[HN Gopher] Class Bullshitters
___________________________________________________________________
Class Bullshitters
Author : hn-0001
Score : 55 points
Date : 2022-03-04 15:44 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (atis.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (atis.substack.com)
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I'm a 1st level bard / 1st level fight / 12th level psionicist.
| cudgy wrote:
| Interesting combo. Did you start out as a drunk bar singer with
| a propensity for fighting and later decide to pursue the art of
| mind control? Or were you a devout mind control expert who
| dabbled with the guitar and a few Martial arts classes along
| the way?
| rayiner wrote:
| This is kind of an odd framing because the traditional notion of
| class is hereditary. If you look at it one way, my wife and I are
| the same class--professional degrees from the same school working
| for similar professional firms. At one point we lived in
| virtually identical 1950s split levels, on opposite sides of the
| country. But my family was affluent landowners for generations
| "back in old country" and my wife's family comes from a poor
| rural part of the Oregon coast. Our acculturation and is
| completely different. My dad thinks and acts like someone whose
| dad had sharecroppers tending their farm, and her dad thinks and
| acts like someone whose dad hunted game to add protein to the
| family's diet. And my dad raised me and her dad raised her and we
| still think and act differently as a result. It wouldn't be a
| "lie," as the title suggests, for her to say she comes from a
| working class background and for me to say that I don't.
| 12ian34 wrote:
| The whole idea of social class is so disgusting and dehumanising
| that whilst I think it's important to talk about Social Mobility
| and how we can improve that - I wish people would stop self-
| classifying and talking about classes like they actually exist.
| To me, the whole idea of classes revolves around the gatekeeping
| of opportunity by (generally) the most fortunate. I always refuse
| to classify myself. Aside from demographic studies by governments
| to improve social mobility, what good can it do the world to know
| the class of an individual?
| zardo wrote:
| > Aside from demographic studies by governments to improve
| social mobility, what good can it do the world to know the
| class of an individual?
|
| In large part, government decision makers are made up of people
| from dominant classes. They can hardly be relied upon to
| improve social mobility, as it's people like them who stand to
| lose from increased social mobility.
|
| An oppressed class that doesn't recognize itself can't organize
| as a class to combat that oppression.
| nineplay wrote:
| In the US, at least, people's thoughts on classes seem all over
| the map. Some people think of 'working class' or 'blue collar' as
| people without degrees but if a teacher makes less than a plumber
| than who is in what class.
|
| OTOH calling yourself 'rich' is going to sound braggy. Someone
| with a comfortable 6 figure income and a 2 million dollar house
| may sound like they are downgrading themselves by saying 'upper-
| class' but if they say 'rich' a lot people are going to think
| that 'rich' means private island in the Caribbean, not two weeks
| in Hawaii.
|
| It's best to just stay away from it.
| throwaway9980 wrote:
| Maybe people just don't have clear class identities? I grew up
| middle, perhaps upper middle class in the US. Both of my parents,
| especially my mother, came from lower social economic backgrounds
| than what they provided for me. I was very close to my mom's
| extend family as a kid. My grandparents grew up very poor. No
| running water, dirt floors type of poor. By the end of their
| lives they were upper middle class. Some of their kids did even
| better, others regressed to the mean.
|
| We're all still part of the same family. The shared values among
| the family are much stronger than any shared values across class
| identities. Class just doesn't offer much explanatory value to
| me. I suppose I am upper middle class today, but I don't think
| "oh yes, let's instill some upper middle class values in our
| kids." I don't even know what those would be.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Class identities are much weaker in the US: they're much more
| tightly tied to economic status and are thus fungible (almost
| anybody can move up or down the US class ladder by gaining or
| losing wealth.) We have a "cultural class" system as well, but
| it's similarly weak (with opportunity, nearly anybody can join
| the starving intelligentsia).
|
| The author is in the UK, where class identities are _much_
| stronger and are not intrinsically tied to wealth (but are
| frequently associated with wealth, thanks to generational
| privilege).
|
| An upper-class British acquaintance recently related to me that
| they'd never eaten certain foods that Americans think of as
| "quintessentially" British, because those foods are lower-class
| foods. They weren't afraid of eating them or snobbish about it,
| it just _hadn 't occurred to them_ that it was part of the
| international perception of their culture (because, to them, it
| just isn't their culture).
| tyjen wrote:
| Unfortunately, many people from privileged backgrounds love to
| lie about their background by creating a "struggle story." They
| repeat the story enough that they genuinely believe that they
| faced adversity equivalent to people who literally lived through
| those circumstances.
|
| A frequent "struggle story" I've heard, is claiming to be a high
| school dropout, then attending attending a 60k a year an elite
| liberal arts college. They didn't dropout due to poor life
| conditions interfering with school, but they claim the
| association for credibility. Then it bleeds into, "Well, if I
| could do it, why can't they?" It's really an extreme form of
| mental gymnastics.
|
| I'd like to call this behavior, "poorfishing."
| vmception wrote:
| Would love to have this conversation about the US but UK class
| system just doesnt influence enough to be so complicated
| exdsq wrote:
| In what way doesn't it influence enough? The political system
| in the UK is fairly broken such that PPE at Oxford will get you
| a long way in your goal to being an MP, and going to a public
| school gets you a long way towards getting into Oxford, which
| is a classist system with practical output
| vmception wrote:
| I was thinking enough outside of the UK, or that the UK isn't
| big enough and more irrelevant with its new isolationist
| direction
| exdsq wrote:
| Still the 6th largest economy with seats on the UN Security
| Council and others - it might be going the way of
| Switzerland (that's the model most Brexiters I know want)
| but that doesn't mean it's fading away into obscurity on
| the global stage
|
| (This is coming from someone who left the UK for the US and
| hopes to move to Asia afterwards, so mildly biased but not
| that much)
| nailer wrote:
| So does doing well at a grammar school (which in turn is
| determined by your ability rather than your class).
| exdsq wrote:
| Doing well in a grammar school works to an extent but still
| disproportionately less than say Eton. You can see this by
| just looking at current cabinet ministers
| ghaff wrote:
| I registered for a The Economist event a while back. I have
| never ever seen such a laundry list of titles you had to choose
| from. And I don't think _not_ choosing one was even an option.
| Basically the usual few plus pretty much every aristocratic and
| clergy title you could think of.
| dcminter wrote:
| It doesn't necessarily mean much - I think there's some
| standard (ISO?) list somewhere. I remember many years ago
| when the www was new and spiffy the British Airways booking
| website had a drop-down title selector that included "Pope"
| but I can't imagine he ever flew with them!
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm sure there's an ISO standard :-) I've never seen that
| anywhere else though. Admittedly, tech has generally gotten
| away from emphasizing titles much to the point that it's
| sometimes a slightly contentious topic.
| showerst wrote:
| I'm from the US, and when I was in college I took a British
| Airways flight for the first time, and on the way home I got
| a stern talking to from the gate agent in London about fraud
| because I chose some random foreign (to me) royalty title.
|
| For a few years after that I got random junk mail addressed
| to the Viscount =).
| paulpauper wrote:
| In the US, there is a huge cultural and economic divide between
| the processional/educated class vs. the low-skilled class,
| whereas elsewhere in the world not so much. In the US, the goal
| or aspiration is to escape being working class, as epitomized by
| the likes of JD Vance and others, whereas elsewhere being working
| class is not something to be so ashamed of or to escape from.
| closeparen wrote:
| I am a "class bullshitter" within the American class system
| because I stubbornly refuse to believe that selling my labor for
| a high price and paying a lot of rent puts me in the same class
| as people who buy labor and collect rent.
|
| I also don't think these are identity traits of mine; rather they
| are contingent facts about living in a HCOL area. If I were
| slinging code 9-5 in e.g. Chicago then no one would doubt I was
| middle class.
| xemdetia wrote:
| I would agree. In the US any class is defined by the social
| safety net they have and in the current workforce it's often
| entirely self funded with many parents/older generation
| reaching into the pockets of their children for labour or
| money. Even people living a 'middle class lifestyle' are one
| bump or bruise away from losing everything. Since the UK has a
| different expectation of a social safety net I can see how
| things might go in a different direction. If I was not
| constantly under the risk of healthcare costs blowing up what
| little I have built up then I probably would consider myself
| middle class. But since my income stops as soon as I stop and I
| don't have a huge runway to get going again I don't feel like
| I'm in the middle at all.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| Is "class" still considered a meaningful term in sociology? Does
| it even exist?
|
| This is not a rhetorical question, I'm interested in a scientific
| answer.
| tjader wrote:
| I am also interested in this. I don't understand how it makes
| sense to talk about "class" in such a discrete way.
|
| Is a FAANG engineer who earns $250k/year really an oppressed
| proletarian? Is the small bakery owner who struggles to make
| ends meet really a bourgeois because he owns a mean of
| production?
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| Social class is an abstraction of privilege. Hope that helps.
| And yes, the term is still in use.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Understating your class background is a way to get around a
| couple of different problems: if you are successful in life, your
| successes are magnified because they are self-made, or even made
| despite the odds being against you. On the other hand, if you are
| not as successful as you'd like, a rougher background offers a
| handy justification for that. The underlying message is "my
| successes are more impressive, my failures aren't really my
| fault".
| subjectsigma wrote:
| 1. In my liberal tech social circles, I hear so much talk about
| "eating the rich" and how the wealthy and privileged are ruining
| society that I'd be insane to self identify as anything but
| middle class.
|
| 2. It's all relative anyways. By HN standards I'm making a measly
| salary, but my salary is over double the national average.
|
| 3. The richer you are, the more likely people are to ask you for
| things. Money, favors, etc. This is both locally and globally
| true.
|
| 4. Some of it is a mindset. Growing up I was absolutely not poor,
| but the way my parents talked about money felt different from
| others. For example I didn't get a cell phone until the end of
| middle school because it was "too expensive". Everyone was always
| asking for my phone number and I had to tell them I didn't have a
| phone. In the grand scheme of things this is really
| inconsequential, but at 13 it felt like my parents were ruining
| my social life with their penny pinching.
|
| Cars were another big thing. Our cars were ancient and my parents
| refused to buy new ones. We never went to a mechanic unless we
| absolutely had to. On Saturday mornings my dad would wake me up
| and tell me we were doing $X to the car and I knew I would be
| cancelling any plans that day. I didn't actually mind fixing the
| car, but I hated telling my friends "I can't go play basketball,
| I have to help fix the car" and having them wonder aloud "Why
| can't you just take it to a mechanic?" because it made me feel
| poor.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| > I'd be insane to self identify as anything but middle class.
|
| People who say "eat the rich" know you're not rich enough to
| count by the dearth of body guards and yachts. If you're really
| that scared of your friends a therapist is advised. :|
| foogazi wrote:
| Why would we ever allow others to label us based on our ancestors
| choices?
|
| Don't let your past define you
| WJW wrote:
| > Why would we ever allow others to label us based on our
| ancestors choices?
|
| It seems quite understandable that people whose your ancestors
| were kings, presidents and other notable figures would be in
| favor of being given a leg up based on the status of their
| ancestors.
| mvc wrote:
| But "solidly middle" is still working class really.
|
| My sister has a degree, and is a nurse of a about 5-7 years. Her
| husband also has a degree (and even went to private school) and
| does local government procurement paying ~35k. I'm sure the
| author would describe both as "solidly middle".
|
| They're still wondering how on earth they're supposed to pay for
| childcare, energy, mortgage. If the car breaks down, they're in
| trouble.
| brimble wrote:
| Discussing this is a mess for a bunch of reasons, including
| that no-one bothers to agree on a framework before starting to
| argue over it, and that there's overlapping terminology, _and_
| there are major differences between countries. So you 've got
| "lower/middle/upper-middle/upper" (or more nuanced versions
| like Fussell's that add a few more), you've got
| "working/professional/upper", et c, and terms get recycled such
| that some will say "lower" in the first is the same as
| "working" (and distinct from "middle") and so on. Then, on top
| of that, it's all different in Britain.
|
| Plus there's the distinction between income and _socialized_
| class, which are tied up together, but which aren 't identical,
| and lots of discussions take place without anyone bothering to
| specify which they're talking about.
|
| [EDIT] Oh and then of course there's Marxist analysis. Folks
| should lead with explaining their angle and definitions,
| otherwise discussion about class tends to be a bunch of people
| talking past one another.
| ggm wrote:
| Age can play to this. My brother is 9 years older than me, born
| into postwar food rationing, a time my family would have been
| teetering on the edge of financial stability for complex reasons
| and hugely stressed about money, and financial stability. I was
| born into the 1960s boom years, The emergence of ubiquitous
| consumerism, plastics, technology.
|
| We have different perspectives on class, roots, class
| identification. Not that we were ever working class but we own
| different perceptions of our relative class status.
| IntFee588 wrote:
| The "protestant work ethic" promotes this vague notion that
| labour, toil and suffering on earth brings one closer to god.
| This is more deeply rooted in western cultures than you'd think
| and feeds into the "work hard and you'll make it" attitude of
| western exceptionalism.
|
| Because of this, people have a vested interest in glorifying
| their own struggle, even if they had circumstances that led to
| their professional success. They're not going to admit that they
| had things handed to them on a silver platter or got lucky,
| they'd think of it as some sort of moral failing. They think
| success needs to be justified.
| rq1 wrote:
| It's not a western value at all as exclusively as you describe
| it.
| dijit wrote:
| I get quite annoyed at this because personally I have faced
| extreme adversity and only through sheer dumb luck of loving
| computers from an early age have I been able to escape my
| circumstances.
|
| I'll say it clearer for anyone who missed that: luck.
|
| A lot of social issues in the uk are primarily class based, you
| won't even be aware of the jobs you'll be looked over for because
| you didn't go to the right school, and those "right schools" pre-
| select based on background.
|
| "Daddy is a barrister, I guess we let this one in?!"
|
| In the event you are born with privilege you prefer to be
| underestimated, I don't think I've met many upper class people
| who are genuinely happy being removed from the masses. Maybe it's
| a grass is always greener thing.
|
| Myself, I speak with a middle class accent, desperate not to be
| thrown back to where I came from.
| bloqs wrote:
| The biggest problem is demonstrated here too. You have no
| experience of existing in a higher social category, so your
| anecdotes of what you imagine it to be like are purely bogeyman
| fiction traded between lower classes.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| That's bollocks. I attended a prep school where most kids
| came from multi-millionaire families. They knew their
| privilege inside and out, and weren't shy about broadcasting
| this knowledge. OP is not wrong.
| Mezzie wrote:
| In my experience, the rich and wealthy are pretty self-
| aware.
|
| It's the upper-middle class who are _really uncomfortable_
| with their social position.
| Jensson wrote:
| That is just selection bias, people who aren't rich have
| to work and therefore you meet them even when they don't
| want to socialize. Rich people who don't want to
| socialize don't need to, so you only see those who really
| wants to be out there and meet people.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > "right schools" pre-select based on background
|
| No, on money.
| gunfighthacksaw wrote:
| Obviously money talks, but a school like Eton would be more
| willing to take a somewhat wealthy aristocrat than a common
| as muck lottery winner.
|
| If you come into a hundred million overnight, that doesn't
| make up for your previously deprived life and the associated
| markers (lower register, lack of childhood polo lessons, no
| time/money/inclination to go play white saviour in the third
| world)
| exdsq wrote:
| When I was seven I went to a public school (which in the UK
| is sort of like a posh private school, from a US
| perspective). To get in, at seven, we had to take an entrance
| exam on maths, science, and English. So to pass this I went
| to a feeder school from literally the age of two and a half
| to prepare for the exam. My entire class came from others who
| went to feeder schools. This in turn prepped us for the
| public school exam to get into senior school (which had a
| 100% success rate). And that in turn prepped a lot of people
| for the Oxbridge exams and so on.
|
| So yes, money is the trick, but it's not worth it. I burned
| out at school hard because I'd been going at it for so long.
| dimgl wrote:
| > only through sheer dumb luck of loving computers
|
| It's not healthy to frame it this way in your mind. It almost
| sounds like you're ashamed of how easy it was for you to escape
| your circumstances. Remember that the good times don't actually
| last forever, and you might reach a ceiling in your career that
| other people in other professions don't have to deal with.
|
| Also, being a software engineer isn't the only profession that
| pays well. It just so happens that due to modernity, it's
| extremely accessible.
| enobrev wrote:
| As someone who has been incredibly lucky _and_ has worked
| very hard to surpass a rough start, I think it simply helps
| to have a thorough understanding of what it means to be
| lucky.
|
| You could be the best [whatever] in the world, but if you're
| on your couch and disconnected, nobody will ever notice. Luck
| would literally have to come and hunt you down at random. If
| you're pretty good at [whatever] but at the right places
| (including virtually) and meeting the right people, luck will
| work far better for you.
|
| In both cases, luck is important. You can be among the best
| and be at every conference and active on every forum, and do
| well in every competition, and be first to launch with every
| idea, and get funded every time, and still lose badly,
| repeatedly. Which is why we like to say it's important to get
| used to losing. Because even if you're very good and always
| in the right places at the right times with the right people
| - you _still_ need luck.
|
| You just need less luck than someone who isn't showing up
| every day. And a lot less luck than someone literally doing
| nothing in the middle of nowhere. But you still need luck.
| klodolph wrote:
| > It's not healthy to frame it this way in your mind.
|
| I don't think this is unhealthy. I liked computers, my
| sibling liked painting... only one of us got a high-paying
| job and can afford a lot of leisure time and travel. I don't
| think that it requires _shame_ to acknowledge that luck had
| something to do with it. Luck is ever-present in our lives.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| Yeah, it's luck. It's perfectly healthy to frame things as: I
| took a deep interest in computers for which expertise is now
| in high demand.
|
| I'm in the same boat: loved computers early on and had no
| interest in pursuing them professionally (I was eight when I
| started programming). It's _lucky_ because I could just as
| well have loved botany, or auto mechanics, or pottery, etc
| _but I happened to pick the one that later in life was in
| high demand_.
|
| Sure, yeah, I worked hard, but not because "I want to make
| MONEY when I get older!" but simply because I had the
| interest (and supportive parents...luck again). The alignment
| of my early interests and market conditions today are 100%
| luck. And that's what you need: to be in the right place at
| the right time. I'd attribute my success to 10% personal
| factors and 90% external factors.
|
| You still need to work your ass off for that 10%, but the
| other 90% is all out of your hands, and it's ok to
| acknowledge this (and that doesn't mean you feel guilty). In
| fact, if we ever want to create a world where the ratio is
| not 90/10, but 80/20 or 60/40 or dare I say 50/50, we need to
| acknowledge just how much of our lives is out of our control.
| haliskerbas wrote:
| Genuinely asking, as someone who frames my own circumstances
| similarly, what would you say is a healthy way to frame
| things?
| sugarpile wrote:
| Fwiw I disagree with it being unhealthy and I view myself
| the same way. It IS lucky that my only hobby/interest I've
| ever really had also happens to be something that pays so
| well.
|
| Nothing unhealthy about recognizing one's luck and being
| correspondingly grateful for it.
| MichaelConlon wrote:
| Just throwing another opinion in the mix. I think it's
| healthy to recognize one's own work in addition to that
| dumb luck. It's certainly lucky that we liked computers
| but it's also true that a lot of us worked hard and took
| advantage of our lucky situations. That's not to say we
| succeeded on hard work alone, far from it - luck is a
| crucial part, but it's also unfair to not give yourself a
| little credit sometimes.
| seabird wrote:
| Framing any and all success (maybe not what OP is doing,
| but a lot of people do this so it's probably worth
| addressing) as "sheer dumb luck" implies that you think
| there's a lot of things in your life that are outside your
| control when they really aren't. The OP may have
| deliberately chose that wording to convey that _in their
| case_, their love for computers was something they pursued
| completely and entirely ignorant of it being a high-
| demand/high-paying field. There's a lot of people that have
| convinced themselves that the odds of them getting a well
| paying job and doing better for themselves are approaching
| zero, for no reason other than believing that the only way
| to have that happen is to be born into it or to have "sheer
| dumb luck". That prophecy fulfills itself.
|
| There's luck involved, but it's only part of the story.
| tjader wrote:
| I would say it's unhealthy to think of it as _only_ luck.
|
| It's luck that you like something that is sought after in
| the job market. But actually spending years learning about
| it, and sometimes learning things you may not like so much
| because they are needed for the job, takes effort.
| jostylr wrote:
| Being willing to take advantage of the luck by working
| hard, taking risks, having a vision as to how to succeed
| and be useful. It is very much about empowering both
| yourself and others. The luck part is there to help prevent
| the "I did this, why didn't you?" crappy privileged
| perspective, but it needs to be balanced with the drive.
|
| As an example, over a decade ago, I quit a job with no
| plans of getting another one. Someone I knew told me about
| an opportunity (luck / connections), and I pursued it. It
| was hard at first, but now it is almost a turn-key
| operation. Still requires work, but far less than it did at
| the beginning. It has netted me a good tidy sum which has
| been crucial for living the life I want.
|
| Was it luck? Absolutely. Was it my own ability, hard work,
| and willingness to take that step? Yes. What would have
| happened had I said no? No idea, but probably less of a
| good outcome.
|
| Ideally, one tries to frame one's life to be empowering but
| not arrogant, not trivializing the difficulty of other's
| paths. Luck is not empowering. Belief that hard work alone
| can get you to the height is not empowering. Some mixture
| of these things, that can be empowering. Understanding that
| the goal is to be useful to others as well as yourself,
| that's really empowering.
| Mezzie wrote:
| SO much of it is luck.
|
| I'm from a complicated class background myself, but my dad's
| family were tinkerers. My grandfather was a factory worker who
| was obsessed with televisions, so when my dad got into
| microcomputers, the tools were around for him to start cheaply
| because he could use/repair broken ones. And then when _I_ was
| born, my father 's experience meant he could help me with
| coding. (Because in his generation, you had to learn BASIC etc.
| to do anything).
|
| I'm not any better than say, the kids of my dad's classmates.
| We were just the family who did the grunt work in an area that
| _really_ took off. Their grandfathers might have liked sports
| instead of tearing open tvs.
| bjourne wrote:
| But the thing is, you could be a class bullshitter, just like
| the woman the article describes! There is no objective test to
| determine if you had to overcome "extreme adversity" or if you
| were "privileged" like most middle/upper-class people were.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Because our moral values are wrong.
|
| We should be celebrating richness, not poverty. Unfortunately,
| victimhood is trendy these days and I feel most of it can be
| traced back to marxism.
|
| Why should we celebrate richness?
|
| If you're richer than your peers you did something that society
| considered valuable. Money is the ultimate form of direct
| democracy.
|
| Now, we can argue that people in Wall Street are screwing up
| people left and right, that governments can print off money and
| that governments can force people to give them money.
|
| These are serious issues and I'm the first one to say something
| should be done about these - but still, the people in Wall Street
| are providing financial services that businesses find useful. And
| those businesses provide useful services to people, so the
| richness of Wall Street can be traced back to useful services.
| Governments printing money affects the market via inflation.
| Nothing much can be done about governments taking money from
| people under the threat of incarceration (unless you have an
| army), but the government is, in most countries, a form of
| indirect democracy - so the government still end up providing
| some value to end users with the money they forcefully took.
| Sure, part of it get burned in the inefficiency of centralisation
| and bureaucracy but most of it keeps going around (eg. by paying
| contractors to fix the roads).
|
| Therefore, I think becoming rich can absolutely become a moral
| value and I think the world would be better that way.
|
| In the words of the working class hero 50 cent: Get rich or die
| tryin'.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > If you're richer than your peers you did something that
| society considered valuable
|
| Get born of the right parents? Meet the right oligarch?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| That's an antique notion that died in the '80s? Once the rules
| changed, the rich started skimming from every transaction
| (money tranfers, dividends, security exchanges, and on and on)
| until they have almost all the money. The rest of us serve at
| their pleasure.
|
| That's not how it was supposed to work. You were supposed to
| succeed from being part of the generation of wealth. Not just
| sitting and skimming while everybody else works. And then
| passing it on to your heirs.
|
| I wish it worked as you describe. That's where we need to get
| back to.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I hate to break it to the author but peole lie about pretty much
| everything.
|
| People will lie about their incomes on anonymous surveys. People
| lie in anonymous polls about their voting intent. You can boil
| this down to:
|
| 1. People lying to themselves and then reflecting that lie to
| others. A common one I see here is, for example, "it only takes
| me 30 minutes on the bus to get from SF to work". At 1am on a
| Tuesday with a tailwind maybe. It's a form of cognitive
| dissonance; and
|
| 2. People lying to others. This is for personal gain and because
| the person cares about how they're perceived by others.
|
| So if you take an example from the post (eg working class family
| background) it could be either. I've known people who really
| believe they're working class heroes but they're clearly middle
| class. It can be woven into their identity. It can just be virtue
| signaling. It can be to fit in. It can be aspirational.
|
| The 2000 election had Al Gore vilify the "top 1%". A survey at
| the time found that 19% of people thought they were the top 1%
| and another 20% thought they would be some day. So with this lie
| they've told themselves (knowingly or not) you've dended up
| alienating 39% of voters.
|
| Ultimately though a lot of these lies can be reduced to people
| feeling good about themselves even if that means making other
| people look bad.
|
| A lot of social media is built on such "flexing". Instagram in
| particular. Even Tiktok has all these videos where people post
| these "how am I so amazing?" videos. You just need to realize
| it's pretty much all lies.
|
| Oh and as for this specific example from the post (ie
| fetishization of a working-class background in the UK) this is
| interesting because my experience in the UK was there's a lot of
| value in signaling your upper class background, how you went to
| Oxford, Cambridge or Eton, the BBC accent (now this is really the
| modern RP accent) and so on.
|
| The UK is still quite classist (IME). Up until 20-30 years ago,
| university applications asked your father's occupation.
| brimble wrote:
| > People lie in anonymous polls about their voting intent.
|
| Political scientists have had to develop a separate category,
| along with methods to identify its members, in order to capture
| _actual_ "swing voters", for related reasons. Lots of folks
| like to classify themselves as "centrist" or "independent" or
| "on the fence" or what have you, while _in fact_ voting party
| line every single time just as reliably as someone who self-
| identifies as being highly partisan. Actual swing voters are a
| tiny minority of the people who identify as such (which is why
| "get out the vote" is, not-so-secretly, far more important than
| courting those voters--lots of seemingly odd behavior by
| politicians makes way more sense when this is factored in)
|
| Bad political reporting (which is lots of political reporting)
| won't bother to make the distinction, which results in
| misleading coverage, graphs, et c.
| fredley wrote:
| I think one of the things going on has to do with a decade or so
| of 'reality' TV being a primary source of entertainment for many
| (most?) people. And in particular one aspect: the 'sob story'.
|
| On any TV show, and in the media in general, there are a few
| different competition formats (a la Bake Off, The Apprentice,
| BGT, etc.) but all include a 'sob story' element, particularly
| near the end as we get to know more about the contestants. Every
| single person selected by the producers for these shows has some
| factor in their life that they've overcome to get this far.
|
| Individually, this makes for an engaging TV show, we warm to the
| characters because they have a good story, but overall the effect
| is damaging, I think. The effect is to create a system that only
| allows people to feel successful if they've overcome some
| terrible adversity. It's not enough to come from a comfortable,
| middle class background, do well in school and then lead a
| moderately successful life. What have you really achieved if
| you've done this?
|
| Most people in the UK live reasonably comfortable, stable lives
| (modulo class). Since--according to my theory--people need to
| feel like they have something to overcome in order to be allowed
| to feel successful, people will overstate hardships, and focus on
| and amplify negative events and circumstances in their lives in
| order to feel validated.
| newacc9 wrote:
| Victimhood is equated with morality, furthermore victims are
| entitled to compensation. There's incentive to be seen as a
| victim, because it screams both "I am moral, and I am entitled
| to compensation" It happens at both the individual level and at
| group levels. Its sort of a key to understanding modernity.
| ishjoh wrote:
| I often find it doesn't take much digging in someone else's
| life to find out they have lived through something awful or
| traumatic, either it happened directly to them or to someone
| very close to them. I'm always amazed people are willing to
| share their 'sob story' on TV, I think there are a lot of
| people that wouldn't ever share their stories.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| HN needs to attract some actual sociologists to talk with.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I had an interesting conversation about class in the UK the other
| day. I took my friend and our four boys (all around 10) to a
| football (soccer) game.
|
| It turned out that my friend had grown up with a different accent
| to what he currently speaks with. He'd grown up in a rough part
| of Essex, going to a school where kids normally don't even think
| about university. After about two weeks at Cambridge, he realized
| he was different. To sum it up, almost nobody at Cambridge speaks
| like an Essex boy. That's despite Cambridge being not terribly
| far from Essex.
|
| I noticed something similar. My family are refugees, so spread
| all over the world, including an aunt North London who gave birth
| to six cousins. They speak English a certain way. Coming as an
| international student, I noticed a lot of accents at Oxford
| (hello Brummies, Scots, Welsh, Scousers) but not a lot of
| "council house between hackney and Romford" accents.
|
| If you've followed British politics, you've heard of something
| called the Bullingdon Club. Cambridge has something similar.
| Neither of the two of us knew much about it when we were there,
| but we did know there were some veeeery posh kids around, because
| they speak a certain way and often have a pretty expensive style
| about them.
|
| So that was the fathers. Working class? Well if you're upper
| class traditionally it means you have a title, and not many
| people do, so in some sense it's legit to call yourself working
| class. It doesn't say much when your job could be anything
| between chronically unemployed and hedge fund manager, though.
|
| For dinner, we took our boys to a restaurant. Being around the
| age of the 11 plus exam, the conversation turned to private
| schools. It turns out one of the boys had gotten into one of the
| most expensive selective schools in the country, which I pointed
| out (this is why I am so sought after as a dinner guest). Since
| they're kids, they still have naive ideas about money, and the
| vogue among kids at the moment is to aspire to be an influencer.
| "I'll make a YouTube channel and millions of followers will see
| it".
|
| Thus followed a little talk about how many views you actually
| need to make enough money to pay for two kids to go to the most
| expensive school in the country, and perhaps also a house and
| something to stave off starvation.
|
| I'm also the kind of exciting person who has official statistics
| about income distributions in his head. A rough tax rate is also
| part of that spiel, in case I find an uninformed primary
| schooler.
|
| Realistically, you either need to be in the top 1% (PS175K/year)
| or the top 2% (PS120K/year) with a second income (PS50K is around
| 87th, so maybe two ~97th at ~PS100K ) to be able to pay for two
| kids to go to a PS30K/year school, pay a PS30k/year
| rent/mortgage, maybe eat and holiday for PS15K, and also pay the
| tax man.
|
| That's what the numbers look like, and I'm not surprised at all
| that kids don't know them. What are the chances when you're
| sitting around at your school that you've been told is famous,
| that basically every single one of your classmates has either a
| top 1% earning parent or two top 3% earners? If you knew you
| would certainly think you were very lucky indeed.
|
| So this kid, who is quite bright and has a place at a top school
| that sends dozens of kids each to his dad's alma mater, can still
| claim to be working class by heredity. That is what this article
| seems to be about. People mostly want to feel that they deserve
| what they worked for, and certainly kids in prep schools work
| hard. But it's also true that you almost never see anyone doing
| ordinary jobs. It's not actually that weird that a kid thinks
| being a lawyer or trader is an ordinary job, when his entire
| class has parents that both do something like that. It's not even
| that hard to imagine them thinking their parents work really
| hard. Certainly a couple of the other parents in my kid's year
| are always traveling or working late.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Working class? Well if you're upper class traditionally it
| means you have a title, and not many people do, so in some
| sense it's legit to call yourself working class.
|
| Not being in the legacy pre-capitalist aristocracy doesn't mean
| you are working class; basically the entire capitalist class
| structure from the working class to the _haut bourgeoisie_
| exists outside of that aristocracy. Or, rather, parallel to and
| overlapping it, for the most part, as, but for the senior
| royals, legacy titles no longer have a firm connection to how
| one relates to the economy and derives support.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Absolutely true. But it's still a thing you can say, however
| trivial and however long ago it was that people with titles
| meant something. You can also muddy the waters by pointing at
| the few aristocrats who do actually have a pile of money.
|
| Everyone likes this working-class label for some reason.
| Something between "Worked your way up" and "didn't have a
| silver spoon" is the desire.
| Biologist123 wrote:
| Contrarian opinion: the class system in Britain is the legacy of
| an ethnic hierarchy which has (1) matured and become a little
| fuzzy over the course of a thousand years, and (2) is obscured by
| the fact all ethnic groups are white. Normans at the top of the
| hierarchy (Queenie is a descendant of William the Bastard),
| Angles, Saxons, Vikings in the middle, Celts at the bottom. This
| ethnic difference contributes to quite different class cultures.
|
| I read this is relevant to the US, as Celts by and large settled
| the Appalachian uplands where soils were poor, and the population
| of the mountains has maintained a distinct Celtic culture and
| position in the US class hierarchy.
|
| Additional aside, UK weird hostility to red heads (often remarked
| upon by visitors) is in fact legacy hostility to Celts.
| starwind wrote:
| See "Surnames and social mobility in England, 1170-2012"
|
| https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/60593/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRAR...
| brimble wrote:
| > I read this is relevant to the US, as Celts by and large
| settled the Appalachian uplands where soils were poor, and the
| population of the mountains has maintained a distinct Celtic
| culture and position in the US class hierarchy.
|
| These are largely the "Scots-Irish", as we call them in the US.
| They originate as the Borderers, that is, the lowland folks who
| lived on the border of Scotland and England (an effectively
| lawless region for a long stretch of time). At some point a
| bunch of them were shipped off to Ireland, then a bunch of
| _those_ moved to the US. Hence, "Scots-Irish".
|
| The history of their migration paints a picture of a people
| disliked basically everywhere. Kicked out of the Border
| country, then kicked out of Ireland, then kicked out of
| Pennsylvania, before finally settling in Appalachia (and being
| hated there by almost everyone outside that country--it's
| _still_ socially acceptable to say all kinds of horrible things
| about them).
|
| We (I'm very, very much of that "stock" on one side of my
| family) seem to be some real bastards.
| jessaustin wrote:
| To be clear, (we) Scots-Irish are indeed descended from
| Celts, both Gaels and Picts. I doubt any of us have _only_
| that background, however.
| Biologist123 wrote:
| Thanks, very interesting. Wikipedia has a good page on Scots-
| Irish, with a suggestion lowland Scots were originally Irish
| gaels. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch-Irish_Americans
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| People are trying to say, "I worked for/earned what I have." I
| think it's as simple as that.
|
| If you've see the show Schitt's Creek, think of the two adult
| children in that show. People want to not be seen as that.
| nailer wrote:
| > They did all the cleaning, all the cooking, all the
| entertaining, and all the decorating and did really well.
|
| If you're cleaning foeces off the side of someone else's room
| toilet you're working class. I'm not sure why the author thinks
| it's obvious that "her grandparents owned a hotel" means she's
| not, like the quote above doesn't count for anything.
| [deleted]
| achenet wrote:
| Historically, those who owned property were the haves, and
| those who worked it were the have-nots.
|
| Medieval lord/peasant, Cotton plantation owner/African slaves,
| Captialist/worker, etc.
|
| As such, owning a hotel, which is a business that can provide
| you with revenue without you working (obviously in this case
| the grandparents did choose to work, but could have chosen to
| have other do the work for them and still reap the profits),
| generally makes you upper class.
|
| For another argument- If you own a hotel, you have a net worth
| greater than at least 80% of the population, and hence are
| upper middle/upper class.
|
| A hobo on the street corner might work less, but has net worth
| 0, hence is lower class, which is often used as a synomym for
| working class
| humanistbot wrote:
| Because you can easily lie about your class background,
| especially to yourself.
| ecshafer wrote:
| A marxist class analysis clears this issue up pretty well, as its
| based on the relationship to labor and capital. The example
| interviewee would be working class based on their relationship to
| capital. Grandparents that own a hotel (assuming its not a large
| chain) would be petite bourgeoisie, as they own a small amount of
| capital, but must work to make it productive and are therefore
| still a kind of working class. The accountant father is still
| working class, as he must work for a living, but would be
| considered Private Managerial Class, as they are rewarded well
| for their skills within capital.
| reedf1 wrote:
| This is true, but British social class is much more complicated
| than that.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| I think the answer here is simple: "class" means different things
| to different people.
|
| I'm an American, and I consider myself "middle class". I was born
| when my mother was 17. She finished high school and went on to
| work and get a two-year degree from a tiny business college that
| no longer exists. She married in her mid-20s, when I was in first
| grade, got a job at a company and is still there over three
| decades later. She went from making minimum wage in 1991 to in
| the ballpark of $350k / year today. My father - the man she
| married, not my biological father - was a public school teacher.
|
| I attended school in a very poor area, and my experience in high
| school was _far_ more comfortable than my peers.
|
| My dad bought me a very inexpensive truck when I was 12. It was
| ~20 years old, the bed was badly damaged, and the engine didn't
| run due to a combination of overuse and neglect. We parked it
| outside our garage and he taught me how to work on it, return it
| to operable condition, and sell it for profit. With his guidance
| I pulled and completely rebuilt the engine and transmission. We
| went to scrapyards on the weekends, and eventually found a steel
| bed for it in good condition. We kept all the receipts. The total
| cost, including purchase price, parts, and a couple of services
| like having a machine shop mill the engine block flat for the new
| head, was ~$2k. By the time I turned 14, when I could get a
| "learner's permit" in my state, we sold that old truck for $4k. I
| then had my choice - I could take that $4k (of which I had earned
| about half through my labor) and buy whatever I wanted, or my
| parents would sell me the truck my dad already owned for the same
| price. Because I'd done so much work on "my" truck, I jumped on
| that offer; I knew that his truck was well-maintained, and I
| didn't want to have to rebuild a vehicle that I was going to rely
| on.
|
| By 2002, when I graduated high school, I think my parents were
| making about $175k/yr combined. I went to college on an academic
| scholarship and my life fell apart almost immediately. After a
| couple of years of struggling (and my parents paying for mental
| health services), I was finally diagnosed with severe depression
| and ADHD. It took me until I was 23 before I was "functional",
| and another two years after that before I felt at all confident
| that I wasn't going to fall back into that pit of despair.
| Throughout that dark period of my life, my parents were there
| both emotionally and, to a reasonably limited extent,
| financially. They weren't paying all of my bills, but I knew they
| wouldn't let me die hungry and homeless.
|
| Today, I'm 38. I've been with my wife since were 14, married her
| at 21, and now have two daughters. We live in a five-bedroom home
| that we purchased in our name, with money that we earned and
| saved. While we don't feel like we have a huge safety net for
| ourselves yet, we are definitely "financially stable" - and a big
| part of the reason we feel like we don't have that safety net
| built is because of the depth of the financial safety net that my
| parents were able to provide.
|
| So... in summary, while I consider myself "middle class",
| objectively I'm firmly in the "white collar" world. My wife
| doesn't work for anyone outside our home, is able to run a side
| business primarily for personal fulfillment, and our children are
| happy, well cared for, and want for little.
|
| My wife's parents' story is very different from ours. Her dad was
| "working class", and retired from Walmart as a cashier in "Tire &
| Lube Express". He has a large but benign brain tumor that is
| becoming more and more of an issue as he ages. Her mother has
| struggle with mental health issues and has never been able to
| hold down a job more than a year or so at a time. My wife moved
| between her parents' home and her grandparents' home multiple
| time growing up. While they have their own problems to deal with,
| I think they really did the best they could raising my wife.
|
| One of the highlights of my adult life so far came a couple of
| years ago, when my wife's parents' car broke down yet again. They
| had asked us a couple of times to take them to doctors
| appointments, and while I have offered fixed their vehicles a few
| times over the years, they _will not_ ask me to do things like
| that. I sat down with my wife, looked at our finances, and
| decided that we could reasonably take responsibility for their
| transportation needs from here on out. We looked at reliable used
| cars, but decided that buying a reasonable new car would mean a
| warranty and that the total cost of ownership amortized over the
| expected lifetime of the vehicle would be comparable. Plus, her
| parents had never owned a new car; at best they were able to buy
| a reliable used car a couple of times in the past.
|
| We bought them a new Kia Rio S. It's cherry red, and her parents
| cried when we gave it to them. It's still in my name, so I put it
| on our insurance and bought a service contract through a local
| shop. The only thing they have to pay for is fuel.
|
| (continued in a reply to this post)
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Now that I've written an abridged mutli-generational
| autobiography, how does this relate to the topic? Simple - all
| of the above influence how I see myself.
|
| I live in a town of 14k people, a few miles from the town of
| <200 people where I grew up. The median household annual income
| here is <$30k. The media per capita income is $16k. I work
| remotely for a West Coast tech company, and my salary alone
| puts us at over 5x the median income here. Relative to my
| community, I think it's fair to say that we're "white collar".
|
| The people I work with come from a variety of backgrounds, but
| with few exceptions are third generation "white collar". Those
| born outside the US generally come from "merchant class"
| families or higher - otherwise, how would they have been able
| to afford to immigrate to the US in the first place? Relatively
| to my colleagues, I come from a "blue collar" world.
|
| At one point, before I was able to reliably find remote work,
| we moved to Virginia where I was the first tech hire at a
| startup. The office I started in was actually a hotel meeting
| room that they had leased while they built out their permanent
| office space. While I was with that company, they expanded
| twice.
|
| The second time they expanded, we were ready to move in to the
| new office space, except the desks hadn't arrived before the
| electricians left and it was going to be two weeks before they
| could get back out to wire them up. We _really_ needed the
| space, so I told the founders that I could install them in a
| couple of hours if the electricians could swing by in the
| afternoon to inspect the work for code compliance. In
| retrospect, I'm sure they thought I was nuts. They agreed, the
| electrician agreed, and I ran back to my apartment to grab my
| tools. By lunch I had all thirty or so of the desks wired up,
| the mess cleaned, and we were able to move everyone into the
| new space. I left the ceiling tiles open and the covers off the
| junction boxes in the ceiling so they could be easily
| inspected, but otherwise the job was 100% complete.
|
| Why did I have the knowledge and tools to do that? After
| failing out of college, I'd worked for about a year as an
| apprentice electrician. I realized then that that all of my
| colleagues at that company came from multi-generational
| "academic class" families, and that that sort of thing was
| completely foreign to them. I spent the next two years at that
| company making good friends, comparing life experiences, and
| learning from each other. One of them shared his investment
| portfolio with me and walked me through his strategies and what
| his parents had taught him. I rented a garage and taught him
| basic auto maintenance - oil, tires, how an engine and
| drivetrain works, how to check each fluid and what they all
| did.
| unfunco wrote:
| I'm from a working class family but have done okay for myself, my
| salary, house, and lifestyle would be considered by most people
| to be middle-class now, but I still consider myself working class
| because I don't feel you can change classes. However, if I were
| to have children now, they would grow up in a middle-class
| household and would be middle-class forever, but I am and will
| always still be working class.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| A "working class" person in the US is blue collar. "working
| class" is a subaltern identity in the UK, that is a victim of
| social pathology, probably not even actually working. See
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_to_Labour
|
| I'd say though that culture studies today talks about "race,
| class and gender" but largely ignores class. I know plenty of
| white people who have black problems including a tendency towards
| meaningless but dangerous contacts with the police, but if you
| never got more than 50 miles from the coast you might not know
| there is such as thing as a hillbilly.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Quite a lot of people who identify as "working class" are
| retired, which produces even more policy nonsense.
| samhw wrote:
| > probably not actually working
|
| This is how we got the hilarious "but I don't work!" clip:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXZ52-XgUjA
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > "working class" is a subaltern identity in the UK, that is a
| victim of social pathology, probably not even actually working.
|
| This tends to be called "underclass" in the U.S. I agree that
| it should not be conflated with a traditional "working class"
| identity, which in practice is far more socially developed and
| less affected by social marginalization dynamics.
| codeflo wrote:
| It is talked about, but maybe not to the extent that it could
| be. For obvious historic reasons, race and class are highly
| correlated. I think this causes certain class issues to
| disguise as race issues and vice versa. To be clear, both kinds
| of discrimination exist, both are terrible. But people are
| sometimes bad at separating correlated variables intuitively.
| And, how do I put it, the social sciences don't have the
| reputation to always use the most statistically sound methods.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I'd say it's less "disguised" and more lack of awareness of
| the Venn diagram going on.
| klodolph wrote:
| Classism is definitely more pervasive in the UK than the US. This
| is one part of the story about the dominance of US in tech...
| during WWII, seems people in the UK were too busy waging war to
| bother as much with classism. War ends, and people with the
| "right breeding" come in and take over some of the tech projects,
| rather than the people with the right skills. Paradoxically,
| working in tech is seen as somewhat low-class.
|
| Keep in mind that this is a simplification, it's only part of the
| story, and it's a story about a particular time in UK history,
| and I'm not trying to draw larger conclusions about meritocracy
| in the US and UK. (Should go without saying.)
|
| Also note that the narrative of British technological "decline",
| often cited as lasting from 1870-1970, is usually quite
| exaggerated and distorted. Entire books have been written on the
| subject. Classism is a piece of the puzzle but history defies
| simple explanations.
| brimble wrote:
| > Paradoxically, working in tech is seen as somewhat low-class.
|
| Fussell (though writing about the US) may have some insight
| here. For one thing, _working_ is kinda low-class; for another,
| being concerned about the latest-and-greatest of technology is,
| separately, kinda low-class. He writes (I 'm paraphrasing) that
| American old money is more likely to drive a 30-year-old truck,
| to have ancient kitchen appliances, maybe even fairly old
| entertainment-related electronics, than to have a flashy new
| sports car and top-end appliances--because caring about new
| technology is "low", so is something those sorts of people have
| been socialized not to care about (much of it's the "help's"
| problem, anyway, after all).
|
| The US has a similar thing going on, along the
| "working/professional/upper" axis: many programmers make
| "professional" levels of money (e.g. doctor, lawyer, upper
| management at mid-level corporations, that kind of thing) but
| as a society we seem to have decided it's not proper to _treat_
| them as professionals, so they remain working-class in many
| respects (along with actual engineers).
| klodolph wrote:
| Yes, there's a lot of similar stuff going on in the US.
| However, the new money / old money distinction in the US
| seems to not have the teeth that it does in the UK, at least,
| from the mid 20th century onwards.
|
| The thing about old money having old cars and appliances
| applies to the UK too. If you're upper-class in the UK, you
| might wear Wellington boots and go hunting with your dogs in
| your Subaru hatchback. At a glance, it might look
| indistinguishable from something you might find someone doing
| in rural Montana.
|
| The Gilded Age in the US is absolutely fascinating... it
| seems like at that point in history, the US was trying its
| hardest to ape European conventions for class, and
| simultaneously, there was a ton of economic growth fueling
| the noveau riche. That's when we got people like Rockefeller
| and Vanderbilt. It's the time when Wharton's _The Age of
| Innocence_ was set (highly recommend this book). Old money
| went to the opera at the Academy of Music Opera House, and
| new money went to the Metropolitan Opera House. (Guess which
| one is still around.)
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