George Carlin - It's A BIG Club & You Ain't In It!

One of my favorite clips ever is [VIDEO] It's a big club and you ain't in it! Thoughtful, funny, masterfully delivered.

It is important to note, especially given the positive view given to the guild system in this article, that it is written on a masonic philosophy page. The freemasons have a long and esoteric history that should be viewed with some skepticism. Secret fraternal orders have a sketchy history. George Carlin has a famous comedy bit where he states "It's a big club and you ain't in it" [1]. My own feeling is that guilds of all sorts prioritize exclusivity for the purposes of bestowing power on some select few. As the article states "Master’s were few and far between". This is similar to how luxury brands maintain their high value: exclusivity. The standardization and guarantees of quality seem to be secondary to the pyramid scheme nature of ascension within these organizations (in the same way that the quality of luxury goods is often secondary to their exclusivity). It reminds me in some ways of the concept of "familiars" in vampire lore, humans who willingly toil away for their masters hoping one day to be elevated to the same level. It is a complex topic because of the positives and negatives of these systems being highly intertwined. To this day in Canada there is an apprenticeship system for trades. However, it is no longer an inner circle of masters deciding who gets the special status, it is a regional qualification body with clear guidelines, training, testing and certification. As a society we haven't at all gotten away from the degenerate aspects of guilds. Think of the

George Carlin said it best way back in 2005: "[...]THEY’VE GOT YOU BY THE BALLS! They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want OBEDIENT WORKERS. OBEDIENT WORKERS. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.[...]" [VIDEO] [LINK]

There's a double-whammy here of the Myth of Meritocracy under capitalism and Prosperity Gospel under Protestantism. After the Civil War we compensated slave owners . After the GFC we bailed out the banks. The government giving money to poor people is somehow a moral hazard yet the wealthy not only expect government handouts, they demand them. What's interesting AI is I think many people in tech don't yet realize how this is going to impact them. Jobs losses, depressed wages, unpaid extra work and constant layoff churn. The heady heights of the 2010s will seem like a fairy tale. Except this time, unlike a century ago, there is no labor movement. It's been decimated. There is no effective pushback against further wealth concentration to like 100,000 people. The Jeff Bezoes of the world will demand even more government money so they can have $205 billion instead of $200 billion and things will get really bad until eventually we have a Russian or french type revolution. Too many people think it's a big club when it isn't. As George Carlin said, you're not in it [1]. People actively advocate for their own worsening material conditions because they're deluded into thinking they'll be Jeff Bezos one day. [1]: [VIDEO]

I'm reminded of the prescient 2005 commentary of George Carlin: "it's a big club and you ain't in it" [1]. Hollywood, in particular, is almost completely nepo baby captured. This is an oft-repeated trend where an industry goes into decline and the children of those who originally succeeded end up dominating it. I think there's a lot of this in politics too, particularly because government jobs (including staffers on campaigns and for representatives) don't pay a lot so you really have to come from an affluent background to afford to live. It used to be that if you wanted to be a cast member on SNL you had to go to Harvard because of the Harvard Lampoon. I've seen this issue with the doctor pipeline too. Various analyses show that coming from a high socioeconomic background is a massive advantage, even with med schools trying to provide more opportunities to candidates from a lower socioeconomic background. A few med schools now because of endowments have gone tuition-free but even here it seems (it's early days) like wealthier candidates get more of these opportunities. As a wealthier person you don't need to "waste" time on a job. You can do resume-packing activities (research, volunteering). So circling back, elite education's role (IMHO) is to be exclusionary. It's to maintain this structure. "Social proof" is extremely important because a lot of opportunities in life aren't about talent or skill but connections and social factors. You go to Stanford and do CS and you get

I sorta think your conflating authoritarian socialism (aka communism) with democratic socialism which is as large a mistake as conflating pure democracy with corrupt representative democracy where a minority of the population is used to rubber stamp an oligarchy. Similarly capitalism in its purest forms is basically feudalism because the "people" won't have any dollars to vote with. And time and time again it seems the benevolent Henry Ford style capitalists are proven to be the minority. So one might say that without the socialist scare in the late 1800's early 1900's which forced the hands of the capitalists all those quality of live improvements everyone like to go on about probably wouldn't exist. We might all by working 80 hour weeks and scraping by in company hovels eating whatever gruel the company store gives us. But then again, a large portion of the US population is wildly unaware of how the bottom 30% live, while ignoring their own debt slavery. So enjoy your bread/circuses while the rich take an even larger slice of the economic pie. edit: How about some George Carlin, RIP [VIDEO]

Not really. They do it all the time. Legislator votes for the right bills and her niece gets a cushy job somewhere in exchange. You can't prove anything wrong happened. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. - George Carlin [VIDEO]