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A place where I've noticed the whole "self-improvement is right-wing" meme being true has been in fictional media. In recent years, a number of films (e.g. Star Wars, Captain Marvel) and TV shows (e.g. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Rings of Power) - all of them made by openly progressive people openly pushing a progressive agenda - have been criticized for what some have disparagingly called the "HER-o's Journey," wherein the heroine, often fairly boring or unlikeable from the start, goes through a character arc where she discovers that she was actually always as awesome as she always believed she was, realizing that all her problems were the fault of everyone else who couldn't see her innate awesomeness that was always within her. This is obviously meant to contrast with the classic "Hero's Journey," which tends to involve a hero going through a character arc where he struggles with and overcomes some flaw he has, allowing him to overcome some obstacle at the climax. It'd be easy to say that this is a projection of how women and men relate to each other IRL, where women judge if men are good enough for her while men improve themselves to become good enough for women, but I don't think it's that simple, since, AFAICT, fictional media that follow this type of narrative tend not to be particularly liked by women any more than they are by men. But to add on to this whole "refusal to self-improve" phenomenon, when these works underperform commercially, usually the creators of these works tend to blame the fans for failing to understand their value, rather than blaming themselves for failing to deliver something that fans would want to give money for.
More broadly, these phenomena both tie into something Jonathan Haidt has talked about with respect to modern leftist politics, which is that he sees it as "reverse-cognitive behavioral therapy." One well known trope in CBT is that one reframes "this person caused me to feel this way" to "this person did this, and I responded by feeling this way," which obviously shifts the locus of control from external to internal. Much of the modern left is informed by the idea of discovering one's true self and being in touch with one's emotions, which often rounds down to just trusting every feeling that goes through one's mind as true and valuable and projecting it onto the world - this is something we obviously see coming from all sides all the time, but the modern left particularly encourages this as virtuous for people who have been deemed oppressed.
Another disparate thought I have is that the left has long been associated with support for religious and sexual minorities, who have traditionally been oppressed by a society that would treat them as second class citizens for believing the things they believe. In such a setting, trusting one's own feelings over what society tells you is considered a righteous act of rebellion, and it's not at all a leap to go from that to the belief that any sort of belief in improving oneself is actually an internalized form of the oppressive standards that society imposes on you. I also wrote in another comment that the connection to postmodernism makes it so that it's easier to disconnect one's beliefs from base reality, which in this case is the belief that any negative health effects of being fat or obese are purely imposed by society and disconnected from biology or physics. This also connects with beauty standards, where the notion that skinny, fit women being considered attractive is deemed to be a purely arbitrary societal invention.
I don't know that there's any theory that neatly ties all this together. I'll just say, as someone who's been a leftist Democrat all my life, seeing Democrats whine about Republicans for so many decades without taking responsibility to improve themselves has largely made me check out of politics over the past half-decade to a decade. The idea that it's our responsibility and only our responsibility to shape our message to win over Republicans and independents to our cause, and that these people who disagree with us have no responsibility to be convinced by a message they don't find convincing just doesn't seem to occur to them. That said, I'm seeing this from the inside of just one side, and so maybe this exact same type of passing-the-buck phenomenon happens just as much in the other side.
This seems connected to the more recent idea that competency isn't real, and that all jobs are rewards/punishments that grant privilege/status and nothing more. The idea is that we can just redistribute status by just giving members of oppressed groups prestigious jobs to do, and that will work out fine because nobody is more competent than anyone else at anything. It's not even believing that people might have equal capacity for competence when brought up with equal privilege, but that they actually do have equal competence regardless of their life history. There is no need to improve or work hard to earn something; we just need privileged people to get out of the way.
This comment from back when we were on the reddit by @SerenaButler (not sure if they're still with us) discusses the idea you're talking about, and is imo very insightful. Original: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ey1zdz/comment/fh6z9pz/
Text: As a somewhat aside, for the longest time as a kid and/or student I never understood why "Access to jobs" was a cause celebré for advocacy campaigners. Jobs are shit and no sane person would ever want one (at least, absent The Man's omnipresent conditioning that you must work for his profit). Money, sure, everyone wants that. Jobs, no. It's like campaigning to be given sickle cell anemia rather than a malaria vaccine: you are asking for a horrible things that coincidentally happens to be upstream of the result you want, rather than asking for the result you want.
The solution to this problem became apparent the first time I'd worked a few jobs: to wit, many jobs are sinecures where you doss about with your work friends, get paid mostly for "presence", and are not actually required to exert your muscles (intellectual or literal) at all. So that's why people want """jobs""". Government's promising to deliver """jobs""" is really a promise to deliver what people actually want, money-for-nothing, with merely the most tissue-thin sop of "labors to be performed" in exchange for these monies to keep up appearences.
To bring this back around to the quoted point: yes, having understood the above logic, campaigners absolutely would have no problem pushing for unqualified people to get jobs, because, outside of a very limited subset of jobs, like, nuclear power plant technician or something, the accomplishment of the task is irrelevant because the task is essentially a fiction. It does not really need to be completed and no-one will suffer if it is not completed so it doesn't matter if the people assigned to it are unqualified. Most jobs (especially public sector ones) are just dolled-up wealth-transfer programmes, and campaigners understand this, and governments understand this, and """generate jobs for the X community""" is a dog-whistle for "free money for X".
EDIT: Through this rubric, lots of (apparently very irresponsible) Blue Tribe campaigns suddenly snap into focus as perfectly reasonable. Women in front line infantry? Well, if you believe that government jobs are all sinecures and tasks to be performed are fictitious and everyone knows this, therefore all these Red Tribers complaining about "upper body strength" or whatever probably are dealing in bad faith misogyny; they just wanna keep the wealth transfer in the hands of /their guys/ burly dudebros rather than letting women sup from the greenback firehouse. Affirmative action Ivy League admissions? Why not, qualifications = credentialism = fake, there's no real tasks to be performed at Harvard or in post-Harvard employment, so therefore all these Red Tribers complaining about "meritocracy" probably are dealing in bad faith racism; they just wanna keep the wealth transfer in the hands of /their guys/ Good Old Boy WASPS rather than letting minorities sup from the credential spigot.
If you really believe in the bullshit jobs thesis, and you really believe that everyone else is in on the open secret too, then when someone makes the "muh objective competence qualifications" against you, it is perfectly reasonable to believe it's an argument that could only ever be made in bad faith.
Except that’s very definitely not true; most jobs have actual accomplishments that need to be done. Sure, diversity coordinators are figures no one would miss if they all called in for months at a time, but almost all of the common jobs need to actually do something. Even the HR lady could perhaps be routed around but there are actual things she does; if she quit on short notice management would have to do it until they found a new one.
It seems like this idea is limited to very high status jobs- and truthfully I don’t know if replacing CEO’s with a block of wood in a suit would make any difference, I suspect it depends on the company- and we only notice it when it applies to things like ‘surgeon’ and ‘airline pilot’, where, not knowing how to do there jobs even in very broad strokes, I can tell you that a block of wood in a uniform powered by chat gpt could not do it. Honestly I’m not actually sure if diversity advocates believe these jobs are less skill-heavy than commonly assumed or if they’re just high on their own supply about the massive untapped potential of black women.
I think the government/academic jobs vs private sector jobs is doing most of the divide there. As Ghostbusters said, "You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."
I've worked government jobs (low level ones) and I've worked private sector, and in the government job I just had to do the minimum required and follow the rules and I could be sure not to be fired. Private sector there have been times I've worked my butt off and still went home scared that I'd be unemployed next month because the company went belly up.
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The wider concept of bullshit jobs also includes jobs that need to be done quickly and well because your employer is competing with other employers, not so much because the job would demand efficiency and high competence even in a vacuum (such as a nuclear plant operator).
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This is a textbook example of someone failing the intellectual Turing Test.
But we live in a world where the Man and/or thermodynamics requires you to work in order to avoid death. Where jobs confer economic benefits (getting paid) and social status (not being an unemployed loser). Certain jobs confer not only money and status but a non-trivial amount of societal level power. Maybe we shouldn't value jobs but we absolutely do. And thus it makes perfect sense for someone to be concerned with access to jobs*. As an individual, you want your peers and broader society to stop humiliating you. As an advocate, you're trying to break generational poverty and what you see as inequities in the distribution of wealth/power in society.
In short, it doesn't require you to think that competence or effort are fake. It requires you to believe that discrimination is real.
They seem to be confused about both what the bullshit jobs thesis is and how popular it is. As near as I can tell, SerenaButler subscribes to the theory more closely than their imagined blue triber.
In general, I don't think this post is insightful. It makes a number of assumptions about the beliefs and motives of the people it is attempting to describe that just do not track. Or it hits on surface level beliefs but fails understand the underlying content, e.g. it is probably correct to say that a lot of blue tribers don't think much of arguments from meritocracy, but it isn't because they think qualifications are fake. It's because they think we don't have a functioning meritocracy.
*there certainly seem to be no shortage of red tribers concerned with protecting their jobs.
This is not credibile. If it were true, I would expect progressives to participate in efforts to measure skill, qualifications, and merit. In fact, despite the many difficulties of doing so (Good heart's law, etc ), the urgency should inspire tireless ingenious effort to that end. Instead, everywhere I look, the opposite is true: progressives direct their energy towards frustrating the project of improving meritocracy, often enough ridiculing the goal itself.
The historical treatment of black Americans is a stain on our country and the progress we've made combatting discrimination fills me with pride. The job is not complete, but is close.
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Being valuleless in the sense of not accomplishing anything isn't the same as valueless in the sense of you not getting anything from it.
So there's no contradiction between thinking a job is valueless, and wanting the job because it provides you with money and power. But if you think the job is valueless (in the first sense), you'll think of being "unqualified" for a job as just an excuse to deny you money and power.
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I haven't read this comment before, but I've had thoughts similar to this rattling around in my head for a while. I think the thought first occurred to me with respect to affirmative action, that the justifications were based around the notion that individuals belonging to demographics deemed as oppressed had been treated unfairly and therefore, at the individual level, deserved benefits to be tilted in their favor in things like school and job applications*. Obviously, the point of these filtering mechanisms is to select for individuals with the skills, ability, wherewithal, motivation, etc. to make the most out of the school and/or perform the job well, which are not dependent on whether or not someone belongs in a demographic group deemed as oppressed. So the benefit that we get better be worth the tradeoff of taking away these educational or employment opportunities from more qualified people to give them to less qualified ones.
But what is the benefit? Ultimately, it's mostly money. There's little benefit people get out of being assigned homework or going into lecture halls to take tests or sitting in front of computers to crunch numbers. People do these things so that, in the long run, they end up making more money. So why not just give these individuals money and let the work be done by people who are qualified?
Well, the problem there then is the "dignity" of the thing or whatever. People don't like to feel like charity cases; they like to believe that they earned the things that they have, through their own hard work, will, resilience, talents, etc. And so we have to get them to play-act the part, to go to classes and offices, to give them the plausible deniability that they actually earned the money that they're getting. This is also why AA is framed as helping people who are disadvantaged, rather than giving people bonus points for happening to belong to particular demographic groups, even though those are literally the exact same things.
And it's this dishonesty that gets me. I wish the left would just say that we should give people free money as a way to make up for injustices we presume they must have suffered due to belonging to certain demographics. We can then discuss and argue about which individuals deserve free money and how much, and there will be plenty to disagree about there, but at least everyone would have an open and honest understanding of what is at stake here. Trying to launder the free money through subverting our ability to put competent people in positions where they can contribute the most to society seems strictly worse than this.
I think this sort of enforced kayfabe is also at play with, say, the whole "transwomen are women" thing. I think it was Scott Alexander who argued that, regardless of how we see things, we should respect transwomen's identities by using their pronouns and such, because it's just the nice thing to do, and we ought not contribute even more to the suffering that they clearly must experience merely for believing that they were born in the wrong sex. I'm not sure if I agree with this, but I'm sympathetic to it, at least. But that kind of honesty is unacceptable in the modern left - the only line that's acceptable is that transwomen are women in every way that matters. This necessarily comes with it many implications about things like sports or pregnancy that many/most people aren't willing to accept. Like how AA only makes sense if you believe that competency isn't relevant in school/work, this kayfabe only makes sense if you believe that sex differences are purely socially mediated, and if we just twist society enough, then transwomen could live lives that are indistinguishable from females.
Again, I just wish people would state these honestly so that everyone can, with informed consent, place their votes on how they want society to be run instead of constantly obfuscating with this sort of play-acting fakery. But I suspect that, to some extent, the fakery is an essential component of the whole structure, and perhaps even the entire point.
* There are multiple justifications, of course, one of which is that, due to systemic oppression, our current filtering mechanisms erroneously judge individuals who belong to demographics deemed as oppressed as being less qualified than they actually are. However, assuming this were true, this, in no way, can support affirmative action; rather, what it would support is fixing our filtering mechanisms to make more accurate, more precise assessments of individuals, which is the opposite of the blunt tool of AA.
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This strikes me as a great example of something passing the intellectual Turing test. I think this is exactly how a woke person would justify their opinion. Their opinion is misguided because it's based on an inappropriate generalisation, but I think a woke person would read the description above and think "yes, that's what I'm getting at". And of course, you're right to point out that the opinion contains a grain of truth: competency really isn't a core requirement for some jobs. and many jobs really are sinecures.
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