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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)
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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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