On the paradox of perpetual betterness...
...so, Fark headline:
"I spent 95 percent of my union-work time defending the incompetents, the lazy, the malingers and the malcontents. And they got paid the same as my fellow workers who showed up every day and gave their all to the job"
The guy who says this thinks it's because of unions. But that's not the real problem.
The real problem is that he thinks he's better than everyone else.
But that's not an uncommon assessment: Most people do, especially at their own jobs.
Follow me here: You have what's called the Dunning-Kruger effect, wherein the average person thinks that they're above average at what they do, even if they're incompetent. Basically, they don't know enough to know how they're doing, so they think they're doing well. Meanwhile, those who do very good think they do shitty, because they also don't know enough to know how they're doing. They're also have one more quality than the average person: humility.
...and that lack of humility leads us to the flip side: Since the average person thinks they're above average at what they do, their swelled head leads them to believe that everybody else is worse than they are at their job. Even if it can be directly proven that they aren't, they still think it.
Now, combine the two above facts with the cognitive dissonance of remembering every negative event and forgetting every neutral or positive event, and you have statements like the Fark headline above.
The problem?
Quite often, those swelled heads start talking about what people "deserve". And to me, "deserve" is a four-letter word.
Basically, people get offended when people who appear to do less than they are are doing better than they are. They've been taught that hard work will get you places, and many were taught that through the church with the so-called "prosperity gospel": That hard work and prayer will get you riches here on earth. Never mind the fact that most Scripture absolutely eschews personal wealth, only focusing what happens after you die. In fact, the earliest Christians were hermits and monks; only Catholicism's rise changed that, and the thought that God and Jesus want to make your material life better. They didn't go all the way, and thus the splinter groups.
Anyway, onward back to the premise (sorry, Mort). You've got people who mostly think they're doing better than they really are...they think they're working hard, and many are, I'll grant you. And they think most people aren't working as hard as they are, which may or may not be true. So what do they go after? The social safety nets. Why? Because they prop up the "lazy". Unemployment, to them, only makes people sit on those glorious checks (which always seem to be bigger than theirs...) rather than look for a job. Welfare? Yeah, that black chick with all that stuff I can't afford is on welfare, so why should we have it ever? (Note the subtle racism: The lazy ones are almost always black, unless you know them.) They don't seem to get that the "lazies" and the "gamers" are the outliers, and the normal person on unemployment is someone who got laid off from a job very much like theirs, and the average person on welfare didn't qualify for unemployment and needs money for their children and can't wait for a callback from one of their own many interviews, and that they could be next on either of them.
And the reason? Because they're better than those lazies on welfare and unemployment. Because they have a job, and they're hard workers...only guys like the guy in the headline don't think that. Those guys think the people who think they're hard workers are lazy, and the only reason they're around is those damned unions...except in places where there are no unions, in which case they must have friends in the company or something. And this paradox where everybody's better than everybody else is the crux of most of the reasons why we can't beef up our healthcare so that everyone has some sort of coverage, and why we can't get people to want to raise taxes, especially on the rich (but I'll be in that tax bracket someday!), and why everyone wants to cut the budget in the social services, but no one wants to cut the budget in anywhere else (Those damned lazies don't deserve a dime! But we need to spend more on our military than the rest of the world combined for protection!)
In short, the paradox is why we're in the rut we're in. And if we can't get out of it, if we can't aid our fellow men instead of condeming them and trying to cut them off at the knees when they try to stand on their own...that, more than anything else, will be the fall of the United States of America.
"I spent 95 percent of my union-work time defending the incompetents, the lazy, the malingers and the malcontents. And they got paid the same as my fellow workers who showed up every day and gave their all to the job"
The guy who says this thinks it's because of unions. But that's not the real problem.
The real problem is that he thinks he's better than everyone else.
But that's not an uncommon assessment: Most people do, especially at their own jobs.
Follow me here: You have what's called the Dunning-Kruger effect, wherein the average person thinks that they're above average at what they do, even if they're incompetent. Basically, they don't know enough to know how they're doing, so they think they're doing well. Meanwhile, those who do very good think they do shitty, because they also don't know enough to know how they're doing. They're also have one more quality than the average person: humility.
...and that lack of humility leads us to the flip side: Since the average person thinks they're above average at what they do, their swelled head leads them to believe that everybody else is worse than they are at their job. Even if it can be directly proven that they aren't, they still think it.
Now, combine the two above facts with the cognitive dissonance of remembering every negative event and forgetting every neutral or positive event, and you have statements like the Fark headline above.
The problem?
Quite often, those swelled heads start talking about what people "deserve". And to me, "deserve" is a four-letter word.
Basically, people get offended when people who appear to do less than they are are doing better than they are. They've been taught that hard work will get you places, and many were taught that through the church with the so-called "prosperity gospel": That hard work and prayer will get you riches here on earth. Never mind the fact that most Scripture absolutely eschews personal wealth, only focusing what happens after you die. In fact, the earliest Christians were hermits and monks; only Catholicism's rise changed that, and the thought that God and Jesus want to make your material life better. They didn't go all the way, and thus the splinter groups.
Anyway, onward back to the premise (sorry, Mort). You've got people who mostly think they're doing better than they really are...they think they're working hard, and many are, I'll grant you. And they think most people aren't working as hard as they are, which may or may not be true. So what do they go after? The social safety nets. Why? Because they prop up the "lazy". Unemployment, to them, only makes people sit on those glorious checks (which always seem to be bigger than theirs...) rather than look for a job. Welfare? Yeah, that black chick with all that stuff I can't afford is on welfare, so why should we have it ever? (Note the subtle racism: The lazy ones are almost always black, unless you know them.) They don't seem to get that the "lazies" and the "gamers" are the outliers, and the normal person on unemployment is someone who got laid off from a job very much like theirs, and the average person on welfare didn't qualify for unemployment and needs money for their children and can't wait for a callback from one of their own many interviews, and that they could be next on either of them.
And the reason? Because they're better than those lazies on welfare and unemployment. Because they have a job, and they're hard workers...only guys like the guy in the headline don't think that. Those guys think the people who think they're hard workers are lazy, and the only reason they're around is those damned unions...except in places where there are no unions, in which case they must have friends in the company or something. And this paradox where everybody's better than everybody else is the crux of most of the reasons why we can't beef up our healthcare so that everyone has some sort of coverage, and why we can't get people to want to raise taxes, especially on the rich (but I'll be in that tax bracket someday!), and why everyone wants to cut the budget in the social services, but no one wants to cut the budget in anywhere else (Those damned lazies don't deserve a dime! But we need to spend more on our military than the rest of the world combined for protection!)
In short, the paradox is why we're in the rut we're in. And if we can't get out of it, if we can't aid our fellow men instead of condeming them and trying to cut them off at the knees when they try to stand on their own...that, more than anything else, will be the fall of the United States of America.