Rise And Grind

If there's any expression that perfectly embodies the deep rooted, yet mistaken belief that intelligence and hard work are the only ingredients needed to bathe in the warm comfortable water of upward mobility, it's this slogan from so called "motivational speakers": Rise And Grind...

Enter "rise and grind" in YouTube's search-box, and you'll be greeted by a slew of videos from motivational speakers like Gary Vaynerchuk and the likes. You know, the boys and girls, men and women who tell you that all you need to "make it" is hard work, dedication and a winner's mindset. They go on about how they made it big by never giving up, by thinking in terms of opportunities instead of problems, by working 18 hour days to make their dream of material abundance come true. At the same time they'll say it's not the material abundance that's important; they'll say that this is sort of a natural side-effect of the aforementioned personal and behavioral traits. And above all they'll mention that if you didn't "make it," there's something wrong with you, that you just didn't try hard enough, that you're too soft or lazy, or that you just didn't "want" it enough. These people make me sick for the role they play in keeping alive and promoting the idea of the meritocracy.

The political left and right both claim that government exists to create or maintain a level playing field for everyone to compete in for success. They only differ in the way to get to that equality of opportunity, or they argue among each other on whether we're already there. They both agree that liberalism and free market capitalism are the foundations upon which to build that playing field, and that's a problem. That's because this foundation entails the commodification of literally everything, including the things we need for equality of opportunity, like education, housing and healthcare. Opportunity itself is commodified, and therefore there's no equality of opportunity, the meritocracy is a myth, and "upward mobility" is increasingly becoming a thing of the past as we increasingly rely on the marketplace to decide who's "deserving" and who's not. Meritocracy is just a term used by the elite ruling class to justify their position of extreme wealth and power, and they've been very successful in anchoring in our consciousness that the're deserving of that position; "if Elon Musk is so rich, he must have worked hard and be very intelligent!" If only that were true...

No. The rich role-models of our day, of any day, are not smarter than you or I, they don't work a million times harder than you or I. Instead they started out with millions of dollars of intergenerational wealth, like Musk, or they stole ideas from actual smart people, like Gates, or they just were lucky, like Bezos. I mean, Jeff Bezos created a small online book store, something our kids could do. He just made his store in the exact right moment, under the right market conditions and he ruthlessly applied the rules of capitalism to grow that store into the behemoth it is now. This behemoth makes it very hard, to say the least, for anyone else to start and grow a small online store; it should be clear to anyone that the idea of a meritocracy is antithetical to an actual meritocracy. The idea that "the marketplace of merit" decides who's deserving, is toxic at its core, if only because it tells the billions of people who work hard and stay poor that they're not deserving of a life of dignity, and telling them it's their fault as well.

The "aristocracy of merit" is simply a replacement for the aristocracies of yesteryear. It's a meme meant to keep intact a strict hierarchy of wealth and power, just like in the old days when the King said to the Priest: "You keep them stupid, I'll keep them poor." Alas, today's Priest is a society encompassing system of education, mass media and religion that brainwashes the masses into believing that the "natural hierarchy" that exists today is the only possible way to organize society. That's wrong. The meritocracy is wrong. Capitalism is wrong. We're confronted with young generations, millennials and Gen Z, who increasingly have no hope, who simply can't see a way up on the social mobility stairway, and who seek a way out in the mind-bubbles of social media, courtesy of the technocracy. They're not lazy spoiled brats, they're the generations for whom the dream of upward mobility is becoming harder and harder to reach. The "rise and grind" mindset is creating millions of burnt out people who blame themselves for not being successful or deserving of success. Stop it.

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