The middle class is a giant cargo cult.
The first rule of the middle class: "This isn't a cargo cult."
The second rule of the middle class: "This IS NOT a cargo cult."
Consequently, the middle class desperately tries to be as useless as possible at all times. They are of course too poor to be able to afford total uselessness.
A middle class can be almost anything, as long as it's an empty superstition. They like to mimic the form of something useful, while ensuring it is drained of all discipline. The form of inconvenience without any actual inconvenience. They like email jobs and hate the trades precisely because paper pushing is a waste of time. I low key think factories were pushed out of America because factory jobs got to be known as middle-class, but middle-classers hated having something useful to do, and needed the factories shipped off so they had an excuse not to work there.
Having excuses is a major middle-class industry. Doing something on your own initiative is verboten, it's all about having no (apparent) choice. You would think they would notice that lords have tremendous initiative, but that would be inconvenient, so they somehow manage not to.
Middle classers always strike me as ridiculously fragile. They often throw tantrums at the slightest thing out of place. They genuinely can't handle it, after all. They immediately get lost when confronted with the slightest deviation from a pre-defined spec. They call them 'negative' emotions because they crumble at the slightest hint of them.
If you're very clever you can trick the middle class into doing something useful by scamming them into thinking it's useless. However, the delusion requires constant maintenance, lest they notice there's a beneficiary of their actions. Doesn't seem worth the bother.
P.S. Many commoners are born to lord families, and they will grow up to be genuine parasites if nobody disowns them. This certainly doesn't help the lower-class perception of lords as useless layabouts. Indeed, there's a double whammy. The commoners pay more attention to other commoners, because they're easy to understand, and tend to disregard the genuine lords, resulting in partial invisibility. Instrument error.
5 comments:
i dont follow the logic on why they specifically try to be useless all the time but it is definitely true.
Scene: being forced to be totally useless, i.e. doing schoolwork.
Me: "This is an unforgivable slight on my honour. I swear undying vengeance." (Funny, but not a joke.)
Middle class: "Yay! We have an excuse to be useless!"
The things lords do seem useless to the middle class, like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. Or just changing things to be a dick. "Wash your hands before surgery." "The fuck would we do that for? Are you calling me dirty? I'm not dirty!" "Do it, or you're fired." "What a fucking jerk."
The middle class are striver, i.e. they have megalomania and think they deserve to be lords. To achieve this, they try to look useless the way lords do, via doing actually useless things.
Originally doctors refused to wash their hands because it was useless. Accidentally reacted like normal people do at first. Now, they refuse to wash their hands precisely because the use has been properly explained to them. Hospitals lack medicine on purpose; doctors largely do the job for signalling purposes, and patients likewise visit for the same reason. The first and only goal of a doctor is to avoid being confused with a ditch-digger, who has, you know, usefulness metrics. His boss wants results.
things lords do seem useless: ok
do things that seem useless because superior people do them: ok
do things that are useless and specifically avoid things that are known to be useful that can be determined to be the real reason lords are lords: ?
do the former two just override the last one? is that the argument?
it seems true for me due to RAM limits. currently gw is special drops week. special drops worth some amount. i run a few farms, not that many drops, check prices, prices aren't that good. conclusion: special drops aren't worth farming. but it was obvious "i run a few farms" could've been fewer and the conclusion made quicker, had it not been for the original idea at the outset, "but it's supposed to be good", which overrode the real-time returns that were the point in the first place, "it's not that good".
1: admitting that use can come from [the things lords do] would force the middle-classer to admit they're screwing up.
2: admitting they're screwing up would mean understanding how they screwed up. Revenge is Sour: if they could figure that out, they wouldn't screw up in the first place.
1+2: "I haven't done anything wrong. It's all executive meddling."
3: noticing the use, even having admitted it is possible, means looking beyond the shallowest surface appearance.
The middle class cannot determine that lords are lords for a reason.
If doctors could work out on their own that they need to wash their hands, they wouldn't have had to be whipped into doing it. They would have already been doing it.
Correction: originally doctors refused to wash their hands because it would mean admitting any part of them is anything but pristine. Diseases are low-status, obviously only low-status folk spread disease, see? Low resolution thinking: high-status things are perfectly high-status, low-status things are perfectly low-status.
Doesn't even occur to them they could possibly be a disease vector, unless they, like, didn't go to church on sunday, or otherwise broke previous narcissistic rules.
hmmm
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