culture
politics

Where As a Nation Do We Go from Here?

Writer, Photographer
University of Texas at Austin
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale

Chris Arnade

Writer, Photographer

February 3rd, 2021
Michael
I am going to come at this question as someone whose perspective is based on twenty-five years in elite spaces filled with our nation’s “winners” (Academics and Wall Street) and ten years documenting and hanging with our nation’s “losers.”
The “Here,” as I see it, is a country with a deepening educational inequality that has not just become more significant, but unlike our other inequalities (race, income) is celebrated and encouraged by our political class.
Education is how we define and sort out the winners from the losers and we are proud of that.
The educated class, I call them the front-row, are our new elites. Being clever and showing that, is the entry requirement to this class, and once you enter you get to hang out with other clever people, live in select neighborhoods, and have access to select and powerful institutions, where you help write the rules we all play by.
If you play your cards right, then you are also awarded huge amounts of money, fame, and social status.
You also get to segregate yourself from the vast majority of Americans who didn’t take to or excel at the countless classes, testings, and other hoops we make people navigate to prove they are clever and winners. These are the “losers.”
These are the people you get to make the rules for, both explicit ones like who goes to jail, who gets hired for what jobs, who we let become part of our country, and the less explicit rules, like what are the right ideas to have about religion, or sports, or what you eat.
The most dangerous thing about our “Here”, and what is essential to answering “Where we go” is that the winners have constructed this system to ensure that the losers feel exactly like losers, because they embrace two offensive notions.
The first is that those in the front-row deserve what they got, because they won at a fair system that tests cleverness. This gives them moral cover for their privilege and scorn, and though wrong, at least there is some truth to it.
The second and more damning notion is the idea that anyone can win at this system, with just enough “whatever”, so that if you didn’t make it to the top, it is your fault. You lost. You are a loser. You deserve to have rules made for you, and you deserve the scorn for how you live, think, and for what you eat.
This is wrong and humiliating, and humiliated people often end up embracing what the front-row defines as reckless behavior. Things like embracing any community that will have you, regardless of what they believe.
That alone is a blueprint for trouble but recently there has been a growing realization among many of the losers that the winners are not good at what they do, not better, and that they are just building rules to benefit them.
That is really a blueprint for trouble.
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