The vulgar materialism of progressive philosophy
The following article comes to me by way of Linda. It's titled, "The Preposterous Reality: 25 Hedge Fund Managers Are Worth 680,000 Teachers (Who Teach 13 Million Students)".
In 2009, the worst economic year for working people since the Great Depression, the top 25 hedge fund managers walked off with an average of $1 billion each. With the money those 25 people “earned,” we could have hired 658,000 entry level teachers. (They make about $38,000 a year, including benefits.) Those educators could have brought along over 13 million young people, assuming a class size of 20. That’s some value.
Apparently the 25 hedge managers did something that is even more valued in our society.
The very title is glaring in its blatant materialism and fixation on money. Since when is a man's moral or metaphysical worth determined by the size of his bank account? Sure, a hedge fund manager has a lot more money than a teacher. So what? What on Earth does that have to do the relative value of the hedge fund manager or the teacher as people? Don't Progressives themselves teach us not to judge people based on how much money they have? Don't they argue against conflating a person's moral worth with their financial worth? Isn't that exactly what they're doing in getting outraged at the fact that one doesn't match the other?
Ironic, isn't it, how the progressive movement considers wealth to be such a social ill, yet is fixated on it? It reminds me of how it's often said that the Catholic church is obsessed with sex because of the degree to which they lose their shit about it.
Look, of course a hedge fund manager has way more money than a teacher. A hedge fund manager moves money around for a living, primarily into his own bank account. He spends every moment of his day doing so.
A hedge fund manager has a comparatively enormous amount of money for the same reason that a professional musician has a comparatively enormous amount of stage time, or a computer programmer has a comparatively enormous number of lines of attributed code, or a teacher has a comparatively enormous number of students he's taught. Cranking out those deliverables is what they do. All day. Every day. Of course they produce more of their respective deliverable than people who aren't working on producing that deliverable. The statement is tautological. In short: fucking duh!
To generalize a formula first established by the Beatles, "The X you take is equal to the X you make." If you're a musician, your life will be filled with music. If you're a technologist, your life will be filled with technology. If you're a banker, your life will be filled with money. It's simple cause and effect. If you don't understand that, then you're just stupid. I'm sorry, but it's true.
So, think about how vulgar, how base, how mentally decrepit one must be to resent the hedge fund manager for his accumulation of wealth - to fail to see it as the logical consequence of spending a career focused on the singular task of accumulating wealth. Only a pathological fixation on the size of a person's bank account, an shakeable belief that a person's worth is determined by their material fortune, can possibly explain the sense of outrage expressed in that AlterNet article.
Really, AlterNet? You believe that "society" is saying that 25 hedge fund managers are "worth" the same as 680,000 teachers? Then apparently you believe that "society" allocates money to people based on the degree to which "society" values those people.
And that is so not how it works.
There is no correlation between how much money a person makes or has, and their "value" to "society". That correlation is something you apparently want. That correlation is also something you scold others (and rightly so) for believing.
But the reason there is no such correlation is because there is no such creature as "society".
You seem to believe that we live in a world in which a parent or a teacher or a God grades you and gives you stickers based on some kind of objective metric of your performance. And of course we expect the nameless, faceless authority figure to be fair and impartial and to grant reward in proportion to merit.
That's adorable.
Of course it's natural for you to think so. That's how we spend the first 18 to 22 years of our lives, under the power and protection of our parents and teachers.
But in the real world, there is no such being. There is no parent, no teacher, no God. There's just you and 6 billion other schmucks, each of us trying our hardest to live as best as we can. And ideas such as reward-for-merit, and appeal to a fair and impartial higher power, and especially the fallacy of equating dollar signs with little gold stickers, are all just recipes for living a very bitter, angry life.
I will agree with one thing the article states, though:
"It’s going to take a lot of political will - over a long period of time - to reorder our most basic economic values."
Yes, yes it will. See, the problem is exactly that most Americans alive today do in fact believe that money represents your worth, and they do believe that a just society is one in which teachers make more money than bankers -- a statement that is as preposterous as suggesting that bankers should have more time spent on stage than actors or musicians.
The problem is that the Progressives are actually substantially winning this meme war, whether they know it or not. Most Americans, I think, do believe that Society is some kind of higher power that is trying to pay people based on merit, and most Americans think that Society is acting unfairly in paying hedge fund managers more than teachers.
But there is no person or institution named "Society". Nobody has ever received a check or direct deposit from Society.
Plenty of people, of course, do in fact receive checks from the government, and far too many Americans fail to understand that government is neither an embodiment of Society nor a proxy for a parent or teacher.
Yet many, many Americans would like to see Government take on this role. There's a great many of my countrymen who believe it would be a good thing for Government to assess each individual's value to Society and pay that individual accordingly. This is called Communism. And while its basic mathematical failings will be a topic for another time, the most important and relevant failing of Communism here is more holistic: the simple observation that, if Government acts as an embodiment of Society, and Government is responsible for assessing an individual's worth based on that individual's contribution to Society, then what we're really talking about is a State that directly assesses and employs people based on their value to the State. Hasn't mankind already tried that many, many times? And hasn't each time turned out to be a really bad idea? I just wish you'd freaking learn from history already. But maybe you can't, because as we've already established, you're just stupid.
In 2009, the worst economic year for working people since the Great Depression, the top 25 hedge fund managers walked off with an average of $1 billion each. With the money those 25 people “earned,” we could have hired 658,000 entry level teachers. (They make about $38,000 a year, including benefits.) Those educators could have brought along over 13 million young people, assuming a class size of 20. That’s some value.
Apparently the 25 hedge managers did something that is even more valued in our society.
The very title is glaring in its blatant materialism and fixation on money. Since when is a man's moral or metaphysical worth determined by the size of his bank account? Sure, a hedge fund manager has a lot more money than a teacher. So what? What on Earth does that have to do the relative value of the hedge fund manager or the teacher as people? Don't Progressives themselves teach us not to judge people based on how much money they have? Don't they argue against conflating a person's moral worth with their financial worth? Isn't that exactly what they're doing in getting outraged at the fact that one doesn't match the other?
Ironic, isn't it, how the progressive movement considers wealth to be such a social ill, yet is fixated on it? It reminds me of how it's often said that the Catholic church is obsessed with sex because of the degree to which they lose their shit about it.
Look, of course a hedge fund manager has way more money than a teacher. A hedge fund manager moves money around for a living, primarily into his own bank account. He spends every moment of his day doing so.
A hedge fund manager has a comparatively enormous amount of money for the same reason that a professional musician has a comparatively enormous amount of stage time, or a computer programmer has a comparatively enormous number of lines of attributed code, or a teacher has a comparatively enormous number of students he's taught. Cranking out those deliverables is what they do. All day. Every day. Of course they produce more of their respective deliverable than people who aren't working on producing that deliverable. The statement is tautological. In short: fucking duh!
To generalize a formula first established by the Beatles, "The X you take is equal to the X you make." If you're a musician, your life will be filled with music. If you're a technologist, your life will be filled with technology. If you're a banker, your life will be filled with money. It's simple cause and effect. If you don't understand that, then you're just stupid. I'm sorry, but it's true.
So, think about how vulgar, how base, how mentally decrepit one must be to resent the hedge fund manager for his accumulation of wealth - to fail to see it as the logical consequence of spending a career focused on the singular task of accumulating wealth. Only a pathological fixation on the size of a person's bank account, an shakeable belief that a person's worth is determined by their material fortune, can possibly explain the sense of outrage expressed in that AlterNet article.
Really, AlterNet? You believe that "society" is saying that 25 hedge fund managers are "worth" the same as 680,000 teachers? Then apparently you believe that "society" allocates money to people based on the degree to which "society" values those people.
And that is so not how it works.
There is no correlation between how much money a person makes or has, and their "value" to "society". That correlation is something you apparently want. That correlation is also something you scold others (and rightly so) for believing.
But the reason there is no such correlation is because there is no such creature as "society".
You seem to believe that we live in a world in which a parent or a teacher or a God grades you and gives you stickers based on some kind of objective metric of your performance. And of course we expect the nameless, faceless authority figure to be fair and impartial and to grant reward in proportion to merit.
That's adorable.
Of course it's natural for you to think so. That's how we spend the first 18 to 22 years of our lives, under the power and protection of our parents and teachers.
But in the real world, there is no such being. There is no parent, no teacher, no God. There's just you and 6 billion other schmucks, each of us trying our hardest to live as best as we can. And ideas such as reward-for-merit, and appeal to a fair and impartial higher power, and especially the fallacy of equating dollar signs with little gold stickers, are all just recipes for living a very bitter, angry life.
I will agree with one thing the article states, though:
"It’s going to take a lot of political will - over a long period of time - to reorder our most basic economic values."
Yes, yes it will. See, the problem is exactly that most Americans alive today do in fact believe that money represents your worth, and they do believe that a just society is one in which teachers make more money than bankers -- a statement that is as preposterous as suggesting that bankers should have more time spent on stage than actors or musicians.
The problem is that the Progressives are actually substantially winning this meme war, whether they know it or not. Most Americans, I think, do believe that Society is some kind of higher power that is trying to pay people based on merit, and most Americans think that Society is acting unfairly in paying hedge fund managers more than teachers.
But there is no person or institution named "Society". Nobody has ever received a check or direct deposit from Society.
Plenty of people, of course, do in fact receive checks from the government, and far too many Americans fail to understand that government is neither an embodiment of Society nor a proxy for a parent or teacher.
Yet many, many Americans would like to see Government take on this role. There's a great many of my countrymen who believe it would be a good thing for Government to assess each individual's value to Society and pay that individual accordingly. This is called Communism. And while its basic mathematical failings will be a topic for another time, the most important and relevant failing of Communism here is more holistic: the simple observation that, if Government acts as an embodiment of Society, and Government is responsible for assessing an individual's worth based on that individual's contribution to Society, then what we're really talking about is a State that directly assesses and employs people based on their value to the State. Hasn't mankind already tried that many, many times? And hasn't each time turned out to be a really bad idea? I just wish you'd freaking learn from history already. But maybe you can't, because as we've already established, you're just stupid.