A Tale of four pieces: Into the mindset of the PMC class.
Apologies for redundancy and/or not being fleshed out properly.
#"To properly address a problem, you must properly understand the problem"
On to my thesis.
Yesterday I posted this article, and this portion stood out to me.
The work ethic has another source too: a need to prove ourselves as worthy citizens in capitalist society. Those deemed worthy – of benefits, rights, privileges, entitlements – are those who can show they do legitimate paid work, or have done so in the past, and have therefore contributed to the state of the nation. This dimension of the work ethic has historically been associated with a class-wide identity of being producers.
Aristotle argued that leisure, not work, was the sphere of life in which our true selves can be realised, where humans strive for perfection. How to fill our free time had long been the question of a purpose-driven life. The rise of capitalism gave way to a new conceptualisation of both work and the self. The rising bourgeoisie in early capitalist countries distinguished themselves from the parasitic aristocracy by focusing on their own status as a productive class. Their sense of worth, and their claim to power, was predicated on their work ethic, which they saw as generating the true wealth of society. What this means is that the work ethic, as we know it, was hardly conceived of as a capitalist shibboleth. Actually, the bourgeoisie first tried it out on themselves.
I said about that portion;
This last part to me also helps explain the PMC mindset as the natural progression.
Natural progression from the bourgeoisie I mean. Carrying on.
Today I came across this article, (posted on this sub by u/randomcollection 5 days ago), and this part stood out to me;
There’s a space between that 0.1 percent and the 90 percent that’s often overlooked: the 9.9 percent that resides between them. They’re the group in focus in a new book by philosopher Matthew Stewart (no relation), The 9.9 percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture.
There are some defining characteristics of today’s American upper-middle class, per Stewart’s telling. They are hyper-focused on getting their kids into great schools and themselves into great jobs, at which they’re willing to work super-long hours. They want to live in great neighborhoods, even if that means keeping others out, and will pay what it takes to ensure their families’ fitness and health. They believe in meritocracy, that they’ve gained their positions in society by talent and hard work. They believe in markets. They’re rich, but they don’t feel like it — they’re always looking at someone else who’s richer.
They’re also terrified. While this 9.9 percent drives inequality — they want to lock in their positions for themselves and their families — they’re also driven by inequality. They recognize that American society is increasingly one of have-nots, and they’re determined not to be one of them.
Also
####One of the things you write about in the book is how much this 9.9 percent are willing to invest in their children — in nannies, in schools, in extracurriculars. Where does this pressure come from, this urge people have to make their kids the best?
I think the driving motivation is fear, and I think that fear is well-grounded. People intuit that in this meritocratic game, the odds are getting increasingly long of succeeding. They work very hard to stack the odds in their kids’ favor, but they know as the odds get longer, they may not succeed.
That’s coupled with another one of the traits of this class, which is a lack of imagination. The source of the fear is also this inability to imagine a life that doesn’t involve getting these high-status credentials and having a high-status occupation. This life plan looks good, and it certainly looked good in the past when the odds were more sensible. But it’s not a great deal. It’s something that isn’t just harmful to the people who don’t make it, it’s also harmful to the people who get involved and do make it, in some sense.
[snip]
####In what way is it harmful to the people who do make it to the 9.9 percent and the people who don’t?
I’m not suggesting it’s equally harmful. The psychological damage to the upper-middle class is kind of trivial compared to the substantive damages other people face. But it is, nonetheless, pretty real.
I would point to the sociological and psychological evidence that you have significant increases in anxiety-related disorders and other forms of unhappiness even among people who are fairly well off. It’s a trade-off that all or most of them are willing to make. But it’s not a free lunch.
[snip]
####To what extent does the upper-middle class drive inequality, and to what extent are they driven by inequality?
Most of this culture of the 9.9 percent is an effect and a consequence of inequality. That said, it’s one of those effects that becomes a contributing cause; it’s part of a feedback loop.
Most of the root source of inequality is structural, and I think much of it goes to an economy that’s no longer as competitive, where you have oligopolies rising without significant challenge. The balance of power between what we call workers and what we call capitalists is out of whack, and that’s a fundamental source of inequality. Race and gender can also play into inequality.
That inequality does have these fundamental sources, and once it’s in place, other mechanisms come in to lock it in and to exacerbate it. That’s where the culture of the 9.9 percent comes in. This culture that focuses on meritocracy becomes a way to justify a professional credentialing game where certain categories of workers are able to carve out high rents for themselves. It’s where certainly families — because they have excess resources — are able to over-invest and lock in benefits.
Those are mostly consequences of rising inequality, but then they feed back into it in obvious ways. They lock people in place, they tend to make it harder for large numbers of people to do well, they exacerbate the irrationalities in society.
It all sounds very gloomy, but I’m not actually that gloomy. I just think this is the way human societies work. There’s nothing in human nature that says we’re particularly good at forming large, complex societies that make everybody better off. These are sort of the forces of entropy at work in human society. I don’t want to be some sort of misanthrope condemning all of humanity. My point is that we are imperfect at forming reasonable societies, and we need to understand those imperfections if we’re to do better, which we can.
####We’ve talked a lot about the culture of the 9.9 percent so far, but what does that culture mean for everybody else? The people who can’t afford to super credential their kids and send them to Harvard?
I think the underemphasized concern here is the extent to which the other 90 percent end up buying into this value system to some degree. I’ve been in the child-rearing game, and I see a lot of the madness firsthand — parents freaking out when their child takes a sip of soda out of the refrigerator because they somehow imagine this is really going to make it impossible for them to demonstrate enough virtue to get into the right college. They will curate every experience for their kids — every travel experience, every friendship.
I mostly see it among members of the upper-middle class who can afford it. But increasingly, the same sets of values and practices are clearly spreading to where people can’t afford it and where it doesn’t make sense. They’re also buying into this idea that kids have to be absolutely optimized, maximized so they can get onto the narrow path that leads to a stable upper-middle-class life, and otherwise it’s Starbucks until the end of time.
It basically takes away a potential countervailing mechanism. If society were such that you produce this one noxious class but then that gives rise to a reaction of people angry with this class and then acting out, you might have some conflict. Hopefully, it’s not violent but can be mediated through political institutions, but you have at least a mechanism that might lead to a solution. But when the ideology starts to spread, it effectively removes the basis for that conflict, it neutralizes the opposition in a way, and that’s a problem. It means that the system just continues further down the road toward greater instability.
[snip]
####What’s the role of the idea of meritocracy here?
I think that meritocracy mostly gets invented after the fact. You have significant inequality, and then you get people reimagining how the economy works. They first make the false assumption that individual merit or individual talent and effort is the main factor in production, and it isn’t. Most human economic activities depend far more importantly on the degree of cooperation that people are able to establish between themselves — cooperation within firms, cooperation between firms in a marketplace, and cooperation in a society at large in terms of having standards of trust, reasonable laws, and so on. All those things are far more important in determining economic output than mere merit or merely allocating rewards to merit.
People make this false assumption precisely because the inequality is already there, and they’re looking for a justification. Then, they make the further false assumption that the variation in human merit is tremendous — it’s astonishing that some people are literally a million times smarter than other people. You have to qualify a little bit because whenever you criticize meritocracy, someone will come back and say, “Well, people are unequal, some people are smarter.” I have no problem with that, there are differences among people, and those have to be recognized. But it’s completely false to think that those differences are great enough to explain the kind of variation that we see in the economy.
Nonetheless, all of this rhetoric around meritocracy tends to grow and becomes more convincing precisely as inequality grows. In this respect, I don’t think our meritocracy is all that different from previous aristocracy. The definition of aristocracy is just the rule of the best, and people who have merit are also by definition the best. It’s the same kind of rhetoric. Yes, aristocracy usually relied more on birth, but that’s just a mechanism for identifying the people who are going to be perceived to be the best.
####And we work more in order to be able to have this merit to be perceived to be the best. That’s one of the things that struck me about your book — how many hours the upper-middle class, the managerial class, is working now to maintain their spot.
There’s no question that workloads have gone up where people are earning the most. There again, there’s this ideology of merit because we think it’s because these people are so incredibly productive. The hour of that corporate lawyer is just worth so much money that of course they’re going to work those extra two hours just to cash in on that. And it’s just so ridiculous, it’s wrong.
Those people are working hard because they intuit precisely that merit isn’t deciding who’s getting to claim these rents. They’ve got to do something to distinguish themselves from the competition, and the way to do that is just to demonstrate a greater willingness to sacrifice, a greater willingness to submit one’s own identity, and a greater willingness to obey. I see this manic work trend as some of the clearest evidence we have that the meritocracy is out of whack and inequality is far too great.
###Key from that last portion; "greater willingness to obey"
####So what is the role of the 9.9 percent in making this better?
The key contribution of the 9.9 percent, the culture of the 9.9 percent, is going to be to return to the actual original values of America’s upper-middle class. If you get rid of the false idea of meritocracy that everyone earns what they deserve and substitute the idea that meritocracy means holding power accountable to rational standards of public scrutiny, you have a class that can actively contribute in a positive way toward equality. There’s nothing more dangerous to inequality than a society where people and activities are held up to rational standards. There are some core values in what we call meritocracy — of holding power accountable to reason, of treating people as equals under the law, of making deliberations public, and professionalism. All of those core values are intrinsically good things. What’s happened is that inequality perverts and distorts them. The contribution of the 9.9 percent would be to pursue those.
I don’t think the answer is to put the 9.9 percent on a boat, send them out to sea, and sink it, though that would probably make for better sales on a book like this. But I do think the issue is basically a class that has allowed itself to delude itself about the sources of its own privilege, and its main contribution would be in opening its eyes and then living and working more in accordance with what I think was the original inspiration of the class.
What follows when people recognize the actual sources of their privilege is they become a little more humble and they are more willing to help other people, more willing to invest in the future. For me, one of the most distressing statistics is that the richer people get, the less they believe in publicly supported child care. It’s not that they don’t want their taxes to go to pay for child care, it’s that they’ve internalized this idea that everyone can do this, everyone can raise their own child or just hire a nanny. “Let them hire a nanny” is the new “let them eat cake.” It just shows how this incredibly virtuous, super-well-educated class becomes oblivious to the basis of its own existence.
Also today, u/FThumb posted this (IMO Excellent) piece and well, I'm going to quote a portion of my response on that;
Edit 2:
This portion touches on something
Level four — Now we really get deep. Level four is the true analysis of our reality. And there are a lot of different topics in level four. Things like, “What really is money?” or “What the fuck are nation states? Why is everything we do somehow connected to national interests? What does it matter if I was born on this side of a line and you were born on that side of a line? Who even drew those dumb lines?” Or level four could be something like, “Why do we live the way we do — in single-family houses or apartments? We live inside seclusion boxes, hardly interacting with our fellow humans except at our wage slavery jobs where we go, ‘Hey Jim. At least it’s hump day’ or some dumb crap like that. What the hell is this existence?”
Spanish village seeks Unesco world heritage status for outdoor chats
The nightly chats also offer a sort of psychological release, keeping loneliness at bay at a time when concerns around mental health have sharpened, he argued. “Residents come out onto the street and instead of feeling that they’re alone, what they get is a therapy session,” said the 38-year-old. “They share their stories or the problems they’re going through and the neighbours try and help.”
Residents in the small village have reacted warmly to his bid for world heritage status, he said. “So far I haven’t received any criticism, it’s been very positive.” He’s waiting to hear back about next steps but he expects it to be a slow process, one that could take years.
"Isolation" increases anxiety. as a result, it also makes you more likely to want a "strongman to protect you" AND increases radicalization.
This is all a feature not a bug. Again, it's no coincidence people like HRC considered someone like Hosni Mubarak a "Good family friend". They've always been 'pushing right"
Consider that pretty much everyone in the 9.9% is part of the "Work from home" class as well, it's no wonder IMO that those not forced by necessity to socialize have higher amounts of "Fear" as well, especially lately.
Then we come to this piece covering Catherine Liu's book, Virtue Hoarders, and noteably;
‘We must be heretics’, says Catherine Liu in her new book, Virtue Hoarders. ‘We should blaspheme.’ Her call for sacrilege is directed against the pieties of the professional-managerial class (PMC), which dominates ‘political organisations, publishing, media, private foundations, think tanks, and the university’. This is a class ‘convinced of its own unassailable position as comprising the most advanced people the earth has ever seen’; insistent on ‘its ability to do ordinary things in extraordinary, fundamentally superior and more virtuous ways’.
Liu has some fun ridiculing the pretentiousness of PMC self-experimentation, observing that ‘from returning to the “land”… to keto diets, only drinking sewage-laden raw water, and intermittent fasting, its self-indulgence is always a kind of sanctimonious austerity’. Her point, though, is a serious one: that this elite ‘finds in its particular tastes and cultural proclivities the justification for its unshakable sense of superiority to ordinary working-class people’. As she puts it: ‘PMC virtue hoarding is the insult added to injury when white-collar managers, having downsized their blue-collar workforce, then disparage them for their bad taste in literature, bad diets, unstable families, and deplorable child-rearing habits.’
Many of Liu’s descriptions of middle-class ‘progressives’ looking down their noses at hoi polloi are familiar from recent discussions of the rise of ‘woke’ establishment orthodoxies. Two things give the Virtue Hoarders some extra spice, though. First, this is personal. As a professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Liu describes herself as partially belonging to the PMC, and as engaging in ‘political self-criticism’. She intends her book as ‘a guide to identifying PMC values in ourselves, the better to liquidate them’. It is an act of self-excommunication.
Second, and most significant, is the book’s timeliness. Published in the month that President Joe Biden took office, Virtue Hoarders is part of a larger discussion that has rumbled on over the past four years, particularly in the US, about the political role of the PMC. Frustrated hopes for a left-wing populist movement centred around Bernie Sanders’ bid for the Democratic Party nomination – defeated in 2016 by Hillary ‘deplorables’ Clinton, and then again, in 2020, by Biden and his woke authoritarian running mate, Kamala Harris – prompted debate on the American left about whether the PMC is an ally or an enemy.
To some extent, this debate has been a rerun of the same discussion that has arisen periodically since the 1970s, when Barbara and John Ehrenreich first coined the term ‘professional-managerial class’. Their analysis was mainly concerned with whether a class, whose ‘major function’ they identified as ‘the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations’, could nevertheless act as an ally of the working class in, as the Ehrenreichs hoped, a ‘mass radical alliance for social change’.
Rereading the Ehrenreichs’ original two-part essay (available here and here) with the benefit of hindsight, their hopes look misplaced — particularly given their account of how ‘the “New Left”, the anti-war movement, the ecology movement, [and] the women’s-liberation movement’ that emerged in that era all ‘defied “the system”, but often with moralistic contempt for the working class’. A simpler explanation of such moralistic elitism might be those movements’ flawed politics, rather than their adherents’ objective relationship to the means of production. Oddly, that sort of deterministic thinking can end up exculpating people of responsibility for their political choices. Liu’s ‘exfoliating and brutal’ reassessment of her own ‘values, sensibilities, and affects’ is not some alternative version of PMC-style introspection but a deliberate rejection of one political outlook in search of something better.
A kind of economic determinism also seemed to underpin later attempts to find a positive role for the PMC. Returning to their theme in 2013 in the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street protests, the Ehrenreichs again offered an optimistic case for a working-class alliance with the PMC. Noting that economic and technological changes had eroded the security and autonomy of the liberal professions, they forecast that ‘in the coming years, we expect to see the remnants of the PMC increasingly making common cause with the remnants of the traditional working class’, and suggested that Occupy had already initiated such a project. Yet as Liu argues, ‘Occupy was squarely a PMC elite formation’, not just demographically but also politically, dominated by ‘PMC/New Left ideas’ that led to a ‘fanatical commitment to proceduralism’ and ‘suppressed real discussion of priorities or politics’.
[snip]
Yet as Liu observes, at least in some fields, the ‘vanguard corps of PMC elites’ have been actively undermining professional integrity and standards rather than, as the Ehrenreichs put it, acting as ‘a “liberal” force, defending the values of scholarship and human service’. She presents a robust defence of Angela Nagle, whose 2017 book Kill All Normies pointed out the corrosive effects of the type of ‘subcultural fetish politics’ pursued in academia and elsewhere, and lays into those who sought to ‘blacklist and deplatform’ Nagle in response. Liu also attacks the New York Times’ revisionist 1619 Project, noting that ‘powerful financial and media interests’ have promoted this ‘attempt to change the way we understand American history and historical research itself’.
Liu says the ‘endgame’ for her critique is ‘a return to socialist politics’, but as she is no doubt aware, this raises as many questions as it answers. As Sean Collins argued on spiked last year, one problem for the Sanders campaign after 2016 was that it ‘increasingly took on board the identity politics and cultural views of the woke left’, becoming ‘more in tune with the upper middle-class’ than with the masses. But as Collins also suggested, another problem was the intrinsically limited appeal of Sanders’ retro brand of welfare socialism. Left populism has little prospect of success unless it can connect with people’s aspirations for agency and democratic control. As Liu notes, ‘the credentialed classes love to use the word empower when they talk about “people”, but the use of that verb objectifies the recipients of their help while implying that the people have no access to power without them’.
As things turned out, the more pessimistic alternative scenario outlined by the Ehrenreichs in the 1970s is closer to what happened: ‘the possibility exists’, they warned, ‘for the emergence of what may at first sight seem to be a contradiction in terms: anti-working class radicalism’. Looking at today’s version of ‘progressive’ politics, it is not hard to recognise what they described as ‘the PMC radicals’ recurring vision’: a ‘technocratic’ society run by ‘bureaucrats, planners, and experts of various sorts’. Today’s managerial elites are asserting their supposed virtue to shape just such a future, and to push back against the populist hopes of recent years. Virtue Hoarders amplifies a discussion that still needs to be had out. We need more heretics.
At risk of kicking the proverbial wasp's nest (Because idiots can't understand basic nuance), there are some interesting parallels to this nation's despicable past, and the psychological impacts as a result, as stated by Malcolm X;
So you have two types of Negro. The old type and the new type. Most of you know the old type. When you read about him in history during slavery he was called "Uncle Tom." He was the house Negro. And during slavery you had two Negroes. You had the house Negro and the field Negro.
The house Negro usually lived close to his master. He dressed like his master. He wore his master's second-hand clothes. He ate food that his master left on the table. And he lived in his master's house--probably in the basement or the attic--but he still lived in the master's house.
So whenever that house Negro identified himself, he always identified himself in the same sense that his master identified himself. When his master said, "We have good food," the house Negro would say, "Yes, we have plenty of good food." "We" have plenty of good food. When the master said that "we have a fine home here," the house Negro said, "Yes, we have a fine home here." When the master would be sick, the house Negro identified himself so much with his master he'd say, "What's the matter boss, we sick?" His master's pain was his pain. And it hurt him more for his master to be sick than for him to be sick himself. When the house started burning down, that type of Negro would fight harder to put the master's house out than the master himself would.
Key: "When the house started burning down, that type of Negro would fight harder to put the master's house out than the master himself would."
But then you had another Negro out in the field. The house Negro was in the minority. The masses--the field Negroes were the masses. They were in the majority. When the master got sick, they prayed that he'd die. [Laughter] If his house caught on fire, they'd pray for a wind to come along and fan the breeze.
If someone came to the house Negro and said, "Let's go, let's separate," naturally that Uncle Tom would say, "Go where? What could I do without boss? Where would I live? How would I dress? Who would look out for me?" That's the house Negro. But if you went to the field Negro and said, "Let's go, let's separate," he wouldn't even ask you where or how. He'd say, "Yes, let's go." And that one ended right there.
So now you have a twentieth-century-type of house Negro. A twentieth-century Uncle Tom. He's just as much an Uncle Tom today as Uncle Tom was 100 and 200 years ago. Only he's a modern Uncle Tom. That Uncle Tom wore a handkerchief around his head. This Uncle Tom wears a top hat. He's sharp. He dresses just like you do. He speaks the same phraseology, the same language. He tries to speak it better than you do. He speaks with the same accents, same diction. And when you say, "your army," he says, "our army." He hasn't got anybody to defend him, but anytime you say "we" he says "we." "Our president," "our government," "our Senate," "our congressmen," "our this and our that." And he hasn't even got a seat in that "our" even at the end of the line. So this is the twentieth-century Negro. Whenever you say "you," the personal pronoun in the singular or in the plural, he uses it right along with you. When you say you're in trouble, he says, "Yes, we're in trouble."
But there's another kind of Black man on the scene. If you say you're in trouble, he says, "Yes, you're in trouble." [Laughter] He doesn't identify himself with your plight whatsoever.
SOURCE: X, Malcolm. "The Race Problem." African Students Association and NAACP Campus Chapter. Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan. 23 January 1963.
I highly recommend you read all the pieces, as I find that in combination they're a good insight into the mindset.
Thoughts?
Edit: Formatting, better readability.
Posted Oct 22, 2021, 11:53 PM UTC · edited