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We can add not owning stocks to the list of RW life advice that includes not going to college, working at the nail factory, marrying an 170 pound woman, dumpster diving for yogurt, and not getting vaccinated.
https://x.com/L0m3z/status/1899623568650145985
(Yeah I know he's "joking" but what's the joke?)
What is actually wrong with working at a nail factory? It’s not advice I would give to a bright young man, but, like, somebody has to be willing to work at a nail factory, and the continuing availability of nails is more vital to our civilization than further refinements in advertising software.
There are plenty of people who aren’t college material and aren’t cut out for the trades or the army. What would you have them do? A factory job is usually a step up from McDonald’s. It’s better than being a welfare parasite.
Bourgeois ethics are not constructed around how important one's work is to the maintenance of civilization but to how much it enhances an individual's self actualization.
If making nails was a prestigious endeavour or part of some social movement you could get away with it, but getting stuck in low tasks is a failure to raise one's social status and therefore contemptible.
The idea that people can not be college material is alien to this ethical framework. So is valuing family, religion or anything else over self actualization. Everyone can and must become a self actualized bourgois individual, axiomatically.
Agree with some of this. Having a self-actualizing career is very important in contemporary bourgeois society. This can be seen in the way the prestige of jobs is imperfectly correlated with income, being a college professor is higher status than being a restaurant manager even if the latter makes more money. But this part gets to a general problem I have with the Online Right:
The American bourgeois has a lower rate of divorce and a significantly lower rate of bastardy than the working-class. One of the reasons high-class people don't want their kids to work at the nail factory is because the nail factory is full of people from unstable families for whom that behavior is normalized. Plus other pathologies like obesity, criminal records, etc.
But the reason isn’t that they prioritize religious and family values above all else, or that they see the role of a family man as an end unto itself. It’s that their bourgeois social circle expects them to form stable marriages with children with members of the same social circle or a similar one that partially overlaps it, because it’s one important thing that confers social status and thus contributes to self-actualization eventually. On the other hand, failing to achieve this is a sign of high time preference, which they see as a personal shortcoming.
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Well sure, I’m not saying that kids who are college material should go work at a nail factory for forty years. This seems like a significantly worse life than being an accountant or claims adjuster or whatever other unglamorous white collar job. But we shouldn’t shame people whose abilities simply aren’t that great into going to college or bust. Society needs garbage collectors, it needs nail makers, it needs forklift drivers and ditch diggers.
As an aside, restaurant managers don’t really make more than full professors unless they’re top performers. Their pay tends to be performance based(health scores, keeping within budgets, and drive through times for fast food) and most restaurant managers are not towards the top.
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Don't get me wrong, this isn't a total criticism of bourgeois morality. Like every creed it has some value but is fundamentally flawed. I'm merely trying to elucidate why it produces such value judgements.
This sort of bourgeois universalism has produced much good and can work very well provided it is only applied to a homogeneous society of smart, pious and honor bound individuals.
Once you start trying to enact its universalism away from just Englishmen of good character is where nature comes to ruin the party.
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