Showing posts with label privileges. Show all posts
Showing posts with label privileges. Show all posts

Tuesday 2 February 2021

Hard Work!!

         In our type of Society, one of the illusions that the wealthy always try to perpetrate is that you get wealthy from working hard. The last thing they want you to understand is that most of the wealthy owe their wealthy position to a privileged background. Much better to keep the working class believing that they might make it big time, if they only work hard enough, and that wealth comes from sweat and not from inherited position and/or wealthy connections. How many wealthy people have you heard boasting of how hard it was for them, but because of their fortitude and hard work they won through in the end, omitting to mention any of the privileges that they may have had along the way.
 
 
A few experts in that field have had a wee look at this phenomenon in this interesting article from Sage Journals: 
Introduction
         In a Hawaiian resort four well-groomed men puffing on expensive cigars and resplendent in white dinner jackets settle down to a nice glass of Chateau de Chassilier. Thus starts Monty Python’s classic 1974 ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch about a group of men reflecting on their ascent into Britain’s elite. But rather than an exercise in self-congratulation, it is soon clear that this is an exchange of childhood reminiscences – and one in which the stakes revolve around proving one’s purported proletarian origin rather than privileged destination. ‘We used to live in a tiny, tumble-down ’ouse with great ’oles in t’roof’, John Cleese tells us in a distinctly ropey Yorkshire accent. ‘’ouse!’, exclaims Graham Chapman in marginally improved dialect. ‘You were lucky to ’ave an ’ouse. We used to live in one room. All 26 of us.’ From here a ludicrous race to the bottom ensues, with boasted familial dwellings stretching from corridors to lakes to shoe boxes.
       The sketch may not be particularly funny (and indeed a forerunner for the now hackneyed comedy trope of the ‘Northerner’) but its enduring appeal with the British public (it has been repeated verbatim by multiple1 comedians since) lies in the fact that it continues to carry a pertinent thread of social commentary. For over 50 years, survey research has consistently demonstrated that Britons tend to identify subjectively as working class, even when – like the Four Yorkshiremen – this often contradicts their ‘objective’ class position (Heath et al., 2013; Savage, 2007). For example, the latest available data – the 2016 British Social Attitudes Survey – shows that 47% of those in ‘middle-class’ professional and managerial occupations identify as working class (Evans and Mellon, 2016).


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Friday 5 October 2012

THE WEAVING OF ILLUSIONS AND MYTHS.


       Something this capitalist society always tries to conceal is that opportunities to "climb the ladder" social mobility, as it is called,, is vastly enhanced the higher up the ladder you are born. Conversely, the lower you are born the more difficult it will be to move off the rung you started from. In this type of society, wealth is not just comfort, it is privileges and opportunities, it is the gateway to more wealth, privileges and opportunities. However the myth that is perpetuated is that the world is filled with self made men/women who reached the dizzy heights of wealth, privilege and power all by their own effort and hard work. The truth being that most people in this world work very hard all their lives just to survive and never end up rich.
   -------Every political system requires a justifying myth. The Soviet Union had Alexey Stakhanov, the miner reputed to have extracted 100 tonnes of coal in six hours. The US had Richard Hunter, the hero of Horatio Alger's rags-to-riches tales.
     Both stories contained a germ of truth. Stakhanov worked hard for a cause in which he believed, but his output was probably faked. When Alger wrote his novels, some poor people had become very rich in the US. But the further from its ideals (productivity in the Soviet Union, opportunity in the US) a system strays, the more fervently its justifying myths are propounded."There is no monopoly on becoming a millionaire" ...
      As the developed nations succumb to extreme inequality and social immobility, the myth of the self-made man becomes ever more potent. It is used to justify its polar opposite: an unassailable rent-seeking class, deploying its inherited money to finance the seizure of other people's wealth.

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Sunday 31 July 2011

PRIVILEGES FOR SOME, FEAR FOR OTHERS!!!

       

       One of our over lords, Oliver Letwin, Policy Minister for the millionaire cabal, has stated the old upper class mantra that, public sector workers should be afraid of losing their jobs because it will make them more productive. His comments were made at a meeting with a leading consultancy firm. This is the same Oliver Letwin who reportedly agreed to repay a bill for £2,145 for replacing a leaking pipe under the tennis court at his constituency home in Somerset after having claimed it on his parliamentary expenses. The same guy who once said  that he would rather beg on the street than let his children go to an inner city comprehensive school.
         It never fails to amaze me how the arrogant bunch of Oxbridge millionaires and their lackies see people as units to be worked harder, to live in fear of losing their job and a constant fear of deprivation. While they themselves feel they are entitled to any and every privilege that they can lay their grubby sweaty little hands on.

   We need to put the fear of death into those bloody workers.
  
     Do we need them? They cost US a fortune to keep THEM at a priveleged standard THEY believe THEY are entitled. They produce nothing except hot air and spend their time passing legislation that will slash the living standards of all the ordinary people in this country, but will not affect them one little bit. They call it democracy!!!