This is a casual observation so I'll be reserved about generalizing from it, but I'm struck again and again by what I would term a distortion of both perspective and self-image in the modern, North American psyche. I think I am guilty of it, too, only in myself I have the gall to assume that it doesn't have as negative a net social result, if only because I lack the resources to be of consequence to anyone but myself at the moment.
But in people of means, and here I don't refer solely to the paper-thin slice of the demographic pie that rakes in Blankfein-esque payouts, but to the well-off more generally, there appears to exist a tendency towards normalizing their standing to fit the ground level of the social hierarchy. In plainer English, what I'm trying to get at is that the rich and the middle-class seem to assume that they are in some ways the economic equivalent of the poor. It's usually from this stance that they then justify behavior with externalities as their consequence.
Now, I say North American psyche because I don't know enough about anyone else's to claim that they suffer from the same self-delusion. I probably can't even generalize too much about Americans, since there is nowhere in this portion of the Western hemisphere where inequality is more pronounced than New York. I assume the tendency to exist in other places if only because a dimmed estimation of others is something axiomatic to the natural informational limits of human beings.
Yet the sentiment pops up here again and again, and I'm shocked by its ferocity each time. Poor is redefined to mean ever greater states of material plenty that seem less only relative to the even more grossly inflated abundance of one's current economic standing. This psychic disconnect of course stands firmly in the way of any kind of positive redistributive action. It also prevents the United States, at least, from forming the fundamental tenets of social solidarity that I think are necessary to call a body of human beings a society at all.
Are we a society? Or are we fooled by physical proximity, contracts and their mechanism of enforcement into thinking that our collective existence is structured by a meaningful social latticework?
Oh, and fuck Locke.
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My impression, and again I'll include the same caveat that this is nothing more than an impression, is that the majority of Americans identify as middle class. This, I think, is empirically true at the upper end (I think I remember talking to you about some report which had various middle-management financiers estimating the median income to be about $80,000), but I also wouldn't be surprised if, at least in America, the same self-identification applies to lower end of the distribution as well. On the one hand you have the rich and upper-middle class deluding themselves into thinking that they're just like average folk, and on the other side, you have an American working-class borrowing their way into something that more closely resembles the American average as understood by all American T.V. watchers. Which is to say that, at least until last year or so, I imagine that for a huge portion of the country, the traditional relationship between income and material possession broke down so thoroughly as to render class a stand in for social/religious attitude. Which may have played a large part in convincing so many to vote against their economic interests. So maybe with the downturn, this country will return to that unhappy equilibrium in which the majority of the working class have to actually start spending and living like members of the working class (plus the delight of deleveraging), and with it will come the return of class as a potent political category.
ReplyDeleteOr...I might be getting ahead of myself. But you had a grand thought, so I get to have one too.
Certain members of the English Labor Party have begun to beat the drum of inequality and systemic discrimination on the basis of class, which means we could expect to see that return as a rhetorical device in upcoming electoral struggles in Europe. I have little faith in Americans wising up in the same way. I would suppose it more likely that a less inconvenient substitute will be found by elites on either side of the aisle. And if class does capture the mass imagination, it's sadly not so unthinkable that the Republicans will manipulate it a whole lot better than the Democrats.
ReplyDeleteBut hey, you know what's nice? Sushi rice with sesame and garlic oil dribbled over it and a nice, fresh piece of raw tuna on top--truly a poor man's Cadillac.