I felt some fear too. I was in late elementary and middle school overseas and when I came back I had a bit of culture shock. I despised a lot of popular culture as antiintellectual and uneducated and rude... some of my childhood friends werent as I remembered and we werent interested in the same things anymore (which was not a surprise, really - we'd been going back for the summers most years).
This evoked memories of my time working in Japan, where at 24 years old, was the first time I had lived in the country.
I very much felt like a foreigner, and had never felt more "American" than when I lived and worked there.
Similar to the author, I saw my new grad colleagues getting their souls crushed by the corporate machine (mine was one of the hardest crushed), felt a strong desire to help, as someone who came from a culture with a healthier perspective towards work and life, but was entirely powerless to do anything.
You'd judge a 1000+ word essay by just two words early on? Perhaps that is exactly the point the author is trying to make about the state of things these days...
I'm not familiar with the term "social contract", but maybe you could enlighten me? I found it was an interesting way of describing quirks about our world that aren't readily describable.
My best guess about the "whistle" lwhalen refers to is the anti-libertarian implication in the concept. That Wikipedia page links to various bits of criticism, including "A critique of social contract theory as counter-factual myth" and "A satirical example of a social contract for the United States from the Libertarian Party."
Basically, the social contract is a replacement for a real contract that justifies the power you have over government and the other way around. I see it come up like this most often with regards to tax and zoning laws.
In case of the article, the social contract says what the city can do to you, and what it must do for you. Noteworthy is e.g. that the system here can surveill you with helicopter spotlight.
I found it a bit ironic that in your comment you use the term "SJW", which literally has no function or meaning except as a dog whistle. The only way you could turn the idea of "someone who fights for justice" into a curse word is through the syntactic trickery of initialism, a diminution which lets speakers use their shared scorn as a shibboleth. It's the textual equivalent of repeating what someone else said in a "baby voice", in order to make fun of them.
Apropos of the article, I have been living in China for fifteen years (left the US a few weeks before 9-11), and am preparing to move back in a month. Everyone tells me I'll have reverse culture shock, and I guess I believe them, but I don't really know what to prepare for. Apparently I'll have to prepare for more people talking in baby voices.
Oh sweet summer child, on your return to this great land, people mocking the PC Police and the SJW will be the least of your worries. You will have to navigate precious snowflakes, twitter'd trigger warnings, wild Trigglypuffs, and so on. Good luck, and godspeed.
lwhalen, social contract, like the word liberal, has two meanings.
Originally it was an idea of Edmund Burke, the Irishman who explained much of Conservative thinking in the book Reflections on the French Revolution. It meant the 'deal' between the generations.
An example of a positive intergenerational deal is the old quote I'll paraphrase/butcher here about 'A civilization is one in which people plant acorns which will one day provide shade for their grandchildren'.
Of course the Social Contract can be broken too. I would say the Bolsheviks and the French Revolutionaries (despite their long propaganda campaigns) broke the contract, leaving their grandchildren in a worse position than in a counterfactual history where their thought pattern did not fruit into horrific memeplexes devoid of natural adaption, totally contingent on holding up order with brute force.
The second meaning of the social contract is the Liberal version which is broadly the social democracy 'deal', originally from Roseau (I think), which also centers around mutual benefit, but I think more across space rather than time as with Burke.
If it is a positive deal, then money departs the pockets of those who don't strictly speaking require it to survive and the unfortunates of the world get propelled into better patterns of behaviour that ultimately generate a society than is holistically the better off because of it. So we get progressive taxation.
Just as with the first deal, there is the inversion of it also. So it could morph into a giant fraud where the already rich or well positioned in society exhort fiscal transfers from people who ought in fact to be receiving the very payments they are paying in tax.
So whether the phrase is a dog whistle depends on the intentions of the author, or (this is often my suspicion) whether they thought they understood the words 'social' and 'contract' and so why not the conjunction. The West is filled with literate people who don't read but who aquaplane their way through life until they hit the hard shoulder.
> ... criticised social contract theory by claiming that society is indeed, a contract, but "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born".
Or do you mean there are two social contract theories, one Burkean and one Hobbesian? If so, I think you've inverted the time order, though I'm hydroplaning. ;)
Any interpretation is even more complex by the feminist and race-conscious criticisms of the social contract: http://www.iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/ . Who is supposed to hear this dog whistle?
Could have sworn Rousseau was after Burke, although logically it makes sense, somebody had to mangle France first after all and then Burke could write his book.
> Or do you mean there are two social contract theories, one Burkean and one Hobbesian?
I'm thinking Hobbes provided the template, and then there are Liberal (Rousseau) and Conservative (Burke) versions of the same contract depending on how you perceive it.
> Any interpretation is even more complex by the feminist and race-conscious criticisms of the social contract: http://www.iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/ . Who is supposed to hear this dog whistle?
The only thing that's changed is that in-your-face racism is acceptable to many whites because "Trump says what's on his mind." For a lot of people, dog-whistle euphemisms like "urban" aren't needed anymore.
People have become coarser and rude.
Just because we got a black president doesn't mean things are better for non-whites.
IMHO, I do not think racism as a whole is on rise.
As for "is acceptable" or not, I think that's a personal choice. Racism is never about internal thinking, it's about conduct.
Trump said many things, but I do not think it's fair to label them as racism speech or similar. He certainly did not "say what's on his mind"; otherwise the words would be 100* worse TBH.
What happened Bubo is that Obama's go-to-move is race baiting.
'You are racist' button got hit so much: it no more has any meaning.
Trump was not in WH for the past 8 years.
