Don’t be too harsh he’s a cool dude, but he unfortunately has some capitalism good musk good sentiments that I’ve been trying to dismantle for some time now and i thought I’d ask for help with this.
Or you can just dunk.
ask him if firefighters are in the 1%
continue on to talk about teachers, but before letting him say that 'some teachers are really shitty at their job' ask them if he truly believes there are no driven teachers being rewarded with the shittiest financial means the country can get away with
continue opening the conversation with other occupations, like nurses and construction workers. and ask him, how many nurses it took for a driven and passionate hedge fund manager to make his first billion
don't even bring up concepts like class war or anything, just talk about the material reality and embody what you want to say rather than explaining it
Medical researchers is a good one to bring up imo. They're all fully aware that on the off chance they actually come up with some massive breakthrough they're definitely not the ones who'll be raking in hundreds of millions of it, and yet they keep doing what they do. If it's drive and passion you're looking for it's right there in the lab.
By the same token, it's truly appalling how passion is weaponized to crush every last bit of productivity out of the handful of people who can tolerate 80+ hours a week at the bench.
Don't take the people here too seriously. Your friend can be a cool dude with a shitty ideology, it's what he does that matters.
I don't think your friend is going to change without a random event happening to him that puts him in a precarious position. He's saying it's better to be a homeless person in NYC than any historical wealthy person or any ancient sumerian king. That's a brutal misunderstanding of what it's like being homeless. No homeless person would ever think "man this sucks but at least I'm not Emperor Shenzhong and living in a palace with a thousand servants."
Your friend is stuck thinking he lives in paradise, he disregards what poor people now think and feel, and he lives in a bubble.
Truly spoken like a dude who has never met or even seen an actual working class person in his life. "Truly hardworking" lmao does he think 99 people are just always playing on their phone and not doing their job, or does he think that somehow billionaires are actually performing physical and mental labour commensurate to their personal wealth?
This is either a child or someone who needs to genuine complete from-scratch reeducation about all aspects of reality. Wouldn't be surprised to learn that he also is unaware that the earth is not flat or that there is a tiny man who lives in his computer.
So all the 1% are cool except vast, overwhelming majority (I think the stats are >90% in 'merica) who are there by way of inheritance?
Also, fuck these attitudes that accuse 99% of the population of not being hardworking, passionate and motivated. It's an insult to every parent (including my own) who had to work shitty jobs all day long for decades just so their child/ren can have a roof and food and water and are among the poorest of all people.
And obviously, no, very few people pre-1800 would want to be a homeless person today. The only real exception is medical technology. Personally I'd trade my median wealth to be in a cool pre-1800 peasantry community.
pretty much everyone loses their inheritance
That's ridiculous. If somebody inherits money at a young age or youngish age - they can stick it in an index fund. It's a safe investment and if they reinvest a majority of the proceeds - due to compounded interest it will grow a surprising amount over time.
And - of course - the larger the inheritance the greater the chance their parents will help them via their influence, networking etc.
Half a million dollars in an index fund will net you the median annual income for life.
If you family had a house or two you can make more money doing literally nothing than you would working.
hope he's a teenager bc this is stupid
"uhh actually generational wealth doesn't matter bc it all reaches equilibrium eventually, the people getting killed in the meantime are irrelevant"
okay then life doesn't matter bc heat death of universe, also I can
you and take your money or do a 
just for funsiesand generational wealth does NOT equalize. The richest families in developed Northwest Eurasia
are something like 60% the same as they were 600 years agoarticle
map
(this map doesn't control for "rich getting richer" where some billionaires don't inherit most of their wealth, but were already multi-millionaires to start with/had connections with billionaires--which is like pretending that using only half the available cheat codes in a video game make you a legitimate player)this moron doesn't understand anything about human dignity, and he thinks that absolute material wealth is the only thing that leads to human happiness. This says a lot about him, perhaps he wouldn't mind being a slave (if rewarded with access to some matrix-like alternate-reality technology)
"passionate, hard working people get rewarded for their work" lmao
be passionate tree grower
plant trees in your shared community garden
get merk'd by
an extremely american story!this is the mayoest, angliest, waspiest, boiled-eels-fermented-in-lye-iest, faux detached and fake enlightened take on the internet. Where you just spout bs but with the air of "it is what it is" to appear totally right
It’s doubtful he ever sees it your way because “capitalism good musk good” sentiment is a fundamental difference that can only really be changed by real experience.
Without passing too much judgement, as long as your friend is firmly middle of the status quo and believes in the meritocracy, he will never have a the perspective required to see the world like we do.
Also, be weary of his language, he is on the verge of calling poor people lazy whether he means to or not.
I mean, i once came from this sentiment once as well and have now since been deprogrammed and changed direction leftwards. I mainly see it more as an intellectual disagreement rather than a fundamental one.
His stance is intellectually flimsy, if it were just that you wouldn't need the least bit of help
Fair enough, obviously there is more nuance to people and their beliefs, but I just immediately get a certain vibe when they start acting like the 1% is actually good.
Trying to say that unhoused people have it good in New York compared other places in other time periods is reminiscent of slavery apologists acting like slaves had it good because they had housing.
Obviously I’m not trying to label your friend as a slavery apologist, I just drew comparison between the ideas.
Trying to say that unhoused people have it good in New York compared other places in other time periods is reminiscent of slavery apologists acting like slaves had it good because they had housing.
It's even dumber than that. The idea that NY homeless have it better than even literal peasants in past ages is silly, let alone having it better than the landed gentry as that fucker implies. Peasants generally had a stable means of subsistence and weren't as liable to get maimed or killed by state actors for just existing.
Saying "the worst get nothing" is basically one step away from saying that poor countries could be carpet bombed and the world wouldn't be lessened in any real capacity. I think a lot about how many people that could have the capacity to be brilliant medical researchers are stuck toiling away in lithium mines as slaves.
1 % of wealth has nothing to do with hard work lol, but with investments. Unless you take the world, then it has to do with imperialism.
Unless your friend thinks dipshit writing ad pitches works 1000 harder than bangladeshi seamstress.
"humans are not equal" what the fuck you should bully him just on that. you should be very harsh and very challenging, ask him to explain why he is better than everyone with less money.
...So one is asked to go back in history to the mythical day of the original social contract made between equals, who later became unequal because they really desired it, as evidenced by the inequality of the sacrifices to which they consented. I do not think that this way of avoiding the questions of the specificity of capitalism even deserves to be considered elegant.
- Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, page 17
The 1% of humans who he describes as good human beings are not the same 1% that own the wealth. In fact the wealthy 1% cannot abide the virtuous 1% and do everything they can to see that number doesn't increase.
I think it's silly to say that just 1% of people are good, though it is certainly true that the 1% suppress them.
I think it's fair to say that only 1% aren't arseholes and then the rest of us are on a sliding scale. I have moments of great altruism and then again I have moments of misanthropy. I think that's true of most of us. So yes, talking about good people or bad people kind of relies on a utilitarian measurement that is doomed to failure. It is however demonstrably true that there are some people who achieve the consistent levels of kindness that we wish we could maintain.
I think it's too moralizing to say that someone isn't a good person because they are unkind when they are at the very lowest point of their mental well-being. There's a difference between fairweather kindness, which is fair to hold some disdain for, and "having a breaking point eventually," which I think is generally called "being a human," even for that 1% you mention.
Yes, that's fair, I think. I was more saying that most of us don't fall neatly into either a good or bad category. I usually say I'm not good but I'm good enough - under most circumstances you will encounter a fairly even tempered and even kind individual but sometimes you will encounter a grumpy person who is not going to help you with whatever problem you have.
Far as this discussion goes I was using 'good' as a placeholder for "truly hardworking passionate, driven, disciplined, and motivated" because I didn't want to have to type it out since the origin was an image and I'm lazy enough not to want to keep typing that.
You should talk with your friend about systemic racism in the US. An entire group of people repeatedly dispossessed from the value of their labor. The argument your friend is using has racist undertones whether they know it or not.
I didn't want to jump there immediately, but there's definitely nascent fascism in the messaging when you really analyze it. If we are to say that wealth over time is a measurement of merit, what are old money families? People who just have hereditary superiority? Wouldn't racial disparities in income therefore also be racial disparities in merit? And the same for sex, gender conformity, etc. The hierarchy of income lines up with social oppression (because intersectionality represents the facets of class oppression), so they are basically claiming that the cishet white dudes have some sort of underlying superiority to everyone else (along with Jewish and East Asian people, so you can see why The Bell Curve is so popular among fascists).
The inheritance thing suggest to me he's already thinking about flaws in the "meritocracy", he just hasn't considered all the implications.
The one percent isn't self-made. Their success is built off of society -- contingent on it. The same way your or I don't generate our own electricity, don't crack our own petroleum, don't purify our own water, don't grow our own food -- Bill Gates does not write every line of code for windows, Jeff Bezos does not box every product for shipping, James Walton does not keep his aisles stocked. Every day you and I depend on the labor of other people to live the lives we live, and we contribute our own labor into the pool. Every day, Jeff and BIll and James and their class make millions on the labor of other people -- but they don't have to contribute their labor back. The money they take is a privilege bestowed by the simple fact of ownership. They own the warehouses and shops and companies that everyone else work in.
More over, none of them would be where they are if not for the work that was already done by society. Bill Gates relied on the invention of Allen Turing, on the free programming done between universities and research firms on the early DARPANET. Jeff Bezos relied on the already built internet infrastructure and the postal systems ran by government. James Walton just ate up local groceries that had already established profitable ventures.
I'd go with something like:
lmao man you and I both know people who work their asses off yet aren't in the 1%
Have any friends, teachers, coworkers, parents, etc. to use as examples?
The root here is basically Just World bullshit, and with this stuff you aren't going to get anywhere doing a point-by-point
response. Hit one point hard, ideally with an example neither of you is really going to debate (one of your parents being hardworking, disciplined, etc.).
