The Bizarre Religion of "Bootstraps" & "Pay Your Dues"‏

Singing rightful too-ra-laddie too-ra-lee

There is no one who can tell a lie like me

You can search until you tire, you won't find a bigger liar

I've been lying since the dawn of history —Irish Folk Song

One of the puzzling things about the Edumacation Scam-a-thon is how it exposes its defenders' little personalities quirks, as their belief system is challenged. The belief in loan+tuition+credential=magic job is sort of a religion. It is, for the moment, the established conventional-wisdom about careers and formal graduate education. Its high-priests are the boomers. It is a fact of human psychology that humans simply like to have some religion, even when they otherwise deny it. The second they abandon one religious belief, they turn to another. Even if they oppose a belief system, their opposition to it itself becomes their belief system, which they, like a true believer, take very seriously and in fact live by.

Recently, on JD Underground, there was an attack of yet another "pull yourself up by your bookstraps, c'mon!" lecturer. In defense of a craigslist ad that paid $15 an hour for a licensed attorney position, the believer/lecturer finished off with a "you've got to pay your dues" line. That is his belief, his religion, when it comes to careers and jobs. Pay your dues, and then your dues pay you back. These kind of bootstraps-people appear, now that the scam has been exposed for several years, as religious fanatics, who cannot help themselves. They think their religion of bootstraps is not only true, but all of us must believe it and live by, as if it were a fundamental law of the universe. If our true believers went back to the 19th century, and saw in the factories eight-year-olds working 16 hour days without so much as a fire escape as a fringe benefit, they would say, "you've got to pay your dues, little Oliver! Sure, your health is permanently damaged due to mercury residue, but hey, life can be hard sometimes. Pull yourself up by your (size 3) bootstraps!" Life can be hard sometimes, son.

So, despite every possible indication to the contrary, even with evidence in mainstream publications like the Times, Journal, or Barron's, showing there is simply a lack of JD-required jobs and (concomitantly) depressed wages for the few jobs there are, one would have to be pretty dense to think that "paying your dues" would solve the problem. The fallacy has been addressed before, and the best response was in the forum, so I will reproduce it; let it be etched in gold plate:

"Pay your dues" implies that there is a reward after paying your dues. The reward can be knowledge or money.

The first premise is easy to dispose; none of the posters averred that they lacked knowledge or that the job would be a teaching experience. If "pay your dues" implies that the education you received was so irrelevant that you should take the job just to gain knowledge, it must mean that the educational system has utterly failed. Then, we might as well shutter all law schools.

The second premise relies on the suggestion that doing work for free or nearly free means that someone will value my work and pay greatly for that. The basic notion of working for free or nearly free is that the work is not valued in the least bit. If a commodity is consistently sold at low prices, it means that the value of the commodity is low. So, paying your dues does not yield a monetary reward now or later.

The response of the true believer of the Church of the Bootstraps? (This is not a joke)

I'll be honest with you. I didn't read your entire post. I got five lines in and gave up. 

If this exchange were in a novel, the publisher would reject it because the ignorance and arrogance displayed by the bootstraper would be unbelievable in an adult. My own response is simpler and would be: What "dues"? How much and why? To whom would we "pay" them anyway? What happens after we pay them? Notice that nobody will answer these questions, because the only people who believe in the "pay your dues" religion would have to admit that it is bogus when applied to the legal profession today.

Perhaps the most likely explanation for the existence of the sacred "pay your dues" faith is that people can't resist personalizing a situation and applying the fundamental attribution error: 1) I worked hard and paid my dues, therefore, I have a job; 2) You do not have a job, therefore must work hard and "pay your dues"! It is so obvious, you spoiled born-after-1964 children! Damn you plastic toy-playing kids! Do you even know what a Radio Flyer is?  

It is a strange thing that this belief is a combination of both insult and compliment; they insult the law grad by implying he is immature and lazy and needs to "pay his dues". But they inadvertently compliment him by implying he can magically turn the situation around through a triumph of the will mentality; he is not a victim of circumstance which is almost impossible to get out of (i.e., no jobs at any living wage), but an unstoppable, "Law & Philosophy" Übermensch who can rise above the world he was born into!
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Read my book-length satire/exposé of law school, Smarter Than Socrates: The End of the Law School Era.