Mark Liu: Week 6

Privilege has become one of the biggest copout words. It’s become an easy excuse to justify failure in life when in reality, you only have yourself to blame.

I am privileged, yes. Privileged to be born with a brain. I am fortunate to have this unique brain, which allowed me to learn long-division when I was 4, and also write these sensational columns in the midst of finals. The point is though, my genius is part of who I am and I have also made the most of it.

The truth is, the 99% are stuck in the 99% because they are just bad at this game. They waste extraordinary amounts of money on pointless things like weddings, and they end up spending even more when the marriage inevitably goes to shit and they have to have a child just to keep things interesting. About 80% of the 99% are poor because they don’t know how to save. They spend all their money on iPads and iPhones instead of ISAs, on Tesco Finest sandwiches when a dependable egg and cress would do.

In chess, we have a saying: play the side you’re dealt. It’s common knowledge that white has a 55% winrate advantage in chess over black, and the same is true in life except it’s around double that. But even as black, I can still win in chess and always do.

Likewise, most people can succeed despite their background, but instead of doing something about their lives, people have created a blame culture, where they blame either the government or rich, successful people for their problems, and then waste time trying to ‘occupy’ their way out of ELO hell (chess term).

Sure, a lot of people are actually massively disadvantaged from being born into a bad background, but that’s just an argument that their parents shouldn’t have been allowed to breed. I used to be against selective breeding “in theory”, but then I saw Jeremy Kyle. There is no way that man should have been allowed to be born.

Don’t confuse what I’m talking about for eugenics, because discriminating based on genetic traits is obviously stupid. I’m talking about discriminating based on people being assholes, which is fair game. We need to stress that people do not have fundamental rights to breed any more than they do to drive cars.

In fact, we need a license system like we do for driving. People would take rigorous tests to prove they are fit to procreate and generally not an asshole. Much like we have a lot of immigration law; we need to control who comes into this country from people’s wombs.

There should be massive penalties for procreating without a license and even bigger ones for drunk-procreating or PUIs. You might argue that having a child isn’t as dangerous as bad driving, but tell that to Mr and Ms Hitler.

It’s just incredibly selfish to bring a child into this world, especially as we have established that 99% of children eventually grow up to become miserable and destitute. So unless you are in the privileged 1%, your choices are to kill it, have another or just accept that it’s destined to have a shitty life. In other words you can abort, retry or fail.

I would encourage people to do the first. Otherwise, suck it up when they start spending their adult lives making plastic cards complaining about how underprivileged they are on Tumblr.