WHY NEPOTISM ISN'T EVIL: IT'S HONEST

What parental instinct, privilege, and biology teach us about the real world.

“Las Meninas” by Diego Velázquez

In my younger years, I was quite ambitious.

I wanted success, as society saw it.

I aimed high and ridiculously big.

This was how I found myself at a prestigious school, ready to spend a year studying screenwriting.

At the end of the year, the teacher said that there was an opportunity to be a junior writer for one of the main television shows at the time. I can’t remember the series, that’s how important this piece of storytelling was, but, of course, I wanted in. You take any chance you get when it comes to television and film because they are few and very far between. Our teacher selected a few of us to be considered, and he accidentally…at least I hope it was an accident, linked us in on the group email he sent to the producer. In this email, he wrote our names, and next to each name, the particular talent he saw in each of us.

“Claire: Funny, creative, sharp as a tack.”

“Caleb: Dark, dry, mature.”

And then when it came to one woman’s name, he wrote something that amounted to: her parents are extremely well-connected — she’s going to make it.

What kind of analysis is this? I thought to myself. I was twenty-seven years old but still so embarrassingly innocent. I truly believed the best man for the job would get the job.

At the end of the course, this woman and I were both apparently considered for a show, and she was ultimately selected. Who are you going to choose out of two equally talented randoms — the one from a small town or the one whose parents were already deeply embedded in the industry? You’d be an idiot to choose the former. I don’t for a second judge the choice made.

This is how life and the world work, and I believe if we are brave enough to admit it and accept it…We might have a more fruitful, truer, and ultimately less painful experience.

In my younger years, with this ambition, I was also incredibly progressive.

Women and men are the same.

Broken families are fine, chill.

Polyamory…why not? Let loose, freaks.

Men are dangerous and hate women.

Buy yourself some anonymous sperm, sister! What harm could be done?

The patriarchy is poison, and only when women run the world will we find balance.

Multiculturalism is a piece of cake, you racist! We’re all the same.

Nepotism is evil and must be annihilated.

I believed these things with all my heart and soul…until I had a child.

Until I got an upfront seat to what life is, how it starts, how it moves and grows, and when one does this and truly pays attention to one’s own body and feelings, strengths and weaknesses, and looks at data…all of the beliefs above are absolutely, astoundingly insane.

And now we have Kate Winslet and Ethan Hawke directing their children’s work, we can see that even “the good ones” can’t help themselves. They are aching to collaborate with their children and pass on their wisdom. They insist on having their aging genetics front and centre through their children’s fresh faces…pushed right to the top of the queue…over all the DEI cases and the ocean of talent.

It’s natural.

It’s nature.

It’s biology.

It’s true.

I know of another story — one I’ve seen play out more than once in different forms — of a man who funded an entire theatre company because his son loved theatre. When the son didn’t always land the lead roles, questions were asked. Creative freedom was defended. Eventually, the funding went elsewhere. The company survived, and the director who demanded creative freedom later went on to cast his own children in many of his productions.

Once again, I have no problem with this. I’m not calling out villains. I’m recognising a pattern — one that appears wherever parents have the means to help, shape, or protect their children. A pattern that perhaps can’t be broken, and maybe shouldn’t be.

But, I’m a liiiiitle bit tired of the progressive types slamming the rest of us down here doing quite ordinary work and trying to get by, I’m a little tired of them preaching about privilege when “mummy got me all of my privilege”; the only socially acceptable kind of headstart that we haven’t torn apart…yet.

My feeling is that the Left hasn’t put this particular privilege in the shredder like they have with their long list of other perceived privileges — sex, race, gender identity, religion, etc. — because most of them have benefited from nepotism at one level or another. It’s how the world works and turns. It would be weird if it didn’t; it would be even more destructive than judging human talent and virtue through people’s skin, gender identity, and sex.

Most of the people on the Left now are privileged. Mummy and daddy did quite a bit for them, if they think about it. A bit too much, maybe, in some cases.

You’ll find the working class swinging to the Right, following Tommy Robinson and the like, because they have had it to the back teeth with the elite telling them that their skin colour and sex determine their futures…not their God-given talents and grit.

They are told this by nepo babies, and it is incredibly hard to swallow.

I think the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis can’t be slamming us with all of the privileges we need to recognise and destroy when her godfather was Hollywood royalty.

This won’t ever go down well.

What is the solution to nepotism?

There isn’t one. It’s like trying to make a man a woman, or a dad a mum, or a new mother a CEO and a present parent. Nature and truth don’t quite work that way.

You bend it and break it, and a whole invisible system collapses, and the human spirit blackens. Ugliness is unleashed.

A parent should and must pass on their wisdom, connections, and resources to their child in any way they can. Their biological survival instinct must be respected for their best to bloom.

Our children are everything to us.

Would Kate Winslet have produced and directed for the first time unless she had the burning desire to see her son’s work on screen? I don’t think so. Something beautiful lit up inside her. I completely respect it.

But maybe Winslet and other left-leaning progressives could see this epic use of privilege — as unfair as everything else in life — and ease up on the…

“You must hire x, y, z because I said so…it’s only FAIR!”

Maybe this biological truth could be the door creaking open to reveal other truths to those who would have fantasy over hard, cold, but manageable reality.

Life—Mother Nature—can be brutal, but try to bend her rules to your particular flavour of ‘fair,’ and reap the chaos that follows.

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