I can't speak to other areas but Silicon Valley was definitely like that.
In the 1980s in Palo Alto, my high school AP Computer Science teacher asked parents to come in and give guest lectures in the last few weeks of class. Donald Knuth's daughter was in my class so he came and talked about TeX. Another kid's parent was a VP at a bank; he talked about secure transaction processing for ATMs. My dad (a researcher in robotics and AI) talked about expert systems.
There is an odd disconnect between what I'm saying and what you're hearing. One can either be an effective communicator and respond to what people actually say OR one can assume bad faith and spend one's time trying to ferret out what failing in others prevents them from understanding your wisdom and taking the conversation in the direction YOU want it to go. In this conversation you consistently chose the latter approach; I rather prefer the former.
I have actually deliberately AVOIDED using the term "Marxist" except in response to you using it. I do this because I'm not sure I understand Marxism and I'm not sufficiently interested in the topic to want to argue over the subtleties of who or what is and isn't considered "Marxist". That's why I went with "Marxian" to unambiguously describe terminology that is "related to Marx and/or Marxists" and "pseudo-marxists" to mean "people who seem motivated by concerns related to Marxism, whether or not they themselves are actually Marxists".
I don't understand why it's so threatening to YOU that ONE point in the original article seemed to miss the mark and make a universal claim that from my point of view doesn't universalize to me or the people I know. Is your worldview so fragile that it can't withstand that? This all seems very odd.
Unlike the Idiocracy context, my comment about your tone was objectively valid; I am positive any jury of my peers would agree. (And apparently did agree by downvoting your response when another corespondent called you on it). ALL you have to do to avoid being perceived as pompous is leave out your usual preamble and meta-commentary. In short, the next time you find yourself writing a response that has this format:
> paragraph #1: "Regarding YOU: Something is wrong with your reasoning abilities and you should be ashamed of thinking the way you do. You made a basic error. You weren't charitable. You're not trying to learn. I'm not surprised you made this elementary mistake. You have not done your homework."
> paragraph #2 "Regarding what you SAID: Here is some actual information and argument that responds directly to your stated concerns, leaving out all ad hominem attacks and attempts to analyze underlying motives"
...just LEAVE OUT that first paragraph. You can still write it if it makes you feel better, but then leave it on the cutting room floor - delete it before you post. All of it. Because even if it were all TRUE, it would still tend to poison the resulting discussion. If you want people to read charitably, lead by example - read charitably yourself.
When people don't find your arguments convincing, you might want to at least consider the possibility that your arguments aren't very good. Or perhaps (as in this case) you've just done a bad job of showing their relevance to the current conversational context. The fact that nobody except you seems to have read the text the way you read it doesn't prove you're wrong and everyone else is right, but it does suggest you might want to take a step back and look at what assumptions you're making that others aren't.
You recently said that conversations are for "finding out"; how exactly does talking down to people and calling them 'tards advance that goal?
Are you sure you read the article? It's not merely "about Marxism", it's about how Marxism allegedly applies to today's issues. It has this general format:
(1) describe some issue/concern workers today have, like "work doesn't seem very meaningful" or "work is too specialized" or "we're all so anxious all the time".
(2) demonstrate how Marxism addresses that issue/concern.
(3) repeat #1 and #2 for a different issue/concern, until done.
The format only WORKS - it only has a prayer of being convincing - if section #1 uses everyday language the way actual people use it. If you let part #1 include weird Marxian terms of art rather than normal English language, the logic fails - it becomes circular.
If you can redefine terms like "anxious" at the start to mean exactly and only what Marx would have meant by the terms, you have failed to make the case this article author is trying to make; you have failed to make a logical connection between the problems real people have today and Marx's analysis that demonstrates "we are all Marxists now". Instead, all you're doing is proving that the problems Marx invented and described/asserted using his own weird language...are indeed described/asserted by Marx. Which demonstrates not that we are Marxists, but that Marxists are Marxist.
(1) Regarding the word "anxious", you wrote: "the word was not used in isolation. It was contextualized in an utterance about the particular anxiety about the loss of livelihood--predicated on the very real perception of profound expendability--of people in a capitalist system."
No, in fact, it was NOT so contextualized. Read it again. Maybe YOU saw it that way because you already had some framework to hang it on, but the original claim was a standalone question, the start of a discussion point, and the first mention of anxiety in the whole piece. It said: "Why are we all so anxious all the time?" That is a question, in English, not written by Marx, so we shouldn't need to bend over backwards to interpret it in some explicitly Marxian context to decide whether it would be a sensible assertion to Marx. What matters is whether it's a sensible assertion to us. If not, then we don't need Marx to explain anything here. My conclusion: it's not true. So maybe the rest of the essay is fine, but that one point is unnecessary.
(2) It takes real chutzpah to claim in the same sentence (a) somebody else has ignored the Principle of Charity, and (b) that this person "should be personally ashamed" to have made "a very basic error". You don't seem to be following your own advice. :-)
Setting aside your pompous overall tone - which is probably not helping you to win any arguments - the best I've been able to parse from what you've said so far is this: if somebody already accepts a slew of Marxist assertions, then this new Marxist assertion seems ordinary and reasonable.
And I agree, it probably does.
But since I'm not already a Marxist, I don't have any existing framework wherein it makes sense to say things like "concentrated capital exploits labor" much less to discuss how this allegedly happens and how that goes on to create what "Marxist analysts" mean by "anxiety". (I'm not convinced the word "exploit" is even a useful term in this context.)
I would prefer instead frame employment in terms of ordinary economics and say that when any two parties agree on any sort of contract there is likely to be both a producer surplus and a consumer surplus; both sides profit by the exchange. If it made sense to call one of those surpluses "exploitation", you'd have to call the other one that too. It's not one-sided.
Sadly, pseudo-marxists have been spouting this sort of stuff for so long that by now they've polluted the terms "capitalism" and "capitalist"; it might be easier for free-market advocates to give up and start over with a new term (like, say, "free-market advocates") for what economists used to mean by "capitalism" than to keep fighting over it. I'm probably never going to convince you that "capitalism" doesn't "exploit workers" because to you, "exploiting workers" is part of the definition of "capitalism".
When I say something is an extraordinary claim, I merely mean it's a claim that seems intuitively false to me. Since the claim was phrased in a way that didn't seem to exclude my own subjective sense of the world as a source of evidence, I consulted that sense, and found the claim wanting.
In the end, it seems like the title claim of the article - "you are a Marxist" - probably just doesn't apply to me. Maybe it applies to you. Which is fine.
> The author has actually asked, "Why are we all SO anxious...?" Not just "anxious," but "so anxious."
In that case, my answer is: because we are each on our own hedonic treadmill, and that particular level of anxiety is what evolution handed us. Whatever level it is, it probably has some survival value.
Though I think the real problem in our conversation here might be that I live in an allegedly "capitalist" society and I'm not particularly anxious, so when I read text like "why are we all so anxious" I have to come up with a meaning for that sentence that isn't immediately false on the face of it.
Are you "extremely anxious", such that the term "so anxious" applies to you? Do you assume it applies to everybody else too? This isn't a rhetorical question; I'm honestly curious: do you think people in capitalist societies have an extreme form of anxiety and people in more socialist ones don't? If so, that strikes me as an extraordinary claim; I'd like to see some sort of evidence for it.
> Not that I'm very fond of social sciences but do you have at least one study to support your claim
I'm basing my claim on the standard findings of happiness research as I understand them - look up "hedonic treadmill" or "happiness set point". People have a core level of happiness. Being anxious from time to time has the value that it makes us act to try to better our condition. We make and do stuff in large part because we are chasing the illusion that if we overcome this one next obstacle we'll then be happy, but whether we succeed or fail, we eventually return to our default level. Marx's claim is based on the false idea that if we just fixed society in various ways then people could be happy all the time. But he's wrong; they can't.
Quote: "The results of this study suggest that regardless of whether the life event is significantly negative or positive, people will generally always return to their happiness baseline". Source: Silver (1982). Coping with an undesirable life event: A study of early reactions to physical disability. Northwestern University.
Of course, the other answer is that we're not anxious all the time. Maybe Marx was. Maybe the people who find Marx insightful are too. I'm not. Most people are anxious some of the time. And they should be, because being anxious some of the time can prompt you to improve your life situation or avoid immediate danger.
> Why are we all so anxious all the time? Marx had a diagnosis. Because capitalism makes the human being utterly expendable...
I'm sorry, but that's just nuts unless you can point to a society - of any sort anywhere - that contains no anxious people. People are (sometimes) anxious for the same reason deer and mice and all other animals on the planet are anxious: being anxious has survival value.
Suppose we completely solved the need to pay for food and housing; people would be anxious about health care. Suppose we solved that too? People would be anxious about the need for pet health care. Or better housing. Or social validation. Or we'd start inventing brand new threats to be anxious about, like catastrophic global warming or nuclear meltdowns or economic collapse or being hit by a meteor.
In the 1980s in Palo Alto, my high school AP Computer Science teacher asked parents to come in and give guest lectures in the last few weeks of class. Donald Knuth's daughter was in my class so he came and talked about TeX. Another kid's parent was a VP at a bank; he talked about secure transaction processing for ATMs. My dad (a researcher in robotics and AI) talked about expert systems.
It was okay. :-)