Yeah, exactly. Yeah, this book basically tries to expand on that
a little bit. I think that's the starting point for all of this needs to be
like, you know, what is the role of people in society? Like, what is this? What
is this society business about? I think the author of this book thinks the
society business is about, you know, human flourishing, and the common good. The
common good being like, you know, we should encourage things in society that
kind of benefit everyone. And that's kind of almost like the goal. And we, and
we want to promote human flourishing. So you know, we want to have a society
where everyone can flourish, I won't go too much into the details of like.
I mean, I don't have a good definition for this, he doesn't actually present a
good definition for this. But I think, I think whatever your definition of human
flourishing is, it actually doesn't really matter to most of this guy's
argument, but human flourishing, and the common good, are the things that we
want to promote in society. And I guess the question is, like, does meritocracy
actually do that? The other sort of recent, events, rather than that he talks a
lot about our first Brexit and second, Trump being President of the United
States. And he thinks that both of these things are a result are sort of like an
inevitable result of these meritocratic ideals.
Where, you know, if you look at the people who voted for Trump, and who voted
for Brexit, you know, if they hadn't, if you hadn't gone to university or
something like that, I can remember the exact stat that he gives, you know,
there's like a 70% chance you'll, you'll like, vote for Trump or Brexit, or
something. And if you had gone to university, it's like, significantly lower
something. So like, this sort of university thing, you know, really seems to
have split the country, the country being the UK, or the US, and I'm sure
applies to other countries as well, to split the country into and, you know,
there are these narratives about like, Oh, you know, these people who vote for
Trump, they're just like, racist or whatever.
They're these people who voted for Brexit, just like racist or whatever. And he
kind of says that, yeah, sure them racism as a part of it. But if you, if you
only look at it through the lens of racism, you kind of miss out this
completely, sort of separate thing, which is that large swathes of the
population don't no longer, are no longer given any social esteem. And so he
talks about this idea of social esteem quite a lot, which is linked to the idea
of like, everyone having some amount of dignity and social status and stuff like
that. And basically, if you haven't gone to university, because of like all this
meritocracy stuff, you know, that is just kind of assumed, you know, if you've
gone to university, especially a good university, you know, in sort of
prestigious careers and stuff.
You're doing alright, you get social esteem, people think you're a productive
member of society. If you haven't gone to university, you don't get any social
esteem, and you're kind of just kind of feels bad, basically. Right. And so you
have like a ton of people who sort of feel forgotten. And like, he also talks
about how the elites are people who went to university, good universities and
stuff like that. There's just like, so much casual shitting on people who
didn't, you know, in the US, there's a term called The Flyover States, which are
like all the states kind of in the middle. Yeah, I guess. Yeah I guess the the
implication is that that just like kind of irrelevant that the states that you
fly over to get to New York or San Francisco, whatever the relevant cities are,
right?
And yet the phrases like trailer trash and all of this kind of stuff. And like
that there's just like so much shitting on people who didn't go basically to go
to university. And that that's kind of the double edged sword of meritocracy,
which he digs into, which is, yeah, it's it's great if you're doing well. But,
you know, the, it's kind of implied that if you're not doing well, then that's
kind of on you for not, you know, not having done the right things or whatever.
And this is all very much linked to like, yeah, like sort of morality. You know,
like, if you're, you know, partly this idea of meritocracy is that, like, if you
do well, you kind of deserve it.
And it's sort of like, morally justified. And so if you don't do well, by the
traditional metrics, or whatever, that that is also morally justified, and, you
know, okay, so that's like, a bunch of me rambling, let me let me get to some of
these clips. So I think the first, the first couple of chapters are kind of
about the history of this stuff. Like, where does this idea kind of come from
of, you know, if you do the things you are, you're a good person kind of thing.
