Tom Friedman’s column in the New York Times explains a thing or two. After going through a litany of the ills plaguing society and the world, he says:
What’s going on here?
There are multiple and different reasons for these explosions, but to the extent they might have a common denominator I think it can be found in one of the slogans of Israel’s middle-class uprising: “We are fighting for an accessible future.” Across the world, a lot of middle- and lower-middle-class people now feel that the “future” is out of their grasp, and they are letting their leaders know it.
While he puts it largely on the world stage, it’s equally applicable to lawyers. We want the world to adjust to us. We want what we want, and we’re not getting it, so rather than hunker down to the heavy lifting of doing better, we demand that someone change the our world so that we can continue doing what we find easiest and most convenient and still achieve our dreams.
Why now? It starts with the fact that globalization and the information technology revolution have gone to a whole new level. Thanks to cloud computing, robotics, 3G wireless connectivity, Skype, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, the iPad, and cheap Internet-enabled smartphones, the world has gone from connected to hyper-connected.
This is the single most important trend in the world today. And it is a critical reason why, to get into the middle class now, you have to study harder, work smarter and adapt quicker than ever before. All this technology and globalization are eliminating more and more “routine” work — the sort of work that once sustained a lot of middle-class lifestyles.
Some will see this explanation and think he’s talking about “innovation.” If I just grab hold of innovation before anyone else, I can soar to the top while others are stumbling about, bumping into themselves. Hop on the train, baby, and ride it to success.
But note that he talks about something different as well, that working harder and smarter is at the core of adapter to change. He’s not saying that there’s some easy route, some magic bullet, that will solve problems, but that the upper end of the spectrum keep getting farther away and harder to reach. Need proof?
Think of what The Times reported last February: At little Grinnell College in rural Iowa, with 1,600 students, “nearly one of every 10 applicants being considered for the class of 2015 is from China.” The article noted that dozens of other American colleges and universities are seeing a similar surge as well. And the article added this fact: Half the “applicants from China this year have perfect scores of 800 on the math portion of the SAT.”
Young people in China are deluged by competition. There are an awful lot of them, and they are told that either they do better or they fade quickly away (or worse). It’s hard to get a perfect score on the math portion of the SAT. But less than that isn’t going to distinguish a Chinese student sufficient to be worth sending to Iowa. Think how sad that must be. Yet they don’t whine about the unfairness of their circumstances. They work harder.
In the meantime, this same tool that allows for some to rise above the rest also provides an opportunity for the rest to create a critical mass of mediocrity.
This globalization/I.T. revolution is also “super-empowering” individuals, enabling them to challenge hierarchies and traditional authority figures — from business to science to government. It is also enabling the creation of powerful minorities and making governing harder and minority rule easier than ever. See dictionary for: “Tea Party.”
Those who don’t want to put in the effort to achieve now have a place to join with others who believe that life is unfair to them, the government has failed them, by not accommodating their needs and making them wildly successful as they sit alone and spend their time pretending to be somebody on the internet rather than actually doing something with their lives.
No one pays attention to one voice complaining We can’t hear it. But put enough voices together and the sound grows louder and louder. Nothing wrong with that, except when you look to see what they’re complaining about. When it’s whining over the unfairness of expecting hard work and excellence, hard core effort, the internet provides the medium for the mediocre to have their say. This doesn’t mean that government is doing a bang up job, or that people who get less than 800 on their SAT have nothing to offer society. Not at all.
But never before in the history of mankind has complaining been elevated to lifestyle. And it’s because of technology, that allows the mediocre to meet each other, share their vision of a mediocre society that provides them with the stuff of their dreams without any heavy lifting, and create a virtual public square to demand that society change to meet their needs.
Tom Friedman says that tech has eliminated much of the routine that was sufficient to keep the mediocre busy and sustain a middle class lifestyle. It’s gone, baby, and it’s not coming back. If you’re satisfied with mediocrity, then get used to being hungry and miserable because you’ve just ended any hope of doing better on your own.
What about mass protests organized around twitter against governments that fail to provide young people with the opportunity to have wonderful lives? The medium can do that, join together people from diverse places to coalesce into a massive force promoting their goals. But no government, no ABA, no law school, can make you better than you make yourself. The most it can do is create a tyranny of the mediocre, where society agrees to its demand to provide Cheetos* and low-cost internet connections so that they won’t take to the streets and attack defenseless hipsters.
But the best you can hope for is the trickle down from those working harder than you, who are too busy achieving to join your protest. The reason for this is obvious, because no creates anything of value by whining about it. Complaints don’t create. We have great tools available to us today, but they’re just tools. We can use them to achieve more, faster, better, or to find a bunch of malcontents with whom to share unhappiness.
The constant sound of whining on the internet about how unfair it all is won’t make your lives happier or your futures brighter. You have to do that for yourself. Too much effort? Bummer.
*No Cheetos were harmed in the writing of this post.
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You just don’t understand
My only complaint is with Friedman. He put the “m” in mediocre. You, on the other hand, have earned the right to complain. Good work as always. (This is my tribute to civility, too).
So now “Tea Party” = “Complainers who don’t want to compete.” I thought the core of that movement was to remove government obstructions to competition.
I believe he used tea party as an example of a governing minority getting into power.
And I expect I never will.
You were very civil to Friedman.
The American Revolution was a governing minority getting into power too. And they did it without the internet.
Poor analogy.
Back when I was a teacher, among the kinder epithets we had for “No Child Left Behind” was “No Child Gets Ahead.” Our educational system is producing mediocrity by design. To survive as a school and maintain funding, it was necessary to get all students to “proficiency” in each subject being tested. How was proficiency defined? By some statistically-challenged politicians who decreed that test results at the 40th percentile (on a norm-referenced test) were considered “proficient.” In case any readers also missed this bit of statistical knowledge, that means that 60 percent of students will *always* be considered proficient and 40 percent will *always* be considered deficient. When there is a mandate to get 100% of students proficient — which apparently means only 95% because the school can avoid reporting on 5% of its students.
So, in an effort to meet a statistically impossible mandate, schools have focused solely on improving lower-achieving students, many of whom cannot or will not meet proficiency. I do not mean to imply that helping the “bottom” is a waste of time; all students need an education. But, the very top students are all but ignored in this system. Some will achieve anyway. Some will still do slightly better-than-mediocre things, but they could do a lot better with the right guidance. A lot of school is wasted for at least the top ten percent of students, especially at the elementary and middle grades. As a result, when learning could be best, the best students are being ignored. We then have fewer students who achieve at the levels needed to score 800 on the SAT mathematics test.
Do you think anyone is telling the students they need to work harder? Maybe, but they’re not listening. After all, there are no consequences, positive or negative, to the student for the standardized test results. Once the college entrance exams come around, the consequences are still pretty minimal, and the student has only learned to whine about it.
I speak from experience both as a music teacher (who wanted his students to be excellent, dammit) and as one of those students who achieved anyway. I’m not from China — in fact, I grew up quite close to Grinnell — but I did end up with an 800 math score on my SAT. That hasn’t mattered much in later life, of course.
So long as our educational system is training students to be good, compliant factory workers — if they’re one of the lucky ones to have a job at all — we won’t have anything *but* complaining. Achieving is so much better than complaining.