This problem is RAMPANT in the DCUM crowd

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08/27/2019 11:19

Subject: This problem is RAMPANT in the DCUM crowd

quote

Anonymous

https://palladiummag.com/2019/08/05/the-real-problem-at-yale-is-not-free-speech/

Teach your kids REALNESS, people, not this fluffy "we make 300k a year and are poor crap because COL is high" I see all over DCUM. One person CAN make a difference, and guess what, you ARE elite and need your kids to be raised with that knowledge.

"On the surface, there is nothing wrong with haphazard and sometimes warped class signaling. But if you put on a façade for long enough, you end up forgetting that it is a façade. The rich and powerful actually start believing that they are neither of those things. They actually start believing that there is not much difference in status and resources between themselves and the upper-middle class, the middle class—and eventually, between themselves and the actual poor. They forget that they have certain privileges and duties that others do not. They forget that the inside joke was just a joke all along.

When do the rich lose sight of their status? For most people, it starts well before Yale. One incident stands out from my high school years. I had attended a summer program at the Center for Talented Youth at Princeton and befriended a well-spoken boy of 17 from Hartford. The other students mocked him—not for being poor, but for being too rich. They would elevate their voices into a high-pitched taunt to mock his prestigious prep-school. I was angry, but didn’t know what to say at the time. I had no idea that these students were themselves from Harvard-Westlake, a prestigious and prohibitively expensive private school in Beverly Hills. I had no idea that these kids were even richer than the boy they were mocking. The only difference was that my friend showed the tells of his class.

When these kids grow up, they end up at conferences where everybody lifts their champagne glasses to speeches about how we all need to “tear down the Man!” How we need to usurp conventional power structures.

You hear about these events. They sound good. It’s important to think about how to improve the world. But when you look around at the men and women in their suits and dresses, with their happy, hopeful expressions, you notice that these are the exact same people with the power—they are the Man supposedly causing all those problems that they are giving feel-good speeches about. They are the kids from Harvard-Westlake who never realized they were themselves the elite. They are the people with power who fail to comprehend the meaning of that power. They are abdicating responsibility, and they don’t even know it.

Normal class dynamics shouldn’t trouble anyone. It doesn’t do much damage to society for the rich to sometimes hide their status to stay safe, or for the poor to pretend that they are richer than they are to fit in with their idols.

But something else is going on—something more systemic. We mock each other over wealth and mannerisms, to the point that we forget how and why wealth is built in the first place. We forget the extent of our own power and start blaming an ephemeral elite beyond ourselves for the ills of society. And when something does need to be challenged in elite thought, not in the fake, recuperated way that Greta Thunberg ritually challenges an already-supportive crowd at Davos, but in the real way that carries personal risk—we bail. When we see an unfashionable truth that may risk criticism or ostracism, we forget our own position of strength and assume we cannot bear those risks. We give up the fight before it even starts—as if somebody else can or will fight it.

That is what can lead to societal dysfunction. But it is also a symptom of that dysfunction."