Belmont Club: Is Vivek Ramaswamy’s Unpleasant Advice What We Need to Hear?

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Vivek Ramaswamy broke the first rule of public relations. He said something that will probably alienate the public in what we can call his blood, sweat, and tears tweet. The billionaire entrepreneur had one simple message on X: We can’t get ahead by taking it easy, no matter what Hollywood says.

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.

(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).

More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”

Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve….

“Normalcy” does not lead to exceptionalism. Which is it to be? Hollywood’s “feel good” or Desmond Doss’ indomitable “Please Lord, let me get one more”? It’s certainly feels better for most to head to the mall. But something in our childhood past bids us be wary of easy counsel. “Bilbo laughed. ‘Gandalf, I have never known you give me pleasant advice before,’ he said. ‘As all your unpleasant advice has been good, I wonder if this advice is not bad.” Is concentration and unremitting effort the inevitable price of achievement? 

The exhortations of Vivek Ramaswamy would have been familiar to many a 19th-century British “public school”—meaning private school—boy. It would have been preached in every pulpit and rostrum. To tweet it would have been commonplace. One of the accusations against white privilege is that it “normalizes” an obsession with achievement and expansion—per ardua ad astra to the classically educated—hence impelling conquest in contrast to the more communitarian, more easygoing human culture of the global South. Progressives have been trying to purge the West of this impulse ever since the end of WW2 because an unhealthy fascination with success is the foundation of white supremacy.

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” is what the baddies did. The entire progressive cultural agenda boils down to extirpating this unwholesome desire. And they are close to doing it. The original Olympic motto is made up of three Latin words: Citius, Altius, Fortius. These words mean Faster, Higher, Stronger. On the 20th of July 2021, the Session of the International Olympic Committee approved a change “that recognises the unifying power of sport and the importance of solidarity.” The new Olympic motto now reads “Faster, Higher, Stronger–Together.”

The problem, as Vivek points out, is that China won’t get with the decolonizing program, or rather, they have exempted themselves from it. “Be brutally honest,” he writes. “’Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.” Europe has already had its ass handed to it by China.

Share of Global GDP in 2007: 1) EU: 25.2% 2) USA: 24.7% 3) China 6.1% 

Share of Global GDP in 2024: 1) USA: 26.3% 2) EU: 17.3% 3) China: 16.9%

Only two months ago, Emmanuel Macron warned that the EU was only 2 to 3 years from irrelevance. “The EU could die, we are on a verge of a very important moment … Our former model is over. We are overregulating and underinvesting. In the two to three years to come, if we follow our classical agenda, we will be out of the market.” 

But can they change? Only if Europe is so humiliated by China that they, like Mao and Sun Yat Sen in the last century, spend the rest of their lives relearning Citius, Altius, Fortius. Until then, everyone can hang out at the mall, though everything in it will be made in China.