this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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That’s a good quote and I’ll have to take a read of the book, but I actually think this perspective is actually part of the problem I’m talking about. To the eye of a famous accomplished author, it would appear that people below them glorify and aspire to the people of his class.
I mainly take issue with the gross oversimplification of all people below his financial status as poor and self hating. This was perhaps true at the time it was written, but I think the situation has changed since 1969 if this was true then. I think the problem isn’t really some kind of nebulous cultural inconsistency, but it’s a systemic failure in media like a said previously.
Middle-ish class people don’t talk about how poor people deserve to be poor; not even in the very conservative area I live in. They just don’t talk about them at all. That is except in the context of a news story they heard and every news story only covers poverty in two contexts: crime and societal decay. Poor people and their communities are only shown as dangerous things that people should avoid. This is unfortunately true in a lot of ways, but not the whole story and it turns every poor person into a potential junkie, gang member, or crazy person who should be avoided.
Media is definitely to blame, especially if we go the other way in the way it worships celebrities as people worthy of praise for arguably doing not much and being in the right place at the right time whilst having the right connections. It gives an impossible ideal for success that appears to reward merit but mostly rewards narcissism and self-promotion, and tries to sell these as viable paths for young adults that is free for the taking for anyone of any background.
I do also think that the middle-ish class are somewhat silently complicit, even if they say nothing bad about those less fortunate. They will never say anything bad, but they will also not allow for social housing to be built in their backyards whilst sympathetically tutting about it.
I'd argue that the only thing that's changed since 1969 is the open hatred had the higher classes had to their poor, whereas now it's more a source of embarassment to shut out and not talk about.