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Notes -
What Happened to Society's Life Script
In the fifties, the American dream was, for the vast majority of people, pretty obvious. You find a job with the main employer of the town, whether that was a coal mine or a factory or a railyard or whatever the case may be. You marry, if not literally the girl next door, then something close; maybe a high school sweetheart. If you were a woman you were then expected to stay home and be a housewife, and except for a few very highly-female coded jobs, that's just what you did. If you were a man you might have been required to serve in the army beforehand, but few people went to college; only if you were wealthy and/or very, very smart. It mostly wasn't your decision either way, about any of it. 'Should I go into the military, or skilled labor, or go to college?' wasn't a question very many people had to ask; usually what you did next after finishing high school was readily apparent, often literally by having only a single option or a very small set thereof. If you did have the opportunity to go to college- most people didn't- both the university and your parents had much more say in what you did there. And I think we should note- the vast majority of people here could find respect as a worker bee. This is important because the vast majority of people have to be worker bees to have a functioning society.
Today, that is not the case. Everyone who wants to can go to university, or near enough. Many people stay in university long past the point at which it does any good, in point of fact. The military is 100% volunteer, and few people live with access to a single major employer. Young people can't find spouses, and these days don't seem to be able to blunder into relationships either. Every individual can, with certain reasonable limits, do what he wishes, and nobody with institutional power seems keen to say no, that's stupid, do this instead.
And it seems that we have lost something, there. Occasionally conservative pundits will start talking about the success sequence- finish high school, work full time, get married, and then have children. There's some other obvious things that go along with it, like 'don't do drugs'. But the gist of the success sequence is, well, a (somewhat vague)life script. And realistically the success sequence is the sort of thing our culture should be putting more effort into promoting; it isn't the default message despite every idea therein being a good one.
I think the youth agree with me, here. Jordan Peterson's popularity, notoriously, came from offering boomer dad advice. Recently there's been discussion of positive male role models to replace Andrew Tate; Andrew Tate's pitch isn't much different from tons of other redpill influencers. What's different is he's selling 'you, too, can be like me, just do x, y, z'. Obviously he's a lying grifter, but his fanbase are mostly teens. What replacement for his (dumb)life script are these positive male role models offering? The pro-social version of Andrew Tate isn't the male feminist activist. It's Mike Rowe.
Unfortunately, "work hard, at a quite possibly unpleasant job" isn't a great sales pitch. But I want to circle back to the point I made ending my discussion of the fifties- most people have to be worker bees. In a functioning society there are few girlbosses because there simply are not very many bosses- the average person will always make the median income, live a not particularly impressive lifestyle, and live in flyover. To put it more pithily, average people will always be average. And being average isn't, well, a flashy and appealing thing. In the past, lack of options meant people became average worker bees. Today, people have the option not to do that; they may not be Indian chiefs and fighter pilots and surgeons and other high status jobs instead, but they're being something, and usually that something is below average, gig workers and basement dwellers. It has to be said, therefore- most people can't figure it out on their own. For every unrecognized genius there's a dozen schizos. Boring middle-aged advice serves a useful purpose; to throw out the social pressure to follow it was a mistake. The question becomes, then, 'how do we bring it back?'
We can't. I was thinking recently of how the employment opportunities in my town have narrowed over the years - there's pretty much only one "main employer" left, and if head office back home in America decides it's no longer worth having a plant in my area, it'll be shut down or sold off and then probably shut down.
I agree about worker bees: we need them. But we seem to be in the middle of turning all our worker bees into drones, and expanding a few into queens. Where did the jobs in the coal mines or box factories or steel plants go? Right now, they're trying to shut down the coal mines under the aegis of climate change, but the writing was on the wall decades back - Maggie Thatcher didn't decide to break the power of the unions by going after the miners first despite it being a vital industry, it was inefficient, expensive and out-dated. Coal and steel were no longer kings, the old Industrial Revolution was on its last legs and being replaced, though few could see it, by the Information Economy where now the money came from financial services industries based in London: stock markets (the encouragement of the Sids to invest in newly privatised industries), investment banking, and the rise of new technology (leading to the dotcom bubble).
As for the box factories and steel plants? See the Rust Belt - manufacturing industries are moved overseas to cheaper countries with low-cost labour. And once those sources dry up, automation and AI will take over. Even white collar jobs are now not immune, as we see the prognostications about how AI will be able to do the jobs of X, Y or Z.
So the life script now is increasingly "success is for the very, very smart" in a more and more narrow definition of "very, very smart". You have to go to college because there's no hope of any kind of reasonable job without the piece of paper for a degree, and the kind of rewarding job is more and more "can you participate in the new Knowledge Economy - that is, are you able to work on the AI that is going to replace 90% of all other jobs?"
If you're a queen bee with the particular STEM skills that are currently in demand, you can have that life script sequence of success. If you're a worker bee, increasingly you're being turned into a drone. Hence all the pinning of hopes on both Fairy Godmother AI to produce post-scarcity Utopia, and UBI where it won't matter if you're a drone, everyone is a drone, and at least you won't starve.
(The alternative there may well be "live in the pod, eat the bugs, own nothing" instead of "UBI so you can be creative and artistic, meanwhile AI will run the world and create the magical cornucopia out of which endless prosperity flows").
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