Very interesting article. I see someone who won the lottery. They have built a huge house and family, based on the single skill of showing up for work, and having the right father. While this happens, this person thinks it is thier right, and they will fight politically with every ounce, wrecking whatever institutions and future health of the political system, to keep the privleges they inherited. No sense of altruism or giving back, just keeping what is theirs, justified as there is a child invoked.
The profile is very insightful, but depressing, as how can we have anything but a selfish fight of selfish people, is that what democracy devolves to?
Being able to own a house and raise a small family should be something that the majority of people can attain. It shouldn't be like "winning the lottery" but it can seem that way for younger people, including myself.
The guy profiled has one child, who is disabled. The article describes his house as a "big house in the woods", but looking at the picture of their kitchen it is clearly not very "huge" and very far from the kitchens you'd see on HGTV. And the fixtures are 10+ years old.
I think heart-stirring profiles of people as examples of political and social issues are usually not good journalism, but maybe a benefit is that people could humanize whoever the boogeyman of the day is. This guy deserves some flak for putting his whole identity into his job and for believing too much in various political dei ex machina that promised to let him keep it, but "selfish" and "wrecking institutions"?
IMO that's what happens when you have democracy but we're not all in the same boat (or maybe this happens to any nation when people aren't in the same boat). We'll always have selfish individuals, but why do we have selfish peoples? That must mean clannism is still a great strategy.
I'm pretty sure the parent post's point isn't that raising kids or building a house is a bad thing. The bad thing is the presumption that this one job must last forever, and the eager engagement with politics that can't actually preserve that job based on soundbites from a man who contradicts himself every five minutes.
Imagine for a moment you live in a capitalist society.
If the land around you is cheap, that's a red flag about the value of that land. If you have information others don't that makes the land much more valuable to you (anything from minerals, to perfect growing conditions for some valuable plant, to just being a good spot to build a wildlife sanctuary), then you're in luck.
But if it's good land but otherwise cheap it's because the smart money already left. This spot is too far away from infrastructure, the area is hostile to certain people/industries, or there is high risk because there is one large employer/industry in the area and the economy will collapse like a house of cards if that industry has a downturn.
This is one of the ways I think capitalism fails us. Economies of scale push us to have two or three large providers of product X, globally, but from a town's perspective they would be more resilient if they had numerous 'large' employers in different enough industries that they only all suffer in a recession, but not so different that people can't retrain.
I don't think capitalism is perfect (though I think it could be significantly better with less regulation), I just think it's better than any other system that has been proposed.
That aside, what has that to do with my original comment?
I feel like you're trying to reach for some sort of 'gotcha' here, but there isn't one. The parent comment's point is that people should be aware of when they've gotten lucky and be able to engage with the world when that luck finally runs out (or, at least, engage with politics that can realistically preserve some of that luck).
We've all won considerable lotteries just in being alive. One out of 100 million sperm, avoiding perinatal death, a nurturing family, household, community, country, "choosing the right parents", a locally advantageous ethnic or tribal status, well-functioning social institutions (especially healthcare, education, general safety, law and justice, sanitation and infrastructure, environmental protections, clean water, safe food0, an encouraging relative, neighbour, teacher, mentor, or boss (vs. the opposite), a healthy or growing economy, personal talent, temperament, or skill, happening to get interested in a hot topic or subject, access to labour markets, access to entrepreneurial markets, suportive labour, professional, or entrepreneurial institutions, a social safety net, physical appearance, mental health.
These and many other factors have a high element of luck. Absence of any one can prove a tremendous (though not necessarily unsurmountable) handicap.
But, and this is key: dashed expectations, even where born of a lottery, can become huge personal and societal problems. The stages and processes of grief: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptence, are born from a dramatic shear in expectations.[1] (Differences across social groups, as in racism, are a related phenomenon, though different in that it is distenctions among- rather than within-groups but over time, that are involved.) Writ large over society such disapointments can be exceedingly potent forces, particularly politically.
Discover your own lottery card(s) overpromised and underdelivered, you'll likely feel similarly.
The exectations set up through cultural mythos can prove to have a tremendous downside debt of ther own; "rugged individualsm", "self-sufficiency", "meritocracy", "American dream", "technological progress", "free markets", "manifest destiny", "self-made (wo)man", etc. All of these have fascinating, if not widely known, ideological foundations. And historical literature on each often shown sharp, if buried, contemporary criticism.
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Notes:
1. Kübler-Ross's initial research is notable. The precipitating event wasn't loss of a loved one, but notification of the subject's own imminent mortality. A dramatic shift in worldview.
The profile is very insightful, but depressing, as how can we have anything but a selfish fight of selfish people, is that what democracy devolves to?