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I’ve had the same shift and it’s coincided with me becoming, in chronological order, someone with a hard but well-paid job, a homeowner, a husband, and a father. None of that is easy, and it takes takes basically all of my time and mental energy to keep the whole thing standing up. Of course it is very satisfying and rewarding too.
In little breaks I have in my otherwise full schedule of carefully tending my garden, I notice that most people around me are just like me, showing up, working hard, earnestly trying to do their best. They’re all types, from the banker to the software engineer to the plumber to the Mexican immigrant lining up outside Home Depot looking for work while his wife works in the nail salon. Life is hard but most people show up and do their best, and end up doing okay.
And then you see the few people who at best just don’t give a fuck and can’t be bothered, or at worst actively make things worse for everybody else. In any sane society, these are the Bad Guys and would be treated like the Bad Guys. We’d be taking these people off the streets, we’d be keeping them away from our communities, and we’d be screaming at them for their absurd anti-social behavior.
But instead, especially in coastal big blue cities like where I live, society and government is entirely, 100% engaged in excusing and enabling them, while me and the banker and the plumber and the immigrant day laborer pay for it and told to smile while we do it. The only time we can get law enforcement to do anything is when their anti-social behavior is bad enough that it could hypothetically harm them (they don’t have any property, so property crime isn’t punishable).
Everybody else is out there busting their ass and it feels like the government always takes the other guy’s side. It’s so frustrating and absurd.
I teach at a big university. Class compositions are always like: 15% of students are awesome and are thrilled to be there and go above and beyond. 70% are good and do the work. 15% don’t give a shit. It’s hard to strike a balance between giving the best students more challenging and enriching material and keeping the worst students on track with the basics. In particular, you’re worried about leaving behind an earnest try-hard who just happens to kind of suck or be behind for reasons beyond his control.
My senior colleagues gave me the following advice which I’ve realized is absolutely right: conduct the class 100% for the benefit of the best students. They want to be in the class. They’ll benefit the most. And guess what, there are basically zero earnest try-hards who land in the bottom 15%.
I don’t know why we can run society in the same way. Run society for the benefit of the people who choose to participate productively in society. I know there’s this mythical class of people who would love to participate in productive society but their circumstances have done them wrong; if only they got the right social worker they could turn things around. But more and more I become convinced that almost all people who are out there shitting on other people’s lawns are just going to be lawn shitters no matter what we do and we need to get them as far away from our lawns, and my family, as possible.
I blame Hollywood for that, people are too stupid to avoid being influenced by movies (Good Will Hunting et al). For another example we have the case of silencers in guns.
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"Social Justice" is why. If you run society for the benefit of the productive people, there will be some people who don't or can't contribute. To put it as mildly as possible, advocates for those who don't or can't contribute would strongly object to removing those people from society. Take a look at graphs showing lifetime net consumption of government benefits. Any government policy has to account for the fact that the bottom 15% of the population is functionally incapable of participating in civil society.
Yes.
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What subject do you teach to get that level of participation post-Covid?
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