Quote Originally Posted by gilmore View Post
And to think, it took only four generations and some 200 years, as opposed to, say, some other countries where the bi-racial son of a deserted single mother---also from a remote island off the country's western coast--- became president before he was 50 years old.
No. it took 300 odd years. How many generations is that?

It also should be noted that our fine "meritocracy" here in the USA is based on avarice and ruthlessness more than actual accomplishment or talent. If you are more ruthless than your peers, you'll do well in this society. How is that significantly different than clan or feudal societies? Our avarice is based on transportable wealth whereas theirs was land based, that's all I can see.

This is not to say that people with real talent and real energy won't do well, but they will generally do well in any society. It is worth noting that the freedoms and the opportunities that any society offers it members are generally the result of years, generations, even centuries of evolution and change. That evolution in the UK begat the system we have in the US, just as it begat the system that is now extant in Britain. The worth of a people and the society they live in needs to be judged on how far they've come, how inevitably change has prevailed, not where they were six hundred, three hundred or even fifty years ago.

61 posts in 37 hours, and many of them bitter about how unfair it is to not be a member of the lucky sperm club, and how this is somehow tied into accidents of birth, etc. This almost sounds like the basis of the next Dan Brown conspiracy book-- Angles and Crofters, maybe? Or would it be The Karl Marx Code?

It has been my observation that people with talent, who apply themselves, inevitably do well. Those who sit on the sidelines of life and piss and moan about how unfair things are usually accomplish little, regardless of their self-styled "social status" or third level (and often second rate) academic attainments .
MOR hit the nail on the head (especially the "bitter" part). And it is a theme that has run through both this thread and the one previous that got "capped" because it "went on for 18 pages"--a fate most "serious" discussions, sadly, seem to suffer.