Ok this phrase has NEVER made sense to me….you physically can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps. How did it become such a common idiom for (as I’ve heard it) “putting in hard work without help to earn a better life”? Seems counterintuitive
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It started as a description of the impossible, as described in other comments.
Then when the impossible happened – poor people appearing to become rich overnight – it became different: it meant basically you had achieved the impossible. American economy seemed to give upward mobility a lot more… but it was never frequent or easy.
But now it has become ironic without being intended to: because you recommend to someone “do your own thing, pull yourself together”, and use an impossible act to describe what, in this reality and inequality, is also almost impossible to achieve.
It becomes even more ironic when “personal responsibility” ideologues say this is what the poor should do. Because they *are* describing an almost impossibility with an impossible act, isolated rare acts as a recipe for the masses.
They just make it appear possible and within the capacity of all people to excuse their destruction of the few mechanisms that relieve inequality; but their own expression betrays the underlying reality.
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