Hahahahahahaha.
No, meritocrat-twat, you get paid well because the people you’re working for are toxically wealthy. Do the same job for poor people, not on a yacht, you get paid dick all.
They really believe inequality is down to a flat rate per hour for work done. More hard work; more money.
Reminder that meritocracy was invented (by Toby Young’s dad of all people) as a satirical idea for a dystopian book back in the 1950s, and shouldn’t be used as an actual way of justifying calcified privilege and inequality.
Actually, maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe the job is “difficult” because everyone you have to live with and hang out with has a soul like a torched hearse. Maybe that’s worth a few extra zeroes on the salary.
👆I feel like ethics and the building of fully working individual moral compasses are what underpin any (theoretically) successful civilization. This idea has been buried in the last seven years in the west - or maybe it was illusory all along. Greed trumps morality and principles.
The traditional colonial education system has created a lot of people who are certain of their own moral purity as they cause massive harm to humanity.
You only have to look at how historians in societies have decided
Homosapiens wiped out Neanderthals violently
Egyptian pyramids involved mass space Labour
Without any evidence, except that’s how their society would have done it
I know ethics and morals are discussed a lot in schools, which is great. I think this usually focuses on personal behaviours and interactions, and doesn’t directly address one of the biggest moral decisions we take - what jobs we choose.
Maybe we, as a society, should place more emphasis on that? Make a different kind of investment in the self, but it pays out in terms of the world you help build. A different narrative to build a better, more morally and ethically aware civilization.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that people wealthy enough for this already have their kids at a public school. So what the fuck does that say about the quality of public school education?
Nostalgia is fascinating because in its original usage it could be cured, because you can go home. You can’t go back to an imagined past.
Read a couple of recent books on it, and keep noticing that there’s a new one out every six months. For some reason it’s endlessly discussable, never nailed.
In Welsh, the equivalent word is "hiraeth", which in my understanding has more of a "the past is gone and you can't get it back" nuance. It's a longing for a time or place that's been and gone, or which perhaps never really existed quite the way you remember. Feels like a much healthier view.
And whose Welsh equivalent 'Hiraeth' still does mean something like 'complete mental disintegration as a result of extreme homesickness.' Mind you I live on the Mynydd Hiraethog and I haven't gone gaga Piccadilly endoscopy capybara geranium.
Haha! I just mentioned hiraeth before I saw your message! Yes, I think hiraeth has a slightly healthier "Mate, it's gone, you can't get it back" undertone though. Nostalgia seems to be as much about "If we work really hard we can bring back the past" as is about yearning for the past.
I think it depends on context. The 'Hiraeth' is 'Mynydd Hiraethog' definitely implies something much more mentally devastating, and if you've ever been alone up here on a soft day or in the dark you'll understand why. It is shatteringly empty. This is the road I live on. That's it on a busy day.
Oh my word, that is beautiful! Frankly, I'd be devastated to leave.
I'm only a learner, but I definitely sense many depths to 'hiraeth' that as a second language speaker I'll never fully grasp. Rather like 'cynefin', which seems to mean a lot more than just 'habitat'.
Meritocracy is Toby Young believing he gets to pontificate because he is brilliant, whereas in fact he only got to Oxford because his dad pulled strings for him.
