You can have Lake Wobegon if there’s as many ways to excel as people. Everybody gets humaning participation trophy for being best at something. The problem with this is a) there’s no grounding in survival/adaptation truth signal b) it’s not actually a fun human condition
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Be careful what you wish for in wishing mediocrity would go away. You’re saying: make it to the top or break down and fall to the human garbage pile. Mediocrity is sustainable “fake it a bit till you die happy” option. Not “fake it till you make it or fail and die of insanity.”
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Mediocritism isn’t socialism by the way. Capitalism is a 10x better engine of mediocratization than any kind of socialism *if* you don’t fetishize it. I suspect vaguely socialist modes of societal organization emerge as an overcompensation when mediocrity is stressed too hard.
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This happens when exceptionalists and excellentists drink their own “meritocracy” kool-aid too much and start believing in master races, superhumans and other statistically dubious eugenics fever dream misreadings of how capitalism actually works.
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Ironically you know what’s a sure sign of mass exceptionalist thinking? Overly muscular systems of “meritocracy” thinking. You know where they believe super strongly in that? China. It’s the party line that all Chinese are above average if you standardize testing enough.
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Capitalism works not by raising floor or ceiling but by dragging up middle via democratization-mediocratization. Misreading this is basically a case of being so terrified of being merely ordinary, and people who accept a contemporary ordinary life, you wage war on mediocrity.
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So dare to be ordinary, huddle in the middle, slack off, say fuck-off to excellence/meritocracy/hustle religions and Make Meh Great Again
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End of conversation
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Well, what were those homeless people doing before and who replaced them? Presumably they had some menial job is the point, the machine has to continue functioning and in that case some other middle removed them and not high tech etc? I guess this would be churn?
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