Conversation

Replying to
To both sides I’m slightly suspect. The poor are suspicious of my work with the rich, and I’m often accused outright of being a petit bourgeoisie capitalist shill. Which is 100% true. Equally the rich often suggest I’m a commie in bourgeois disguise. Also 100% true.
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The opposite of every great truth is also a great truth. The poor are exploited. True. The poor are ressentiment driven identitarians who may or may not work hard. Also true. The rich are lazy venal rentiers. True. The rich are burdened with large responsibilities. Also true.
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This is class-based bothsidesism of course, which is why the worst of both sides are the ones who hate people like me the most (“vertical centrists” perhaps?). But for every systemic failure theres plenty of blame to distribute from top to bottom of pyramid.
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Every class is complicit in how the world works. Every class has its full complement of sociopaths, clueless and losers. Every class has lazy and hard working types. Every class has people with fixed and fluid class identities. It’s a fractal thing.
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Despite the fact that rewards of the system working are very unevenly distributed, ironically, every class winning or losing in terms of rewards seems super attached to the identities that keep the system the same. They want more rewards, but don’t want to change their identities
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To bring it back around to investing, there is investing in *yourself* to consider. Self-Investors (1) invest in their own growth, destroying last identities to forge new ones. Self-Investors (2) double down harder and harder on who they think they are.
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There’s also Self-Investors 1.5. People who “grow” in a limited way reducible to class mobility. Start rich, fall into poverty and go commie. Start poor, get rich, and go capitalist. They say you’re the mean of your 5 best friends. These class-movers just change their 5. 🙄
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In Great Tuth terms, these 1.5ers never achieve any sort of integration between opposed great truths. They just go from one great truth to its negation, by cherrypicking a different subset of confirmatory evidence from their experiences.
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There’s a behavior I call default-stereotype switching. Going socialist to capitalist? Switch poor-default from the suffering, exploited people you know to the resentful lazy ones. Going the other way? Switch rich-default from generous entrepreneur to Wall Street scammer.
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So long as you don’t pop out of the class-mobility identity ladder entirely, and drop class-based defaults of admiration and contempt for individuals, you’re part of the problem. Which is fine. It’s not a shaming. It means you’ll be manipulated as interchangeable passives.
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Not a coincidence: every single time anyone has strongly criticized me for my values, politics, or aesthetics (usually lack thereof), when I look, there’s a strong, hardened class identity behind it (this is not true of competence/skill/ignorance criticisms, which I appreciate)
Replying to
I’m pretty bourgeois. Petit, not haute. It’s traditionallly been the least admired class, inviting the most contempt. The identitarian poor see it as a snobbish climber class. The identitarian rich see it as a gauche not-even-new-money class. It is the most fluid-identity class.
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The upside of being in maximal contempt zone is that it is the zone where it is most difficult to harden an identity. There are no bourgeois manifestos or middle-class ideological tracts *for the bourgeois*, despite this being the class that writes these things for other classes
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Writing *about* the petit bourgeois is almost universally unsympathetic. Much of it by members of the class themselves, via ritual self-flagellation. This is the world of Babbitts and Karens. They are portrayed as standing for nothing except their own comfort and convenience.
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But middle-class societies tend also to be the ones in which human nature evolves fastest, through identity creative-destruction, as tidal forces of contempt from above and below tear apart and reconstitute the class, every generation. They also staff the investor (1) world.
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Rich and poor usually don’t change and don’t want to change. They have stable identities they aspire to, conform to, and then cling to with hardened determination. The petit bourgeois middle class doesn’t have this psychological luxury. It evolves as a series of tropes and memes.
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I don’t mind this. I’m fine with my life story being a series of bad memes that don’t cohere. Wojack today, Karen tomorrow. Neither world-denting Straussian-Girardian hero n or working class hero. Maybe I’ll title my autobiography “Glub and brrr: the story of a series of memes”
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Positive archetypes are for people who live on maps. Investor (2) types, whether they invest with money or hardened self-congratulatory class identities that make growth an imperative for everybody but themselves. The price of living on the territory is being reduced to a meme.
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