Editing Openai/6962ca00-cfa0-800a-ac62-bd84f6c201e0 (section)

==== The “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” rhetoric was never intended as a general rule applied evenly across society. In practice, it functioned as a boundary-policing slogan: ====
* Applied downward (to stigmatized out-groups)
* Suspended inward (for one’s own community)
* Ignored upward (for elites)

So when:
* Black Americans are told to self-improve → it is moral instruction
* Rural whites fail to adapt → it becomes evidence of external betrayal

This is not hypocrisy in the casual sense; it is in-group moral exemption. Moral rules are used to rank people, not to discipline the self.

That is why “take your own advice” rarely lands. The advice was never meant to be symmetric.