False consciousness / alienation / Transparency 2.0 Forum

[AOT]

Arguing about whether or not 0L's are all strivers/victims of false consciousness seems kind of beside the point, other than the fact that that assumption has been used as an excuse for massive amounts of condescension ITT. Even interesting, non-soul sucking jobs are part of the system. The people who are writing all this theory are selling their ideas as well as their time, which I would argue is worse. The difference between living a meaningful life and an empty one is about way more than professional choices. There are an infinite number of ways you can create meaning in your day to day life to greater and lesser degrees.

I realise that the OP didn't assume either of these things, but it seemed to be the way the conversation was headed..

[Businesslady]

This isn't to say that "strivers" don't exist - but it is to say that observations of external student behavior in law school which leads to the generalization of "massive scale" striverism is an assumption that needs to be questioned. I say this primarily as someone who was (and to some degree still is) often accused of being a "striver" simply because people (1) are often unwilling to believe my actual motivations when I share them, or (2) have made assumptions about me without ever asking why I do the things I do.

Okay, I mean, you can have a pass on the "why did you go if you don't like thinking" front then? I don't have an issue with identifying complexity where it actually exists.

(1) the "great mass" of law students may not actually work that way, and (2) even if the assumptions of law students are close enough to be accurate we're left with odd assumptions about the way the world works which seem to be equally unjustified.

I'm not interested in actually arguing for any of the intuitive frameworks or constructs in the heterogeneous Marxist tradition and I think the "casual Marxism" thread might be a better place to pick at the whole pseudoscience.

I know I splatter text here, so sorry or whatever, but I'm more than comfortable with the constructs of false consciousness and alienation from posting here entirely too much. Are you more comfortable if I talk in terms of an observed trend of possibly subconsciously but still ultimately disingenuous application of Humean skepticism where justifying the status quo is involved, and hypothesizing that there's some possible interaction of risk-averse personality and rhetorical training that breeds it? Is it wrong not to give the benefit of the doubt anymore to the intellectual honesty of "I'd like to see the evidence" in response to very high-level abstractions and models that are useful for their simplicity and can unpack elegantly or be refined to suit particular situations?

Three quick examples of the "way the world works" that ratfukr seems to be assuming and which I would seriously question:
1) I don't have time to trace how much of ratfukr's Marxist analysis depends upon accepting the "labor theory of value" but given that most Marxist analysis depends upon that theory, and that theory is highly questionable, it would seem to cast a pall over subsequent analysis done in this thread.

I don't know if it's useful to respond to an inferred assumption with an explicit assumption that's actually garbage. I do know that if there's anything you actually would want to dedicate your time to, it would be the matter of why this is not maddeningly conclusory, or indicative of exactly what I'm *actually* mostly discussing ITT. Speaking of induction problems.

2) It seems like there's some weird cognitive dissonance going on where ratfukr thinks striverism is a problem because you're looking for external validation vis-a-vis prestige and yet ratfukr is simultaneously okay with something done as "performance art" even though that medium is just as dependent upon external validation (i.e. you care what the audience thinks; perhaps you want to evoke a response other than approval, but the validation is just as external).

No, I cite to Arendt.

3) Ratfukr has repeatedly brought up the fiat nature of modern currency as though it's somehow a problem, but with no real explanation of why. Mediums of exchange with no intrinsic value are demonstrably superior to the alternative (where inflation/deflation is based upon often random fluctuations in the stock of some commodity), and nothing that ratfukr has ever posted challenges this.

I do not think it is a problem and have never said it is a problem.

Look, at least you're trying, so you pass the cogito thing. I still think your approach is a garbage form of question-begging (I think) and what I call "willfully dense" elsewhere but as you're aware we all have our own cognitive dissonance to bear. Personally, I try not to pass intuition and ideology off as logic. Well, no I don't, but I don't do it on behalf of capital, so suck it, fascist.

[Businesslady]

Arguing about whether or not 0L's are all strivers/victims of false consciousness seems kind of beside the point, other than the fact that that assumption has been used as an excuse for massive amounts of condescension ITT. Even interesting, non-soul sucking jobs are part of the system. The people who are writing all this theory are selling their ideas as well as their time, which I would argue is worse. The difference between living a meaningful life and an empty one is about way more than professional choices. There are an infinite number of ways you can create meaning in your day to day life to greater and lesser degrees.

I realise that the OP didn't assume either of these things, but it seemed to be the way the conversation was headed..

I know that I'm working with fairly unfalsifiable ideas. Because it's shorthand. That's how doctrine works.

For clarity, here are some of my assumptions:

1) Law students and lawyers are generally risk-averse
2) The application of doctrine in a manner deferential to "precedent" tends to favor existing power structures
3) A legal education model within an adversarial legal system often functions in terms of binary oppositions
4) Vested interests have none of the incentives of idealized scientists to properly weight evidence to reach consensus
5) Cognitive dissonance exists
6) We're working with objective manifestations of beliefs, not reading minds
7) Look at this fucking place and tell me it's not a bunch of strivers projecting mediocrity and rationalizing risk aversion with really cynical and self-defeating ideas about the entire world and just straight up ball-moving concern trolling while boomers light their cigars with burning wads of cash and laugh. Well, not actually, because I think gross systemic incompetence, in the form of a combination of social disincentives to empathy and mass inattention, is probably more at issue. In other words, false consciousness and alienation.

[Businesslady]

Embedded in all of this is the suspicion that conclusory arguments from a position of power constitute a form of textdumping attrition that perpetuates this whole process. The empirically-inclined would be well advised to watch this thread progress. I get that this is circular. It's doctrine.

[Moneytrees]

Look at this fucking place and tell me it's not a bunch of strivers projecting mediocrity and rationalizing risk aversion with really cynical and self-defeating ideas about the entire world and just straight up ball-moving concern trolling while boomers light their cigars with burning wads of cash and laugh. Well, not actually, because I think gross systemic incompetence, in the form of a combination of social disincentives to empathy and mass inattention, is probably more at issue. In other words, false consciousness and alienation.

Do you think there's a tiny chance that you may be over thinking this? Your assumptions betray your arrogance. You sound like the type of kid that gives philosophy majors a bad name.

[OneMoreLawHopeful]

Three quick examples of the "way the world works" that ratfukr seems to be assuming and which I would seriously question:
1) I don't have time to trace how much of ratfukr's Marxist analysis depends upon accepting the "labor theory of value" but given that most Marxist analysis depends upon that theory, and that theory is highly questionable, it would seem to cast a pall over subsequent analysis done in this thread.

I don't know if it's useful to respond to an inferred assumption with an explicit assumption that's actually garbage. I do know that if there's anything you actually would want to dedicate your time to, it would be the matter of why this is not maddeningly conclusory, or indicative of exactly what I'm *actually* mostly discussing ITT. Speaking of induction problems.

Wait, so I'm totally confused about what you mean by "false consciousness" then. In Marxist thought "false consciousness" was what you had insofar as you lacked "class consciousness," but the basis for class consciousness was being collectively screwed based upon Marx's ideas relating to the labor theory of value.

Insofar as you don't ascribe to that theory, in all seriousness, what class are denizens of TLS members of? How is class even defined in your thought?

Alternatively, if you're talking about "false consciousness" as somehow being distinct from a framework that involves "class consciousness" what are you really getting at here? I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming you're not just ascribing to the "sheeple" beliefs of conspiracists, but I need something here to understand how you are using this term.

[cotiger]

im gonna add some overquoting to this projecting. its a good thing we have these above average folks to educate us eh guys?

TBF - I don't think they're trying to be so condescending as to imply that anyone who disagrees is "below average," but I do agree that there's a fair amount of projecting going on here which is unacknowledged by some (though some have admitted to projecting, so that's not universal either).

I wouldn't say that I'm projecting all that much. I've never been particularly strivery. Like.. I turned down ivy for a fairly rando LAC where I loved the culture and then spent a couple of years post grad working in the performing arts.

When I decided not to attend it was mostly because I recognized that what I was most interested in wouldn't be best served by law school, but also in some part due to impressions of the culture of the legal world derived from TLS and the ASWs. It was distressing to know that no matter how much I resisted, at a certain level I would have to care about prestige and pedigree and brass rings simply because everyone around me would actually care.

[Businesslady]

Three quick examples of the "way the world works" that ratfukr seems to be assuming and which I would seriously question:
1) I don't have time to trace how much of ratfukr's Marxist analysis depends upon accepting the "labor theory of value" but given that most Marxist analysis depends upon that theory, and that theory is highly questionable, it would seem to cast a pall over subsequent analysis done in this thread.

I don't know if it's useful to respond to an inferred assumption with an explicit assumption that's actually garbage. I do know that if there's anything you actually would want to dedicate your time to, it would be the matter of why this is not maddeningly conclusory, or indicative of exactly what I'm *actually* mostly discussing ITT. Speaking of induction problems.

Wait, so I'm totally confused about what you mean by "false consciousness" then. In Marxist thought "false consciousness" was what you had insofar as you lacked "class consciousness," but the basis for class consciousness was being collectively screwed based upon Marx's ideas relating to the labor theory of value.

Insofar as you don't ascribe to that theory, in all seriousness, what class are denizens of TLS members of? How is class even defined in your thought?

Alternatively, if you're talking about "false consciousness" as somehow being distinct from a framework that involves "class consciousness" what are you really getting at here? I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming you're not just ascribing to the "sheeple" beliefs of conspiracists, but I need something here to understand how you are using this term.

Unapologetically loosely for effect, as you can see. I use it in the sense of class consciousness in that I believe that most white collar work is lumpenproletarian and not petit bourgeois. That does not rely on an industrial-era labor theory of value. You might like Walter Benjamin.

[Businesslady]

im gonna add some overquoting to this projecting. its a good thing we have these above average folks to educate us eh guys?

TBF - I don't think they're trying to be so condescending as to imply that anyone who disagrees is "below average," but I do agree that there's a fair amount of projecting going on here which is unacknowledged by some (though some have admitted to projecting, so that's not universal either).

I wouldn't say that I'm projecting all that much. I've never been particularly strivery. Like.. I turned down ivy for a fairly rando LAC where I loved the culture and then spent a couple of years post grad working in the performing arts.

When I decided not to attend it was mostly because I recognized that what I was most interested in wouldn't be best served by law school, but also in some part due to impressions of the culture of the legal world derived from TLS and the ASWs. It was distressing to know that no matter how much I resisted, at a certain level I would have to care about prestige and pedigree and brass rings simply because everyone around me would actually care.

This makes sense.

Switching back into pure speculation so in before "induction problem!" - I think on some level, without sufficient family wealth or the right mix of "prestige"/scholarship to make the point moot (in which case there's no need for "improvement" on the conventional wisdom), one kind of has to want to fight back potentially to the point of financial self-immolation for it to make sense to go for the reasons I'm curious about. (Maybe not - does someone want to talk about PAYE? I know fuck all.) It seems pretty possible that admissions as administrative work will result in a self-fulfilling, self-selecting, "numbers-driven," society-harming profession of apologists. That's a really fucked up and sad thing to happen to what could be at least in part praxis school. That seems like the consequence of institution-side risk aversion: writing a story of the future so cowardly that it amounts to harm. I don't see anything elite about being fucking wusses, and neither does the rest of society. Like I said, I don't really see a crisis in legal education, but in capitalism and democracy.

[Businesslady]

And also, yeah, I definitely acknowledge it's important to parse out how much people want "prestige" in the sense that it's a proxy for career optionality. I think that this is how freedom becomes defined in many cases is fairly easy to swallow as a pretty good example in practice of Marx's alienation, on which, again, enough has been written in terms of "doctrine" that people rigorously trained in analogical reasoning and application of abstract value statements to fact patterns might find something in the literature of value.

[Moneytrees]

im gonna add some overquoting to this projecting. its a good thing we have these above average folks to educate us eh guys?

TBF - I don't think they're trying to be so condescending as to imply that anyone who disagrees is "below average," but I do agree that there's a fair amount of projecting going on here which is unacknowledged by some (though some have admitted to projecting, so that's not universal either).

I wouldn't say that I'm projecting all that much. I've never been particularly strivery. Like.. I turned down ivy for a fairly rando LAC where I loved the culture and then spent a couple of years post grad working in the performing arts.

When I decided not to attend it was mostly because I recognized that what I was most interested in wouldn't be best served by law school, but also in some part due to impressions of the culture of the legal world derived from TLS and the ASWs. It was distressing to know that no matter how much I resisted, at a certain level I would have to care about prestige and pedigree and brass rings simply because everyone around me would actually care.

This makes sense.

Switching back into pure speculation so in before "induction problem!" - I think on some level, without sufficient family wealth or the right mix of "prestige"/scholarship to make the point moot (in which case there's no need for "improvement" on the conventional wisdom), one kind of has to want to fight back potentially to the point of financial self-immolation for it to make sense to go for the reasons I'm curious about. (Maybe not - does someone want to talk about PAYE? I know fuck all.) It seems pretty possible that admissions as administrative work will result in a self-fulfilling, self-selecting, "numbers-driven," society-harming profession of apologists. That's a really fucked up and sad thing to happen to what could be at least in part praxis school. That seems like the consequence of institution-side risk aversion: writing a story of the future so cowardly that it amounts to harm. I don't see anything elite about being fucking wusses, and neither does the rest of society. Like I said, I don't really see a crisis in legal education, but in capitalism and democracy.

So what's your solution, exactly, to solving the issue of having a "numbers driven" society? The main function of such a system in the legal domain is to provide an efficient screening process for hiring. The primary reason firms recruit H students isn't so that they can flaunt their prestige.

[Businesslady]

Fuck jobs, and yes, that is the primary reason.

[Moneytrees]

In any field, you want to recruit the best workers. The n.1 ranked institution, all things being equal, will consistently provide better workers than, say, the n.50 ranked institution. Sure, firms want to hire from prestigious schools and write on their website that they only recruit at elite institutions. But it's not conceptually difficult to see why firms want to streamline the hiring process and just hire from the best schools.

[Businesslady]

"Hurr durr I don't see a grand design for society with prescriptions for everyone in critique I haven't actually read but like where are your SOLUTIONS. Checkmate libs" isn't really a constructive response to "if you're going to spend 3 years reading cases and trying to extract the reasoning behind them, you may as well read theory and save yourself the cognitive dissonance of wondering whether you should actually be internalizing capital's bullshit lawyerly sophism as if it were actually anything but specious nonsense you get points for acknowledging exists; here's some."

Tl;dr retake or don't go

Excerpt from a book by the faculty director of Wharton's Advanced Management Program on why the skills gap is flame:

My solution is read the fucking thread, and also, fuck jobs.

[cotiger]

That seems like the consequence of institution-side risk aversion: writing a story of the future so cowardly that it amounts to harm.

I once read an article by this guy talking about how hiring had changed over the course of his career. Talked a lot about the development over the last 30 years of people essentially being groomed for employment from birth. And how it's tough to justify the risk and uncertainty of someone with different experiences when there are so many people who are perfect on paper. While each individual hiring decision may be optimal, over time that lack of diversity will kill you.

You can extrapolate that to society as a whole.

[Businesslady]

Yes, or in this instance specifically to the judiciary in a society where electoral neofeudalism has become a race to the bottom in plainer and plainer sight and turned the other two branches of government into laughingstocks. Arendt has me all neoclassical and downright conservative - what happened to a sense of civic duty?

I guess if concentration of power (in the form of money or otherwise) can poison something as radical as, for example, Christianity, I don't know why I should be surprised to see American democracy eat shit too. It's just offensive to watch "elite" law schools beg firms and "the market" for scraps of validation and pass off taking a learnable test for merit in this neoliberal dystopian ritual. You clearly belong in the agon. It shouldn't be so expensive to be there, obviously, but it also shouldn't be so unpleasant.

[cotiger]

A profession with so many external indicators of success (Top law school? Success! Law Review? Success! Clerkship? Success! V10? Success! Partner? Success!) plays so well into the present day focus on "quantifiable" measurement. But the end result of either stalling out at one of these levels, or even of finishing the obstacle course frequently involves mental illness and/or alcoholism. So we have this ideology of success, but it doesn't really correlate with internal fulfillment. So you're left to wonder exactly what that ideology is serving.

That's what I get out of the term false consciousness in this situation.

The thing that's really strange to me is that lawyers come from the richest background of any occupation in the country. I mean, 40% of Duke law students graduate with $0 in debt. That kind of family resources should enable you to pursue whatever you want without worrying too much. For some, of course that might be law. But for the vast majority, even the majority currently in law, that seems to not be the case.

People back in the day who didn't have to work just didn't. Keynes predicted we'd all be so rich that no one would have to work much at all. But instead it's the opposite. Not saying that an idle upper middle class is a good thing, but there's something perverse about someone who has the means to not give a fuck about getting by poisoning relationships and their own mental and physical health in order to be a transaction cost doing something that doesn't give them deep internal satisfaction.

[Businesslady]

There's definitely a deadly combo of artificial scarcity / resentment that keeps the rentier class in power.

Here's my fave point / counterpoint on Keynes's "Economic Possibilities" conception of the leisure class:
Peter Frase:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/01/hips ... esentment/

Yves Smith:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/08/ ... -jobs.html
and comment clarifying: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/08/ ... nt-1329041

[Businesslady]

What a debasement of the profession (as well as every other "job" in capitalist society by the way) it is not to be able to demand more and say fuck you without risking homelessness, starvation, and lack of access to medicine. Is it ransacking corporatism and neofeudalism that killed the old dream? Is this "the market at work?" Should people who feel like they deserve more for their intellectual curiosity think of numbers-gaming Peter Principle strivers as basically bootlicking scabs? Or does the fact that this career path was traditionally a handout to rich white dudes from "good families" invalidate the position that people getting in this position on a more nominally meritocratic basis should be demanding the same? I think everyone deserves more for their time - the old guard, like Keynes, never "had" to work, but they also never subjected themselves to the indignities that people today made to feel grateful for the opportunity to work suicidal hours do.

Artificial scarcity. Resentment. Divide and conquer. Alienation. False consciousness.

A Harvard Law School graduate could expect in 1960 to bill fifteen hundred hours a year at a major big-city law firm. In return, he was virtually certain to make partner in six years, share in the firm's profits, and enjoy a collegial, relaxed, lifetime position of prestige. His desk and office would be kept for him until he died, sometimes for years after, as a show of respect.

Today's Harvard Law School graduate can expect to bill twenty-two hundred hours a year, and often as many as twenty-four hundred. In return, he stands perhaps a one-in-eight chance at making partner after eight years, and even then he might not share profits. As a partner, he will never be allowed to relax; if his revenues or hours drop, he will be invited to resign. When a Harvard Law School graduate fails to make partner, he is seen as the worst kind of failure by colleagues and prospective employers, because he entered with staggering advantages and promise. If he does make it to partner, then to retirement, no one will think to keep his desk around.

"Young Harvard lawyers are less content today than we were. They work harder, longer hours. They don't have the time to indulge themselves, to become Renaissance people. My classmates still believed that it was possible to go to plays--every night if we wished--to learn music, to have intellectual discourses. We led pretty decent lives in the law firms. Today, a Harvard Law graduate comes in conditioned to give up large parts of his life for a number of years. I don't know if it's a pretty decent life."

--Samuel B. Fortenbaugh III, class of 1960, former managing partner at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, New York

http://www.esquire.com/features/killing ... rvard-0800

[Businesslady]

Look at this fucking place and tell me it's not a bunch of strivers projecting mediocrity and rationalizing risk aversion with really cynical and self-defeating ideas about the entire world and just straight up ball-moving concern trolling while boomers light their cigars with burning wads of cash and laugh. Well, not actually, because I think gross systemic incompetence, in the form of a combination of social disincentives to empathy and mass inattention, is probably more at issue. In other words, false consciousness and alienation.

Do you think there's a tiny chance that you may be over thinking this? Your assumptions betray your arrogance. You sound like the type of kid that gives philosophy majors a bad name.

This thread is turning into a full-blown QED bugzapper.

I didn't study philosophy. You shouldn't need to study philosophy to get training in critical thinking. I already described the cheapening of undergraduate baccalaureate degree-granting institutions into costly lumpenproletariat enslavement machines in the off-topics. I actually think vocational training should be respected and dignified on its own terms, all kinds of education should probably be free and available, and that basic income should be utilized to rectify the fuckedness of the rentier-damaged labor market. If what you get out of "maybe you shouldn't go to a really expensive critical thinking school if you don't actually want to think because you're pissing in the drinking water" is arrogance, then okay, but I don't know what to tell you. "Over thinking" [sic] the enterprise of going to fucking *law school* on a website called Top Law Schools.

People should be incentivized to be good at what they do. Or they can sit at home and cash checks and play video games, I really don't care. I think the American legal system is bloated as all fuck not least because everyone-gets-a-ribbon, let's-freak-out-about-welfare-abuse-with-a-million-forms, jobs-uber-alles is probably not a very good response to the exact kind of obvious exploitative fuckery that Marx described (except in cubicles because our more literal sweatshop slave labor is all overseas or migrant or otherwise out of sight, out of mind). I already posted the Yves Smith link so if anyone wants to jump on my shit about being supercilious and underestimating the value of this type of work please note I'm fully aware of how loaded it is to call certain jobs "bullshit" and very much respect how Smaug and others got to their respective stoic conclusions. That's an objection to tone rather than substance and in my opinion doesn't do much to invalidate the central thesis.

[bk1]

Switching back into pure speculation so in before "induction problem!" - I think on some level, without sufficient family wealth or the right mix of "prestige"/scholarship to make the point moot (in which case there's no need for "improvement" on the conventional wisdom), one kind of has to want to fight back potentially to the point of financial self-immolation for it to make sense to go for the reasons I'm curious about. (Maybe not - does someone want to talk about PAYE? I know fuck all.)

PAYE might be a financial safety net, though maybe not. I'd have to calculate how much you'd be able to realistically save on a low salary to cover the tax bomb that hits at the end of 20 years (you are taxed on the forgiven ~$400,000 in principal + capitalized interest (assuming sticker price) as if it were income).

[fats provolone]

if the usfg is still sovereign in 20 years you've got bigger problems than tax liabilities

[bk1]

if the usfg is still sovereign in 20 years you've got bigger problems than tax liabilities

Touche.

[Moneytrees]

I never said you shouldn't critically analyze the legal field or the motivations people have for going to law school. But to assume that most people who go to law school have not undertaken any form of self-reflection, and then to claim that this state of affairs leads to a cycle of apathy and intellectual enslavement, is a bit of stretch in my opinion.

You're trying to tackle too many disparate issues all at once, which leads to generalizations and blanket statements that may not apply to all students. In my experience, both with friends in law school and on TLS, law students don't equate landing a Biglaw gig, or a prestigious clerkship, with achieving the American Dream or fulfillment. Many people are aware that the legal field is ridden with stress, challenges and a stream of never ending work.

There are too many law schools, too many students in debt, and not enough jobs. Fair enough, the legal field is in need of a major shake up. But I think it's a mistake to assume that most students are a bunch of sheep that have never considered the downsides of the legal profession.

[fats provolone]

if the usfg is still sovereign in 20 years you've got bigger problems than tax liabilities

Touche.

it's okay that's extraordinarily hypocritical coming from me