Saturday, October 3, 2020

The Divide is Class, and the Status Derived from it

 I was waking up/leisurely meandering through the Web, when I found this gem from the past, on the Chicago Boyz archives.

X people are independent-minded, free of anxious regard for popular shibboleths, loose in carriage and demeanor. They adore the work they do, and they do it until they are finally carried out, retirement being a concept meaningful only to hired personnel or wage slaves who despise their work. Being an X person is like having much of the freedom and some of the power of a top-out-of-sight or upper-class person, but without the money. X category is a sort of unmonied aristocracy.

The X category was  referring to the Gen-X Elite, many of whom did not join large corporations or aggressively devote themselves to upward mobility. Think of them as the embodiment of the Friend's cast - often working tedious or boring jobs, but possessed of the belief that their lives were more important than many of those who followed more traditional choices.

More on the topic of Libs vs. Anyone-Who-Disagrees-With-Any-Tiny-Part-of-What-They-Hold-Sacred here.

The above link, in the comments, brings up an interesting point: Why are the younger Not-Right adherents so incapable of seeing their opponents as Fellow Humans? Why are they so angry?

I believe that it is precisely because they were largely raised by the Boomers and Gen-X crowd, who constantly praised their Way of Life, yet failed to provide for their offspring, financially, educationally, emotionally, or spiritually.

Now those kids are left with nothing - literally, nothing.

  • No debt-free start in the world - they largely 'paid' for those fancy colleges with loans (in some cases, the parents were working to pay off their own pricey college loans). Part-time jobs weren't easy to find during college - too many people willing to work for free (another way to describe internships).
  • A sad choice between living with a parent (and, perhaps, a spouse/lover/succession of lovers and any semi-attached children), and in a space that they could afford (overcrowded, ugly, and dangerous).
  • No serious job prospects - more poorly-paid gigs, juggling several part-time jobs, resorting to illegal/sleazy/degrading work (not just a Socialist phrase - how do you think guys like Weinstein/Lauer/many, many other Woke Folks get their victims - they mine the desperate fields)
  • No solid source of spiritual comfort - only loosely associated and tepid quasi-believers, who seldom meet in person, only when they feel the need). No guidance with life decisions. No firm guidelines for how to make choices. Just 'freedom'.
  • Friendships that are ephemeral, and based on rigid agreement with a complicated set of doctrines. Failure to adhere to all of them consigns you to Perdition - or, life among the Deplorables, truly a fate worse than death!

1 comment:

Paul Bonneau said...

I'm doubtful about the utility of collective-speak, particularly when applied to generations - as if (for example) all Boomers think alike, or do all the same things.

"Society is a collective concept and nothing else; it is a convenience for designating a number of people. So, too, is family or crowd or gang, or any other name we give to an agglomeration of persons. Society... is not an extra "person"... The whole has no separate existence. Using the collective noun with a singular verb leads us into a trap of the imagination; we are prone to personalize the collectivity and to think of it as having a body and a psyche of its own."
-- Frank Chodorov