Motivation and Privilege

Motivation and Privilege

Was discussing the election of the London Mayor with Twisty.  Personally, I think London elected the best of a bad bunch, despite Sadiq Khan’s lack of popularity with Scottish Asians.  (he came up here and lied to them at the time of the referendum) Time will tell how well he does, but there is no reason to suspect that his allegedly questionable contacts will interfere with his job.  Zac Goldsmith, whilst very high profile, does not appear to really understand, or for that matter need to understand, the nature of the job, having conducted a campaign based on the fact that he is not Muslim, but is pansexual.

 

Who cares if he is pansexual?  He seems to, but I am not sure anybody else does.  I wondered why he always seems so terribly young, given that he is not much younger than me?  Twisty asserts that this is because he has never had to work for anything, has effortlessly become a high profile Conservative, and with £400 million, does not really need to work at all.  At this point I started to mentally question this hypothesis. Parental achievement can be demotivating, since you are unlikely to top the heroic feats of your forbears. At least instead of destroying businesses like his father, Zac has chosen to serve people, albeit as a Conservative MP.

 

Stella McCartney did not have to be a particularly good designer to get backing.  This is true.  She would always have had a great deal of support due to her contacts and surname.  Lulu Guinness the handbag maker also had a very easy time.  I recall an article about her stylishness before her first handbag was even on sale.  Now she presents a ‘cheap’ product at £300 on Kelly Hoppen’s shopping channel, and it actually sells.  According to Twisty, I should feel resentful of this, that people with moderate talent have an easy route to fame and a living via their name and wealthy family.

 

The flip side of this is that Zac, Stella, and Lulu would find it extremely difficult to get a job in Gregg’s the bakery, should they ever require it, as it would be assumed that they would find taking orders, fulfilling people’s lunch requirements, and cleaning up after themselves extremely menial.  I can tell you this, because as an apparently ‘middle class’ Glaswegian graduate (with a bog standard school education, rather than private education social network like my comparatively mediocre brother)  I was turned down for hundreds of jobs I would have not only have been able to do well, but would have worked extremely hard at, as is my usual wont.  At least with their names, these people have a decent opportunity to shine, or bomb, in front of the entire population, instead of a low key continuous failure to be acknowledged as with my own experience.

 

In 2008 or so, my friend in London spoke in hushed terms of how the middle classes were suffering in London from a similar malaise.  Graduates were not getting jobs, based upon the lack of availability, and were expected to feel shame at their own failure, rather than coming out in public and asking where the knowledge economy actually is?  The over-supply of graduates has been going on for some time.  It is not only a class issue, but an issue of an economy which is sustaining itself via putting people in a state of debt misery for life. Then you see the SNP being attacked for not producing more working class graduates.  Those working class non-graduates are probably earning more than you, is the real reason. Glasgow has the most highly qualified bar staff in Europe.

 

So when the issue of motivation and privilege came up yet again, as it frequently does with Twisty, who has had an unfortunate life for reasons other than opportunity, as he has enjoyed far more opportunity than I have, I felt rather put out, on behalf of people who are either fortunate by birth, or fortunate by actually being given a chance. It is not always safe to assume that the fortunate few are incapable of learning how to fill an unexpected niche, and they are not always as clueless as you might assume.

 

One of the most offensive experiences I ever had was at an interview with a married and well kept company director, who asked me whether ‘I paddled my own canoe.’  I was not only paddling my own canoe at the time, despite people like her not giving me a chance for employment, I was also paddling my parents’ canoe, and maintaining my scum siblings undeserved inheritance as I am still doing.  You get tired of paying for everyone else’s bullshit, whether financially or by sheer hard labour with no chance for a life of your own. This does not mean you target people with a better life deal than you, however, with mean spirited joy in their problems.

 

There are thousands, if not millions of people of all social classes who have no understanding of how fortunate they are.  Fortunate to have the opportunity to work, to have families, to go out when they want to, to sit and watch TV instead of bothering to improve themselves.  They tend to say things like ‘you make your own luck’ and ‘pull your socks up.’ Similar to Twisty, they feel quite free to object to people more fortunate than themselves. I trust they will not be requiring any help for reasons of sickness or circumstance any time soon, because frankly they do not deserve any.

 

 

 

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For regular readers – 50 is the magic base number for youtube now, you get about the same number of random hits on 50 videos from an unknown that you used to get on 1.  Just so you know to divide your work into small chunks rather than relying on one under-tagged video. Obviously, Ina is at a disadvantage since she has no face, and in the event anyone ever wishes to meet her, I guess I will have to invest in an actual disguise. I will post the link to relevant playlists once they are all up and sorted into manageable chunks. I am planning to do some sketch writing at some point, so the channel will develop as the project wears on.

 

I am about halfway with the  blog transfer to youtube.  Most, but not all of the videos are going up, I do not see any reason to repeat some of the more impulsive entries, and as with the free books of posts I put out earlier in the year, I will be classifying them according to topic, as I seem to have settled into a number of themes. It has certainly been an enlightening year or so of finding out what my weaknesses are.

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