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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   2456 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 6, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Alright, here's my take as someone who sees everything as downstream from culture, be that right or wrong.

Germany had a good formula for dealing with the post-war years, minus the bits where we got over a manpower shortage by importing totally-not-permanent-guest workers from abroad. It worked in a non-globalized world with fixed borders, in which Germans unquestioningly stuck to German ways of doing things and accepted German standards and expectations as practically god-given and naturally correct. Naturally you'd get a job - any job if you can't get the one you want - and work for a living and deliver high-quality work; what kind of asshole would do any less and leave others to pick up the slack?

Obviously this state of affairs has changed.

  • Germans have by all means adopted the axiom that anyone who doesn't go to Gymnasium (the top tier of our three-tier secondary school system) is a failure. Not universally and necessarily that one must go to university and study, though very many do subscribe to that view, but there is a very noticeable class divide between those who went for the Gymnasium white-collar track and everyone else. Blue-collar work is lumped in with the asocials and unemployed, with barely-integrated immigrants and with intolerably backwards troglodytes who do and say and think all the wrong things.
  • Several generations of unchecked immigration, large-scale failure to force immigrant assimilation, and the wilful destruction of the Leitkultur have turned the lower classes into a fucking mess. Half of them are effectively foreigners who are just here because it pays, and they work only as much as absolutely necessary and only to such standards as they cannot get away with ignoring, and if possible they will work not at all. Welfare makes it possible. And the other half is ethnic Germans who wish they were migrants because being German isn't cool anymore, and why work hard and try to sustain society when everyone is just looking out for themselves? It's a race to the bottom of who can be the biggest defect-bot. And the third half is basically balkanians who are ferried here in bulk to do work that Germans and immigrants alike think themselves too good for.
  • Meanwhile, the middle and upper class try their damndest to ignore what's becoming of the country while fantasizing about emigrating to doesn't-even-matter-where.

Germany got nothing right.

Depends on where you live to some extent though. Baden Württemberg and Bavaria are full of guys in their late 20s and 30s making €75,000 a year as machine operators in factories producing some kind of industrial equipment who live in places where rent is relatively low and they can spend their weekends (and their million sick days) growing and smoking weed and a month a year in winter in Thailand with their Serbian girlfriends. Certainly a much better material condition than the Italian or Greek or British working class.

It's not really like that, although yeah, it's certainly better than in Greece or Britain.

Some unskilled 55 year old I know has been pushing a button at Porsche for 15 years, makes 30 Euros/hour base pay. He‘s being offered free early retirement packages (which are insanely good in germany). He‘s also addicted to coke and in bankruptcy proceedings, but that‘s another story.

Yes, those specialists, hard workers who do useful work, exist, but they are relatively rare and their numbers are dwindling. Most earn less, and do less useful work, and do it worse. Our material conditions are good, overall, but at the cost of burning down the commons by taxing productive members of society and growing ourselves an ever-larger underclass or outright parasites. We're being kept afloat by hyper-industrious boomers and those few who follow their example, and by leftover wealth from better years, and we have absolutely no perspective on improving our competitive position, social cohesion or working culture.

Perspective in English doesn't share the meaning [2] zeitlich: Zukunftsaussicht, Entwicklungsmöglichkeit (Wiktionary) that Perspektive has in German, just by the way.

Thanks for pointing it out, though I was aware. I just allow myself some Germanisms from time to time.

Edit: Does this sound like a lame excuse? It does. It does.

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