The anxiety that causes this is exactly the same anxiety that causes middle class people to try hard to appear rich, causes midwitted people to try to appear ingenious. The middle tier of a hierarchy is the most precarious
We all know the theory. In a hierarchy with intense competition, everyone at tier N will try to pose as tier N+1, because 1) they can possibly get away with it and 2) it’s valuable if your superiors treat you as “one of their own”
This dynamic exists in any hierarchy, and hierarchy will always exist. Attempts to flatten hierarchy are intrinsically unstable. A new one always emerges, sometimes, ironically, based on “who can flatten hierarchy the best”
We live in exactly this world, where an old social hierarchy (patriarchal, nationalistic, industrious, officially ended in 1964) is used as a model to establish a new hierarchy built on “equality”: the more you are gay, brown, or disabled, the more equal you are
In some languages there are special honorific words that you must use to refer to your elders or to leaders. In American English we also have special words we must use for the privileged classes (nonwhites). Anything less than reverence is evidence of “hatred”
The most idiotic doctrine to come out of the church of 1964 is “cultural appropriation,” this childish slur that nonwhites use to rhetorically flog white people, totally ignorant of the positive sum nature of cultural exchange, a toddler clutching his toys "that's mine!"
Of course if you are a white person visiting China or India they will be all too happy to sell you their traditional clothes and teach you the song of their people, it’s only 2nd-gen AMERICAN Chinese and Indians that use this slur, for the same reason strivers try to look rich
What 2nd-gen immigrants have is *racial* status anxiety, because e.g. “real” Chinese see them as Americans, and “real” Americans see them as Chinese, so they have to protect their superficial cultural markers, because they are afraid of being demoted to the status of white people
The hypocrisy of 2nd-gen nonwhites using "privilege" discourse is that it's justified by economic disparity, and the loudest advocates of this discourse all have higher average incomes than the whites who are supposedly privileged over them
But that's not to say their grievance doesn't exist, it's just that money is the wrong language for quantifying it. As any white man who works in a big tech company knows, being the ethnic minority is often socially alienating
The social barriers of cultural otherness, whether they derive from class or heritage, cannot be erased by changing the distribution of wealth. Being in a social minority is always alienating regardless of race, class, or intelligence
"Political correctness" as instantiated by the modern corporate HR office is an attempt to redistribute STATUS through a centralized command system, it enables big businesses to run arbitrage against international markets for mid-IQ labor.
By now it's a common talking point in rationalist-adjacent spheres that Americans lack a sophisticated discourse of class and use money as a proxy and hilarity (sorrow) ensues. But in fact we have a fully formalized rubric of social class in 2020: the OWS intersectional stack
We all know about the tyrannies and the hypocrisies of the new civil rights era hierarchy, it only took 50 years for it to be formalized into the OWS stack but once it was done, the hideous logic of it was inescapable
Most republicans or red tribers (unfortunate label but you get it) are still living in the fantasy where the government is the only bad guy here, as if the oppression of the civil rights movement is somehow a fight between individual and state
This is idiotic, it has never been true, because the markets create concentrations of wealth and power which in turn condition and catalyze the actions of the state, which then condition the market...
“Free enterprise” is an oxymoron, and by the way, enterprise hates you, and big corporations are the number one threat to your "liberty" in the current year.
the right: Corps + People vs. the State
the left: State + People vs. Corps
the truth: Corps + State vs. People
the right: Corps + People vs. the State
the left: State + People vs. Corps
the truth: Corps + State vs. People
Anyone who performs the religious rituals of the civil rights era (protesting, rallying, political activism &c) is a dupe, they are not "making their voice heard", they are only sycophants braying "thy will be done"
It may be useful to see capital as an alien power metabolizing humans in order to manifest itself more fully into the world, but it is moronic to imagine that "the people" or "the state" could somehow chain it
The government creates a legal environment that privileges people according to their rank in the OWS stack, and the litigation threat allows companies to structure their culture around flattering the privileged, in ways that are expensive for upcoming competitors
In this way, tyranny and oppression are entirely decentralized, and everyone involved has plausible deniability, and even most of the underclass is complicit because there is no one for them to scapegoat but themselves; they are constantly told they are privileged.
The magic trick here is the nominal distribution of privilege is exactly inverted from reality. (Some) white men have more money but they have the LEAST social capital, they're institutional Dalits; you participate in this institution by denying it
The upshot of this is all new Oreos say "What's your pronoun?", implying the binary gender scheme that's so real it's hard to even argue for no longer obtains. You can't vote against this with your wallet because all corporations are ideologically aligned
The markets aren't going to save you from the caprice of the state because only "eye-to-eye, hand to hand" markets operate in the mythical way that libertarians imagine. At scale, the price of trust is higher than any commodity
In his seminal work, Civilization and Capital, Braudel calls the end consumer market the "infrastructure" and the financialized wholesale and warehouse market the "superstructure" -- and the latter clears based on social as much as economic capital
Bazaar-style infrastructure markets where price signals demand eventually develop superstructure markets where personal relationships are as important as profit optimization. Braudel argues that, far from treating this as corruption, we should see it as normative
"Oh you don't like it? Make your own Google. Oh wait I mean make your own payment processing platform. Oh wait I mean make your own internet. Oh wait I mean make your own state. No, not like that, bigot."
You're not going to make your own google because you are being systematically stripped of all your social capital. They can't quite take your property or your life yet, that comes later. Your social power evaporates first. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
