Class contradictions

Apologies for the lightness of posting recently. I took a break from spouting class envy to look for a detached house in Rutland.
Anyhoo, I've found what looks like a nice place 15 minutes walk from town, almost all of which is alongside Oakham School's massive playing fields and buildings. Whilst passing these, two thoughts occurred to me. One was: is it really right that so much opportunity and privilege be available to a tiny minority of people, who were born advantaged anyway? The other was: hey, this is handy if I get caught short between the pub and my three bathrooms.
Then I looked at the parents' car-park; the school was having an open day. And the motors were considerably cheaper than my prospective neighbours'.
Which raises questions about the subjectivity of class. Many of you no doubt think the chip on my shoulder is a silly affectation; how can I claim to hate the middle class when the only reasons I don't listen to Radio 4 or go into Waitrose are that I prefer Radio 3 and Ocado?
But isn't it just the mirror image of a more common mismatch between subjective class perceptions and reality - that of people who think they are middle class but whose scrimping and saving and worrying about money makes them objectively working class?

Comments

[Steve]

I once heard someone say that most of us are only two pay packets away from penury and that most of us are therefore working class.

Then again, if your pay packet is a million quid and it only comes once a year, if you missed a couple you might start to feel hard-done-by too!

[Bob B]

Wave, Chris - you're on camera:
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=school&near=Oakham,+Leicestershire&fb=1&cid=0,0,3213033599784560998&sa=X&oi=local_result&resnum=1&ct=image

[jameshigham]

Rutland uber alles - class war is a fine criterion for house buying.

[BGC]

Having done my level best to wean you off the class hatred drug by dint of evidence relating to the need to control for IQ - and clearly having failed utterly, as demonstrated by the link to some grotesque and bile-full prejudices from a certain Stephen Law - I bid you goodbye and promise not to darken your comments section again...

[Jackart]

Most of the parents are making huge sacrifices to send their children to Oakham. What's more important, a new car or a really first class education?

Incidentally - I'm there for an old-boys match in March, if you fancy a beer with some upper class hooligans?

[Luis Enrique]

"scrimping and saving and worrying about money makes them objectively working class"

Holy Cow does this mean I can finally lose my public school educated guilt and proclaim myself objectively working class? Result!

[GeoffH]

"scrimping and saving and worrying about money" are NOT defining characteristics of the working class.

[ortega]

I'm reading you from Spain and I'm a little confused.
Is not Ocado the on line shop from Waitrose? Is on line shopping a working class attribute. Not in Spain.

[CD59]

BCG,

Since your underlying premise is correct, it would be sad, and perhaps immoral, if you had less stamina for propagating what people need to understand, than those who are addicted to envy, and propagate with abandon their trivial, simplistic skeptical and degenerative philosophy.

It is not that envy cannot be understood. Envy has two causes:
1) A feeling of being outcast from the feast. This is a primordial defense against the universal human strategy of shunning those who will not conform or who are dangerous to the tribe.

2) A general selfishness, that seeks to take from others rather than to gain by creating, saving, or trading. (Focusing on the thing rather than gaining the skill that gets the thing.) This is partly the fixed-pie error. It is partly a form of philosophical skepticism. It is partly ignorace, simplicity and laziness.

These are both selfish motivations. The fact that many people find it much easier to be selfish and envious, than to do the hard work, study, self denial, and to control their breeding, simply means that there are a lot of people who lack the character to do otherwise. For these people to ally into political groups in order to steal from others is simply an act of organized banditry. It is also part of the latter phase of the decline of any civilization and related to widespread skepticism.

Furthermore, we must allow the top twenty percent, who, by a combination of ability and parental philosophy, are more productive than all their brethren combined, to have both the incentive, reward and ability to do their innovation, disruption and reorganization at a high enough velocity to maintain competitive advantage.

A civilization's purpose is to create incentives for and allow their top performers to compete in order to reduce prices. To be destabilizers. To be innovators. To force social reorganization in response to needs, innovation, and changes in resources.

Your thoughts on IQ are valid. But there are four properties that affect a person's abilty to perform:
a) "G" or general intelligence. What we call IQ, or the rate at which people's patter recognition operates to identify patterns.
b) General Knowledge, or, the 'patterns we learned and can apply'.
c) Short term memory, or the ability to permute and compare ideas
d) Metaphysics and Wants, or, how high is the correlation between your desires and theories and what is actually possible in the real world.

It is possible to compensate for average intelligence by accumulating knowledge and a decent set of metaphysics for example.

To your opposition's credit: There is some truth to the fact that wealth will eventually concentrate in too few hands, but only with the help of a governmnet or priesthood. In general, the prosperous people run to remote parts of the empire as the civilization collapses. They do so because the proletariat has bred itself like locusts and consumed all in it's wake, become the most important economic force, destabilizing the productive middle class' control over the political and economic order. These civilizations once dead never recover. They die and cast their lot into ignorace and poverty.

The UK, and most of europe have benefitted since the end of the great wars, because the US has been the paternal sherrif leaving Europe to be largely maternal and friendly, and to be free of the cost and social burden of keeping the east's locusts at bay. But the US is dying as we speak, in every possible way, militarily, demographically, economically, and intellectually.

The time for envy is past. Either we quash it. Or our civilization will die of it.

[stuart]

I think this about the English all the time. Working class brits are really very rich.

[Geoffrey]

The problem with working and middle class - is we're all much the same (albeit some can only afford a 1 bed flat and a Fiat Punto, whilst others have a 7-bed townhouse in Kensington and a fleet of Bentleys). Then there's three other classes:

The Bumholes/Chavs (the people who sued to be working class, but are now the sicknote class, benefit scroungers and wasters)

The Public Schools (people who had paid-for education, will pay-for educate their children, and who think they are somewhat superior - probably cos they actually got an education, and now are doctors and lawyers)

Royalty and those that not got to work (also now known as the "Celebs", but also a few obscure toffee-nosed inbreds)

[dearieme]

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

[kinglear]

All of us who work are by definition working class. Of course, the more socially stratified " classes" we talk about have nothing to do with work or anything else except knowledge. Being upper class is not having to ask - you have already been taught manners or whatever it is that is in question. Naturally, some of the younger members of the upper class spoil it all with their arrogance - in rather the same way as those of the underclass do with their own particular brand of arrogance.
C'est la vie.

[Mike Woodhouse]

Hmm. So I probably started out working class because my parents were still becoming middle class. but they got there. Then I left home, had to work and became working class again. Moved up in income and down in mortgage impact to the point that I moved back into the middle again. Acquiring children, school fees, a yearly inheritance tax liability and end-meeting difficulties then caused me to revert to working class again. In about five years I think I may find myself middle class, in which band I hope to remain until I join the gaga class.

Seems like we've redefined class mobility as highly pervasive, rather than a rarity.

Which is nice.

[Gracchi]

Good you've found somewhere to live- now you are definitely out of the lumpenproletariate :)

Seriously I think all our class perceptions are muddled- actually the working class has shifted to a great extent thanks to things like the demise of teh Unions and fall of manufacturing

[Peter Risdon]

The middle class has always scrimped and saved. This class prejudice is unappealing. It's no different to race prejudice.

[K Fiddler]

Some people might wonder why you are so keen to live next to a school...not me!