Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Ennui on Wall Street

A great post from a newly discovered blog, Dewey from Detroit:


It’s not as if some of the 99% don’t have good reason to be upset. Having learned very little about critical thinking in K-12, they embraced the myth that all they had to do to realize the American Dream was plunk down the money for a college degree. Some got useless degrees, and some got degrees that might have been valuable even a short while ago. But once law schools began pumping out lawyers faster than bagels, as chronicled by Glenn Reynolds, not  only are law degrees of questionable value, but in the inevitable trickle down flow of economics, so, too, are paralegal degrees. Those jobs are being gobbled up by credentialed lawyer-wanna-bees. I’m pretty sure you can get a paralegal degree in 2 years at a community college. 
If that’s not prima facie evidence of some kind of fraud, I don’t know what is. 
Setting aside the whole issue of over-education, the ennui on Wall Street movement was inevitable. Beginning sometime in the 70’s, parents, in concert with the education system, began trying to shield children from life’s inevitable disappointments rather than preparing them to deflect them.  Accordingly, kids received gifts not just on their birthdays, but on their siblings birthdays as well. so as not to suffer from the trauma of getting nothing when someone else was getting something. 
And so it began. Soon all teams received trophies, everyone got a gold star for something and at the end of the school year every student was honored with an “award” for not much of anything. Self esteem was as important as actual accomplishment, and everyone was “special” for something. Unfortunately this enlightened approach to education failed to clarify for the kids that once they moved out of mommy and daddy’s house (sometime around age 35), life really wasn’t going to be fair, and no one else was likely to appreciate their “specialness.” 
As coincidence would have it, at that same moment in time the education system began its now decades long commitment to replacing a moral value judgment system with the self-leveling floor of moral relativism. No longer were things evaluated on the basis of “right” and “wrong.” America’s moral compass was replaced with a  politically correct, multi-cultural gyroscope that was perpetually seeking, but never quite finding, equilibrium. In this brave new world, all ideas and all people were deemed equally valid. With such a tenuous tether to reality can we really blame the Gen Xers, and their Millennial followers for expecting life to be fair? 
Discovering the inherent unfairness of life for the very first time while simultaneously being kicked in the teeth by an economy set on “death spiral” can be quite overwhelming.  So yes, I do understand some of the disillusionment these young and young-ish Occupy Wall Streeters are feeling. I’ve been accused of being mean and heartless for not empathizing with their lot, but frankly most of them have had altogether too much empathy in their lives and way too little reality. And if taken at face value there are a lot of truly sad stories being posted. But yes, I’m skeptical. This is the “look at me” generation who learned histrionics before they graduated out of the child safety seat. Many of them are natural performers by the time they reach middle school. So do I suspect a bit of embellishment? Yes. Yes I do. 

Read the rest.

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