns get medical costs paid. Consider any “solutions” made to curb homelessness that isn’t outright giving people homes.. or volunteers in general. Volunteerism shouldn’t have to exist but does because of the gaps that exist. 🔗 View Highlight
id592416106
The whole thing was about how the 9-to-5 is not enough, and you need a side hustle or something.
✏️ Dolly Parton reframing her old 9 to 5 song to say that, nope that’s not enough anymore.. you need to side hustle and work all the time now.. and that’s somehow a good thing! And she did this for a company (Squarespace). 🔗 View Highlight
id592416378
“dependence” is not a negative word, but the central characteristic of a society where everyone needs everyone else.
✏️ the goal of changing a society’s value 🔗 View Highlight
id592416464
Darwin has obviously been taken for most of this century as somebody who was interested in survival of the fittest, but he wrote about mutual sympathy and how life is dependent on one another—not just interdependent, but dependent. We live in mutual sympathy. It’s a biologically natural state, for humans and for all kinds of creatures, to live in a state of blameless dependence.
✏️ The picking and choosing of what people want to agree with. Darwin is always quoted about survival of the fittest.. but he also talked about dependence as a biologically natural state. 🔗 View Highlight