A recent article shares very articulately how a group of upper-middle class people got so scared of life in this day and age of advanced technologies and modern day conveniences.
This is something I have thought of from time to time in my own career exposure to this class of people. One thing I had noticed was that the older members of this crowd ten and twenty years ago were not quite as disconnected as the current crop of intellectuals. It seems that while the next generation had almost a 100% university socialization, their predecessors had more time exposed to real life “in the trenches”.
I found myself over the years drawn to the realness that the working class brought to the laboratories I worked in more than the intellectuals who could barely have a conversation with you about anything other than science.
This articles goes a long way to help unpack what happened even though it is short on solutions other than re-discovering the value of being exposed to real work towards gaining empathy to those who do this day-in and day-out for their entire lives while keeping a smile.
Here is some clips, but I encourage you to read the whole article!
They’re all around us, especially those of us who live in relatively prosperous metropolitan neighborhoods in the US or Western Europe. Despite being—at least in material terms—among the most fortunate people who have ever walked the earth, they are very scared. And they want you to be very frightened too.
I guess that is part of my own resentment of these types of scared and scarred people .. is that they want others to act as they do.
Indeed, many of them see your refusal to be as frightened as they are about life’s inevitable risks as a grave problem which entitles them and their often powerful and influential fellow travelers to recur to all manner of authoritarian practices to insure that you adhere to their increasingly neurotic view of reality.
This tendency has been in full bloom lately as the people who have sat safely behind their laptops during the last 20 months have harangued and threatened those who have been out on job sites and meatpacking plants mixing freely with others and the virus, to internalize their own obsessions.
It does seem that the COVID season has enhanced the process that brought these people to this point in life. As pure sheep, most see nothing wrong with their worldview as safety is #1 in their lives.
The author goes on to point out that a lot of this is a new thing historically (and isn’t it wonderful to have history to point to towards unveiling more normal times in days gone by):
For most of recorded time prosperity and education have been the gateway to a life of relative freedom from worry. But now, the people who most enjoy these benefits are, it seems, wracked with anxiety and, in the not infrequent way of many people suffering that plague, and hellbent on sharing their misery with others.
From this point on the author shares some theories as to how this all came about:
One way of explaining the phenomenon is in the context of income inequality and its devastating effects on the shape and size of the upper middle class, and those who still believe they have a realistic chance of joining its ranks. Those who have “made it” into that sub-group are deeply cognizant of the unstable nature of their status in a world of corporate buyouts and rampant layoffs. And they worry that they may not be able to provide their children with the ability to retain what they see, rightly or wrongly, as the only real version of the good life.
Thus, when the people way up on top made the decision following September 11th to make the inducement of fear the cornerstone of political mobilization in an increasingly post-political and post-communal society, they found a ready reserve of support in this anxious if also relatively prosperous cohort of the population.
And after two decades of having their already anxious inner selves massaged daily by an a steady drumbeat of fear (and a diet of Trump as Hitler for dessert) both they and their children fell like ripe fruit into the hands of those that wanted to sell them on the “unprecedented” threat posed by a disease that leaves 99.75% of its victims wonderfully alive.
So as you can see, there are several themes that emerge in the CSI for what went wrong, as in, “how did our society produce so many pure sheep?”
Isolation is yet another ingredient:
Adding another layer to this general phenomenon is the increasing isolation of our educated classes from “physicality” in both their work and communal lives.
Until the 1990s it was virtually impossible for anyone other than the richest of the rich not to have any active or passive acquaintance with the world of physical work. Indeed, for the first three or four decades after World War II many of those who could financially afford to relieve their children of this acquaintance with physical work often did not do so, as they believed that knowing what it meant to sweat, ache, be crushingly bored and, not infrequently, humiliated during the course of the day was essential to gaining a more rounded and empathetic understanding of the human condition.
All that ended when the financialization of the economy and the rise of the internet made what Christopher Lasch presciently termed the “rebellion of the elites a much more palpable possibility.”
For example, very few of my students have ever worked during their summers in anything other than office jobs, often procured through family connections. They thus have little understanding, and hence little empathy, of just how brutal and demeaning daily work can be for so many people.
I think you can see that this “understanding” might be useful in helping these people out of this “funk” and towards living real life, dangerous and free in the months and years to come as some of these sheep having gone crazy in herds can return one by one to a more normal worldview.
You never know how your knowledge of history or of society’s brokenness can make you a blessing in another’s life someday!
Be true, stay the course and be kind .. many are walking wounded in this world.
-SF1