Joe
Bageant makes the point in Deer Hunting With Jesus that the working
class of the US (and perhaps of the world) are largely driven by fear.
In explaining how and what they think he makes clear what it is they
are afraid of:
Fears of the Working/Poor/Uneducated Class:
- Unemployment:
Not having, or losing, a job; not having enough; losing their home --
When you live close to the edge, destitution is never far away.
- Authority: When the authorities (the boss, the government, the police) treat you like you're nothing, you learn not to trust them.
- Illness:
When you can't afford to be sick, and can't afford to look after loved
ones if they're sick, and you know what it's like to be uninsured or
trapped in a crappy long-term care or nursing home, the thought of
illness is chilling.
- 'Evil' People:
Evangelical preachers teach you that people are either good or evil,
and that foreigners and liberals (who never give you the time of day)
and people without 'family values' and people who aren't 'like' you are
satan's pawns, and must be vanquished.
- Being Ripped Off: The uneducated are prey for scam artists, and know how people can use money, coercion and influence to take advantage of them.
- Crime: Most
of the victims of crime are in poor areas, because that's where the
people desperate enough to be criminals are, and where law enforcement
is most lax.
- Losing Hope: When
you're constantly struggling, you can't lose hope; when your country is
mired in a hopeless war and the news is all about layoffs and crime,
it's easy to do so.
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In Lakoff's
terms, these fears explain the conservative worldview pretty well. If
you're driven by fear, and these are things you fear, the 'strict
father' approach to living, to raising a family, and to voting that
Lakoff describes makes a lot of sense:
- Promoting strict-father morality in general (good vs evil, rules to be obeyed, strict rules on right vs wrong)
- Promoting the virtues of self-discipline, responsibility for one's own actions and success, and self-reliance
- Upholding the morality of reward and punishment (including
preventing interference with the pursuit of self-interest by
self-disciplined, self-reliant people, promoting punishment to uphold
authority, and ensuring punishment for lack of self-discipline)
- Protecting moral people from external evils and upholding the moral order (legitimate authority)
That got me thinking about the rest of us. If we're not part of the working/poor/uneducated class, what class do we belong to?
Joe
defines "working class" as those people who have no power/control over
their jobs: what they do, when they do it, at what price, and how
vulnerable they are to layoffs not connected to their work performance.
The rest of us, other than the tiny elite of super-rich and
super-powerful, he calls the "catering" class -- because they
cater/pander to the elite in return for a higher level of wealth and
control than the "working" class receives.
So I guess that
means that I (and I suspect the majority of readers of this blog) are
members of the catering/affluent/educated class, most of whom, in
Lakoff terms, are liberal-progressives with the 'nurturing parent'
approach to living, to raising a family, and to voting that Lakoff
describes:
- Empathetic behaviour and promoting fairness
- Helping those who cannot help themselves
- Protecting those who cannot protect themselves
- Promoting the virtue of fulfillment in life
- Nurturing and strengthening oneself
Are
we, too, driven to this worldview and these approaches to living by our
fears? I'd like to believe we are less driven by fear than those in the
working/poor/uneducated class, but I'm not so sure. In one sense, we
have more control over our lives and more assets to protect ourselves
with, and more marketable talents. But perhaps because we have more, we
have more to lose, so we are equally driven by fears. What are those
fears?
Having not done the kind of research that Joe has, I can
only speak for myself, but I have a sense that my fears are pretty
common among those I know. My recent period of self-reflection has made
me a bit more aware of what my fears are, and they are:
Fears of the Catering/Affluent/Educated Class:
- Recession: Because
we own more, we are more vulnerable to declines in value of our assets,
and because our work is so tied up in the modern global interrelated
economy, a recession that makes our skills less valuable and basic
survival skills more valuable threatens us more.
- Responsibility:
By virtue of having more control and say in our world, more authority,
we also have more responsibility. But, although this is a controversial
thing to say, I think we're afraid of this responsibility, afraid of
not being able to discharge it well, of letting people down. We long,
many of us, for a simple, responsibility-free life. The idea that this
is civilization's final century is horrific not only because of the
loss and suffering, but because of the guilt of what we might have done
to prevent it.
- Living in the Real World:
Affluence allows us to cut ourselves off from the real world, to live
in communities (and cars) where we are cut off from the rest of the
world, to live inside our own heads, where it's safe and secure. A
brutal 'real' world where the majority love to hunt, accept cruelty and
violence as normal, hate others, and are enthralled by movies and
YouTube videos that show torture, rape and murder is terrifying to us.
- Intimacy:
This is probably a consequence of the fear above. Intimacy involves
emotional vulnerability, and those of us who have been cocooned
emotionally most of our lives and who have experienced, at least once,
the anguish of being emotionally hurt when we have opened ourselves up,
quickly become afraid to repeat the experience.
- War: We
know war never solves anything, never has a winner, and always makes
things worse. Yet we see it everywhere, becoming bloodier all the time.
Machetes used to kill neighbours in Rwanda, torture, rape, burning of
villages, massive theft by gangs and enslavement of children in Darfur
-- we find these things unfathomable and unbearable, contrary to our
notion of humanity.
- Letting Go:
I think educated people find it harder to just accept, to abandon
themselves and their ideas, to let go of what control they have. We are
inherently more anal than those who live close to the edge, by their
wits. Contrary to all logic, Colombians are more happy than Americans,
perhaps because they don't worry about things they have no control
over.
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Those are the things I
am afraid of, anyway. I suspect my fellow educated liberal-progressives
will protest that they don't fear most of these things, but my
observations suggest most of us do. Or maybe I'm just judging my peers
by myself. What do you think?
Joe talks about the "class war"
that's brewing in the US and, perhaps, everywhere. I think these
different fears explain much of the basis for this "war". It's not so
much we hate each other, as much as that we don't know each other, we
fear (and are driven by) completely different things (and each class to
some extent epitomizes the things the other fears), and hence we can't
communicate with each other. And we don't socialize between these
classes enough to begin to understand the divide and start to bridge
the gap.
The chart above, that I explained in my Fire & Ice
article, shows (in bold) the qualities that are increasingly prevalent
among Americans, especially the young (who are, mostly, children of the
growing working class). My sense is that working class fears drive
the propensities in the right quadrants, while the catering class fears
drive the propensities in the left quadrants. What's more, I think the
disappearance of the US middle class (and consequent growth of the
working class) explains why the 'median' profile of Americans is now in
the lower right quadrant, and moving lower and further right, while the
'median' profile of Europeans, where the middle 'catering' class is faring
somewhat better, is still in the centre-left.
And, for those
who, in wondering why with all my new-found self-knowledge and
opportunity to do anything I want to do, what's holding me back, what
I'm afraid of -- now you know.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
