Cultural critiques and costly signalling

The cult of work and the myth of Asian efficiency

Like many readers of Pimlico Journal, I am a young white man with a skill issue. At least, that is, according to the many Silicon Valley-adjacent commentators on X who have, at the precise moment when mass immigration has been comprehensively rejected at the ballot box across much of the West, chosen to attempt to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and burn their credibility in defence of the H1-B visa’s mass importation of Indians to fill entry-level ‘tech’ jobs.

Their argument, put most succinctly by Vivek Ramaswamy who, in a rant which veils personal jealousy and resentment from his youth with an embarrassingly thin layer of publicly-minded moralising, argues that whites are simply too lazy, stupid, or distracted to effectively carry out the kind of important business and technical roles which will allow Western firms to outcompete their Asian counterparts.

This is obviously absurd. However, just as important as rejecting the factual claim here is rejecting the vision of man and society which underpins it. This view has, in fact, already infected much of Western society, particularly in supposedly ‘elite’ academic institutions and top-level graduate employment, not in small part due to the already substantial presence of Asians within them. I think that my own experience, which is in no way unique or even uncommon, sheds some light on this issue.

As an intelligent young man, I exerted a not-remarkably-high degree of effort and achieved top grades at both GCSE and A-Level. My parents, being normal middle class white English people, encouraged and supported me in the pursuit of whatever extracurricular activities I found valuable, but never forced me into unwanted music lessons nor extra maths tuition. My summers were spent not on pursuing internships wherever they could be found, but on family holidays, time with friends, and generally enjoying my youth. I secured a place on a prestigious degree course at a high-ranking university, and as graduation approached I began to search for a career which reflected this achievement.

The job search will never be anything but tedious and dispiriting, no matter how fair the process is. In this economy, the competition is fierce, and no-one — not least someone who has hitherto only ever succeeded in their life — will enjoy reading the inevitable (and I do mean inevitable) pile of rejection emails that will begin accumulating in your inbox. Nonetheless, for our older readers, it is even worse than you think and — as I have been told by younger friends — it seems to get worse every year.

As anyone who has been through this process will know well, top graduate jobs are no longer attainable through ordinary academic achievement, or even through a combination of ordinary academic achievement and extracurricular achievement. Nowadays, many are locked behind a sequence of internships for which one must begin applications literally during freshers’ week of the first year at university. If you have encountered any number of people on this ‘spring week’ track, you will understand the sheer joylessness and complete lack of personality required to consistently sacrifice the social opportunities that most Brits regard as a key aspect of the university experience in favour of endless cover letters and situational judgement tests. While it is indeed possible to get through the door by other means, this is understood to be much more difficult. Not being such a dead-eyed zombie, I consciously chose to eschew the ‘spring week’ path, and as such found it a tremendous challenge to secure a decent job.

I don’t want to dismiss the reality of racial discrimination here: had I been a black woman, it is likely that my educational achievement alone would have been sufficient to secure me some of the opportunities which I was denied. However, as much as emphasising this obvious fact would appeal to many of our readers, I still do not believe that this was the main barrier at any stage. It cannot be denied that, compared to my Asian competition — with their CVs stuffed full with pointless charity work, a fake ‘start-up’, ‘Finance Society’, seven internships, and ABRSM Grade 8 certificates for clarinet and piano — my applications were somewhat lacking. As much as DEI-type metrics have encroached on selection processes at every level, in general, those with the best overall record of ‘achievement’, as defined according to the logic of the system in place today, will still gain access to the most opportunities. The truth is that Vivek and others have a genuine point when they suggest that the cultural values of white Brits and Americans encourage their young people to pursue different things than those favoured by Asian tiger mothers, and that there is therefore a genuine way in which we arrive in the job market ‘less qualified’ than our global competition, or at least ‘less qualified’ according to current, highly dubious, standards of evaluation.

Just so readers do not think that this article is little more than resentful kvetching: my story, you will be glad to know, has a happy ending. However, many others in my position have not been as lucky. The number of intelligent young men with an excellent academic record who are nonetheless doomed to unemployment or (far more commonly) underemployment is strikingly large and increasing. This is inevitably the case when, due to high levels of ‘high-skilled’ migration, Brits are forced to compete with the entire world for a very limited supply of highly paid, prestigious jobs in a professional service industry which already serves the entire world, and as such does not experience any real increase in demand from the arrival of more people within our borders.

As we shall see, these people primarily gain their high wages not through being more ‘productive’ than natives in the proper sense, but merely through obtaining jobs that take advantage of the infrastructure (in the broadest possible sense of the word) that our ancestors were capable of producing, but their ancestors were not, perhaps precisely because of the presence of certain behaviours that — ironically — advantaged them in the application process over natives in the first place. In many (though obviously not all) cases, their ‘value-added’ is, in essence, the ‘value’ of the rat race.

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The response of the pro-immigration crowd to this kind of story has been instructive: it has been remarkably unsympathetic, even derisive, revealing an animosity towards supposed political allies which is often hidden. Unsurprisingly, given the libertarian origins of many of these people, a ruthless (yet blinkered) logic of ‘competition’ is applied which supposedly confirms the superiority of the Asian striver mentality against the ‘culture of mediocrity’ which values ‘sleepovers’ over ‘maths tutoring’. Vivek’s use of this example (‘sleepovers’) in particular, as opposed to something objectively far more deleterious to productivity and ambition (video games, for example), highlights that it really is often resentment that drives these people: they know that they have paid a big social cost for the lifestyle they have chosen, and believe that they deserve big returns from this as their reward. The only ‘advice’ such people have for whites is to embrace this same mentality, thus allowing them to compete within the terms of the game that has been set. The idea that the terms themselves might be undesirable, including in an economic sense, is one that they simply refuse to even consider.

Putting aside the absurdity of people who are supposedly advocates of a patriotic cultural revitalisation arguing for the rejection of deeply-held native values in favour of alien norms that — conveniently — are instead closely aligned with those of their own recent ancestors, it is worth considering what kind of society these people are actually promoting. Their notion of ‘virtue’ is one in which extreme diligence and a ruthless pursuit of accreditation is elevated above all other characteristics. It is one which allows no space for leisure, for socialisation, or even for intellectual pursuit outside of what is necessary to enhance one’s supposed productive capacity — or, more precisely, not even productive capacity, but signalling capacity.

What kind of society does this create? We do not need any imagination to answer this question because such societies already exist. South Korea is perhaps the best example. Children are almost invariably forced to endure a gruelling regime of schooling followed by daily tutoring at a hagwon (a private after-school academy), spending between twelve and sixteen hours a day on mostly pointless rote learning. That most of this studying is nominally directed towards outwardly ‘useful’ subjects, like mathematics, merely shrouds the ‘mostly pointless’ reality of the system, which would be much the same on a practical level if Korean children were instead forced to solve Rubik’s cubes and memorise the dictionary all day. It’s merely a case of jostling for position, not of learning genuine skills. Given all this, it is unsurprising that birth rates have collapsed, with their TFR reaching the unprecedented low of 0.78: parents make not just huge financial investments in each child, but also huge investments of their own time in order to provide the kind of helicopter parenting that must logically accompany this.

Duty and docility are emphasised not just as an ideal, but as a necessity for functioning at all within such a system, effectively preparing individuals for an equally gruelling lifetime of work in meaningless, alienating jobs. It is also worth noting that it is not enough to be motivated by compensation within such a culture: one must relish work for work’s sake. This leads to a valorisation of the willingness to work extreme hours for thoroughly unimpressive pay. In fact, demanding a salary reflective of one’s work is a sign one lacks the dutiful attitude which must be demanded. This attitude is reflected in ‘tech’ CEOs decrying the fact that native workers are unwilling to treat their graduate engineering role as if they were actually equity partners in a promising startup.

The primary purpose of the H1-B visa — which, we should note, certainly does not select for extraordinary talent that simply cannot be found in the United States — is to undercut native workers, forcing them to accept worse compensation or longer hours as a result. While the incentives are logical enough for the ‘tech’ CEOs, it is unclear why this is necessary for maintaining American competitiveness — unless they are claiming that these Asians will set up genuine competitors to companies like Google and Meta abroad if they are kept out, which seems unlikely — or why the Government should assist them in their goals. After all, even H1-B wages are far higher than the wages available in India and China, or even South Korea and Japan. If maintaining competitiveness is simply a matter of wage restraint, then American ‘tech’ would have gone the way of American textiles years ago, even with the help of the H1-B visa. It’s just a matter of boosting the profits of a tiny group, not the genuine pursuit of the national interest.

This society may in a some sense enjoy advantages in productivity: output per worker will almost inevitably be higher if more hours are worked, especially if each hour is worked more diligently (though, as we shall see, this is far from a given). This productivity does not, of course, result from any kind of innovation, other than innovations in human misery and exhaustion. In fact, the potential for innovation is reduced when conformity and risk-aversion is demanded to such a degree, precluding the possibility of creativity by removing the viability of alternative paths to success. It is no surprise that despite the increasing wealth of Asian societies, none can compete with the West in their output of major innovations in science and technology, save possibly for the kind of incremental efficiency gains in the production of consumer goods.

In the economic realm, things are not much better for Asia. This is despite their genuine prowess in manufacturing, which may be of geopolitical concern, but does not fundamentally produce anything close to the wealth of the West, and especially not the United States. The kind of entrepreneurial culture that exists in America and, despite the attempts by the government to strangle it through overregulation, in Britain, still has no counterpart in the East, despite some cargo-cultic attempts to foster it over there. In these countries, a genuinely wealthy small businessman is typically believed to be of lower status than a civil servant on a mediocre salary, the so-called ‘iron rice bowl’, as only the latter is seen as being sufficiently ‘stable’ in such risk-averse societies. The heroic age of Asian capitalism — of Toyota and Sony, Samsung and Hyundai — is dying, if it is not already dead. China, for example, produces only twice the startup activity of Britain despite a population despite a population twenty times larger! Finally: Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are still only around as wealthy as much-derided Spain, not even coming close to the wealth of the United States. Despite impressive growth, China is still poorer then Turkey and Chile. India is still poorer than Cambodia and the Ivory Coast. If that doesn’t convince you that we don’t need to ‘compete’ with Asia by importing their cultural norms, then I don’t know what will.

But how is it the case that these societies, with the immense value placed on education and hard work, fail to out-achieve their Western counterparts even in the economic and scientific domains, let alone in artistic and cultural production? The reality is that much of the ‘work’ that is valorised, both inside and outside of education, is in fact mostly pointless, or indeed sometimes completely fake and intended only for signalling purposes. Spending ten hours a week revising for the ‘spelling bee’ produces nothing other than a line on a resumé signalling that one is willing to plough endless hours into tedious, meaningless work — enhancing one’s ability to jostle for position within the existing economy’s logic of production, but doing nothing to increase one’s actual hourly output, let alone altering the logic of production itself. And, whilst some remarkable individuals can genuinely work one-hundred hours a week, the vast majority of drones sitting in the office for that time are not in fact doing productive work for even the majority of it. Japanese ‘salarymen’ will remain in the office playing Tetris until their boss has gone home, even if they have nothing to do, or even to wait to do, and even if this means getting back in the early hours of the morning. The Indian ‘freshies’ in London’s hospitality described in a previous article will often ‘work’ (for a bartender) almost inhuman hours, but this is only possible because they are not actually doing much in the first place.

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Opponents of mass immigration are more used to discussions centred around low-skilled immigration from dysfunctional countries, and as a result we are used to pointing to the growing dysfunction of our own societies as evidence for our arguments. We therefore often lack the language to highlight the problem with ‘high-skilled’ immigration and the kind of cultural change it brings with it outside of reactionary and romantic appeals to the preservation of a national culture for purely conservative reasons.

When our societies are as sick and decayed as they are today, this kind of appeal inevitably rings hollow. The society described above is a perfectly functional one in a basic sense — but it is also one which should offend the sensibilities of every native Brit or American, not just because the society as a whole is uninspiring, but because it precludes the possibility of the kind of life that we do and should hold as an ideal. It is a national work camp, a beehive in which the value of each individual is solely measured, not even by economic output (which, while economic output is of course important, would be bad enough), but in fact merely by their willingness to exhaust themselves, preferably as publicly as possible, in work. It is not a sign of ‘laziness’ or ‘incompetence’ to say that this is not in fact the world in which we wish to live.

The problem, then, with immigration in any significant numbers by ‘high-skilled’ Asians is not just that such people bring with them the culture described above, inevitably grafting those values and practices onto our own. It is also that, in order to compete against such individuals, adopting these thoroughly undesirable social values and behaviours becomes a necessity even for white natives if access to elite institutions and opportunities is granted by evaluation based on these metrics. Every competition has its own logic, and each game must be played a certain way to won. If we wish not to play the winning strategy, our only choice is to refuse to play the game at all.

Preventing further immigration of this type, and aiming to reverse the demographic damage that has already been done, is obviously necessary to prevent the continued slide of our societies in this direction. Alone, however, it will not be enough. In fact, it is not clear that the primary cause of the move in this direction has been immigration thus far. Costly signalling becomes necessary when there is no clear and reliable method of signalling one’s true character and abilities. It is a tremendous problem that a person of reasonable diligence and only moderately above-average intelligence can achieve the highest academic qualifications on offer in our society, because it renders the truly excellent unable to meaningfully distinguish themselves, other than through the pursuit of meaningless grinds.

This not only imposes an immense cost on individuals, but it also perverts the signalling in precisely the way described above. Those who distinguish themselves in this way are not the extremely capable: they are those with sufficiently suppressed souls that they are willing to sacrifice everything to the rat race. This becomes self-reinforcing, both because those who succeed are usually those who honestly believe such a system to be one that rewards ‘virtue’, and also because, having made these sacrifices themselves, they cannot but demand that the next generation make the same sacrifices, lest they reveal them to all have been for nothing. How to restructure our educational and professional qualification system to enable uncostly, unfalsifiable signalling is a matter for another article, but doing so is necessary if we wish to free ourselves from this culture.

Vivek et al., then, are right: a cultural revitalisation is necessary, on both sides of the Atlantic. That revitalisation can only take the form of rejecting the revenge-of-the-nerds work camp, rejecting nonsensical signalling in favour of true meritocracy, and rejecting the subjection of our citizens to competition under such ridiculous terms. The supporters of Trump in ‘tech’ often say that they want to colonise space. In all of human history, there has only ever been one culture that could even dream of colonising space. In their misunderstanding of what truly distinguishes the societies they claim to fight for, our new friends in ‘tech’ risk losing that forever.

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Image credits: Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

This article was written by Eurysthenes, a Pimlico Journal contributor based in London. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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