3 ms·

There are no brilliant jerks in the upper class? I dunno about that. Sometimes I run into folks who went to "a small school outside of Boston", and well...

• lmm 7y ago
  You'd think that. But somehow these subjective assessment criteria always turn into a way to include the upper class and push out the riff-raff. (Of course it's probably mostly a question of what class the person doing the assessing is from).
• dragonwriter 7y ago
  > There are no brilliant jerks in the upper class? The upper class in a capitalist society are capitalists and not laborers and, as such, are not subject to employee performance reviews. So changing such a process to punish “brilliant jerks” has no adverse impact on brilliant jerks in the upper class. If brilliant jerks are the people most likely to be able to move upward in class if not actively sulpressed, then suppressing them via employee performance review process may be an effective means of suppressing upward class mobility, though the evidence that this is the actual effect or motivation here seems to be missing. Though I think that it may be that the reference to the working class was somewhat imprecise and the real boundary-enforcement that the concern addresses here is between the non-intelligentsia portion of the proletariat and a group comprised of the proletarian and petit bourgeois intelligentsia.