Marx, Zhuangzi & Psychology Marx + Zhuangzi · Everyone is inherently whole

Karmic Obstacles Series

You Cannot Be a Social Darwinist and Elitist Only When Luck and Power Are on Your Side

I. Social Darwinism and Elitism

Programmers are often quite right-wing, with elitism and social Darwinism as their baseline. Their views are:

  1. This world is so fair, as long as you work hard.
  1. Society is so developed now that as long as you work hard, you can make money.
  1. As long as you keep your feet on the ground, switch to programming, memorize the material and grind LeetCode, rack up internships and get into a major tech company, you can easily earn several hundred thousand yuan a year and buy a home on your own.
  1. I fought my way out of a rural village in one of the four provinces—Shandong, Shanxi, Henan, and Hebei—through my own hard work. Those classmates of mine are just impatient, don’t work hard, or have something wrong with them.
  1. I came from a rural village in one of those four provinces and built everything from scratch on my own. Now I’m one of the best and brightest, with a home and a car.
  1. It still comes down to IQ and genius. I got where I am through talent: good at math, great at competitions, competing my way into an elite university and a major tech company. And XX, who’s even more of a genius than I am, went from Tsinghua’s Yao Class -> MIT -> back to China to start a business -> a net worth of a billion yuan.

This is the typical ideology of the petty bourgeoisie when they are riding high.

II. Feeling the Full Chill

Over the year beginning in the second half of 2024, almost all programmers at major tech companies felt the full chill: being “optimized out,” reassigned, or subjected to psychological manipulation at work; getting little response to job applications; and beginning to “lower their sights” to companies they used to look down on. Many people are saying, “Once this job ends, I probably won’t be able to find another.” Very few still have the confidence to plan their careers beyond forty. Almost everyone has started talking about this or that colleague who bought a large home at the market’s peak and how miserable their situation is now.

III. Elitism Comes Back to Bite

Programmers are now finding it hard to sustain their elitism. They have discovered that hard work gets them nowhere, fate is predetermined, class divisions are entrenched, technology is not all-powerful, bureaucrats run rampant, and their supposed intelligence and genius offer them no direction in the present circumstances. They can no longer bear applying to themselves the logic that if you aren’t doing well, you must be incompetent, lazy, or low-IQ.

A new crop of small-town exam aces have followed their advice and finished grinding LeetCode. Believing themselves both gifted and hardworking, they wait like fully charged batteries at a battery-swapping station, ready to replace them. (Previous article: “The College Graduate Dividend and the Dividend from Cutthroat Competition Among Engineers Are Only Just Beginning.”) They had hoped those born in the 2000s would straighten out the workplace, only to be pushed out by that very generation: “If you don’t work hard, you don’t deserve to be my brother.”

You cannot be a social Darwinist and an elitist only when luck and success are on your side.

IV. The Financial Industry Is Similar

People in finance once stood high above everyone else, swaggering with self-importance, holding forth on the affairs of the nation, writing impassioned commentaries, and treating even the mightiest nobles as dirt.

They simply got their slap in the face earlier. Since around 2015 or 2017, the financial industry has largely been in dire straits. The iron fist and those slaps in the face made financial elites pessimistic and pragmatic. When the autumn river turns cold, the ducks are the first to know.

IV. Looking at the Petty Bourgeoisie Through These Two Typical Groups

Here we see the petty bourgeoisie’s lack of consciousness, their lack of real insight and wisdom, their lack of awareness. Arrogant in victory and dispirited in defeat, they buy into rallies and sell into slumps, curry favor with the powerful, and flatter those above while trampling those below.

Even after reality has battered them, the petty bourgeoisie rarely turn left; they only move from the right to the far right. They once all had a touch of liberalism and Austrian economics about them, admiring markets and entrepreneurial spirit. Now every one of them studies world wars and industrial policy, awaits favors from paternal authority, and bows before grand narratives.

Of course, the smaller strata of the petty bourgeoisie are very likely to be backward and ignorant. That is a characteristic of their class.