More Potent than a Nuclear Attack?
Nuclear attacks, bioattacks, and cyberattacks can, of course, cause great damage but perhaps less damage than something not-overtly violent: convincing the public to work less hard and to allocate yet more resources to people less likely to be productive and contributory.
Yes, the movement toward emphasizing the life half of the work-life balance, chill/just be, we’re-not-human-doings-we’re-human-beings zeitgeist along with legalizing the chill drug, marijuana, could be caused simply by a U.S. grassroots movement amplified by the U.S. media.
And yet, the move away from a hard-work, merit-centric zeitgeist is counterintuitive. Through most of world history, perhaps especially in the U.S., the watchwords were the opposite: can do, luck favors the prepared, hard work, and persistence, embodied in President Coolidge’s famous, “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On!’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”
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Also affecting productivity, the norm used to be to reward excellence including potential for excellence: hence ability-grouped classes, merit-dominated criteria for resource allocation, for example, in hiring, promotion, prestigious college admission, and government contracts. But in recent years and acceleratingly so, non-merit factors such as compensatory demographics have played a larger role in how resources are allocated.
Perhaps the roots of the aforementioned factors could lie in the 60s counterculture in rebellion against their parents’ work-above-all, meritocratic mindset. After all, compared with egalitarianism, meritocracy yields more losers than winners.
But could at least a contributory cause of the veneration of chill culture and diminution of merit be external to the U.S. For example, might some foreign country, seeking to gain an edge over the U.S. workforce, quietly infiltrate society’s mindmolders — media, colleges, churches — to spread the Gospels of Chill and of Greater Redistribution?
That’s macro musing. Bringing this to the personal, if you were to resist over-weighting external influences on your beliefs, where on the work-life continuum do you want to be: harder working, less so, or are you Goldilocks? How about your significant other? Your children? Do you want to allocate your resources more meritocratically or more redistributively?
I read this aloud on YouTube.
Marty Nemko is a career and personal coach. His books include How to Do Life. You can reach him at mnemko@gmail.com
