Published on 12, July, 2020
I was brought up to believe that we are divided socially into classes:
1. Working class.
2. Middle class.
3. Aristocracy.
I also read decades ago that classes were less relevant and were disappearing.
I'm curious as to what others think so here are some questions:
1. What class were you born into?
2. What class are you now?
3. Do you believe in 1 and 2?
4. ie Do you think class exists?
5. Do you think you can move class?
Also, without Googlerating, I'd be curious as to how these classes are defined.
I've tended to think of them as not only to do with our financial situation, but also to do with tastes, interests and education.
With regard to me, I was born working class and ?probably? still am.
A very insightful podcaster recently said that if you look at mass shootings in America as a symptom of evolution’s inevitable and needed trajectory, it shows as clear as day how the middle class is in an existential crisis, sensing its impending and irreversible redundancy. Young, white males especially see what was once a clear path ahead - the comfort of purpose, prestige, steady jobs in white collar bricks and mortar industries - vanish into opaque uncertainty, and they impotently resent it. In some, the rage spills over. Catastrophically. But uselessly.
What evolution once needed for measured progress towards the coming utopian future - a very stable majority middle class- it no longer needs at the forefront for the next phase. What it needs now is the privileged investing and inventing/innovating elite, and the hard grafting, too busy surviving to get annoyed enough to shoot bullets, ‘lower’ class, to forge momentum. The suburban-dwelling joggers with nice early retirement packages are going the way of the dodo, steadily. It’s disconcerting, unnerving. But ultimately in service of a better future we won’t live to see. Where technology forged in a new societal dynamic iteratively levels the playing field until concepts of class, fixed gender, race, precise fixed constant delimitations of any kind are foreign concepts and just the rumours of history.
All will be well. Just not for us. Not in any of our lifetimes. Or the next generation’s. Or the next dozen. Or the next one hundred. But eventually… There’s peace in knowing that. But we can only glimpse the knowledge, the churn of necessity will pull us back into forgetting. Because to get future-kind there, we must suffer. It just is as it has to be.
This reminds me of a song i was listening to yesterday. 30 Century Man by Scott Walker.
Dark, arty, literary type. Went solo in the 60's so he could record Jacques Brel covers. I think he's still alive and every so often releases a new album.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi7WRBz5Atw
Montague Terrace (In Blue ) by Scott Walker
Oh, it was even weirder as a site documenting that nightmarish series has just reminded me:
The scene is a nuclear shelter where all the adults are apathetic and the children are scared. Suddenly one man opens a cardboard box containing dressing up clothes and wigs, which he puts on, and persuades another man to join him. Together they act out a scene from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to the delight of the children.
He produced Pulp's 2001 Album.
Never heard that. Good voice on yer man. I only really know him as the ‘No regrets’ guy. And did he sing ‘the sun ain’t gonna shine any more’? I think they did a video for that in the golden oldie picture show with children in a nuclear bunker or something. Another thing to haunt my childhood dreams.