It's part of the american folk mythology (for a real obvious-in-hindsight example, consider Star Wars (original trilogy): Luke goes from farm hand to ace fighter pilot with no training, and becomes a passable jedi with a few months of training...).
It probably originates 50% from the urban/rural divide and 50% from the underlying outlook of protestantism. In brief:
- much of american history consists of pioneers going and settling the land, then -- decades later -- the 'experts' show up (these could be anything from farm scientists to law enforcement to general government busybodies). So there's this weird split between respect for learning and accomplishment (no, really!) but on the other hand the belief that you can really boostrap yourself / figure things out by yourself just fine. Anything that plays into the belief you could perform at an 'expert' level with only a very minimal amount of training is therefore good entertainment.
- the basic protestant outlook is that your (personal) salvation is predetermined (though perhaps you can mess it up), and that consequently nothing you do can earn salvation if you weren't already gifted it; however, there's a parallel belief that God will show favor upon the saved, eg by granting them success in their worldly endeavors...and so, loosely speaking, a protestant-minded person would interpret someone attaining expert-level performance in a very short period of time as a sign that that person had been gifted with salvation.
At this point in time I'd say neither of those reasons is self-consciously driving the meme's dominance, but those are some of the deep roots of that particular outlook, most likely.
the basic protestant outlook is that your (personal) salvation is predetermined
Totally OT, but I wanted to point out that predestination is most closely associated with Calvinism, which only occupies a subset of Protestantism. The Arminian school of theology is also part of Protestantism.
Yeah, but cf your copy of The Protestant Work Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism to see this argument brought out in full; I'll also handwave and point out that in general, even when the nitty-gritty specifics of belief systems are the stuff wars are fought over, it's surprisingly common for second-order attudinal-and-behavioral consequences of a particular group's outlook to thoroughly permeate the broader society it's found in.
That's a fancy way of saying that, eg., even though the predestination thing is a mainly Calvinist outlook, the knock-on effects of that belief -- working hard but hoping for some 'answer from above' to arrive in the form of earthly success -- have pretty much permeated the deep subconscious of the American outlook.
You can see it manifest all the time, with people attributing success to innate characteristics -- eg, smarts or talent or whatnot -- and not to the work and training that developed those characteristics; this is a more-rational take on the same basic idea (earthly success == sign of grace, not earthly success == mix of lucky breaks and hard effort).
It probably originates 50% from the urban/rural divide and 50% from the underlying outlook of protestantism. In brief:
- much of american history consists of pioneers going and settling the land, then -- decades later -- the 'experts' show up (these could be anything from farm scientists to law enforcement to general government busybodies). So there's this weird split between respect for learning and accomplishment (no, really!) but on the other hand the belief that you can really boostrap yourself / figure things out by yourself just fine. Anything that plays into the belief you could perform at an 'expert' level with only a very minimal amount of training is therefore good entertainment.
- the basic protestant outlook is that your (personal) salvation is predetermined (though perhaps you can mess it up), and that consequently nothing you do can earn salvation if you weren't already gifted it; however, there's a parallel belief that God will show favor upon the saved, eg by granting them success in their worldly endeavors...and so, loosely speaking, a protestant-minded person would interpret someone attaining expert-level performance in a very short period of time as a sign that that person had been gifted with salvation.
At this point in time I'd say neither of those reasons is self-consciously driving the meme's dominance, but those are some of the deep roots of that particular outlook, most likely.