Kontextmaschine

19th February 2020

Post reblogged from You bleed because you don't floss. with 94 notes

anaisnein:
balioc:
argumate:
balioc:
argumate:
balioc:
argumate:
balioc:
kontextmaschine:
been thinking about aristo/bohemian/lumpenprole as a coherent axis defined around common cultural traits (decadence, cults of action?) against a rivalling stability-oriented gentry/bourgeois/prole line
I think the concept you need to tie this together is “belief that the formal rules make sense and that you will be rewarded for following them.”
I once wrote much of a very long essay about (approximately) this, but lost momentum before it finished. Short-short version: aristos and proles are both keenly aware that in fact life is a political jungle where success is defined by allies and resources and risks-that-pay-off, the spiritual essence of the bourgeoisie is “thinking that the world is basically an extension of school.”
how about working class in the military
Yeah, how about it. “I would specifically like to join an institution that, unlike the rest of the benighted world, runs on reliable and formalistic rules enforced by a clear chain of command.”
it’s a compelling framework, but one can just as easily imagine counter examples: people born into a life of privilege who simply assume that this will be maintained without any particular attention or effort on their part, people engaging in scheming Machiavellian political machinations to build their power base at some mid-level corporate accounting job,
The first thing isn’t really a counterexample at all. Yes, there are quite a lot of privileged aristos who are very happy to sit around and enjoy their privilege without any kind of scheming or intrigue at all. Theory and experience both suggest that they’re mostly just willing to believe that they can do this, because they already have the necessary resources and the necessary support and no one is going to stop them, and they’re not afraid of losing everything because they’ve broken some rule about what they’re supposed to do.
The second thing is…actually pretty rare, as far as I can tell. Like, not “you’ll never see it” rare by any means, but rare enough to raise eyebrows when it happens. Accountants don’t want to build power bases or play office politics, they want to do their jobs with a minimum of complication and then go home. (I can say with a lot of confidence that this is generally true of federal bureaucrats, despite the stereotypes.) If office politics actually happen to an extent that there is some kind of noticeable outcome, most of the people in the office will be kind of shocked and upset.
And even then, the office politics are likely to be Lawful Evil “tattling to the boss that Phil isn’t following regulations” sorts of schemes rather than Chaotic Evil “I will go outside the system to ruin you” schemes.
introducing the nature of a System makes it clearer: if you’re sufficiently rich you’re largely beyond the awareness of police, if you’re sufficiently poor you’re crushed beneath the boot of police, if you’re in the middle you might occasionally have normal interactions with police and wonder what all the fuss is about, etc.
All true, but misleadingly specific. It’s not just police (not that I think you’re saying that it is, but…clarity).
If you’re sufficiently rich, you don’t think that your success in life will ever really hinge on whether the particular authority figure standing over you is impressed; if you’re sufficiently poor, you don’t think that the authority figure is ever going to be impressed enough to matter; if you’re in the middle, the authority figure’s opinion could be the difference between “you are a Top Performer with stellar prospects” and “your career will go nowhere.”
If you’re sufficiently rich, your friends and family can pull you out of basically any scrape, so long as they like you enough; if you’re sufficiently poor, your friends and family can be the difference between survival and not, so long as they like you enough; if you’re in the middle, you get all your resources from your job and all your opportunities from your education, and your friends and family likely don’t have much to offer in a practical sense. [That last is a gross exaggeration, but…you get the point.]
Etc.
The second paragraph is true; that is why office politics is in fact rampant in bullshit mid-ass-level corporate. Maybe accountants, specifically, are an exception. I have the impression that @argumate was just reaching for any random non-tech corporate role there. It’s a different story wrt account execs, account managers and account directors, tl;dr stay the fuck out of the cutthroat global thermonuclear war that is office politics in the low to middling pay, high ambition, strata.
and of course, academia itself! where being “good at school” means knifing any challenger who might thwart your attempt at gaining tenure.

One of my grandfathers was a Seabee-turned-construction contractor. He’s the guy who joined in WWII to storm beaches in the Pacific, got assigned to build golf courses in Hawaii and was kind of steamed about it until he saw haunted men rotating back from like, Guadalcanal and was like “fine”.

He held on to his military identity, had his mail addressed “Lt. Cdr” (which is just O-3, like a Captain in other services), had a vanity plate even.

In between he was a Pennsylvania legislator for like one term when the local machine wanted a young veteran face. When I graduated college and was going to Hollywood to try to be a screenwriter, he sent me a handwritten letter, my takes from which were one, when this guy tries to be deep you notice he’s not that deep, and two, wow this guy dictated letters to secretaries his whole life and never learned how to spell.

At least he wasn’t the kind of guy to put a flagpole in front of his 1959 split-level or 1986 golf course-adjacent ranch. But growing up he was someone to define myself against, which is why I never even considered the Navy. Also I chuckled at how my old granddad always ordered Old Granddad whiskey on ice.

But with age comes wisdom, looking back at what he was and what he made his children into I get it. Dude was a socially untalented engineer, and by joining the military – by living in a postwar world where so many people had been similarly shaped – he made that work.

Like, that man lived in a world where he was regularly assigned challenges that he was given the resources to overcome, so long as he brought his own cleverness. And then he was evaluated on how well his solutions met desired objective metrics, and if he did good he would reliably be given better challenges, more resources, and more social standing and quality of life in every way.

(My mom grew up as a Navy brat, this was the Pacific, where that meant servants, but even stateside among whites.)

And I see the appeal there.

I mean god knows I’m not saying “there’s no politics in military officership”, the chain is ability<tactics<strategy<logistics<politics, and by the top levels (especially procurement, where it shades <corruption) its all politics

But now I see the appeal there.