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I bet you've heard the phrase "living well is the best revenge." I think it's also the best argument. There are so many ideas, or larger schemas, that are alluring in abstract. See: every teenager's politics. But far fewer paradigms are actually effective in practice. (Granted, which ones work does vary somewhat based on the local circumstances / environment.)
Living out one's ideals is a costly signal of sincerity, and achieving success and happiness by doing so is the least refutable argument. This is a big reason why religion is so persistent despite sounding batshit crazy from the outside — and I say this as a religious person. The philosophy makes sense once you fit yourself inside of it, but the incentive to attempt that in the first place, despite the context of a secular overculture, is that religious people are more likely to thrive.
Anyway, my question is, why don't more culture warriors pursue this path, of exemplifying why their chosen philosophy is good? Am I wrong that it's the most convincing way to advocate for one's ideals? Or maybe everyone is indeed trying to do this, and most just don't seem very effective from my particular vantage point / vis-a-vis my conception of the good life? Perhaps it's a selection effect where people who deeply care about what everyone else is doing are less likely to be happy, point blank, so anyone discernible as a culture warrior is already precluded from "living well is the best argument" unless they learn to give less of a shit in general.
Edit: Apologies for not responding individually, this ended up getting more responses than I expected. But I appreciate you all and am pondering your points!
UC school? Even when I was in school in the mid 00's, I heard stories about how terrible the cheating was in the UC schools. And who was doing it.
Over on the east coast, in a technical degree, cheating really didn't get you that far. There were tons of projects you could ostensibly cheat on. But you'd flunk all the test, and thus the class. I never cheated, and regularly broke the curve on tests, so I can't say how much other cheating was going on. I will say I did notice lots of people constantly grappling with an ever growing intellectual debt they never payed off. Turns out you can't cheat all the way from the equivalent of addition and subtraction to calculus. There comes a point where you don't even recognize the material well enough to cheat anymore.
Only thing that hurt my prospects in school was my own laziness towards non-technical required courses I had. As well as one professor that literally told me the wrong date/time for the final exams, and when I showed up and nobody was there, gave me a big fat 0 for the final exam. It was something like 20% of my grade, and I still got a C for the course, so I passed. Complained to the dean and they also didn't give a fuck because I passed anyways.
Not in the US, but keep in mind this was when Universities went online during covid. I would say base rates of cheating are not that high during normal times but online you would have had to go through the haystack to find someone not cheating.
Yeah, everything about education during the COVID era seemed a twist on that old Soviet joke. "They pretend to
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