(08-18-2020, 10:38 AM)David Horn Wrote:(08-17-2020, 07:33 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Money seems to matter little, but vocational classification matters greatly. Education matters greatly, and so do consumer tastes. Sailboat (high) or motorcycle (low) even if the two items are similar in cost. Foreign travel is high, but driving about in an RV isn't. Culture does... so believing in lucky numbers isn't impressive. Relying heavily on television for entertainment is of course very prole.
Maybe, prole-life is the new high status choice. Most people are not cut out for an intellectual life, and culture choices tends to be popular rather than high -- even among the more well-to-do.
Fussell wrote his book in a time in which social class was more a matter of the expression of cultural values that it has become in a society that has become increasingly plutocratic, vulgar, and anti-intellectual, and in which having the means of meeting basic human needs is much in doubt for many. It is far easier to control people if people focus on a basic need that gatekeepers can deny. Figure that one can look at Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs and recognize the means of achieving great happiness for people who are stuck in a rut (OK, self-actualization is at the top)... but on the dark side one can see the very bottom in the Gulag or the KZ-Lager in which even survival, let alone food and rest, are in doubt. In such a horrific place one might simply give up all hope and die, whether by doing something that gets one executed, casting oneself onto electrified wire, or giving up on eating. Or perhaps a torture chamber as some torturer points a blowtorch at one's genitals or threatens sudden death to a loved one.
Maybe we are not that bad, but homelessness and hunger are now real threats to far more people than was so in supposedly poorer times. Not long ago I recall seeing that food insecurity was more severe in the United States than in Indonesia, the latter a much poorer country. When class means the distinction between preferring country music or classical music, then it is benign. When it is the difference between ostentatious splendor and gross deprivation, class is a gigantic issue. When class is an issue of masters with no responsibility and subjects with responsibilities but little opportunity, 'class' is anything but innocuous. When the class structure reminds one of a Marxist critique of capitalism, then something is seriously wrong with the local manifestation of capitalism that compels change in that system.
No, I am not blaming our advanced technology. I blame instead the primitive greed of people who have privilege that pharaohs and tsars could envy.
![[Image: maslows-hierarchy-of-needs.jpg]](https://gaiaparadiso.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/maslows-hierarchy-of-needs.jpg)
Maybe we aren't yet in torture chambers or concentration camps. But think of what happens if people able to control the terms of employment make a travesty of safety -- keeping people heavily in debt despite meager pay, reminding people on the job that someone else could take their job at any moment in the event of a slip-up or the capricious decision of a boss, when people are obliged to sacrifice the welfare of one's family because the profit and compensation of executives is deemed by law or practice far more important, when people have no recourse against a dangerous or demeaning situation except to quit with no prospect of employment, when rent is exorbitant enough that people who work hard live in harsh crowding ("Twelve in one room in A-May-REE-Caw"), when a supervisor might be in the position of getting someone to do sexual favors for better terms of (or initial or continuing) employment... we are not a rich nation. We have only the veneer of prosperity, with comparatively few people doing obscenely well.
A wholesome economy makes it easy to achieve basic human needs easily. It does not make human happiness a near-impossibility.
I recognize that some people have built-in problems that make love difficult (ask me about Asperger's Syndrome) -- I could get away with it for a long time with the aid of some cheats, but those cheats no longer work.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.