Success Must Be Worked For

A person is charged in this world with using whatever skills, gifts, and opportunities he or she has with a personal drive to get as far along in life as possible. There is no question that for some the road to success is longer and harder than for others, but pulling down one group will not help others to succeed. I once heard an interview with the daughter of a very famous musician. She said that her last name automatically got her auditions, but if she could not perform on the piano at the highest professional level, her father’s name and reputation would not help her land a job. America needs to focus on encouraging and supporting those who wish to succeed, regardless of skin color or starting point. Success must be seen as what you did with yourself and not where you started.

Alan Joseph Bauer, The Falsehood of White Privilege.

Discrimination Against Caucasians

One reads now and then of Whites being punished for no other crime than the color of their skin. Whether it is a sign-language translator fired from his job on Broadway or teacher candidates denied jobs because of their skin color, Whites are being told that because of a supposed privilege they inherited, they do not deserve to work or to benefit from their skills and efforts. United Airlines has made much noise about wanting to have a more diverse flight crew. My only concern as a passenger in the back is having the best pilots at the front of the plane; I could not care less if it is a man or a woman, or what color he or she is. Not for United. Will they sacrifice pilot quality to reach their minority pilot quota? Will anyone take responsibility if something goes wrong in the air? Of course not. In business and government, nobody takes responsibility for failure.

Alan Joseph Bauer, The Falsehood of White Privilege.

Invented “Dignity”

Since the issue of the [1948] Universal Declaration [of Human Rights], dignity has no longer been about obligation, but about claims and entitlements. The new dignity did not oblige people to strive for any moral merits or deserts; it allowed them to submit whatever claims they wished, and to justify these claims by referring to a dignity that they possessed by the mere fact of being born, without any moral achievement or effort. A person who desired to achieve the satisfaction of a pig was thus equally entitled to appeal to dignity to justify his goals as another who tried to follow the path of Socrates, and each time, for a pig and for a Socrates, this was the same dignity. A right to be a pig and a right to be a Socrates were, in fact, equal and stemmed from the same moral (or rather nonmoral, as the new dignity practically broke off with morality) source.

Having armed himself with rights, modern man found himself in a most comfortable situation with no precedent: he no longer had to justify his claims and actions as long as he qualified them as rights. Regardless of what demands he would make on the basis of those rights and for what purpose he would use them, he did not and, in fact, could not lose his dignity, which he had acquired for life simply by being born human. And since having this dignity carried no obligation to do anything particularly good or worthy, he could, while constantly invoking it, make claims that were increasingly more absurd and demand justification for ever more questionable activities. Sinking more and more into arrogant vulgarity, he could argue that this vulgarity not only did not contradict his inborn dignity, but it could even, by a stretch of the imagination, be treated as some sort of an achievement. After all, can a dignity that is inborn and constitutes the essence of humanness, generate anything that would be essentially undignified and nonhuman?

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.33

When You Lower Standards

Lowering the requirements is a process that has no end. Once people become used to disqualifying certain standards as too high, impractical, or unnecessary, it is only a matter of time before natural inertia takes its course and even the new lowered standards are deemed unacceptable. One can look at the history of liberal democracy as a gradual sliding down from the high to the low, from the refined to the coarse. Quite often a step down has been welcomed as a refreshing, natural, and healthy, and indeed it sometimes was. But whatever the merits of this process of simplification, it too often brought vulgarity to language, behavior, education, and moral rules. The growing vulgarity of form was particularly striking, especially in the last decades, moving away from sophistication and decorum. A liberal-democratic man refused to learn these artificial and awkward arrangements, the usefulness of which seemed to him at first doubtful, and soon—null. He felt he had no time for them, apparently believing that their absence would make life easier and more enjoyable. In their place he established new criteria: ease, practicality, usefulness, pleasure, convenience, and immediate gratification, the combination of which turned out be a deadly weapon against the old social forms. The old customs crumbled, and so did rules of propriety, a sense of decorum, a respect for hierarchy. 

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg. 29-30.

The American Dream

Praise Must Be Earned

A child who learns to read, who can do mathematics, who can play the piano or baseball will have a true sense of accomplishment and an appropriate sense of self-esteem.  Schools that fail tot teach reading, writing, and arithmetic corrupt the proper understanding of self-esteem.  Educators who say “Don’t grade them, don’t label them.  You have to make them feel good about themselves” cause the problems.  It makes no sense for students to be full of self-esteem if they are empty of knowledge.  Reality will soon puncture their illusions, and they will have to face two disturbing facts: (1) that they are ignorant, and (2) that the adults responsible for teaching them have both failed them and lied to them.  In the real world, praise has to be the reward for something worthwhile; praise must be connected to reality.

Paul C. Vitz, "Psychology As Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship," p.18

Class Resentment?

Obviously, the billionaire can afford to pay for certain things like luxurious homes and cars and the best seats on airplanes and at the theater. There is nothing wrong with that. It should not cause resentment in a society in which anyone is free to work hard and use their God-given talents to excel and increase their own value in the marketplace.  Some will not admit it, but our society would be pretty dreary if everyone shared the same level of poverty with no chance of advancing themselves economically through their own efforts.

Dr. Ben Carson, Dispelling the Myth of Haves and Have-Nots in America

Achievement or Privilege?

Our schools and colleges are laying a guilt trip on those young people whose parents are productive, and who are raising them to become productive. What is amazing is how easily this has been done, largely just by replacing the word "achievement" with the word “privilege."

Thomas Sowell, Random Thoughts, 12/30/14

Achievement Differences?

Explaining differences in achievements between groups often pits those who attribute these differences to ability against those who attribute differences to barriers. Neither seems to pay much attention to differences in what people want to do. Few guys from my old neighborhood were likely to end up as violinists or ballet dancers, simply because that was not what they were interested in.

Thomas Sowell, Random Thoughts, 12/30/14