I suspect suck-up culture is reinforced by what I call the scholastic track. Most of the people running things in the developed world are doing so because they mastered navigating the scholastic track. Mastering the scholastic track depends largely on conformity, deference, rote learning, and lots of sucking up. Get good marks from teacher in primary school to get into a good secondary school, then a good college, then a good post-grad program, then a good company/nonprofit/government agency. Critical thinking and real creativity do more harm than good on this track. A skilled navigator of the scholastic track knows that when teacher asks who ended the Great Depression, you don't respond with "that's a stupid question," you say, like a good little lamb, "Franklin D. Roosevelt, and, my, don't you look lovely today."
Because we travel the scholastic track during our formative years, it stands to reason that some degree of irreversible conditioning is taking place. If formal education is your primary responsibility during the first 2.5 decades of your life, and success in formal education depends on making your teachers happy via a mixture of regurgitating received knowledge, obedience, and sucking up, then you can imagine how the same understanding of success persists for the rest of your life. Teacher becomes professor becomes boss becomes client. No matter your age, no matter your station, chances are there is someone above you in the food chain, and sucking up to that person will always be a solid strategy for continued success. We'll always have a suck-up culture to endure so long as we continue to select for skillful navigators of the scholastic track when it come to choosing who gets to run things.
I reserve my moral outrage for my own former opinions. When I look back at some of the views I once held regarding war, race, feminism, etc., and contemplate some of the views I currently hold on a variety of subjects, supported only by my own biases, I am ashamed.
Corrupt moral sliminess, like Hunter Biden but even Pres. Clinton's perjury, is a lot more immoral to me than Lia Thomas. Q'she (a quasi-woman) should be swimming in the Open races - reserving women's races for XX folk who identify as women. IE "real women".
Lia is not one.
We should replace "Men's" sports with "Open" to all individuals, men, women, trans folk. Male-men, real men, will virtually always win.
And those gender-sexually handicapped should use the handicapped toilets, or the Open toilets, reserving women's rooms for XX women.
It's not quite "moral" ire, tho it's outrageous and does fill me with rage.
"In profit-seeking firms, top management will be more successful if they prefer facts to flattery." I'm against sucking up, boot-licking, brown-nosing, and I want this to be true, but I'm not sure it actually is true based on the key visible metric - it seems like good suck-ups are quite often more successful than some who are more factual and do less sucking up. More successful at getting promotions.
I think suck-ups, similar to Peter Principle folk rising to their incompetence level, often populate top spots at older firms, whose founders are long gone. Many presidents/ CEOs prefer more suck-up Yes men, and promote such folk.
Suck up culture = human culture. This sort of behavior happens in all walks of life. Sucking up is just one of the many strategies that people use to improve their lot in life. It may seem distasteful, but I imagine that anyone who has achieved any success in their life has sucked up to some degree. I think the more bothersome tidbit in all of this is that we’re blaming a young person (Lia Thomas) for wanting to swim competitively when there are plenty of mature adults who presided over the decision as to whether she would be allowed to compete against women. Let’s talk about them and leave Lia alone.
At least in the short run, Lia Thomas has been good for women's swimming. It normally gets almost completely ignored; s/he has brought it plenty of attention.
Suck up culture is definitely one of my moral ire triggers. Even more so when you are sucking up to power, and not competence.
I started at my org on the ground level (or basement based on entry level corrected for education). Now that I've surpassed my initial peers by several organizational hierarchy levels, people that were outright publicly rude to me act SUPER nice to me. Just makes my skin crawl. Takes a lot of moral courage and intentional behavior to be fair to them based on level of competence, because my instinct is to be vindictive.
I have one thing that absolutely triggers my moral ire… Moral/philosophical inconsistencies in one’s professed beliefs and actions taken.
If a person, regardless of station, professes a belief but then acts in a way that violates that belief, I lose a lot of respect for them. That makes it particularly hard for me to form any sort of attachment to, or invest in, either of the leading political parties.
One of the advantages of the hard sciences is that suck-up culture has less advantage. Good suck-up skills can get overwhelmed by valid results measured in real world outcomes. A great place for people a bit on the spectrum to do well.
The worse I can do to a person is to categorize them as being informationally useless. In this category are Krugman, most politicians, most media and most academics. Unfortunately, the list is expanding to include people I would prefer not to add. But when a person I want to trust regurgitates the "cult wisdom" du jour, I am left with a sinking feeling. How do I respect someone who refuses to think for themselves and who is comfortable going with the crowd that is so obviously heading over the cliff?
What Kling describes as suck-up culture, where people kiss-up (less crass phrasing) and punch-down: that seems a natural part of any competitive social hierarchy.
In a less charitable view, Kling kisses-up to people like Tyler Cowen and punches down to Trump and Trump supporters with deliberately uncharitable interpretations.
On a more charitable note, Kling makes conscious effort to not kiss-up and punch-down as much as normal.
Sorry, Arnold. The game is a waste of time. When people of interest sin, I express my outrage for just one minute (in Spanish we have a few words that easily summarize our worse feelings about sinners and a minute is enough to shout them out) and then laugh at their idiocy. Most (perhaps all) politicians sin regularly so we cannot take them seriously or laugh at them all day long. Take the case of your senile President whose son Hunter has been manipulating him for the past 40 years. How long do you think I can laugh at what the senile President says or does daily? BTW, Cactus is a perfect idiot --partisan enough to repeat Trump millions of times but to forget about the hundreds of D-politicians which have been sinning for the past 50 years.
I very much appreciate your thoughts Arnold. My simple heuristic is that I don't like (I probably shouldn't say this profane word, although a polite synonym would be "jerk").
Dishonesty and cheating bother me. Especially in fantasy sports leagues. They're supposed to be fun, but as a commissioner in a league, I hate policing cheating.
I suspect suck-up culture is reinforced by what I call the scholastic track. Most of the people running things in the developed world are doing so because they mastered navigating the scholastic track. Mastering the scholastic track depends largely on conformity, deference, rote learning, and lots of sucking up. Get good marks from teacher in primary school to get into a good secondary school, then a good college, then a good post-grad program, then a good company/nonprofit/government agency. Critical thinking and real creativity do more harm than good on this track. A skilled navigator of the scholastic track knows that when teacher asks who ended the Great Depression, you don't respond with "that's a stupid question," you say, like a good little lamb, "Franklin D. Roosevelt, and, my, don't you look lovely today."
Because we travel the scholastic track during our formative years, it stands to reason that some degree of irreversible conditioning is taking place. If formal education is your primary responsibility during the first 2.5 decades of your life, and success in formal education depends on making your teachers happy via a mixture of regurgitating received knowledge, obedience, and sucking up, then you can imagine how the same understanding of success persists for the rest of your life. Teacher becomes professor becomes boss becomes client. No matter your age, no matter your station, chances are there is someone above you in the food chain, and sucking up to that person will always be a solid strategy for continued success. We'll always have a suck-up culture to endure so long as we continue to select for skillful navigators of the scholastic track when it come to choosing who gets to run things.
I reserve my moral outrage for my own former opinions. When I look back at some of the views I once held regarding war, race, feminism, etc., and contemplate some of the views I currently hold on a variety of subjects, supported only by my own biases, I am ashamed.
Corrupt moral sliminess, like Hunter Biden but even Pres. Clinton's perjury, is a lot more immoral to me than Lia Thomas. Q'she (a quasi-woman) should be swimming in the Open races - reserving women's races for XX folk who identify as women. IE "real women".
Lia is not one.
We should replace "Men's" sports with "Open" to all individuals, men, women, trans folk. Male-men, real men, will virtually always win.
And those gender-sexually handicapped should use the handicapped toilets, or the Open toilets, reserving women's rooms for XX women.
It's not quite "moral" ire, tho it's outrageous and does fill me with rage.
"In profit-seeking firms, top management will be more successful if they prefer facts to flattery." I'm against sucking up, boot-licking, brown-nosing, and I want this to be true, but I'm not sure it actually is true based on the key visible metric - it seems like good suck-ups are quite often more successful than some who are more factual and do less sucking up. More successful at getting promotions.
I think suck-ups, similar to Peter Principle folk rising to their incompetence level, often populate top spots at older firms, whose founders are long gone. Many presidents/ CEOs prefer more suck-up Yes men, and promote such folk.
Suck up culture = human culture. This sort of behavior happens in all walks of life. Sucking up is just one of the many strategies that people use to improve their lot in life. It may seem distasteful, but I imagine that anyone who has achieved any success in their life has sucked up to some degree. I think the more bothersome tidbit in all of this is that we’re blaming a young person (Lia Thomas) for wanting to swim competitively when there are plenty of mature adults who presided over the decision as to whether she would be allowed to compete against women. Let’s talk about them and leave Lia alone.
At least in the short run, Lia Thomas has been good for women's swimming. It normally gets almost completely ignored; s/he has brought it plenty of attention.
Suck up culture is definitely one of my moral ire triggers. Even more so when you are sucking up to power, and not competence.
I started at my org on the ground level (or basement based on entry level corrected for education). Now that I've surpassed my initial peers by several organizational hierarchy levels, people that were outright publicly rude to me act SUPER nice to me. Just makes my skin crawl. Takes a lot of moral courage and intentional behavior to be fair to them based on level of competence, because my instinct is to be vindictive.
I have one thing that absolutely triggers my moral ire… Moral/philosophical inconsistencies in one’s professed beliefs and actions taken.
If a person, regardless of station, professes a belief but then acts in a way that violates that belief, I lose a lot of respect for them. That makes it particularly hard for me to form any sort of attachment to, or invest in, either of the leading political parties.
One of the advantages of the hard sciences is that suck-up culture has less advantage. Good suck-up skills can get overwhelmed by valid results measured in real world outcomes. A great place for people a bit on the spectrum to do well.
I would distinguish (a) behaviors that morally irk or exasperate and (b) behaviors that trigger moral ire.
Sense of moral entitlement, suck-up culture, and punching down are indeed exasperating. So are violations of norms of fairness.
Predation by force or fraud -- especially against the weak, the vulnerable, the defenseless -- triggers a deeper moral ire.
My intuition is that evolutionary psychology has hard-wired moral ire at predation against women and children.
The worse I can do to a person is to categorize them as being informationally useless. In this category are Krugman, most politicians, most media and most academics. Unfortunately, the list is expanding to include people I would prefer not to add. But when a person I want to trust regurgitates the "cult wisdom" du jour, I am left with a sinking feeling. How do I respect someone who refuses to think for themselves and who is comfortable going with the crowd that is so obviously heading over the cliff?
Contempt is a big one for me.
What Kling describes as suck-up culture, where people kiss-up (less crass phrasing) and punch-down: that seems a natural part of any competitive social hierarchy.
In a less charitable view, Kling kisses-up to people like Tyler Cowen and punches down to Trump and Trump supporters with deliberately uncharitable interpretations.
On a more charitable note, Kling makes conscious effort to not kiss-up and punch-down as much as normal.
Sorry, Arnold. The game is a waste of time. When people of interest sin, I express my outrage for just one minute (in Spanish we have a few words that easily summarize our worse feelings about sinners and a minute is enough to shout them out) and then laugh at their idiocy. Most (perhaps all) politicians sin regularly so we cannot take them seriously or laugh at them all day long. Take the case of your senile President whose son Hunter has been manipulating him for the past 40 years. How long do you think I can laugh at what the senile President says or does daily? BTW, Cactus is a perfect idiot --partisan enough to repeat Trump millions of times but to forget about the hundreds of D-politicians which have been sinning for the past 50 years.
I very much appreciate your thoughts Arnold. My simple heuristic is that I don't like (I probably shouldn't say this profane word, although a polite synonym would be "jerk").
I don’t know if you coined it, but “sucking up and punching down” is a great turn of phrase. It describes a certain kind of person really well.
Dishonesty and cheating bother me. Especially in fantasy sports leagues. They're supposed to be fun, but as a commissioner in a league, I hate policing cheating.