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If you reveal your class by your outrage at the very topic, you reveal it also by the way you define the thing that's outraging you. At the bottom, people tend

by asark 8y ago

If you reveal your class by your outrage at the very topic, you reveal it also by the way you define the thing that's outraging you. At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have. In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do almost equally important. Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior are indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education. One woman interviewed by Studs Terkel for Division Street: America (1967) clearly revealed her class as middle both by her uneasiness about the subject's being introduced and by her instinctive recourse to occupation as the essential class criterion. "We have right on this street almost every class," she said. "But I shouldn't say class," she went on, "because we don't live in a nation of classes." Then, the occupational criterion: "But we have janitors living on the street, we have doctors, we have businessmen, CPAs" [...] Being told that there are no social classes in the place where the interviewee lives is an old experience for sociologists. "'We don't have classes in our town' almost invariably is the first remark recorded by the investigator," reports Leonard Reissman, author of Class in American Life (1959). "Once that has been uttered and is out of the way, the class divisions in the town can be recorded with what seems to be an amazing degree of agreement among the good citizens of the community." [...] The special hazards attending the class situation in America, where movement appears so fluid and where the prizes seem available to anyone who's lucky, are disappointment, and, following close on that, envy. Because the myth conveys the impression that you can readily earn your way upward, disillusion and bitterness are particularly strong when you find yourself trapped in a class system you've been half persuaded isn't important. When in middle life some people discover that certain limits have been placed on their capacity to ascend socially by such apparent irrelevancies as heredity, early environment, and the social class of their immediate forebears, they go into something like despair, which, if generally secret, is no less destructive. -- from Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, Chapter 1, "A Touchy Subject" (typed in from the book, any errors probably mine)

dTal 8y ago
Of course the "upper classes" believe they're there because of some intrinsic blue-bloodedness that gives them good taste. It's much more flattering than admitting it's because of daddy's money. Meritocracies are more fun to believe in when you're at the top.
- asark 8y ago
  1) yes, they believe that in part because it's an ego boost, but 2) there are values, behaviors, attitudes, patterns of speech, and so on, that are socialized in at an early age and damn hard to consistently, convincingly fake later in life, made even harder because lots of them do rely on having had money available, if only to gain access to the places and activities where the socialization takes place. Prep school, "Summering" the right places, clubs, and so on. It doesn't so much matter that their attitudes and behaviors are strictly better, but that conforming to them and knowing about the things they know and being able to relate to them that way lets you network on a level those "under" them cannot, reinforcing the class hierarchy. You may be able to get a country club sponsorship on the power of your income, but someone else might swing it by being able to talk sailing or swapping prep school stories with their boss—and oh hey you play squash my brother needs a partner, you're not a member there well we'll have to fix that, you know there's a position open with one of our funds upstairs that I think you'd suit just fine, let me make a call or two...
mistrial9 8y ago
yes, and.. also reading Studs Terkel in undergrad here.. A personal theory is that class-thinking is so deeply ingrained in the tribal psyche, that even after explicitly removing it, people re-invent it on a daily basis, to explain differences in people's standard of living, and generally-accepted notions of respected public life. BUT the modern mechanistic economy is not explainable by social notions alone. It is 'complicated' . Secondly, casting aspersions based on class-membership is "all the way out" as a basis for understanding modern economy IMO, either way .. it is prejuidice in another form
dredmorbius 8y ago
"At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have." Misdirection. Not money, ot more properly, wealth, but power. Much the topic of Smith's Wealth of Nations, actually. Though modern economics likes to pretend otherwise.

by asark 8y ago

dTal 8y ago

Of course the "upper classes" believe they're there because of some intrinsic blue-bloodedness that gives them good taste. It's much more flattering than admitting it's because of daddy's money. Meritocracies are more fun to believe in when you're at the top.

asark 8y ago
1) yes, they believe that in part because it's an ego boost, but 2) there are values, behaviors, attitudes, patterns of speech, and so on, that are socialized in at an early age and damn hard to consistently, convincingly fake later in life, made even harder because lots of them do rely on having had money available, if only to gain access to the places and activities where the socialization takes place. Prep school, "Summering" the right places, clubs, and so on. It doesn't so much matter that their attitudes and behaviors are strictly better, but that conforming to them and knowing about the things they know and being able to relate to them that way lets you network on a level those "under" them cannot, reinforcing the class hierarchy. You may be able to get a country club sponsorship on the power of your income, but someone else might swing it by being able to talk sailing or swapping prep school stories with their boss—and oh hey you play squash my brother needs a partner, you're not a member there well we'll have to fix that, you know there's a position open with one of our funds upstairs that I think you'd suit just fine, let me make a call or two...

mistrial9 8y ago

yes, and.. also reading Studs Terkel in undergrad here.. A personal theory is that class-thinking is so deeply ingrained in the tribal psyche, that even after explicitly removing it, people re-invent it on a daily basis, to explain differences in people's standard of living, and generally-accepted notions of respected public life. BUT the modern mechanistic economy is not explainable by social notions alone. It is 'complicated' . Secondly, casting aspersions based on class-membership is "all the way out" as a basis for understanding modern economy IMO, either way .. it is prejuidice in another form

dredmorbius 8y ago

"At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have." Misdirection. Not money, ot more properly, wealth, but power. Much the topic of Smith's Wealth of Nations, actually. Though modern economics likes to pretend otherwise.