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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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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I’ll stop here though I could go on. If you’re interested in this line of thought, I’m mainly developing it in my Great Weirding essay series on
@breaking_smart This thread is kinda my starter assumptions for that, though I’ve never laid it out like thishttps://breakingsmart.com/en/the-great-weirding/ …Show this thread
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Have you read James C. Scott's "Two Cheers for Anarchism"? It has a fairly positive chapter about the Petit Bourgeois in it.
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