Earlier this month, British right-wing columnist telegraph He wrote an op-ed titled, “Gen Z is an employer's nightmare – They embarrassed me in my 20s.” On the surface, the article itself is completely unremarkable. It's a good mix of employer complaints about lazy post-pandemic workers and paint-by-numbers complaints about Kids Today. There's also a generic stock image of a lying Gen Z drinking from a mason jar through a straw and talking on a cell phone.
Subtlety doesn't often come up in this genre of editorials, but when you mention that the author of the article in question is an Eton-educated daughter of a baron with the hopeless name of “Sophia Money-Coutts” , you'd think so.'' You'd probably think I was making a rather lazy and heavy-handed attempt at satire. If the name Coutts sounds familiar, it's probably because it's also the name of one of the oldest and most successful banks in the world.Mr. Coutts' father (official title: Crispin James Alan Neville Money-Coutts, 9th Baron Latimer) is a descendant of founder Thomas Coutts, whose father, John Coutts,, He held the title of Governor of Edinburgh in the 1740s and received an inheritance that, adjusted for inflation, would be worth around £5.5 million today. Her maternal grandfather, William Francis Dees, was a baron, a Conservative cabinet minister, and an editor of none other than a magazine. telegraph. Her alma mater, Wycombe Abbey, is a private boarding school for young women aged 11 to 18 and currently costs £15,900 a term (or £47,700 a year).
In describing her own professional life, the author does not exactly strengthen her case. Ms. Coutts began her career with unspecified “shop floor work” (whatever she was doing, it's safe to assume it didn't include scrubbing the floors) and then “worked on a property in Kennington. After a spell at the company, she says she next worked as an assistant.features desk evening standard.
“It’s pathetic,” she wrote. Made 42 billion cups of tea. I bought tights for her boss. I tried Beyoncé's maple syrup diet and Madonna's cardio regimen. I stayed late and came early. Very quickly, just a few days. Once, at around 4am, I wandered around a West End club all night, trying to wink out what the son of a recently disgraced MP had to say (he never said a word to me). ). ”
Needless to say, another run-of-the-mill schoolie about an entitled young man refusing to hustle, written by someone with this pedigree, is more than a little ridiculous. Sure, young people may not have “tried Beyoncé's maple syrup diet,” but many young people these days say they're definitely working harder for far less money. Considering the source, the whole thing basically reads like a parody of burlesque, but why would someone like Coutts feel the need to write such a piece in the first place?
Columns like this depict what happens when the embedded privileges of the upper class collide with the hegemonic ideology of liberal meritocracy. In earlier times, people who grew up in a background of inherited property and land ownership were less likely to care about such elaborate self-justifying liturgies because the legitimacy of their status was axiomatic. There wasn't. But today, simply doing is not enough. have Wealth and class privilege: You're supposed to, at least outwardly. obtain They are similar, and a combination of individual brilliance and grit is generally the designated means.
In this case, it is tempting to dismiss the apparent cognitive dissonance going on here as a symptom of a particular national pathology. The British Brahmin class is generally more nervous and less confident than its peers elsewhere, and appears deeply attached to the set of symbols and institutions that define it – the monarchy, private boarding schools, etc. I'm always worried about things. A meritless, quasi-feudal order that they exist to maintain. (Scan Coutts' back catalogue. telegraphIn fact, you'll find a treasure trove of editorials that anxiously address the changes in high office.)
But no matter how distinctly British this particular incident may seem, there is a clear contradiction at its heart: the contradiction between the liberal narrative of equal opportunity and the reality of modern capitalist inequality. ultimately has broader implications.
Despite the formal narrative, most 21st century liberal democracies hold that all citizens are functionally equal, that status is always earned, and that differences in outcomes are due to more or less effort or talent. It reflects differences and tells itself that a rigid class society is largely an anachronism. All too often, the beginning of a life determines where it ends, such as being thrown into the dustbin of history. People born with wealth and status almost universally maintain them, no matter what they produce or how hard they work. In the same way, people who grow up without them are much less likely to achieve even basic financial security, let alone prosperity and success.
Today, at least in one sense, the relationship of rich elites to class is defined by their degree of silence regarding these contemporary fictions. The ultra-wealthy and high-born minority (usually on the far right) clearly cling to old ideas about social caste that have little respect for the egalitarian vulgarities of liberal modernity. But far more people seem hell-bent on adopting some version of them as a means of legitimation. To take a telling example, the people involved in the blockbuster college admissions scandal of 2019 were not working class families looking to give their children an advantage by cheating, but to embellish their privilege. They were wealthy parents eager to see their children achieve the necessary qualifications. A sheen of moral desert following the dominant meritocratic script.
To some extent, then, this schizophrenic attitude is nothing more than a psychological projection of the fundamental contradiction at the heart of all modern liberal societies, in which the notion of equality that we formally accept is It relentlessly confronts the embedded reality of class and hierarchies. But more optimistically, it can also be seen as a sign that, despite the political and ideological setbacks of the past 40 years, the egalitarian potential of the democratic era remains with us. Masu.
Thanks to neoliberalism, inequality in many societies has increased significantly since the 1980s. But even in the midst of this new Gilded Age, the pull of democratic ideals is still strong enough that many at the top of the pyramid attribute their existence to their birth. They seem to feel compelled to pretend it's something other than a coincidence.
