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It perpetuates the idea that you cannot rise beyond the class you're born into; indeed also that class still exists and still commands respect.

parenthesis 6y ago
Sting, "Dressed in his Sunday best and brandishing a union jack, … waved to [The Queen Mother] as she passed in her black Rolls Royce and she looked straight at him and waved back, he remembers. "That was when I got infected. That was when I thought: "I don't want this life: I want that one. Once I'd found a guitar to play I found a friend to help me get there," he told the Guardian. Quoting from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/10306480/Sting-The-Queen-Mother-inspired-me-to-become-a-rock-star.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/10306480/Stin...
api 6y ago
As an American I've spoken with a number of other Americans who have worked in the UK and are shocked by how strong the notion of class still is. Example: I know an engineer and process optimization (six sigma) expert who worked with a major US aerospace manufacturer that had operations in the UK. He observed that in the UK the management and much of engineering was from elite UK schools like Oxford and Cambridge, and that these people basically refused to mix with the regular shop floor folks. He had to drag these upper crust UK people kicking and screaming into donning proper gear and walking out onto the shop floor to look at shit. In the US he hasn't encountered nearly as much implicit classism, though there still is a little. The US has its own elite university system but he says it's nowhere near as powerful as in the UK and its strength diminishes (in the US) as you move West. I can attest to the latter point. I have lived in Cincinnati, Boston, Asheville (NC), California, and now I'm back in Cincinnati. The further you get from "BosNyWash" (the Eastern Seaboard) the less often anyone ever asks where you went to school. In Boston it's the first question, and I got the sense there that if you didn't go to a top-ten school there was a ceiling for your career. In California I was never asked about where I went to school in eight years of working and living there. I've only rarely been asked in Cincinnati and NC and it's mostly about "where are you from?" than class distinction. Edit: this is in-re a peer of the parent post but it wouldn't let me post it so here it is... thought it was interesting enough to copy/paste here. A friend who went to Harvard in the USA once told me that the #1 thing he got from Harvard was "permission" to excel. "At Harvard they tell you you're the best, so you try to be the best." That stuck with me. Search for research on social self-limitation. There have been some interesting experiments, like putting A students in a class and telling the teacher they're C students and vice versa. Hint: the students tend to conform to expectations. This is part of why I am so skeptical of people who try to put too much weight on IQ and draw vast conclusions from it. IQ is a mushy psychometric number with a lot of variance within the same person, not a hard physical measurement like mass or distance. It's also why I am open to ideas like "internalization of oppression" and the idea that eliminating discriminatory rhetoric from society might help people who have been historically told they're inferior. When someone is told they're inferior, maybe they believe it and act accordingly? Lastly I have this weird speculation that this may be a reason that psychopathic personality types often rise to great heights (if they don't end up in jail). A side effect of their antisocial nature may be that they do not self-limit. No idea how you'd test that, but I wonder about it. Same goes for some high-functioning autistic types.
shard 6y ago
Even without a monarchy, society can self-organize into self-perpetuating classes. See "Class: A Guide Through the American Status System" by Paul Fussell.

parenthesis 6y ago

Sting, "Dressed in his Sunday best and brandishing a union jack, … waved to [The Queen Mother] as she passed in her black Rolls Royce and she looked straight at him and waved back, he remembers. "That was when I got infected. That was when I thought: "I don't want this life: I want that one. Once I'd found a guitar to play I found a friend to help me get there," he told the Guardian. Quoting from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/10306480/Sting-The-Queen-Mother-inspired-me-to-become-a-rock-star.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/10306480/Stin...

api 6y ago

As an American I've spoken with a number of other Americans who have worked in the UK and are shocked by how strong the notion of class still is. Example: I know an engineer and process optimization (six sigma) expert who worked with a major US aerospace manufacturer that had operations in the UK. He observed that in the UK the management and much of engineering was from elite UK schools like Oxford and Cambridge, and that these people basically refused to mix with the regular shop floor folks. He had to drag these upper crust UK people kicking and screaming into donning proper gear and walking out onto the shop floor to look at shit. In the US he hasn't encountered nearly as much implicit classism, though there still is a little. The US has its own elite university system but he says it's nowhere near as powerful as in the UK and its strength diminishes (in the US) as you move West. I can attest to the latter point. I have lived in Cincinnati, Boston, Asheville (NC), California, and now I'm back in Cincinnati. The further you get from "BosNyWash" (the Eastern Seaboard) the less often anyone ever asks where you went to school. In Boston it's the first question, and I got the sense there that if you didn't go to a top-ten school there was a ceiling for your career. In California I was never asked about where I went to school in eight years of working and living there. I've only rarely been asked in Cincinnati and NC and it's mostly about "where are you from?" than class distinction. Edit: this is in-re a peer of the parent post but it wouldn't let me post it so here it is... thought it was interesting enough to copy/paste here. A friend who went to Harvard in the USA once told me that the #1 thing he got from Harvard was "permission" to excel. "At Harvard they tell you you're the best, so you try to be the best." That stuck with me. Search for research on social self-limitation. There have been some interesting experiments, like putting A students in a class and telling the teacher they're C students and vice versa. Hint: the students tend to conform to expectations. This is part of why I am so skeptical of people who try to put too much weight on IQ and draw vast conclusions from it. IQ is a mushy psychometric number with a lot of variance within the same person, not a hard physical measurement like mass or distance. It's also why I am open to ideas like "internalization of oppression" and the idea that eliminating discriminatory rhetoric from society might help people who have been historically told they're inferior. When someone is told they're inferior, maybe they believe it and act accordingly? Lastly I have this weird speculation that this may be a reason that psychopathic personality types often rise to great heights (if they don't end up in jail). A side effect of their antisocial nature may be that they do not self-limit. No idea how you'd test that, but I wonder about it. Same goes for some high-functioning autistic types.

shard 6y ago

Even without a monarchy, society can self-organize into self-perpetuating classes. See "Class: A Guide Through the American Status System" by Paul Fussell.