by Akim Reinhardt
The wealthy and powerful have always used the narrative to their advantage. The narrative defines them as superior in some way, and thus deserving of their power and wealth. In ancient times, they might be descended from the Gods, or at least favored by them or otherwise connected to them, perhaps through special communicative powers that granted them insights into the will of the Gods or God. In modern capitalist societies, that narrative promotes a fantasy of merit. You are rich and/or powerful because you are better. You are more civilized, better educated, more intelligent, or blessed with an exceptional work ethic. These narratives cast wealth and/or power as not only justifiable, but deserved.
The poor and exploited have always had the narrative used against them. The narrative defines them as inferior in some way, and thus deserving of their poverty and exploitation. In ancient times, they were conscripted by the Gods to serve the will of the Gods’ descendant, favored, and prophets. The poor serving the wealthy and/or powerful was the will of the Gods or God, and could extend into the afterlife. In modern capitalist societies, the narrative promotes a fantasy of the non-meritorious. You are poor and/or exploited because you are inferior. You are uncivilized, uneducated, stupid, or lazy. These narratives cast poverty and/or exploitation as not only justifiable, but deserved.
The middle class cannot use the narrative to their advantage to the degree that the wealthy and powerful do. The middle class can only use the narrative to modestly justify its modest advantages. The narrative does not demonize the middle class the way it does the poor and exploited. It does not cast them as savages, morons, or parasites. Instead, it frames the middle class as the laudable backbone of the nation, casting a moral sheen over them. This is consolation for the narrative subjecting the middle class to a volatile message of fear and hope. If you work really hard, and get a little lucky, maybe you’ll become wealthy. But never forget: while things are good enough for now, they are not great, and if you fuck up, you will be punished. For the middle class, the narrative is not just carrots and not just sticks. It is both, carrots and sticks. With a demon authoring half the pages, and an angel authoring the rest, the narrative is a see-saw that repeatedly raises them with promises of a bright future and drops them down to the edge of the precipice, while slathering them with a thin coating of goodness.
The narrative says the rich are rich for your benefit as much as theirs. Their wealth allows and encourages them to give you blessings and jobs and meaning. The narrative says the poverty of the poor is a threat to the rest of us. They are undeserving of what relatively little they have, having stolen it from the righteous and the rightful. The narrative says the middle class has both hope and fear. Their hard work is admirable and earns them the right to dream of paradise while they teeter on the edge of the abyss.
Narratives create expectations. All people believe their life is laid out for them to one degree or another. But whereas the narratives of wealth and power, and poverty and exploitation, are somewhat static, the middle class narrative is more dynamic. Unfortunately, the wealthy and the powerful, and the poor and the exploited, often come to believe that they deserve their positions, and that they cannot do much to change it. That their destinies are somewhat set in stone, shielding the wealthy and powerful from worry, while rendering the poor and exploited until they are bereft of fatty hope. But for the middle class, the narrative is in motion. Do everything the right way, and you can ascend to a loftier status. Do things the wrong way, and you may very well descend into misery.
The poor are constantly being blamed and tarred as incompetent losers for the crime of being victimized over and over again by a predatory system that relentlessly separates them from their money. Meanwhile, the upper classes are littered with self-admiring dunderheads who fail upwards along a carpet of family wealth while being celebrated as “job-creators” and “pillars of society.” All the while, the middle class is offered a security blanket of righteousness attained through hard work, earnestly believing they are truly what makes the nation great. And this blanket is meant to keep them warm as they oscillate between hope and fear, between empty dreams of becoming truly wealthy and very real fears that cruel fate is just around the corner, waiting to drag them down to the ranks of the working class or even the poor and the homeless.
To say the rich are the problem is to state what should be obvious. Not as individuals necessarily, but as a class. Regardless of how problematic they are as individuals, or how much good they might do as individuals, the broader truth is that the rich are a structural problem, gobbling up a staggering share of resources that necessarily leaves the rest of humanity the poorer.
To say the poor are the symptom, not the cause of broad social ills, is to state what should be obvious. Not as individuals, necessarily, but as a class. Regardless of how problematic individual poor people might be, holding themselves back with self-sabotage, or how admirable they might be, working hard to overcome, the truth is that the poor are structural victims, denied resources (and importantly, not just material resources, but also cultural and social resources) that necessarily diminish their chances for advancement.
To say the middle class works hard to get where they are is to state the obvious. While individual middle class people might make minimal effort, as a class they work hard. However, what is rarely said, because it defies the narrative, is that the middle class is, in its own way, also the problem.
The middle class, as a class, takes numerous steps to cement its position by keeping the poor down. The rich aren’t so insecure as to keep the poor down to maintain their own position. Rather, they directly economically exploit the poor, generating wealth for themselves by saddling the poor with horrific institutions like usury loan services, debt collection agencies, predatory financial commitments, overpriced retail outlets, and so forth. The middle class profits off of these institutions to a much lesser degree. Instead, their main crime against the poor is taking actions that end up denying the poor access to good middle classs housing, schools, and healthy environments. How? Simply by keeping them, or enough of them, out of their towns, suburbs, and neighborhoods. And for the most part, it works.
The top 1% of wealth holders in the United States are far, far beyond the middle class, owning about 30% of the wealth. Meanwhile, the bottom half owns about only 2–6% of wealth, depending on how it’s measured. Between them is the vast middle class: nearly half the population, which holds about two-thirds of the wealth. This includes those at the bottom edge who are middle class for now, but perhaps a missed paycheck or two from slipping, as well as the kinds of upper middle class earners that most Americans consider to be “rich,” or at least “well to do,” driving their kids to pricey private schools in top-of-the-line, imported SUVs, but who in reality are still quite far away from being so wealthy that even the stupidest, most profligate failsons and daughters couldn’t squander it all in one or two generations.
In other words, the wealthy are so few and the poor so multitudinous that chunks of the middle class actually have more than their share. About 1.3 million households make up the top 1% in the United States. Take them out of the equation, and about 65 million households make up the top half. This combination of vast numbers and somewhat outsized wealth means the middle class has something the top 1% does not: cultural influence.
Thus the narrative of the noble middle class. It’s an element of the narrative that the wealthy did not create for the middle class, but which the middle class has created for itself.
The wealthy have a vested interest in the narrative, which justifies their wealth, blames the poor for their poverty, and instills the middle class with a potent mix of fear and hope. And the poor, while not completely powerless and capable of occasionally revealing or even glorifying their position, as a class have very limited resources and opportunities to change the narrative that criticizes and villainizes them. But the middle class, due to their size and collective resources, have enormous influence over the narrative. And they exercise that influence. Trapped in a volatile, and for many even a precarious economic position, the one thing they can effectively do to make themselves feel better (beyond dreaming of one day becoming truly wealthy), is shape a narrative of self-glorification
Take, for example, the humble bicycle.
The bicycle can be a commercial vehicle, primarily for delivery people, who of course are rarely middle class if the bicycle is their primary mode of transportation. It can also be a tool of competition for people with the time and resources for what can be a rather expensive sporting pursuit. And of course it is a much cherished plaything for children.
But for most adults who own and use a bicycle, cycling is a hobby. I say this even if they use a bicycle as part of their commute, as cycling to and from work is always an option for them, and thus a luxury, not a necessity as it would be for, say, a poor person who can’t afford a car and does not live near public transportation.
Yet to listen to some middle class cycling enthusiasts, particularly the white liberals among them, and you would think they are saving the world. They might insist that they are contributing mightily to the fight against climate change and the scourge of dangerous cars. That if just more people were like them, the world would be a better place. And that their superior lifestyle is so self-evident that more people would in fact be like them if the city or the county would simply reallocate everyone’s tax dollars to reconfiguring the road system infrastructure in a way that favored bikes and punished cars instead of vice versa.
Don’t get me wrong. I think biking is great. There should be more bike lanes, and cities and counties should be bike friendly. For those working class delivery bikers if nothing else. Now, I do think making the infrastructure more pedestrian friendly is infinitely more important than making it bike friendly, but I am pro-bike. I’m not here to bash cycling or cyclists. I’m not even trying to point out that in most of America, because of climate, topography, social geography, and the general state of age and health demographics, cyclinbg is not actually a viable commuting option. And of course climate change is a serious problem and cars are very dangerous, and that we as a society should address those problems. Rather, I’m here to point out that you deciding to cycle to work instead of drive is not actually a moral choice. Because you, as an individual, cannot make a difference on large social issues such as climate change and air pollution. Social problems require social solutions. Individual action simply does not matter in the big picture.
So why then do some cyclists insist on adopting a stance of moral superiority? For individuals there could be any number of reasons. Some people are just assholes. But to the extent that it’s a social phenomenon that can be observed among many, not just a few scattered individuals, or as common dogma in a cycling subculture, I would argue that it is an example of the middle class reacting to the perilous nature of its economic position by exerting influence over what it can: the narrative. And that when the middle class seeks to influence the narrative for its own benefit, this often results in a narrative of middle class moral superiority.
This is not a new phenomenon It dates back to at least the Victorian Era (ca. 1830s–1910s in the United States) when the new urban middle class first emerged. Indeed, the American middle class has been attempting to assert its moral superiority over the supposedly immoral poor, and to a lesser extent the supposedly decadent wealthy, for about two hundred years now. And of course it’s not just cycling. We could list other pursuits that the middle class uses to assert its moral superiority, and which though well meaning, actually add up to little, or are theoretically important but ultimately make only a small dent in important problems: recycling, volunteering at successful middle class schools, supporting the arts (especially arts consumed by cultural elites), and pursuing vegetarianism or veganism among others. To be clear, these are all good things to do and there are all kinds of wonderful reasons why someone might do them. But the individual decision to do any of them is not in and of itself a strong moral position. And when an individual does any of them do not, they are not, sadly, making important contributions to the human-made problems plaguing the world. If it were only that simple.
Take veganism as an example. If everyone were vegan, would the world be in better shape in any number of ways? Without question. Or even if just a fifth of the world were vegan, the impact might be enormous. But only 1% of Americans are vegan, and the figure is probably less than that worldwide. And you making the decision to become vegan won’t change that. A substantial percentage of the population will become vegan only if large social programs are effectively employed (whatever they might be), or if most of the animals start dying off (which could actually happen). There might be plenty of good reasons for you to personally become vegan, or volunteer at a school that already has tons of resources, or recycle. But you and yours cannot effectively influence climate change, plastic pollution, or disparities in education. These are large social problems requiring large social solutions.
The poor know they can’t greatly influence the world, so they are not tempted to fabricate illusions of their moral superiority. Truly wealthy individuals actually can make a difference, thus the long tradition of some truly wealthy people making enormous philanthropic contributions as a way of salving their consciences and papering over the reality that they are lecherous parasites who largely make the world a much worse place.
But the middle class is apt to delude itself, insisting their individual choices and actions concerning broad social issues can cast them morally superior. More religious elements of the middle class are likely to do this through religiosity. More secular liberals are likely to do it through actions that support liberal middle class agendas. All of it is moralistic fantasy.
Maybe you’re a good person most of the time. Maybe you’re not. Either way, be honest with yourself about why that is.
Akim Reinhardt’s website is ThePublicProfessor.com
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