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Been thinking that dealing with being a member of the overproduced elite once you recognize that that’s what you are, is the central middle-class challenge today. Naive blue collar larping is just a cope, but working with atoms in a pre-textual way is a part of the answer.
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send examples of elite overproduction
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In fact true blue collar reactionary types — the kind who want high-paid pre-robotic welding jobs back in the US for example — are overproduced elites too. So actually going that way is a sideways move at best.
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It’s the inner growth counterpart to dealing with the Covid-climate-complex (CCC — my term for the overall goat rodeo we’re in). To be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, you need a different new-elite sensibility. That’s one reason Muskism is attractive.
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Otherwise you end up attacking bureaucratically conceptualized problems with a joyless self-flagellating sort of sense of duty and failing. Saints never solve problems. They merely help others rationalize them as karmic punishments and make their peace with failure.
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There’s an active ingredient in Muskism that is part of the solution to elite overproduction. But right now we’re at the “hang around cows” pre-solution stage of smallpox. Edward Jenner hasn’t yet created a vaccine out of the nascent solution. “Go to Mars” = “hang with cows”
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How would you characterize Muskian futures in ideological terms? (Mars colonization, aggressive climate action, lots of sci-fi visions)? It's neither the basic SV neowhig libertarian future, nor the basic NYT-op-ed progressive future. Nor is it Thiel-Trump reactionary.
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You begin to actually face and solve a problem when you first say “I’m not paying for that.” Saint types tend to conflate “this outcome was inevitable given our past failings” with “we must fully reckon with and pay for this before moving forward with a clean balance sheet”
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Sinners otoh, skip straight from “I’m not paying for that” to “who can I stick with the bill.” At some level they accept that the bill must be paid by *someone*. Engineering I think begins with the thought, “can I make hack it so nobody has to pay the full price?”
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