Strivers Are Retards

[Moyai]

A striver is an over-achiever who reduces all human value to hours of mechanical toil for the sake of contrived merit in whatever space they occupy. You'll see this archetype permeate in all walks of life from BASED right-wing homesteaders who believe that young men need to be forced into military camps to "build" WILLPOWER (anticonceptual) to second generation Oriental immigrant pianoslaves who are only viewed as intelligent by westerners due to their rote memorization (slavery) and incessant reliance on vestigial totems of western civilization which they reduce down to cargo cults to feign erudition. (you'll notice that these people have never said anything profound in their lives despite reaching level 10 in piano or whatever ("But level 10 is high! It's just like my video games where I get points and unlock levels")

The essential problem with strivers is that they're representative of a good society, NOT creators of a good society. In other words, they're a result, not a cause. Therefore, when undeservedly praised, it gives confidence to the drudges of society which leads to things like the A.I. art discourse or Indian self-help gurus where toil is given inherent value. In a society without niggers and faggots and worms, hard work wouldn't need constant reinforcement as it would just come naturally since people would actually have something to strive towards. 

I originally planned on just using the Urban Dictionary definition of striver but I figured it gave it too much of a positive connotation that was no longer deserved. The strivers of today are Indians of middling intelligence on twitter telling you about "9 Things We Can Learn From Julius Evola: A 🧵" or lumberjacks commanding young men to torture themselves so they might get the chance of having sex with ugly whores.


I'll leave this discussion open-ended and I'm curious as to what others have to say about this. Some other topics you could possibly link this to would be cargo cultism, mass democratization or HBD.

[Guest]

Anthony origin story???

[Guest]

i think you should strive to limit your total daily screen exposure by at least two hours

[GymChad]

I would argue that striving is just human nature for a subset of people and is not in itself a symptom of Western decline. In an all white country with any IQ distribution that white people have had at any time in history, there will be more midwit strivers than independent geniuses. Those strivers will be rewarded by the system, because that is what striving is -- trying to maximize your reward from the system. Strivers generally contrast with the entrepreneurial genius, this is the person who disrupts the system and comes in from the outside -- warlords not considered, of course.

You could argue that it is the entrepreneurial genius who improves society, who creates society, and the strivers are those who seek to receive his breadcrumbs by following the rules of the systems he built, and I would be inclined to agree. But are entrepreneurs not rewarded today? I would argue they are certainly rewarded in tech.

Complaining about strivers, brown strivers, piano-Americans, etc adds little marginally to demographic decline and IQ dysgenics discourse. At least the azns work hard. Deep down everyone knows they're bugmen. The solution is the same as the solution to all the other problems -- eugenics that makes everyone an ubermensch entrepreneurial genius.

[Moyai]

i think you should strive to limit your total daily screen exposure by at least two hours

Why?

[Guest]

Every striver I have met (and I have met a lot of them) has had the same start, middle, and end. They were told to do something (by their parents), they did it, they continue doing it.

I assume they are just cogs who will do what they are told no matter what the instructions are. Some of them express dis-satisfaction with certain things in their lives, but they make no effort to change them. They will marry a roastie at ~30 who is a year older than them. That is what the striver is.

[Guest]

I assume they are just cogs who will do what they are told no matter what the instructions are. Some of them express dis-satisfaction with certain things in their lives, but they make no effort to change them. 

You need people like that or you end up all-Hitler no Stormtroopers.

Yes, but they are annoying to deal with under present circumstances because one is not in a position to give them instructions/ it is too late for many of them anyhow. All types are necessary of course, and will arise even if one tries to only keep 1. (equilibrium.)

[victor]

Cogs are the foundation of statecraft. They are unimportant individually but are the main type that you must recruit from or negotiate with to win.

You can't have a functioning alternative to society until you have a framework that integrates lesser types from the status-obsessed sociopath to the quasi-robotic normie. Their lack of metaphysical spark makes them the predictable mortar and cinder-block for great men to craft with.

[Spingebill]

But are entrepreneurs not rewarded today? I would argue they are certainly rewarded in tech.

Being an entrepreneur and being inventive aren't the same. It's the whole thing with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, where despite Wozniak building everything, Jobs is the one commonly associated with being a genius because he was the public face of Apple's marketing. Ironically, a lot of strivers who pursue entrepreneurship see themselves as Jobs the tech wizard, not realizing that they're much more similar to Jobs the computer salesman.
It's incredibly easy to tell strivers from inventors in the tech world. The pajeet who grinded 16 hours a day to get into Harvard will pitch apps such as "Facebook but for college students! GrubHub but for NFT collectors! ChatGPT but for retail workers! Grindr but for Please give me money Y Combinator!" Importantly, not a single original thought, only what might move them up in the system. An inventive person, on the other hand, might produce something like "set of linear algebra operations in that scripting language that Godot uses" or "I built an operating system from scratch because God personally commanded me to do so."
That said, entrepreneurship is definitely rewarded more heavily than inventiveness, which is why strivers always tend toward the former. It's much easier and more profitable to explain to Lester the Investor why Reddit for Marvel Fans is the next billion-dollar app idea, than why Strassen's Algorithm in an obscure game engine is important.

[anthony]

Nice thread. Thank you for getting us started on this subject. Let me just run some thoughts out.



Women/Girls: Remember the "Girls' brains mature faster than boys' brains" meme? Obvious answer is that a dog's brain also matures faster. I know I'm hung up on the schooling question but the world is becoming a giant school so it's very important. Girls are naturally excellent at schooling because the whole thing is a giant selection for loyalty and patience with authority, with very short general competence to clear along the way. The strength of girls isn't intellectual, or even any positive character traits. The power of girls in schooling is negative. An absence of character to get in the way of toil. A lack of integrity and good sense to clash with the idiocy all around them. A consistent them across the striver class. A lack of friction. Sometimes caused by a lack of self to clash, other times enabled by the fact they personally do not give a shit about things others will. We'll get more specific on that point as we go.

Chinese: The Tiger Mother and her Oriental Pianoslave. Asians in particular I suspect have a similar thing to girls going for them.



Not an essential point, but I sometimes wonder. Do the Chinese have a unique lack of nerve relative to general intelligence compared to the rest of the human race? An interesting double edged sword if true.

More essentially, I've observed the Chinese pianoslave type personally. And I've observed various other ethnic transplants behaving in more or less the exact same way. Note I'll make on the others is that I think of all ethnic striver transplants Chinese seem to have the most refined aspirations, even if they don't believe in the principles behind them. Indians, Iraqis, whatever, I think the Chinese were just the first notable cerebral striver ethnics to be noticed as a general phenomena.

Being new migrants they had no settled habits or comforts to hold them back, no organic and stable social networks at a set level to acclimate themselves to, their position was fundamentally unsettled and their futures were completely open. This being the case, why not aim as high as possible? America's paths to prestige are ostensibly plain and up for the taking. "Meritocracy". Harvard is one of those, right? Get your grades and get in, get the job, style on everyone with your wealth and status. But China, even modern china, has enough respect for old culture in its blood to want to look the part of better people. That and Harvard also sometimes acts like it cares about looking the part. Hence the piano.

The piano has in the mass mind suffered a similarly unfortunate fate to intellectual life. Something I didn't elaborate upon above under the girl question, but both issues are the same here. The actual thing that did so much good work for humanity in history and was loved and driven forward by those lovers for so long is now a very sickly tradition. But this can be hard to see because so much time is sunk into pursuing institutionalised imitations for institutional credit. In trying to incentivise everyone appreciating these things (arguably the point in some cases, definitely not in others) we have created an environment where this is harder than ever. Actually far worse for the general life of the mind I would say. Music is harder to get totally wrong and become totally alienated from while engaging with an instrument. But it still happened to me so nothing's set here.

Chinese mothers don't make their sons slave over a piano because they love music. Music becomes a totem and path to power. If America told them that music is when you physically bash your face into an instrument over and over again I believe many ethnic strivers would make their sons do exactly that. What actually goes on in the oriental pianoslave's musical education is thankfully not that alienated from what the process is meant to be. They can actually handle their instruments with skill, and get to engage with a lot of music on an at least technical level. But maybe the word "play" wouldn't be fitting for what they at their instruments is the thing. Do these families produce a lot of genuine lovers of music who feel as though their lives have been enriched beyond the point to put on the university application? I can't say. Might be good to get some testimony here.

Now back to that above thought for a moment. "If music was bashing your face into an instrument". Music, has not been reduced to that level. However, I would say that that is almost exactly the state of learning and intellectual cultivation in schools right now. Someone forced to grind out a "musical education" to current institutional standards with no appreciation for the essence of the thing motivating the one pushing this, they won't have a good time, but they'll learn their music. Technically at least. The same cannot be said for school and intellectual life.

I repeat myself in setting this up because I think it might be the most essential point one can cover under this subject, and probably the answer I would give to questions raised by several other threads here and elsewhere. What's wrong with strivers is that the institutional path up into institutional intellectual life is almost completely divergent from the actual path to real intellectual life. The things you have to do to access a more cerebral and cultured mode of existence are the intellectual equivalents to slamming your face into the wood of the piano and calling yourself a pianist.

Girls do this and see absolutely nothing wrong. Ethnics do this, and I suspect the smarter ones just grit their teeth. Either way the most important point is that the best people will probably refuse or break.

Do I have any more thoughts on the Chinese in particular? Probably not. I don't actually have much against them.



E-Stoics (White): Guys who turn their bodies into homework to deal with insecurity and hide their shame and alienation by saying everyone who doesn't is morally weak. Might also wish they had more willpower to read more books. They obviously don't like these books. What upsets me in this case is the moral element. What I've always hated the most about strivers and grinders is their vulgar moralism. How we got to the lumberjack meme. But even a nigger who wants to be Andrew Tate will morally posture at you. They all do.

E-Stoics (Indian Grindset Slaves): Guys who know they can't gymmaxx their ways out of being pajeets and so search for the gnosis that turns them into guru-heroes. Waste all of their money on magic beans.

Village Worthies: Comfortably affluent older normalfags who were able to comfortably "work" their way to success and are more strivers by their total disregard for higher existence than particular efforts applied in spite of this. My mental image is of white well off boomer dads who at the same time understand that their sons have to work harder for less than them and still believe that the world is a fair merit-machine. The men who even if they do nothing wrong consent to an impure age. That goes for all listed of course, but these especially.

Jews: Europe's historic designated striver caste. For various reasons. I'm tired so think this one out yourself.

---

My personal thought that got me started talking about strivers elsewhere, and may have led to the creation of this thread, was on 'Ping-Ling the Piano Prodigy'. I don't know about now, but I feel like 20 years or so ago (I am old) it was huge for white parents to feel intimidated an ashamed of themselves upon discovering the power of striver-drive. And many, being passionless people with no appreciation of anything nice themselves couldn't compete in driving their own children towards richer lives or towards power. And following this took to blaming their children for not being strivers as a means to cope with their own negative feelings. I recognise this in retrospect now, that it's on them. They're acting out. But when I was a kid I didn't. It was impressed upon me that there was some kind of moral chasm between me and the Ping-Ling's of the world. Every minute I spent doing anything but chasing Ping Ling was another reason I'm not Ping Ling and if I'm not Ping Ling what am I good for?

My issues with striver culture are very personal. Striver culture destroyed all natural things an intelligent person would want to pursue and erected fake totems which nobody wants but many are forced to live for despite this. I think as long as the situation doesn't seriously change the lives of most intelligent people are ruined.

[fox]

Chinese striver mentality is probably the result of centuries of extremely rigid Confucian civil-service examinations and abject poverty. Hong Xiuquan, the man who founded the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, reportedly failed the imperial examinations four times and as a result became so distraught that he turned to Christianity and hallucinated that he was the brother of Jesus Christ.

[anthony]

Chinese striver mentality is probably the result of centuries of extremely rigid Confucian civil-service examinations and abject poverty. Hong Xiuquan, the man who founded the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, reportedly failed the imperial examinations four times and as a result became so distraught that he turned to Christianity and hallucinated that he was the brother of Jesus Christ.

God wanted Hong Xiuquan to win.

Less importantly, I find this kind of historically rooted logic unsatisfying. As I said, I see non-Chinese act the same way.

[Adamant]

With regard to the quintessential piano slave example, we can reconstruct the origins of the striver mentality. And as Anthony mentioned, the fact that the Asian is the example we all think of when we think of strivers is more than a coincidence, because their rootlessness in the West allows us to gain insight into the origin of striverism across cultures, since their immigration stories are relatively recent.

So, obviously the piano slave's parents have chosen the piano or violin or classical instrument as opposed to the guitar or drums because the former instruments are a status symbol, and classical music is the 'institutional goal'. This is distinct from parents who are merely strict and may encourage their kids to commit to or pursue a skill they have started by forcing a good routine. As a digression, the next most common striver is probably in the context of sports, with whites and Asians both being represented, and the emphasis is on trophies as opposed to usefulness or the child's enjoyment.

But to return to how this all started, I think the striver phenomenon must be understood as an outgrowth of a standardized curriculum. As an educational model, the idea may have once been to introduce children to subjects they need in the modern world or that it would introduce them to enough different subjects to allow them to know what they would want to pursue in higher education and their careers. But this has obviously degenerated into an enormous waste of time by forcing young people to do things they aren't good at and don't like.

The striver parents then are fundamentally engaged in an act of distinction for themselves and their offspring, when the curriculum is standardized, the extracurriculars become the room to excel, besides the grades which they are also strict about. Of course, the 'institutional' nature of achievement in these extracurriculars means that expending childhood energy in this direction is also a waste of time often.

There have been several armchair psychological analyses of strivers, many made by the equally detestable "burnt out talented kids" who may have had striver parents. These usually say that striver parents are selfish and care about their own pride of having a high-achieving kid, without caring about the kid's welfare, which is true to a point but too often tinged with resentment.

The issue isn't necessarily with the lack of choice, but the pointlessness of the activities in which the striver strives, or tells their kid to strive. In the case of a career striver with no kids, there is something intuitively pathetic about a workaholic who is hungry for achievements as opposed to someone naturally promoted because of competence.

The reason why this isn't always bad, as Anthony pointed, out is because music and sports and some careers can be honed as skills, so the 'bashing your head against the instrument' approach can actually produce results, but the results are not what society needs or wants, which is why the artificiality of the striver is often so transparent. They expend so much effort for gold stars and ribbons and trophies, and ideally that would come with a feeling of glory of victory or conquering something that was important to the person who won, yet it doesn't

[GraphWalkWithMe]

@anthony Good shit. If the 2023 pianoHan was capable of genuine cultural output, they'd be creating something people are attracted to. As it stands, the musical canon they're slavishly aping is the product of inspired European genius from 200+ years past. It's all very indicative of both coolie striverdom and the failure of Whites to live up to prior achievement.

The pure "status-striver" is probably the most contemptible type of person possible. They don't actually seek to learn or surpass the deeds of their priors, they just want to "best" them by the beat of whatever meter is handed down to them. Ants.

[anthony]

@anthony Good shit. If the 2023 pianoHan was capable of genuine cultural output, they'd be creating something people are attracted to. As it stands, the musical canon they're slavishly aping is the product of inspired European genius from 200+ years past. It's all very indicative of both coolie striverdom and the failure of Whites to live up to prior achievement.

The pure "status-striver" is probably the most contemptible type of person possible. They don't actually seek to learn or surpass the deeds of their priors, they just want to "best" them by the beat of whatever meter is handed down to them. Ants.

Again I feel obliged to at least acknowledge they can do something nice. Even if they don't care for it personally. And the raw skill could plausibly be turned towards good ends. Why it doesn't I think deserves its own post. That and sports. I'm tired now but will come back to this thread.

[a system is failing]

One of the things that sticks in the craw of modern people is the inability to simply brute force your way into some particular mode of life. The striver is mostly just a bi-product of this. Many things of status and in particular highly visible status, in the West, are products of volatile genius. People come from a culture unfamiliar with this, and at a time when that very culture is trying to erase its own history of elevating genius, and thus the striver is born. The classic artistic genius as envisioned by the West contains an element of the striver, the lifelong dedication and commitment to serious endeavor. Bach contains the Striver within himself in his ability to be prolific. 

There's a bifurcation of genius that is sort of underway here. The counterpoint to the striver is the person who puts in zero effort yet always wins because he's so far above it all. As time passes this converges on the most retarded niggers imaginable, as being a literal fucking retard too impaired to comprehend "it" is unquestionably the most effective way to be above "it". This is the quirky side character, the person irony leftist wants to be. There's often a mischevious and irreverent quality to genius and this is how its accounted for by the modern mind. They can't acknowledge this innate portion of the genius quality without violating communism, so it gets switched over to being a measure of how much you don't care. 

The energy animating most of modern culture is a fervent denial that anything has been lost. The reduction of these things into categories allows them to be infinitely reproduced in a way that helps people cope. We've defined innate and intuitive genius as being a cool negro who doesn't care (see how often millennials describe their favorite 80 iq rapper as some sort of idiot-savant), and we can find cool negroes who don't care so it's fine guys. It's fine we still have real culture. And if you don't like this crap low level shit then we've also defined discipline and hard work as being a human calculator, so we're fine guys. We still care about finer things and technolgical / artistic progress. It's fine. Jacob Collier invented negative harmony, we still have higher arts, in fact they're more advanced than ever. It's fine.

[fox]

Chinese striver mentality is probably the result of centuries of extremely rigid Confucian civil-service examinations and abject poverty. Hong Xiuquan, the man who founded the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, reportedly failed the imperial examinations four times and as a result became so distraught that he turned to Christianity and hallucinated that he was the brother of Jesus Christ.

God wanted Hong Xiuquan to win.

Less importantly, I find this kind of historically rooted logic unsatisfying. As I said, I see non-Chinese act the same way.

Immigrant strivers simply do it to escape poverty. As for those who grew up in comfort, I find it's due to an inability to realize that they don't have to play by the rules. Or they've just given up. Indian strivers in particular seem bent on attaining power and status as managers and bureaucrats under whites, it reminds me of Ancient Egypt where the highest goal of every socially respectable man was to become a high-ranking civil servant under the Pharaoh. 

This Steve Jobs interview is very relevant. 

[Guest]

 Bach contains the Striver within himself in his ability to be prolific. 

Village Worthies: Comfortably affluent older normalfags who were able to comfortably "work" their way to success and are more strivers by their total disregard for higher existence than particular efforts applied in spite of this. 

I will reply to both of these sections essentially, starting with 1.

1.) It is true, but untrue. The madness in Bach is something too alien to striving to call it the same. Being possessed by such a spirit, one can put out a great volume of work very quickly. As for how his madness was so clearly superior to (most, if not all) others...it's a mystery complete. I understand the point, the striver might see some similarity, they might want to brute force into Bach or equivalent in a category. But I do not think the striver can even perceive Bach besides the marketing value, the value of his name. I have not met any strivers who have such senses. Because striving itself dulls the senses. Relaxation is the key to inspiration, and relaxation entails the silencing of all neuroticism, even the neurotic call to "relax". 

As for the Asian striver, I have met many of the Indian category. They simply want to be well-regarded by their parents and relatives. It's the longhouse, all the way down. For their personal desires, whores and cocaine are enough.

From what I have seen, the Korean is similar. I do not have experience with Chinese.

2.) I will hop off this point to discuss the pernicious nature of striving. I know one such old white boomer who achieved great success in an artistic and business sense. But he was surrounded by strivers, and eventually ceded his ambition to them. He (literally) sold out, and stopped producing work, despite his initial goal (and this goal continues to haunt him now) of winning an oscar. It's not a particularly high goal, but it is an earnest desire for glory and renown as he perceives it. Now he is married to a striver wife after divorcing the first who was also a striver. It is a sad situation, and he essentially boozes his way through it. His children were a half-half split, one had a chance still, the other did not.

Striving drags down those who are "above it" if they are surrounded by such things and consider them as their peers. I hope this will act as a sober reminder: Never equate yourself to things you are greater than. The price is too high.

Who knows. I told the old man to give it a shot still in a candid conversation. But many things happened since then and I doubt he will make it out.

[obscurefish]

Every Superior Aryan Genius should read The Fountainhead so that he can learn how to overcome the striver menace by way of dynamite and dramatic courthouse speeches.

[GoldenOstrich]

Hitler was the last prophet. Post-1945 state-woo-myn are all strivers:
From Aristocracy to Meritocracy:

„Two related social forces, meritocracy and democratization, enabled and institutionalized the rise of middle-class leaders. One of the French Revolution’s rallying cries had been ‘careers open to talents’. From the middle of the nineteenth century, the adoption of meritocratic principles and institutions in the West – such as entrance examinations, selective secondary schools and universities, and recruitment and promotion policies based on professional standards – created new opportunities for talented individuals from middle-class backgrounds to enter politics. Simultaneously, the expansion of the franchise shifted both the social and the political center of gravity toward the middle class as well." (Leadership, Henry Kissinger, p. 764)

„Hence Lee’s recurring references to the junzi, or Confucian gentleman, and de Gaulle’s striving to become ‘a man of character’. Education was not merely a credential to be obtained in one’s youth and set aside: it was an unending effort with both intellectual and moral dimensions.“ (Leadership, Henry Kissinger, p.768)

Uni, especially law skrewl or technical uni, is just glorified trade school. The Yokels there are mainly animated by a desire for prestige. The intellectual discourse is highly performative, nobody is interested in ideas. They are just better AI and thats fine in some sense as someone in this thread pointed out.

It also is a form of other-directedness. Especially interesting is the Harvard example Thiel gives where whole cohorts of oversocialized buisness skrewlers systematically go into parts of the economy that bust shortly thereafter. Thiel talks about this in the context of Tech leaders having aspergers and therefore having less of an awareness to follow the Longhouse.