Slave to the Grind

It means that rather than letting the modern age shape you, you decide to shape it — that when it pushes, you push back.

It means joining a countercultural movement which aims to reassert the will, “revolt against the enervating banality of the age,” protest against excess softness, stultifying complacency, and bureaucratic boredom. Its purpose is to revive a race of decisive, stoic, men who are strong in body, mind, and soul. Men who love struggle more than comfort. Who desire boldness over blandness, who hold a “fascination with a world beyond the boundaries of modern safety and routine.” Men who wish to choose initiative over self-indulgent passivity, independence over dependence, becoming over being, and the “elevation of strenuous effort over self-absorbed thought.” Men who relish obstacles and eschew lopsided development in favor of cultivating the whole man.

Members of a fraternity of Promethean masculinity.

Masters instead of slaves.

Adherents of TR’s “cult of strenuosity.”

паће wrote:На целу ту хај тек, финансијску и осталу булументу у вишим ешалонима корпорација, хај тек фирми пред изласком на берзу или под притиском улагача, на добар део Менхетна и Силицијумске долине и слично. Тамо тај сентимент можда још увек и опстаје у неком облику. Остатак света има сасвим друге проблеме.

Let me illustrate my idea more concretely. There is nothing to make one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should toil and suffer pain. The planetary conditions once for all are such, and we can stand it. But that so many men, by mere accidents of birth and opportunity, should have a life of nothing else but toil and pain and hardness and inferiority imposed upon them, should have no vacation, while others natively no more deserving never get any taste of this campaigning life at all, — this is capable of arousing indignation in reflective minds. It may end by seeming shameful to all of us that some of us have nothing but campaigning, and others nothing but unmanly ease. If now — and this is my idea — there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.

To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers

meritocratic competition

But meritocracy goes beyond this in limiting the possibilities of politics. A friend of mine at an Ivy League university teaches business students about John Rawls in a class on politics and leadership. The students are with Rawls when it comes to equality of opportunity. And some of them, especially the liberal ones, are with him on the idea that one doesn’t simply deserve whatever the market determines. But when Rawls gets to the parts about how people don’t deserve their natural talents, and how society should have a veto over their claims to their intelligence, the wheels come off the bus. It is almost impossible to get elite students to understand that there could be other ways of thinking about society than as a hierarchy of talent, with rewards allotted as such. If the point of politics is merely to get the best people into the most important positions, then it is beyond its scope to help those at lower stations, let alone empower them. At most, this kind of thinking leads to a neoliberal politics of pity and charity—of means-tested welfare—and the hope that the children of meritocracy’s losers might get a different roll of the dice.

Lev Abalkin wrote:meritokratija u stranim firmama, ajte molim vas

William Murderface wrote:Naglasio sam da ne mislim na meritokratiju kao praksu (ona u punom smislu ne postoji nigde, ili samo u uskim stratumima, kao što kažeš, i opet, ne samo u Srbiji) - nego kao na dominantnu ideologiju - način na koji uspešni, ali i oni manje uspešni, vide sebe - prvi kao zaslužene pobednike koji su sve zaradili sa svojih deset prstiju, drugi kao gubitnike koji se nisu dovoljno trudili. Ovo je gledište koje se sve više širi i u Srbiji i neizbežni je pratilac tržišne ekonomije (čak i one vrlo nesavršeno tržišne kakva je Srbija) i marketizacije talenata i sposobnosti. Rastuća popularnost DJB je jasan idnikator toga.