What’s with the post-modern emphasis on it?
As noted, it provides an excuse to redistribute from those who have “won life’s lottery” (as Dick Gephardt once put it), to those less “fortunate,” who then can purchase steaks on food stamps from a hard-working sales clerk who has to get by on hamburger, or worse.
It’s worth noting that there are some fields in which a lot of luck is involved, because the supply of “talent” (such as it is) vastly exceeds demand (e.g., Hollywood). When you see a family of actors (e.g., the Baldwins or Afflecks), it’s because once one of them is in, they then have the connections to bring in the others. And they know it. The guilt they feel knowing that they lucked out while others equally talented didn’t make it probably drives a lot of their “liberal” (which isn’t really; it’s leftist) guilt.
Obviously it’s a combination, but when you’ve achieved a certain level of resources you can better ride out periods of ‘bad luck.’
This is why, poor as I currently am, I first pay 20% to my emergency reserve (that’s not savings because things like car maintenance, etc. will eat it up) second is 33% for my apartment, leaving 47% for monthly consumption… the last week is the hardest. I can easily spend a weeks budget on a single ‘luxury.’ A book was last months luxury.
Meanwhile the resource I have is time which I’m using to gather tools and produce a product. If the first does not succeed I have lots of ideas waiting in the wings. I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better!
The thing is I put less effort in when I’m doing better. Or perhaps I put my efforts into externals more. I got married thinking of the amazing things I could accomplish as a team. Once married, I could no longer focus. She was her own team.
You can’t just ‘get by’ as much as you’d like to be that lazy. You have to focus and work.
Glenn Reynolds has a very simple plan. We should be strongly in favor of raising taxes — on the entertainment industry.
Socialists are focused on ‘dumb luck’ because it’s the only way to justify stealing money from the productive and giving it to the unproductive. The productive didn’t get rich because they were productive, they got rich through dumb luck, therefore it’s only fair that the government should take most of their money and give it to the unlucky ones who’ve spent their lives sitting on the sofa watching TV.
Once you accept that someone became rich and successful because they’re better at what they do, the entire justification for modern socialism collapses.
That last paragraph sure explains a lot about Sean Penn, doesn’t it? When Martin Sheen is your dad, and he brings you and three of your brothers (Charlie Sheen, Christopher Penn, Emilio Estevez) into the industry – and you see thousands upon thousands of people even more talented than you who don’t get that big break – it’s pretty easy to chalk success up to “luck”. And if you get success from luck, then there’s no difference between you and the guy waiting your table. And if other people are “lucky” and don’t want to subsidize the “unlucky”, why, those people are just big meanies, right?
I think a big part of this is psychological insecurity. There’s a lot of people who rely heavily on luck or even harming other people to get ahead. Saying that all success is near purely dependent on luck (or even harming people) is a way to take down success by other factors and elevate the social status of the speaker. I think it goes a long way to explaining why these beliefs manifest so strongly in industries with a huge talent surplus such as entertainment or high end academia.
That last paragraph sure explains a lot about Sean Penn, doesn’t it? When Martin Sheen is your dad, and he brings you and three of your brothers (Charlie Sheen, Christopher Penn, Emilio Estevez) into the industry…
Sean and Christopher Penn are no relation to Martin Sheen and his children.
Huh, whaddya know. Turns out that Charlie Sheen and Sean Penn were childhood friends, though (along with Rob Lowe)..
The point stands though, as both of Penn’s parents were Hollywood actors, which is probably how Charlie Sheen and Sean Penn met in the first place.
It’s more than that. Have a conversation with just about everyone about how “lucky” we are to have been born in a productive western society. If you really want to see the malady, have a discussion about how “lucky” we are to have had the well adjusted parents we were born to. The “cosmic lottery” is a widespread belief – with people assigning probabilities to events that are predetermined and then making moral judgments based on those misplaced probabilities. The most notable rejection of this nonsense is half of Asian culture which still believes in generational wealth creation.
John Scalzi calls it living life on the easiest difficulty setting. More white privilege nonsense.
Remember that to the progs (i.e. commies) no one should stand out in any positive way. Grey grey grey dull sameness is what is required.
Everybody must be equal although just among us elites…we the elites are more equal than others…now on out way to the dacha……
Personal achievement is anathema to progs and commies because an achiever is not hewing to the Party Line. Achievers cannot be controlled.
And so you get things like:
No winners or losers allowed in kid sports. Everyone gets a trophy
No valedictorians
You didn’t build that – never mind the 2nd mortgage you took out on the house to finance your startup nor the sleepless nights nor the colossal risk to oneself and one’s family to try and build a business.
NONE of that matters. After all you couldn’t do it without State funded roads right?
Eads bridge.
And anyone who sticks up above the crowd must be hammered down.
So you can be sure that personal achievement, rugged individualism, liberty and freedom for the individual must be stamped out. And that’s why you see Soviet flags waving at the Democratic Convention while there were zero American flags. That’s why the Dem/progs are openly calling for one world government.
For a great and strong and prosperous America built upon individual liberty and freedom utterly destroys such Black Utopias.
It’s a very very old story.
It’s a very very old story.
That will never go away.