Upward Mobility Quotes

In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely.

But as I pursued that dream of upward mobility preparing for college, things just didn't fit together. As I read Scriptures about how the last will be first, I started wondering why I was working so hard to be first.

Internet porn makes everything more reasonable -- once you've realized there is a massive subculture of upwardly mobile people who think it's erotic to see an Asian woman giving a hand job to a javelina, nothing else in the world seems crazy.

One way our upper class can promote upward mobility, then, is not only by pushing wise public policies but by opening their hearts and minds to the newcomers who don’t quite belong. Though

The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross.

The measure of self-motivation in a young person will become the best way to predict upward mobility.

If this book accomplishes anything it will be to have exposed a number of myths about the American dream, to have disabused readers of the notion that upward mobility is a function of the founders’ ingenious plan, or that Jacksonian democracy was liberating, or that the Confederacy was about states’ rights rather than preserving class and racial distinctions.

That is the real story of my lift, and that is why I wrote this book. I want people to know what it feels like to nearly give up on yourself and why you might do it. I want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children. I want people to understand the American Dream as my family and I encountered it. I want people to understand how upward mobility really feels. And I want people to understand something I learned only recently: that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.

To cultivate love, or whole-soul-fulness, we must resist the temptation to be upwardly mobile, to be always on the move, to pull up our roots and fly to the mythic kingdom of Elsewhere.

Nowhere was the complacency of the establishment, with its blind faith in progress, more evident than in its attitude toward an elite degree: as long as my child goes to the right schools, upward mobility will continue. A university education had become the equivalent of a very expensive insurance policy, like owning a gun.

We do know that working-class Americans aren’t just less likely to climb the economic ladder, they’re also more likely to fall off even after they’ve reached the top. I imagine that the discomfort they feel at leaving behind much of their identity plays at least a small role in this problem. One way our upper class can promote upward mobility, then, is not only by pushing wise public policies but by opening their hearts and minds to the newcomers who don’t quite belong. Though

Inequality is seen as a harbinger of opportunity, a sign that education and other routes to upward mobility might pay off for them and their children.

History, in other words, provides little indication, let alone assurance, that political success is a prerequisite of upward mobility.

Saying sorry too much is an anchor on your upward mobility.

The whitest thing I have ever done in my life was not repeatedly trying to get bangs after seeing pictures of Zooey Deschanel. The whitest thing I've done in my life was trying to save the Flint youth while I was visiting there.

At all times, white trash remind us of one of the American nation’s uncomfortable truths: the poor are always with us. A preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises—the dream of upward mobility—and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable. Of course, the intersection of race and class remains an undeniable part of the overall story. The

I don't want to be around people who accept me as is, in my unrefined state of becoming. I consistently want people around me who push and encourage me to be my ultimate best, who bring out the inner diamonds. I want to be around those intellectual giants who extract the gold within me, those who force me to read, to attend classes, seminars, conferences, and who steep me in an environment of perpetual growth and upward mobility. Not trying to be funny, but I've learned that I simply cannot afford to invest too much time around mediocrity. It's contagious.

Only three routes of upward mobility were available to socially ambitious upstarts such as Columbus: war, the Church, and the sea. Columbus probably contemplated all three: he wanted a clerical career for one of his brothers, and fancied himself as “a captain of cavaliers and conquests.” But seafaring was a natural choice, especially for a boy from a maritime community as single-minded as that of Genoa. Opportunities for employment and profit abounded.

First known as “waste people,” and later “white trash,” marginalized Americans were stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children—the sense of uplift on which the American dream is predicated. The American solution to poverty and social backwardness was not what we might expect. Well into the twentieth century, expulsion and even sterilization sounded rational to those who wished to reduce the burden of “loser” people on the larger economy. In

Accident, they say, favors the prepared mind. Opportunity knocks only for those who are ready at the door. If we believe the novels we read, upward mobility is always ambitious, hungry, and aggressive, or at the very least, discontented. The George Willards are forever yearning away from the spiritual starvation of Winesburg toward some vague larger life. But that is not always the way it is. Some of us didn’t know enough to be discontented and ambitious. Some of us had such limited experience and limited aspirations that only accident, or the actions of others, or perhaps some inescapable psychosocial fate, could explode us out of our ruts. In a way, I suppose I had to hitchhike out of my childhood; but if I did, I did it without raising my thumb.

Black anti-semitism is a form of underdog resentment and envy, directed at another underdog who has made it in American society. The remarkable upward mobility of American Jews--rooted chiefly in a history and culture that places a premium on higher education and self-organization--easily lends itself to myths of Jewish unity and homogeneity that have gained currency among other groups, especially among relatively unorganized groups like black Americans. The high visibility of Jews in the upper reaches of the academy, journalism, the entertainment industry, and the professions--though less so percentage-wise in corporate America and national political office--is viewed less as a result of hard work and success fairly won and more as a matter of favoritism and nepotism among Jews. Ironically, calls for black solidarity and achievement are often modeled on myths of Jewish unity--as both groups respond to American xenophobia and racism. But in times such as these, some blacks view Jews as obstacles rather than allies in the struggle for racial justice.

[The] strong belief in opportunity and upward mobility is the explanation that is often given for Americans’ high tolerance for inequality. The majority of Americans surveyed believe that they will be above mean income in the future (even though that is a mathematical impossibility).”5

Instead, power went to those who made things happen: businessmen and local magistrates. Over time, human nature being what it is, these men would create a kind of nobility, sometimes even buying titles from cash-poor foreigners, but this in itself underscores the point. Upward mobility was part of the Dutch character: if you worked hard and were smart, you rose in stature. Today that is a byword of a healthy society; in the seventeenth century it was weird.

upward mobility fell off in the 1970s and never really recovered

our own communities that reinforce the outsider attitude, it’s the places and people that upward mobility connects us with—

Nations, states, and regions with higher degrees of income inequality actually have less upward mobility, a relationship known as the Gatsby curve.

Such a down-and-then-up perspective does not fit into our Western philosophy of progress, nor into our desire for upward mobility, nor into our religious notions of perfection or holiness.

Making Waves I would do anything for you. Would you be yourself? In the Hans Christian Anderson classic, The Little Mermaid, Ariel gives up her beautiful voice in exchange for legs. This is a seemingly innocent fable that captures our deal with the modern devil. For aren't we taught that mobility is freedom, whether it be moving from state to state, or from marriage to marriage, or from adventure to adventure? Aren't we convinced that upward mobility, moving from job to job, is the definition of success? Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with change or variety or newness or with improving our condition. The catch is when we are asked to give up our voice in order to move freely, when we are asked to silence what makes us unique in order to be successful. When not making waves means giving up our chance to dive into the deep, then we are bartering our access to God for a better driveway. As a story about relationship, the lesson of Ariel is crucial. On the surface, her desire for legs seems touching and sweetly motivated by love and the want to belong. Yet here too is another false bargain that plagues everyone who ever tries it. For no matter how badly we want to love or be loved, we cannot alter our basic nature and survive inside, where it counts.

The distribution of wealth and income is primarily the role and responsibility and freedom of individual people and businesses through their voluntary economic interaction with other people and businesses. And their voluntary exchange of economic value through products, services, and ideas. In this way, social mobility is maximized and a fluid class structure allows for both upward and downward economic movements; this is social justice.

The child of the lower or lower middle class is urged in both overt and subtle ways to surpass his background, his well-meaning parents and friends never anticipating that if their dream of upward mobility is realized, the child may adopt the prejudices of the class to which he's lifted and, with a touch of neurotic distress, may permanently scorn his former life and also, to a certain extent, himself, since the class he's invaded is unlikely to accept him fully.

Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault. My dad, for example, has never disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts some of the most obvious paths to upward mobility. When

I want people to understand how upward mobility feels. And I want people to understand something I learned only recently: that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.

As long as the farm, then the factory, then the office offered social stability and upward mobility to the citizen, the American idea of empowered political citizenship remained viable. When it would or could not, then citizenship was imperiled.10

Len once came to the uncomfortable realization that salesmanship was the key to upward mobility in all careers. You could pretend you were above it, he begrudged, but the truth was you either had to master salesmanship or you’d spend the rest of your life begging for table scraps.

Information Age will be the age of upward mobility. It will afford far more equal opportunity for the billions of humans in parts of the world that never shared fully in the prosperity of industrial society. The brightest, most successful and ambitious of these will emerge as truly Sovereign Individuals.

My dad, for example, has never disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts some of the most obvious paths to upward mobility. When he found out that I had decided to go to Yale Law, he asked whether, on my applications, I had “pretended to be black or liberal.” This is how low the cultural expectations of working-class white Americans have fallen.

More to the point, the principles of competition, even when they encourage talent and create upward mobility, don’t answer deeper questions about national or personal identity. They don’t satisfy the desire for unity and harmony. Above all, they do not satisfy the desire of some to belong to a special community, a unique community, a superior community.

In the Catskills, nostalgia runs backwards. The upwardly mobile Jewish masses of the 1950s and 1960s have been replaced by the Jews of 19th century Poland.

One of the drawbacks of upward social mobility is a sense of guilty indebtedness to the old neighborhood.

And Dorothy was of an unusually independent mind, impatient with the pretensions that sometimes accompanied the upwardly mobile members of the race.

I read that only 3 percent of women during COVID find their husbands to be doing as much homeschooling as they are. That number seems high to me.

Progress is like wheels that never stop; they have to keep turning in order to remain relevant to a car and all of its mechanical parts. Stopping is not an option in real time but it is to those that envy progress and upward mobility. Progress never ends because it is infinite but it rebuilds and readjust (s) to take small steps then massive steps if it is hindered.

In the contest of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they’ve won by being twice as good—and enduring twice as much. Malia and Sasha Obama enjoy privileges beyond the average white child’s dreams. But that comparison is incomplete. The more telling question is how they compare with Jenna and Barbara Bush—the products of many generations of privilege, not just one.

It is ironic, in the manner of a dystopian nightmare, that an advanced capitalist empire which is founded on genocide and slavery, which still functions as the global police, which has an armed population, which routinely violates international human rights, which has the largest known military industrial complex in the world, which is the world’s largest producer of pornography, has also produced a saccharine ideology in which ‘positive thinking’ functions as a form of psychological gentrification. And it is not insignificant that the neoliberal lie that one is 110% responsible for one’s life—first powerfully encapsulated by the ‘alternative’ conservative thinker Louise Hay, and more recently echoed by Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now (1997/2005)—is directed at women. Today, gendered victim-blaming has become a form of upwardly mobile common sense ‘wisdom’. Now victimblaming is expressed by voices that sound soothing, wise, calm, above all, loving.

Progress is like wheels that never stop; they have to keep turning in order to remain relevant to a car and all of its mechanical parts. Stopping is not an option in real time but it is to those that envy progress and upward mobility. Progress never ends because it is infinite but it rebuilds and readjust (s) to take increment steps then massive steps if it is hindered. - Terrance Robinson

Another lesson is that it’s not just our own communities that reinforce the outsider attitude, it’s the places and people that upward mobility connects us with—like my professor who suggested that Yale Law School shouldn’t accept applicants from non-prestigious state schools. There’s no way to quantify how these attitudes affect the working class. We do know that working-class Americans aren’t just less likely to climb the economic ladder, they’re also more likely to fall off even after they’ve reached the top. I imagine that the discomfort they feel at leaving behind much of their identity plays at least a small role in this problem. One way our upper class can promote upward mobility, then, is not only by pushing wise public policies but by opening their hearts and minds to the newcomers who don’t quite belong.

African Americans, like other groups, have always tried to translate upward class mobility into geographic mobility, but remain physically and psychically close to the poorer neighborhoods they leave behind.

I've come to believe that upward social mobility shouldn't be our priority as a society. Rather, upward mobility should be the side effect of far more important things: family, stability, and emotional security for children. Even if upward mobility were the primary goal, a safe and secure family would help achieve it more than anything else. Conventional badges of success do not repair the effects of a volatile upbringing.

People are not plants. They are not fixed to any roots or dependent on them. People are mobile and free to move far from their beginnings—far away, if that satisfies them—far upward, if they have the ambition and ability.

The notion that egalitarian purposes could be served by the "restoration" of upward mobility betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding. High rates of mobility are by no means inconsistent with a system of stratification that concentrates power and privilege in a ruling elite. Indeed, the circulation of elites strengthens the principle of hierarchy, furnishing elites with fresh talent and legitimating their ascendancy as a function of merit rather than birth.

Through the discourse and institutionalization of meritocracy, the narrative of large-scale upward mobility is thereby made concrete at the individual level. The connection between national success and individual merit is a powerful public and private narrative that shapes those who've arrived, those in motion, and those standing still. To return to the two people who quipped about cold showers and bed bugs, we could say that the national narrative of mobility is powerfully grafted onto their individual narratives of worth

Amy Wrzesniewski, associate professor of organizational behavior at Yale University, has been studying a classification system that can help you recognize your orientation toward your work and attain greater job satisfaction. She defines work in three ways: 1.​A JOB is a way to pay the bills. It’s a means to an end, and you have little attachment to it. 2.​A CAREER is a path toward growth and achievement. Careers have clear ladders for upward mobility. 3.​A CALLING is work that is an important part of your life and provides meaning. People with a calling are generally more satisfied with the work they do.

This isn’t some libertarian mistrust of government policy, which is healthy in any democracy. This is deep skepticism of the very institutions of our society. And it’s becoming more and more mainstream. We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs. You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society. Social psychologists have shown that group belief is a powerful motivator in performance. When groups perceive that it’s in their interest to work hard and achieve things, members of that group outperform other similarly situated individuals. It’s obvious why: If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day. Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim to the worst of Middletown’s temptations—premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault. My dad, for example, has never disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts some of the most obvious paths to upward mobility. When

You're not something static. You are the mobile consciousness. You can be at 4 levels: (1) body (2) mind (3) soul or (4) supreme-soul (Nothingness) If you're stuck at mind level, come down to body level. Do physical things with all your five senses open. Once you realize that you are mobile, you can move upwards also.

After 5 years of college, I got a degree. Right out of the gate, I was at the top of my field, earning a solid mid 5-figure salary. There was no upward mobility. I started at the top, at age 23. I did that for 3 years. With free info from the Internet and one $299 course, I learned everything I needed to know to make 3x that salary in a year and a half. In another 5 years, that meager college-degree salary will be so far in the rear view mirror that I won't even remember what life was like to make so little. The Internet has largely rendered college, and education in general, irrelevant. For those that want to learn anything, open your browser and get to it.41a

Our present system based on preparing children for individual upward mobility into the system by making “us” like “them” is destroying our communities because those who succeed in the system leave the community while those who don’t take out their frustration and sense of failure in acts of vandalism. It is leaving too many children behind, labeling too many as suffering from attention deficit disorder and therefore requiring Ritalin, and widening the gap between the very rich and the very poor. The main cause of youth violence and addiction to drugs, I believe, is youth powerlessness. We have turned young people into parasites with no socially necessary or productive roles, nothing to do for eighteen years but go to school, play, and watch TV. Rich and poor, in the suburbs and the inner city, they are, as Paul Goodman pointed out years ago, “Growing Up Absurd,”4 deprived of the natural and normal ways of learning the relationship between cause and effect, actions and consequences by which the species has survived and evolved down through the millennia. Then we wonder why teenagers lack a sense of social responsibility. Schoolchildren need to be involved in community-building activities from an early age, both to empower themselves and to transform their communities from demoralizing wastelands into sources of strength and renewal. Their heads work better when their hearts and hands are engaged.

Especially for upwardly mobile young females, declaring one's enthusiasm for Austen (whose heroines almost always move up in social and economic status as a result of the sterling marital alliances they form) has been a classic means of indicating one's purported good taste, good breeding, and good sense: I am an especially adorable member of the ruling class.

I was impressed with Jack [Kerouac]’s commitment to serious writing at the expense of everything else in his life. At a time when the middle class was burgeoning with new homes, two-tone American cars, and black-and-white TVs, when American happiness was defined by upwardly mobile consumerism, Kerouac etched a different existence and he wrote in an original language.

The Ewells, then, are not bit players in our country’s history. Their history starts in the 1500s, not the 1900s. It derives from British colonial policies dedicated to resettling the poor, decisions that conditioned American notions of class and left a permanent imprint. First known as “waste people,” and later “white trash,” marginalized Americans were stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children—the sense of uplift on which the American dream is predicated. The American solution to poverty and social backwardness was not what we might expect. Well into the twentieth century, expulsion and even sterilization sounded rational to those who wished to reduce the burden of “loser” people on the larger economy.

To prefer to be the servant rather than the lord of the household is the path of downward mobility in an upwardly mobile culture. To taunt the idols of prestige, honor, and recognition, to refuse to take oneself seriously or to take seriously others who take themselves seriously, and to freely embrace the servant lifestyle—these are the attitudes that bear the stamp of authentic discipleship.

In Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, the contemporary feminist philosopher Kate Manne, associate philosophy professor at Cornell University, gives us a handy way of conceptualizing the expectations held of women and the demands made on them: feminine-coded goods and services—those which are “hers to give.” They include “attention, affection, admiration, sympathy, sex, and children (i.e., social, domestic, reproductive, and emotional labor); . . . safe haven, nurture, security, soothing, and comfort.” These are counterposed with the masculine-coded perks and privileges that are “his for the taking”: for example, “power, prestige . . . rank, reputation, honor . . . hierarchical status, upward mobility, and the status conferred by having a high-ranking woman’s loyalty, love, devotion, etc.”[21]

So there is more to their stance than a wistful yearning for acceptance in a world they never made. Their real motivation is an instinctive certainty as to what the score really is. They are out of the ballgame and they know it. Unlike the campus rebels, who with a minimum amount of effort will emerge from their struggle with a validated ticket to status, the outlaw motorcyclist views the future with the baleful eye of a man with no upward mobility at all. In a world increasingly geared to specialists, technicians and fantastically complicated machinery, the Hell’s Angels are obvious losers and it bugs them. But instead of submitting quietly to their collective fate, they have made it the basis of a full-time social vendetta. They don’t expect to win anything, but on the other hand, they have nothing to lose. If

The Republicans did not set out to establish a strong national state or to facilitate the industrial revolution. They believed strongly in the American dream of hard work and upward mobility. They saw no contradiction between capital and labor, between wealth accumulation and equality. Even in the exigencies of war, they directed their legislation to their political base, the farmers and the small-town merchants. Their vision assumed the virtue of rural and small-town America. The majority of Republicans who enacted the legislation grew up on farms. Yet they created an industrial juggernaut that flung railroads across the continent and grew great cities from seaboard to seaboard that attracted thousands from those small towns and farms. These results must be counted among the most sterling examples of unintended consequences in American history.18

Moving was one thing that helped me understand what our environment does to us. Another was becoming a foster parent. Our foster kids were born in a county that borders Clemson, where we lived. Their county is in the ninth percentile for upward income mobility—it’s a very poor area with few jobs and fewer opportunities. Due to the legalities surrounding foster children, I cannot go into much detail about their early environment, but suffice it to say their home situation was far from ideal. The chances for these bright, intelligent, loving children to improve their lot in life, as well as their opportunities for happiness and fulfillment, if they had remained in their native environment were practically zero percent. But as Dr. Raj Chetty and Dr. Nathaniel Hendren stated, “The data shows we can do something about upward mobility…Every extra year of childhood spent in a better neighborhood seems to matter.

Seeing themselves as hardworking and self-reliant, the upwardly mobile sons of white trash parents believed, as Smith put it, that “he is responsible for himself and himself alone.” The same self-made man who looked down on white trash others had conveniently chosen to forget that his own parents escaped the tar-paper shack only with the help of the federal government. But now that he had been lifted to respectability, he would pull up the social ladder behind him.

In the years after President Ronald Reagan took over the White House (where he promptly removed the solar panels), a radical minority once again used the power of language and the power of their own historical myth to tear apart the concept of the common good. Their dismantling of the liberal consensus revived a dangerous trend toward authoritarianism. First, wealth concentrated upward, leaving a large group of Americans dispossessed and angry over their downward mobility. At the same time, popular culture emphasized that those dispossessed Americans were at fault for their failure in a system they increasingly recognized was rigged. Then Republican politicians flooded the media system with propaganda insisting that tax cuts and pro-business government policies were not to blame for the dispossession of white lower- and middle-class Americans. The culprits, they insisted, were lazy, grasping, and immoral minorities and women.

It’s all supposed to be so innocent, upwardly mobile snob, designer shades, beret, so desperate to show he’s got good taste, except he’s also dyslexic so he gets ‘good taste’ mixed up with ‘taste good,’ but it’s worse than that! Far, far worse! Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish! Yes! he, wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep parable of consumer capitalism, they won’t be happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking us on the shelves of Suprmarket Amerika, and subconsciously the horrible thing is, is we want them to do it. . . .” “Saunch, wow, that’s. . .” “It’s been on my mind. And another thing. Why is there Chicken of the Sea, but no Tuna of the Farm?” “Um. . .” Doc actually beginning to think about this. “And don’t forget,” Sauncho went on to remind him darkly, “that Charles Manson and the Vietcong are also named Charlie.

Not only in the United States but also across the globe, evangelical forms of Christianity have proven to have the power to reform men’s behavior and reconcile the sexes. For example, anthropologist Elizabeth Brusco conducted a study of evangelicalism or Pentecostalism (she used the terms interchangeably) in Colombia. As a feminist trained in Marxist thought, Brusco expected to find that Christianity would be “a powerful tool of patriarchy.” Instead, she discovered that when a man converts to evangelical Protestantism, he stops drinking, smoking, gambling, and sleeping around. He begins to direct his money to his family. As a result, the household income goes up and the family’s standard of living increases. The children are better educated, they develop better life skills, and the entire family experiences upward mobility. Brusco concludes that conversion to biblical Christianity has the effect of “re-attaching males to the family . . . thereby dramatically improving the quality of life within the confines of the family.

For our family and others like us, separation is an expression of love. Not just in the physical sense, but in the way we think. We want our children to have an education and a job, to experience life in the way we never could, knowing that everything they gain will make them more distant from us. Loving someone means separating yourself from them. The future is lived vicariously through their achievements: their lives must follow an upward trajectory. They must not fail. That is what social mobility means in Asia today.

So many Christians simply have no idea of the staggering immensity of God's love for them and of that love's power to transform them into people of love, as well as bring them great happiness and lasting peace. If they knew, they would undoubtedly do whatever it takes to make time to be with him. Unfortunately, many of us still view following Jesus as a means to an end - a ticket to heaven, to nice feelings, to a successful, upwardly mobile life, and so on. We still don't get it: He's the end. The reward for following Jesus is Jesus.

So, who are they really, these hundred thousand white supremacists? They're every white guy who believed that this land was his land, made for you and me. They're every down-on-his-luck guy who just wanted to live a decent life but got stepped on, every character in a Bruce Springsteen or Merle Haggard song, every cop, soldier, auto mechanic, steelworker, and construction worker in America's small towns who can't make ends meet and wonders why everyone else is getting a break except him. But instead of becoming Tom Joad, a left-leaning populist, they take a hard right turn, ultimately supporting the very people who have dispossessed them. They're America's Everymen, whose pain at downward mobility and whose anger at what they see as an indifferent government have become twisted by a hate that tells them they are better than others, disfigured by a resentment so deep that there are no more bridges to be built, no more ladders of upward mobility to be climbed, a howl of pain mangled into the scream of a warrior. Their rage is as sad as it is frightening, as impotent as it is shrill.

The conventional understanding of meritocracy is that it is a system for awarding or allocating scarce resources to those who most deserve them. The idea behind meritocracy is that people should achieve status or realize the promise of upward mobility based on their individual talent or individual effort. It is conceived as a repudiation of systems like aristocracy where individuals inherit their social status. I am arguing that many of the criteria we associate with individual talent and effort do not measure the individual in isolation but rather parallel the phenomena associated with aristocracy; what we're calling individual talent is actually a function of that individual's social position or opportunities gained by virtue of family and ancestry. So, although the system we call "meritocracy" is presumed to be more democratic and egalitarian than aristocracy, it is in fact reproducing that which it was intended to dislodge. Michael Young, a British sociologist, created the term in 1958 when he wrote a science fiction novel called The Rise of Meritocracy. The book was a satire in which he depicted a society where people in power could legitimate their status using "merit" as the justificatory terminology and in which others could be determined not simply to have been poor or left out but to be deservingly disenfranchised.

Consumers of racist ideas sometimes changed their viewpoints when exposed to Black people defying stereotypes (and then sometimes changed back when exposed to someone confirming the stereotypes). Then again, upwardly mobile Blacks seemed as likely to produce resentment as admiration. “If you were well dressed they would insult you for that, and if you were ragged you would surely be insulted for being so,” one Black Rhode Island resident complained in his memoir in the early 1800s. It was the cruel illogic of racism. When Black people rose, racists either violently knocked them down or ignored them as extraordinary. When Black people were down, racists called it their natural or nurtured place, and denied any role in knocking them down in the first place.

The fascist leaders were outsiders of a new type. New people had forced their way into national leadership before. There had long been hard-bitten soldiers who fought better than aristocratic officers and became indispensable to kings. A later form of political recruitment came from young men of modest background who made good when electoral politics broadened in the late nineteenth century. One thinks of the aforementioned French politician Léon Gambetta, the grocer’s son, or the beer wholesaler’s son Gustav Stresemann, who became the preeminent statesman of Weimar Germany. A third kind of successful outsider in modern times has been clever mechanics in new industries (consider those entrepreneurial bicycle makers Henry Ford, William Morris, and the Wrights). But many of the fascist leaders were marginal in a new way. They did not resemble the interlopers of earlier eras: the soldiers of fortune, the first upwardly mobile parliamentary politicians, or the clever mechanics. Some were bohemians, lumpen-intellectuals, dilettantes, experts in nothing except the manipulation of crowds and the fanning of resentments: Hitler, the failed art student; Mussolini, a schoolteacher by trade but mostly a restless revolutionary, expelled for subversion from Switzerland and the Trentino; Joseph Goebbels, the jobless college graduate with literary ambitions; Hermann Goering, the drifting World War I fighter ace; Heinrich Himmler, the agronomy student who failed at selling fertilizer and raising chickens. Yet the early fascist cadres were far too diverse in social origins and education to fit the common label of marginal outsiders. Alongside street-brawlers with criminal records like Amerigo Dumini or Martin Bormann one could find a professor of philosophy like Giovanni Gentile or even, briefly, a musician like Arturo Toscanini. What united them was, after all, values rather than a social profile: scorn for tired bourgeois politics, opposition to the Left, fervent nationalism, a tolerance for violence when needed.

The stress laid on upward social mobility in the United States has tended to obscure the fact that there can be more than one kind of mobility and more than one direction in which it can go. There can be ethical mobility as well as financial, and it can go down as well as up.

Perhaps it has never struck you how consistently the great religious teachers and founders leave home, go on pilgrimage to far-off places, do a major turnabout, choose downward mobility; and how often it is their parents, the established religion at that time, spiritual authorities, and often even civil authorities who fight against them.

During disintegrative trend reversals, these processes work in reverse. Abatement of elite overproduction decreases intraelite competition. Additionally, there is another curious dynamic that tends to increase intraelite homogeneity, the “closing of the patriciate”, in which the established elites close their ranks to newcomers and dramatically reduce, or even reverse upward social mobility.

Upward mobility is the great class goal in the United States, and the social environment gets tangibly whiter the higher up you climb. Whiter environments, in turn, are seen as the most desirable.

Culture has sometimes been used to blame poor people and minorities for their own disadvantage. For example, some people believe that cultural values and lifestyles, such as a weak work ethic, childbearing outside of marriage, criminal behavior, and drug use inhibit upward mobility among some groups.

Culture has also been invoked by some as a possible explanation for relatively high levels of educational attainment among Asian Americans. The thinking here is that Asian Americans highly value education and its potential to foster upward mobility and communicate this to their children, who put more effort into their schoolwork than their white and other non-Asian peers.47 These high levels of education translate into good jobs with high earnings. Asian American families likewise have particularly low levels of single parenthood and high levels of cohesiveness, and this also helps explain relatively low levels of Asian poverty.48

GREED “Fame” is bestowed by each upon the other with nauseating flattery And the lust for money forces its way without mercy Academics sing their own praises without blushing Everyone is obsessed with their own upward mobility When people are blinded by their lust for more And flaunt their repulsive wealth in public Greed spreads through the world unchecked— And in this marketplace the cheapest ideas have the loudest reverberations

waste people,” and later “white trash,” marginalized Americans were stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children

Similarly, suburbia unified taste. In The Organization Man, a wide-ranging analysis of suburban household behavior, William H. Whyte pointed to “inconspicuous consumption” as a central precept of acceptable behavior in the middle-class cul-de-sac. While material comforts and luxuries were to be energetically pursued as a part of the good life, it was a part of an observed social contract to not stand out too much relative to one’s neighbors. It was a delicate balancing act between showing that one had a little more taste or money versus maintaining the “strong impulse toward egalitarianism.” And when a family’s capacity for consumption significantly outpaced their neighbors’, they upgraded suburbs. What might have been seen as an obscene or vulgar show of upward mobility in one neighborhood might be normal in the next development over.

it is also important to consider the sociological development of what the historian Philip Cushman calls the “empty self” that arose in this country after World War II. For Cushman, American individualism lost its soul at that point to the huge pressures of industrial capitalism. Whereas before the war our individualism was tempered by a strong ethic of community service, afterward that changed.4 The American Dream of ever-upward mobility, fueled by memories of the Great Depression and by increasingly pervasive national advertising, infused that war generation with a more selfish individualism. Their baby-boomer children inherited that perspective and, in addition, experienced less of the extended family and community-focused upbringing that their parents enjoyed. Many of us have lost our connection to connection.

Every society had its elites, of course: its wealthy, well-educated, upwardly mobile types. Machiavelli, a republican himself, called them the grandi. The trick to preserving a republic was not to allow them to predominate as a class, to amass power at the expense of their fellows. Or more precisely: the key was not to allow them to amass power at the expense of the common man.

Although “the American Dream” is a surprisingly recent coinage (the term was first used in its modern sense in the 1930s), the cultural trope of Horatio Alger and the prospect of upward social mobility have very deep roots in our psyche.

Of those born poor in America, few make it to the top. In fact, most do not even make it to the middle class. Studies of upward mobility typically divide the income ladder into five rungs. Of those born on the bottom rung, only around 4 to 7 percent rise to the top, and only about a third reach the middle rung or higher. Although the exact numbers vary from one study to the next, very few Americans live out the “rags to riches” story celebrated in the American dream.37

Because North Carolina lacked a deepwater port and because plantation-based agriculture increasingly predominated in its eastern counties, white people who migrated into the colony's western, or backcountry, region came overwhelmingly from the north—chiefly Pennsylvania and the western parts of Maryland and Virginia – rather than directly from Europe, as was more often the case in other British provinces. ... These people came to North Carolina to pursue upward mobility by securing fertile land on easy terms, acreage they would clear, cultivate, and then pass on to future generations.

Of course, what we care about most is whether today's young people will be upwardly mobile, not whether today's 40-year-olds did better than their parents. We should pursue that goal aggressively, acting as if the American Dream is under threat, even if we believe it's not.

What is human is also kind, Kindness is supreme sanity. Acceptance is love in practice, Love is the truest upward mobility.

For many black American families, the dogged and grim pursuit of upward mobility—of the American dream being actualized instead of aspirational—cultivates a dynamic where performative mobility replaces actual mobility. This, of course, is a by-product of the historical constrictions and conditions placed on our financial ascension. Moving up the ladder from working poor to lower middle class, from lower middle class to middle class, and from middle class to upper middle class is possible. And it happens often enough that actively pursuing it can’t be dismissed as silly.

Unfortunately, many of us still view following Jesus as a means to an end—a ticket to heaven, to nice feelings, to a successful, upwardly mobile life, and so on. We still don’t get it: He’s the end.

So many Christians simply have no idea of the staggering immensity of God's love for them and of that love's power to transform them into people of love, as well as bring them great happiness and lasting peace. If they knew, they would undoubtedly do whatever it takes to make time to be with him. Unfortunately, many of us still view following Jesus as a means to an end - a ticket to heaven, to nice feelings, to a successful, upwardly mobile life, and so on. We still don't get it: He's the end.

Traditional immigration countries such as Australia, Canada, and the United States have always emphasized the importance of economic self-sufficiency. Therefore, providing refugees and immigrants with equitable access to the labor market even before they learned English had always been a number one goal of integration efforts. Ideally, newcomers would also receive a thorough orientation to the social mores, laws, and legal systems of their new country but understanding these traditions is not a substitute for decent employment, vocational training, and opportunities for upward mobility.

To find a meaningful place in politics, one that doesn’t require us to lie about “white adjacency” or ignore the pain of everyone who looks like us, upwardly mobile Asian Americans must drop our neuroses about microaggressions and the bamboo ceiling, and fully align ourselves with the forgotten Asian America: the refugees, the undocumented, and the working class. What we do now—the lonely climb up into the white liberal elite, the purchase of Brennan’s old house—might lead to personal comfort, but it will never make us full participants in this country, nor will it ever convince others to join in our fight. Naked self-interest and narcissism do not inspire solidarity.

Breaking, burning. Sidney danced harder, aware of how the movement blended her into everyone dancing in the street. And the riling felt so very good. To cry, scream, sweat, and laugh through the physicality. Remaking her in the therapy of something primal. The more she danced, the more a tremendous lump inside her gave way, The beat bopped in her bones. Her muscles swelled of joy. Freedom. Laughter as a form of movement that popped, rocked, allowed her to slip free of herself and be gone into the rhythm. Burning up. Boiling. Steaming. So hot she spiraled upward. They all did. Far away from everything. Hot and bright as stars. Together in cosmic unity. A constellation right there in the streets of Mobile. Sidney welcomed the sensation. That she could be both alone and together. Down to the core. Down where everything and everyone blended into the dimension behind her eyelids connected, finally, in a living darkness. While the rhythm lasted there were no sides. No lines in the sand. No walls. No them. No they. Only us. Alone and together. Like the fine molecules of a mountain.

It's the infatuation with the fantasy of what could be, that the chains exist and perpetuate the self-inflicted hindrance of onward and upward mobility.

things

I think that Franco-American writers interact with this narrative by signifying their ethnic identity in class terms. Alan Bérubé in his autobiographical essay, “Intellectual Desire” finds his father’s ethnic agency in the active identification with a working class status: “my father was offered a low-level management position at work, which he turned down… But there was more to his refusal than class panic over becoming ‘one of them.’’ The distance he had traveled – away from his French working-class family, their farm, their land – was now so far from where he’d started that he began to lose the ground beneath his feet. He wanted to go home”). In many Franco-American texts, ethnic identity is signified through the intentional identification with a working class status; the refusal of upward mobility signifies an active embrace of an ethnic past and creation of an ethnic present. As a literary scholar, I focus on the way these issues are explored in literature, and I believe that literature offers insight into the interplay between the social and the personal not available through other means.

Today poetry is a modestly upwardly mobile, middle-class profession—not as lucrative as waste management or dermatology but several big steps above the squalor of bohemia.