Nobody ever "sells out".
People buy in. They absorb and acculturate, learn new languages, develop new relationships.
A newly-promoted boss on the job, moving from floor to office, develops new sensitivities, new ways of cataloging good work from bad. They acquire a new symbol-set, metrics for good things and bad. This new set draws attention and time, and when used for thinking and expression, it changes the way that they think and speak. They buy in to something else.
In any situation, there are objective truths hovering just outside our actual grasp, perceived truths that make up that grasp, and judgmental truths, the things we hold onto.
When a person shifts from one frame of reference to another, something happens. This objective something can be perceived in a great many ways. On the basis of those perceptions, judgments can and will be made. Some perceptions, and some judgments, will be closer approximations of reality than others.
Now, in your mind, right now, you may be about to argue - based on that same premise - that the perception of selling out is just as valid as the conceit of buying in. It's an instinctive response, and it might be closer to objective truth.
But if you wanted to do so, you would likely need to employ - to think in - the language of the argument itself. You might end up buying in.
Writing it out, this seems strangely like a "gotcha" trick. But it isn't, quite. It's just the nature of the perspective being employed on the blog - a strange ouroborous, eating it's own tail.
“Selling out” is a catchphrase for an action the speaker doesn’t share, and furthermore doesn’t understand because it doesn’t fit their personal reality. There are a lot of similar phrases.
ReplyDeleteExample: Imagine a father of three, who works a job he hates in order to earn a high income.
It would be easy for me to say that his priorities are backwards; that he is putting income before happiness. That belief meshes nicely with my situation.
The father’s world is very different, because he has far more expenses than I do. The happiness he sacrifices working a job he hates is overshadowed by the misery he faces if he cannot provide for his family. By working a job he hates, he’s actually happier overall than if he worked one he liked but didn’t pay enough.
And that would be obvious to me if I were in his situation.
That's all true.
ReplyDeleteAnd all of it points to the idea that "selling out" is a bad, bad phrase. Because it dismisses the kind of empathy and thinking required for you to come up with that example.
Yah?