Jordan Peterson covers a lot of ground in his work to explain the human dominance hierarchy (the lobster thing). When I first heard him talk about that it resonated and connected the dots for almost everything we experience in human behavior in advanced society. It explains why immigrants will do work that citizens will not do. The im…
Jordan Peterson covers a lot of ground in his work to explain the human dominance hierarchy (the lobster thing). When I first heard him talk about that it resonated and connected the dots for almost everything we experience in human behavior in advanced society. It explains why immigrants will do work that citizens will not do. The immigrant sees the work as advancing their perceived social status. The citizen sees the work as below their perceived social status.
However, the citizen that perceives the work as below their perceived social status is correct only if social status is provided for demonstrated social hierarchy value other than productive returns. And this is what we have done with generations that have a college degree, no useful job skills and a bucket of student debt. They FEEL that their degree has advanced their social status and refuse work beneath that social status. But what the fail to understand is that their social status compared to someone without a college degree who is working their way to greater prosperity is actually lower and will continue to decline unless they get their ass in gear and focus on working and a career.
First, humans are not lobsters, and while our chicken-hearted (poultry pecking orders are brutal!) drive to be top bird and peck those beneath us may be natural, it's one of those natural things that isn't good. I'm not calling for the abolition of hierarchy: hierarchy can be an efficient means of organizing information and effort. But status as an end in itself is Satanic. Your impatience with status-seeking that strikes you as obviously unworthy (that of YouTube influencer, for example) suggests you recognize this yourself in some cases.
(That said, when I was stuck in focused protection figuring out how to cut my kids' own hair, I did benefit from tutorials by YouTube influencers showing off their DIY haircut how-tos. The status-heavy attention economy they've entered may be Satanic, but their work be more useful than you'd suppose.)
Second, regarding college degree and status, you might overlook how much obligation to others, rather than vain self-importance, might motivate youth to turn down "honest work" to complete a credentialing process that they've been taught from the cradle to regard as a "success sequence".
I worked so hard temping for a landscaping crew one summer the owner offered to make me partner — provided I quit college. In some respects, the offer was tempting: I liked the work and, since I'd already accumulated some medical debt, I could use the cash. On the other hand, I felt obligated to my family and future to complete my degree, which was in a demanding subject with higher expected returns than landscaping. And, in hindsight, I would have made an unreliable landscaper anyhow, since, unbeknownst to me at the time, underlying connective-tissue disease meant I couldn't sustain my summer's pace of work year in and out, year after year.
I did not, personally, feel landscaping was "beneath" me. But I certainly faced the social expectation — including costs already sunk into a degree — that it would be!
As it happened, while the landscaper I worked for was honest, the temp company responsible for paying me was not, and would end up preferring bankruptcy over actually paying workers like me. So there I was at the end of summer, the hardworking sucker with mounting medical debt, who'd also "foolishly" turned down paying work for degree prospects — but not, I think, out of personal snobbery.
Simply put, I'd had the kind of experience that teaches that rewards for hard work cannot be counted on. There's evidence that children who "fail" the "marshmallow test" accumulate such experiences from an early age:
At any rate, people can learn through experience that hard work won't be rewarded. In the revisited marshmallow experiment, this was done by experimenters repeatedly promising children a reward and then reneging. It wasn't done by teaching the kids the hard stuff was "beneath them".
As Eve Tushnet points out, the "bloodless moralism" of conflating virtue with the success sequence has problems!:
Jordan Peterson covers a lot of ground in his work to explain the human dominance hierarchy (the lobster thing). When I first heard him talk about that it resonated and connected the dots for almost everything we experience in human behavior in advanced society. It explains why immigrants will do work that citizens will not do. The immigrant sees the work as advancing their perceived social status. The citizen sees the work as below their perceived social status.
However, the citizen that perceives the work as below their perceived social status is correct only if social status is provided for demonstrated social hierarchy value other than productive returns. And this is what we have done with generations that have a college degree, no useful job skills and a bucket of student debt. They FEEL that their degree has advanced their social status and refuse work beneath that social status. But what the fail to understand is that their social status compared to someone without a college degree who is working their way to greater prosperity is actually lower and will continue to decline unless they get their ass in gear and focus on working and a career.
Two things:
First, humans are not lobsters, and while our chicken-hearted (poultry pecking orders are brutal!) drive to be top bird and peck those beneath us may be natural, it's one of those natural things that isn't good. I'm not calling for the abolition of hierarchy: hierarchy can be an efficient means of organizing information and effort. But status as an end in itself is Satanic. Your impatience with status-seeking that strikes you as obviously unworthy (that of YouTube influencer, for example) suggests you recognize this yourself in some cases.
(That said, when I was stuck in focused protection figuring out how to cut my kids' own hair, I did benefit from tutorials by YouTube influencers showing off their DIY haircut how-tos. The status-heavy attention economy they've entered may be Satanic, but their work be more useful than you'd suppose.)
Second, regarding college degree and status, you might overlook how much obligation to others, rather than vain self-importance, might motivate youth to turn down "honest work" to complete a credentialing process that they've been taught from the cradle to regard as a "success sequence".
I worked so hard temping for a landscaping crew one summer the owner offered to make me partner — provided I quit college. In some respects, the offer was tempting: I liked the work and, since I'd already accumulated some medical debt, I could use the cash. On the other hand, I felt obligated to my family and future to complete my degree, which was in a demanding subject with higher expected returns than landscaping. And, in hindsight, I would have made an unreliable landscaper anyhow, since, unbeknownst to me at the time, underlying connective-tissue disease meant I couldn't sustain my summer's pace of work year in and out, year after year.
I did not, personally, feel landscaping was "beneath" me. But I certainly faced the social expectation — including costs already sunk into a degree — that it would be!
As it happened, while the landscaper I worked for was honest, the temp company responsible for paying me was not, and would end up preferring bankruptcy over actually paying workers like me. So there I was at the end of summer, the hardworking sucker with mounting medical debt, who'd also "foolishly" turned down paying work for degree prospects — but not, I think, out of personal snobbery.
Simply put, I'd had the kind of experience that teaches that rewards for hard work cannot be counted on. There's evidence that children who "fail" the "marshmallow test" accumulate such experiences from an early age:
https://ricochet.com/228454/archives/un-teaching-grit-the-marshmallow-test-revisited/
At any rate, people can learn through experience that hard work won't be rewarded. In the revisited marshmallow experiment, this was done by experimenters repeatedly promising children a reward and then reneging. It wasn't done by teaching the kids the hard stuff was "beneath them".
As Eve Tushnet points out, the "bloodless moralism" of conflating virtue with the success sequence has problems!:
https://ifstudies.org/blog/whats-wrong-with-the-success-sequence