"We are not even defensive about the fact that our grandfather and our great-grandfather were members of the club. Here were people enjoying the hard work of their predecessors. In those days, that's just the way it was. The people who had the brains and the drive are the ones who built up the big fortunes." -Virginia Soule.
That's how the rich think. It's a variant on survival of the fittest. Prosperity of the smartest! It was Mitt Romney's philosophy of makers and takers. It is incorrect philosophy, incorrect sociology, incorrect economics. It is incorrect It is also wrong in the moral sense. There is of course a correlation but "brains and drive" don't guarantee prosperity and the lack of brains and drive don't doom a person. There is also timing, luck, good and bad, and opportunity, and inherited wealth.
Did the people of Johnstown lack drive? No. They worked very hard indeed. Did they lack brains, the miners and mill workers? No.* Their fear of the dam was well-founded and the brains and drive of the SFFHC members resulted in incompetence and the deaths of 2,209.
But more than that, are brains and drive all? What about being good? What about being good people, empathetic, moral, caring, sympathetic? Are those not attributes more desirable than brains and drive? Soule's attitude is so breezily hard-hearted. People with fewer brains and less drive--no reason to feel defensive about the deaths of 2,209 of them! So tactless, tasteless. If she had (she's dead) brains and drive they did not produce in her that refinement, that is often said to come with prosperity, to be tactful. Being "not even defensive" is offensive.
*British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock gave a famous speech on the brains and drive of working people in 1987.
That's how the rich think. It's a variant on survival of the fittest. Prosperity of the smartest! It was Mitt Romney's philosophy of makers and takers. It is incorrect philosophy, incorrect sociology, incorrect economics. It is incorrect It is also wrong in the moral sense. There is of course a correlation but "brains and drive" don't guarantee prosperity and the lack of brains and drive don't doom a person. There is also timing, luck, good and bad, and opportunity, and inherited wealth.
Did the people of Johnstown lack drive? No. They worked very hard indeed. Did they lack brains, the miners and mill workers? No.* Their fear of the dam was well-founded and the brains and drive of the SFFHC members resulted in incompetence and the deaths of 2,209.
But more than that, are brains and drive all? What about being good? What about being good people, empathetic, moral, caring, sympathetic? Are those not attributes more desirable than brains and drive? Soule's attitude is so breezily hard-hearted. People with fewer brains and less drive--no reason to feel defensive about the deaths of 2,209 of them! So tactless, tasteless. If she had (she's dead) brains and drive they did not produce in her that refinement, that is often said to come with prosperity, to be tactful. Being "not even defensive" is offensive.
*British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock gave a famous speech on the brains and drive of working people in 1987.
