Help me dunk on my friend

ask him if firefighters are in the 1%

continue on to talk about teachers, but before letting him say that 'some teachers are really shitty at their job' ask them if he truly believes there are no driven teachers being rewarded with the shittiest financial means the country can get away with

continue opening the conversation with other occupations, like nurses and construction workers. and ask him, how many nurses it took for a driven and passionate hedge fund manager to make his first billion

don't even bring up concepts like class war or anything, just talk about the material reality and embody what you want to say rather than explaining it

cool dude

this bullshit

Pick one

I don't think your friend is going to change without a random event happening to him that puts him in a precarious position. He's saying it's better to be a homeless person in NYC than any historical wealthy person or any ancient sumerian king. That's a brutal misunderstanding of what it's like being homeless. No homeless person would ever think "man this sucks but at least I'm not Emperor Shenzhong and living in a palace with a thousand servants."

Your friend is stuck thinking he lives in paradise, he disregards what poor people now think and feel, and he lives in a bubble.

Truly spoken like a dude who has never met or even seen an actual working class person in his life. "Truly hardworking" lmao does he think 99 people are just always playing on their phone and not doing their job, or does he think that somehow billionaires are actually performing physical and mental labour commensurate to their personal wealth?

This is either a child or someone who needs to genuine complete from-scratch reeducation about all aspects of reality. Wouldn't be surprised to learn that he also is unaware that the earth is not flat or that there is a tiny man who lives in his computer.

So all the 1% are cool except vast, overwhelming majority (I think the stats are >90% in 'merica) who are there by way of inheritance?

Also, fuck these attitudes that accuse 99% of the population of not being hardworking, passionate and motivated. It's an insult to every parent (including my own) who had to work shitty jobs all day long for decades just so their child/ren can have a roof and food and water and are among the poorest of all people.

And obviously, no, very few people pre-1800 would want to be a homeless person today. The only real exception is medical technology. Personally I'd trade my median wealth to be in a cool pre-1800 peasantry community.

pretty much everyone loses their inheritance

That's ridiculous. If somebody inherits money at a young age or youngish age - they can stick it in an index fund. It's a safe investment and if they reinvest a majority of the proceeds - due to compounded interest it will grow a surprising amount over time.

And - of course - the larger the inheritance the greater the chance their parents will help them via their influence, networking etc.

It’s doubtful he ever sees it your way because “capitalism good musk good” sentiment is a fundamental difference that can only really be changed by real experience.

Without passing too much judgement, as long as your friend is firmly middle of the status quo and believes in the meritocracy, he will never have a the perspective required to see the world like we do.

Also, be weary of his language, he is on the verge of calling poor people lazy whether he means to or not.

hope he's a teenager bc this is stupid

"uhh actually generational wealth doesn't matter bc it all reaches equilibrium eventually, the people getting killed in the meantime are irrelevant"
okay then life doesn't matter bc heat death of universe, also I can you and take your money or do a just for funsies

and generational wealth does NOT equalize. The richest families in developed Northwest Eurasia are something like 60% the same as they were 600 years ago

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(this map doesn't control for "rich getting richer" where some billionaires don't inherit most of their wealth, but were already multi-millionaires to start with/had connections with billionaires--which is like pretending that using only half the available cheat codes in a video game make you a legitimate player)

this moron doesn't understand anything about human dignity, and he thinks that absolute material wealth is the only thing that leads to human happiness. This says a lot about him, perhaps he wouldn't mind being a slave (if rewarded with access to some matrix-like alternate-reality technology)

"passionate, hard working people get rewarded for their work" lmao

be passionate tree grower
plant trees in your shared community garden
get merk'd by
an extremely american story!

this is the mayoest, angliest, waspiest, boiled-eels-fermented-in-lye-iest, faux detached and fake enlightened take on the internet. Where you just spout bs but with the air of "it is what it is" to appear totally right

They wouldn't have

1 % of wealth has nothing to do with hard work lol, but with investments. Unless you take the world, then it has to do with imperialism.

Unless your friend thinks dipshit writing ad pitches works 1000 harder than bangladeshi seamstress.

"humans are not equal" what the fuck you should bully him just on that. you should be very harsh and very challenging, ask him to explain why he is better than everyone with less money.

The 1% of humans who he describes as good human beings are not the same 1% that own the wealth. In fact the wealthy 1% cannot abide the virtuous 1% and do everything they can to see that number doesn't increase.

The inheritance thing suggest to me he's already thinking about flaws in the "meritocracy", he just hasn't considered all the implications.

The one percent isn't self-made. Their success is built off of society -- contingent on it. The same way your or I don't generate our own electricity, don't crack our own petroleum, don't purify our own water, don't grow our own food -- Bill Gates does not write every line of code for windows, Jeff Bezos does not box every product for shipping, James Walton does not keep his aisles stocked. Every day you and I depend on the labor of other people to live the lives we live, and we contribute our own labor into the pool. Every day, Jeff and BIll and James and their class make millions on the labor of other people -- but they don't have to contribute their labor back. The money they take is a privilege bestowed by the simple fact of ownership. They own the warehouses and shops and companies that everyone else work in.

More over, none of them would be where they are if not for the work that was already done by society. Bill Gates relied on the invention of Allen Turing, on the free programming done between universities and research firms on the early DARPANET. Jeff Bezos relied on the already built internet infrastructure and the postal systems ran by government. James Walton just ate up local groceries that had already established profitable ventures.

...So one is asked to go back in history to the mythical day of the original social contract made between equals, who later became unequal because they really desired it, as evidenced by the inequality of the sacrifices to which they consented. I do not think that this way of avoiding the questions of the specificity of capitalism even deserves to be considered elegant.

• Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, page 17

You should talk with your friend about systemic racism in the US. An entire group of people repeatedly dispossessed from the value of their labor. The argument your friend is using has racist undertones whether they know it or not.

I'd go with something like:

lmao man you and I both know people who work their asses off yet aren't in the 1%

Have any friends, teachers, coworkers, parents, etc. to use as examples?

The root here is basically Just World bullshit, and with this stuff you aren't going to get anywhere doing a point-by-point response. Hit one point hard, ideally with an example neither of you is really going to debate (one of your parents being hardworking, disciplined, etc.).

You really need to start from square one, because this dude is misunderstanding the most basics of material reality.

The 1% don't make money through their own hard work, they make it through other people's hard work. Value is created by labor, and the only people performing that labor are the workers, not corporate executives like CEOs and other suits. All the "profits" going to executives and shareholders are therefore value stolen from the workers.

Some of this might be hard to get through depending on how young and naive they are. I've worked both manual labor jobs, and jobs where I've interacted with administrative/executive types daily, so I've got firsthand experience with how much the latter are worthless dipshits and ghouls. Rejecting capitalism is easy when you actually see how the sausage is made from start to finish. But if this dude's experience is limited to watching the west wing or whatever while they work a cushy desk job, then they're probably going to base their ideology off of the typical "unskilled labor" propaganda that permeates western society.

If he's open to it, get him to watch some labor theory of value 101 videos. Here's a decent one. But, if he really believes in his heart that people like Bezos are somehow "more deserving" of their wealth than Amazon delivery drivers who are working so intensely that they have to piss in bottles, then I don't think it's worth your energy trying to convince him of basic humanity. Personally, I would just bully such a person until they feel enough shame to do some introspection, or avoid me so I don't have to deal with their bullshit. (I'm going to be honest, anyone who says "us humans are not equal, we don't deserve what we have" is not worth your energy imo, but good luck anyways if you consider them enough of a friend to try and deprogram them.)

Ask him why star athletes who are the GOAT in their sport like Serena Williams aren't even billionaires. If the claptrap about meritocracy is actually real, then the richest people in the world should have far more GOAT athletes. They are visionaries of their respective sport on top of being physical freaks of nature with unhuman levels of discipline, the creme of the crop of humanity in terms of physicality, the 0.000000001% of humanity. This Forbes articles list a whopping number of 4 athletes who earned more than a billion dollars, and it's total lifetime earnings, not net worth. Lebron James puts far more effort to earn his money by playing a single professional NBA game than someone like Musk does for an entire year.

And you could legitimately credit Lebron or any other GOAT athlete's sports success mostly to themselves and a modestly sized coaching staff (the source of their wealth, of course, has more to do with endorsements and investments like any other capitalist) while Musk or Gates or the Zuck obviously has an army of wage slaves behind them doing all the real work. The James, the Messis, the Williams, and so on have to spend their off-season practicing and actually perform on stage while people like Steve Jobs can simply steal from people who were actually talented like the Woz. The vast majority of athletes can't even steal credit like that since the tape doesn't lie. At best, they might play in a way that makes their personal metrics look good but is bad for the team or they might be very good at self-promotion or they might snub early influences, but they, unlike the Musks of the world, still have to put in the effort. And this is not even getting to the injuries that athletes routinely suffer.

The only arena where capitalist meritocracy has even a sliver of truth is sports, and I suspect the reason why people don't like to focus on it is because most people understand that athletes like Lebron are freaks of nature on top of earning less than "normal" people like Musk. But if the only place where meritocracy sorta kinda is true involves the people at the top being there due to the luck of being born with a particularly configured body and being at the right place at the right time, then what does that say about the rest of capitalist society?

Ideology is fundamentally a survival strategy. If he is being well-served by the status quo, you are extremely unlikely to argue him into an ideology that makes him less comfortable with his social position. The only reliable way of changing ideology is if the new ideology represents a better survival strategy to him than his current one.

I was friends for a long time with a guy whose success and grooming in a field [that he mainly got into due to his father's connections] inculcated a lot of libertarian-style ideology in him to the point that he sent me libertarian thinktank videos sincerely. In the end, he decided his explicit contempt for the poor was more important to him than me, despite everything we had done for each other in the past.

So yeah, everything this dude said was false, but it doesn't matter that it's false; It suits him. It's like a religious conviction (pick a religion you don't believe in), if it helps you navigate the world in a way that mitigates effort and stress to some extent, you'll keep believing in it and if it doesn't, you will drift away from it. There are studies debunking some of what he says, but you'd be hard-pressed to get him to engage with them, and ultimately he's more likely to just flip to a different version of libertarianism where the undeserving rich are "cronies" or whatever. Things like that rarely cause a fundamental change, and really only can if they are used as a catalyst for bringing him to an ideology that works better for him as a survival strategy.

And he can simply say "nah, the poor deserve starvation". That's part of the weakness of morality in political argument, and the reason that scientific socialism (Marxism) avoids such appeals.

You have two options for changing his mind and there is nothing in the OP to suggest they will work, but you might know things about him that will help: Either find ways that his ideology is failing to serve him (e.g. people who say things like this usually have self-worth issues) or give him new experiences that his ideology won't be convenient for, such as personally introducing him to hardworking buddies of yours who are poor.

Good luck

They didn't earn most of the their wealth though. They got lucky. A person happened to be in a place, at a time, with the resources, and decided to gamble... and their gamble paid off.

We never pay attention to the dozens, hundreds, thousands, etc that didn't have 10,000$ lying around to invest in Amazon stock in 1997.

SOMEBODY was going to make a Paypal, it just happened that Musk was one of the people standing around the place where it started to be put together. But it could have been anybody else.

SOMEBODY was going to make money off of the "building" of the railways that run across the USA, SOMEBODY was going to figure out how to make automobiles in a more "efficient" way, etc. It just happened to be person X as opposed to person A,B,C,...Z.

How old is your friend?

It sounds like you are talking to someone who has not actually interacted with corporate America at all. The reason passion is essentially irrelevant to the job is because the only way to earn more money and move up the corporate ladder is to have passion for acquiring the job above yours, not actually have passion FOR the job you are doing, which has been shown through corporate studies like Sears to be ironically detrimental to the operation of the organization as a whole.

Not only that, but everybody and their mother knows that the higher you climb in an organization, the less actual work you do. Which is a good thing btw, being a good manager is doing hands off, trust but verify guidance to your employees and then fighting for their well-being in meetings. Should this be 'rewarded' more than the people actually doing most of the work? Probably not, but that is the way our society is structured at the moment. But that is besides the point that the top 1% make most of them money through passive investments, not through actual wage labor.

Have they ever had a job? Like a min wage one or worked in amazon?

Maybe show them wealth shown to scale

We don't see the social mobility required for a merit-based society. Harvard's Equality of Opportunity Project highlighted the increasing importance of the "birth lottery" in this country.

Billionaires are:

• Hard working for, since they care nothing for regulations and the wellbeing of their workers
• Passionate about exploiting the global south
• Driven by a pathological greed which is killing the planet
• Disciplined lol, I can't even come up with a joke way this is applicable
• Motivated to have the largest yacht to rearrange deck chairs on while the people producing their wealth go without food, shelter, and medicine

Presumably your friend isn't in the 1%, so does that mean by definition he isn't hardworking, passionate, driven, disciplined and motivated?

Ask him if he's just a temporarily embarrassed 1 percenter, or if he really does believe 3,250,000 million rich people in just the US are inherently better than him

"refrigerator = royal luxury" thinking is just absolute horseshit soupbrained nonsense. socratically bully him by asking the simplest of questions like "would you rather have state sanctioned abuse and untreated disease and an iphone or no iphone but you literally own an entire country". a person who has skimmed through as much as a children's encyclopedia should be able to suss out the incongruity though his material reality may prevent him from more than graduation to even worse self deception

His exception to the rule, that being inheritence, make up 99% of the people in the 1%. There is fuck all upward mobility even for the so called "geniuses." All tech guys and businessmen either get that way through connections or nepotism. Ergo, even if he thinks 99% of people aren't driven, capitalism doesn't work the way he says.

For his "The best have to be given the fair share" I'd point out that the researchers and engineers who make the shit are often vastly poorer than their bosses who sell it. Edison got rich and is credited with many inventions but he just hired a bunch of people to do it. The "Best" in their case got a basic salary while the businessman got filthy rich. Even if you need to reward "the best" with monetary measures, capitalism still sucks Donkey Dick.

Also don't listen to the nerds suggesting the bullet. Some people can be good people but have shitty opinions. There's no reason to go scorched earth when there's no revolution even close to coming.

Since other people have taken care of the rest...

It's way better than 1800 - and 1800 was better than 1400, which was better than 600 and so on. And where did those improvements come from? Tearing down social heirarchies. Land reform. More equitable taxation. Creating communal infrastructure. Funding public services. Breaking up monoplies. Expanding voting rights. Expanding civil and human rights. Publicly funded research and technology investment. Almost things the overwhelming majority of the 1% are vocally and demonstratably against and are trying to reverse. Now is better than 1800, so why does he want to go backwards for the profits of billionaires?

"they have to get their fair share" - the richest people in society have so much money they could never, ever spend it, even if they spent all their time doing it. At least not on themselves, which is what they mostly do aside from hoarding it. That's without even getting into CEO-lowest paid worker ratios etc when we're talking about 'effort' or 'hard work'.

"The worst get nothing, that's my philosophy" - you're condemning people to death, so which people specfically do you think you should kill? The severely disabled who can't work? What about people in precarious work that can't make rent anyway? If people aren't born equal and the 'worst' get nothing and are left to die how are you qualifying that? Who gets to decide that? What if the 1% decide you're one of them? (spoiler, they already have)

Edit: This is a rubbish comment I made while drunk, but I'm not taking it down because that's cowardice.

Even if a lot of the 1% are genuinely hard working, do they deserve THAT MUCH WEALTH? Okay let's say you're a genuine innovator who came up with some pretty rad ideas on how to improve technology or infrastructure, cool, I'm all for you getting a nice pile of cash to live a Cush lifestyle. But does Bezos really deserve THAT MUCH MONEY just for coming up with the idea to sell books from a warehouse online? To me that "brilliant" idea is worth a decent upper middle class lifestyle but not fucking "I can fund my own private nasa" money.

There are medical scientists who make much bigger contributions to society by finding treatments for skin cancer and shit who make good money but just a fraction of what Musk of Bezos makes.

I always go straight for the throat, both figuratively and literally if I have the chance. So I can't offer you any advice that doesn't involve a katana in some way.

I suggest a bullet

There's no curing these musk losers, if people still don't see he's a fucking moron they should die, there's just no coming back from that level of mental termites

Don’t be too harsh he’s a cool dude

Nah he is an idiot. Thankfully you won't see this comment.