Need perfect work

1.

A general American self-perception of middleclasshood is easily verifiable. Ask Americans to what social class they belong, and with few exceptions the reply is, “middle class.” Try it. However incongruous this perception may be with circumstances, this belief is seldom questioned. I maintain the notion is absurd. Few people in America are truly middleclass by any reasonable set of standards.

For example, U.S. Presidents and candidates now talk about “saving the middle class” by creating jobs in factories. But exactly when and how did factory workers become middle class? And since when have the entrepreneurial middle classes needed to have low-level jobs created for them? How have the sons and daughters of yesterday’s manual and clerical workers come to regard themselves as middle class? Can it be that virtually everybody has become middle class, with the possible exception of those who live under bridges? Who, then, does all the work in this society?

No doubt in past decades working lower class status has been partly euphemized into “information professional”, “technician” or other quasi-professional designations, this style of work often being done in cubicles rather than “on the line,” but other than mechanization, little appreciable difference seems to exist in the alienated nature of the labor, nor its rewards. No more than boring holes in engine blocks, the shoveling of other people’s information has not been demonstrated as the way to prosperity, independence, health, secure enjoyment of pleasures, friendship, good family or virtue, the traditional components of happiness (Aristotle, 38). At best, with prudence, “a living” may be derived. Hope for happiness passes to the next generation, for retirement in the working classes is often a harbinger of death rather than dreamed-for independence.

Nowadays many sons and daughters have college degrees. Nevertheless this does not land them on the board of directors. Nor will they likely become CEOs, nor marry into the CEO’s family. Exemplifying the definition of social class as a group of people whose children tend to intermarry (Lippmann, 1922), they would do well to partner with teachers, police officers, or even university bureaucrats, i.e., “somebody with a decent job.” But they may have to settle for cocktail waitresses or bartenders, whose dowries will consist of car payments and credit card bills. Under any set of circumstances their children will probably not be attending Harvard, the bastion of the bourgeoisie. The couple will both work for money rather than fulfillment. Holding a 30-year mortgage, never more than a bit ahead of expenses, perpetually buying, seldom owning, economically fragile, only a few weeks of sickness or unemployment would be disastrous. Yet both will think of themselves as middle class. So will their children in turn, waiting tables while attending college, and becoming functionally indentured servants, debt slaves, via government-sponsored loans called “financial aid.” The amount of outstanding student loan debt is approximately $1.0 trillion, the average graduate owes $25K, and exceeds total credit card debt in America. Moreover, student loan debt resembles homicide in that there is no statute of limitations: it cannot be erased by bankruptcy, and even government disability checks are subject to garnishment to repay it. No doubt driven by the pressures and a high social value placed upon the appearance of middleclasshood, universities have adapted by accepting and retaining marginal or failing students who are not employable or capable in many cases of maintaining the 2.0 GPA required for graduation at most schools, and by pushing student loan financial aid programs, all of which is paid directly to university coffers. The failures, dropouts and many unmotivated liberal graduates (i.e., waiters and waitress) finish their university experience with onerous debt. All in all, this constitutes a booming subprime educational market, the fiscal scandal that awaits the next big government bailout.

In hope of gaining a deeper understanding of the middleclasshood phenomenon, I used focus group methodologies to explore perceptions of social class held by students at an urban commuter university in the American Rustbelt. Beyond confirming that virtually all would regard themselves as “middle class,” I wished to explore the meanings they attached to being middle class. Why did they hold this view? How did they acquire it? Did it seem consistent with their circumstances? What were its apparent functions and effects?

I confess that my findings still leave me wondering. Preview of the more detailed results found later in this article, of 320 students in the study, 95 percent perceived themselves as “middle class” and two percent as higher class. Virtually all worked while attending school, or in times off, many at more than one job in retail, food, service industries and “work-study.” Most carried substantial student loan indebtedness in addition to credit card and car notes. They strongly resisted any imputation of lowerclasshood: even food stamp recipients identified themselves as middle class. When it was suggested that most present, including the facilitator, might actually be lower class because of working for a living at wages or salary, many argued this could not be true. They became defensive. Discussions turned immediately toward the moral stigma of being lower class, a thing dreaded. Lower class people had “problems” with drugs, crime, skills, education, “trashiness” and living hand-to-mouth. But most saw no moral or competency differences between their “middle class” selves and the upper classes except for the luck of money and possessions. Strangely, those few who identified as lower class made more money on average. Some became angry when it was suggested that “real” middle class people had trust funds, employed servants, did not work at hourly menial jobs and did not generally matriculate (or profess) at our university, and that they might be “middle class” only in the sense of “middle lower classes.” They obviously did not appreciate trifling with their middleclasshood. When asked what they would do if they woke up one morning and somehow found themselves lower class, they sprang into imagined remedial action: go to school, study really hard, save money, get an extra job—paradoxically, the very things most were doing already. They associated class mainly with money. Some thought that earning more than minimum wage was middle class.

2.

Let me express wonderment first. All the above begs many questions. How do we define class? Have not definitions changed over time, for is not America an unfolding dream of social mobility, wherein class distinctions blur? Saying, “I’m middle class,” may merely be equivalent to, “I’m neither rich nor poor, but kind of in between” As such, class perceptions may be merely relativistic self-assessments, a beguiling artifact of survey methodology, where respondents “guesstimate” their social location.

As a propaganda scholar, though, I tend to look at widespread belief systems as propagandas of socialization or psychological adjustment. Propagandas of socialization convey a way of life, of culturally correct behavior and thought. Such beliefs disseminate and root because they speak to universal needs, desires and purposes. Such functionalist analysis has its limits, yes, but it seems that middleclasshood helped these students fundamentally interpret the world and their role in it in a way that assuages anxiety and fears. People readily accept such propagandas because they need ego-soothing explanations to counteract anxiety and meaninglessness. In many ways, such socialization propaganda feeds needs traditionally satisfied by religion (Ellul, 1965).

Flatly stated, as a scholar of propaganda techniques and effects, I regard the perception of middleclasshood as a distortion of reality on the part of most Americans who hold it. Rather than veridical, true thought, it appears more an assertion, a soothing constellation of explanatory beliefs that help maintain attitudes of inclusive social efficacy. But it is also a manifestation of magical thinking for the conjuring of material advancement. Prayer. All this seems parcel to a broad cultural level phenomenon, a transformation of class and social mobility perceptions that has enfolded America after the Second World War (see Mills, 1953; Packard 1961; Fussell, 1983), since the beginning of the Age of Television.

In a sense though, the idea that middleclasshood may be a mass delusion should not surprise. Solomon Asch (1951) demonstrated convincingly under experimental conditions how easy it was to distort reality perceptions of individuals through simple group pressure. In The Crowd (1896) Gustave Le Bon essentially founded the field of social psychology through his examinations of mass visions, contagious suggestibilities and his law of psychological unity of crowds. His observations informed 20th century mass propagandas, and beliefs, heavily influencing the propaganda techniques of the Nazis, e.g., the mind-bending mass functions documented in Leni Riefenstahl’s famous film Triumph of the Will (1935). Carl Jung (1979) discussed mass visions in times of collective uncertainty in his analysis of the 1950s era UFO phenomenon (by no means the first widely held delusion in history). Articles appearing regularly and currently in the very popular Women’s World magazine pander to a widespread belief in angels. So, asked in another way, why should one expect American popular beliefs concerning class to be delusion-exempt? Mass visions may well be the historical rule rather than the exception.

So what functions does middleclasshood serve for individuals? Ego defense or anxiety management? Favorable self-comparison? Does it lubricate social adjustment? Certainly a self-perception of lowerclasshood is not for the faint-hearted. Such a perceiver stands on the brink, socially, psychologically and even spiritual, while middleclasshood stands a comfortable remove back.

Regarding possible consequences, if middleclasshood is a harmless social delusion, then let’s dream on. But I don’t believe it harmless, quite the reverse. Perhaps much unpleasant work gets done that might otherwise require coercion. Workers can thereby feel they are more than merely hewers of wood and drawers of water. Recollect the dystopian class system of Brave New World, wherein Deltas and Betas were socialized into an ego-defensive complacency (Huxley, 1932). Middleclasshood perhaps alleviates social alienation, constituting a psychological claim of having arrived at a significant social destination. It may simply accompany technological and social progress: grandfather was a laborer but grandchild is a called a professional: same dance, different tune. Of course misperceivers might be “middling” in the sense their situation seems the dominant mode of American existence.

But wondering about the implications for those who teach and conduct social scientific and humanistic research, university professors, whose responsibility consists not merely of conveying technical facts—but of participating and helping to draw their students into an ongoing philosophic and developmental dialectic. Here I perceive ill effects. How does one instruct someone who thinks they have already arrived? What impetus exists to think actively or creatively in regard to self-development, when one already “belongs” to a comfortably accomplished group? What, beyond mere entertainment, would be seen as useful, essential? Middleclasshood implies comfort and the comfortable need not enlarge their sphere. Middleclasshood’s passivity may preclude developmental self-assessments and adjustments fundamental to higher education, which is in large part self-education undertaken beneath the dialectical umbrella of the university. The relative social efficacy of being truly middle class is something altogether different from “middleclasshood” and will be discussed below.

Passivity injures because failure to consider life’s problems does not forestall—but increases their destructive power. Frustration follows because the deluded do not work to develop the tools and philosophic equipment to lead happy lives. Who does not know persons who, despite technical, professional educations, careers, incomes and pretensions of middleclasshood, have “run up against the wall” of commonplace problems and been utterly destroyed?

Psychoanalysts describe neurosis as an ego defense mechanism linked to a claim for unworked for merit, recognition and status (Horney, 1950), i.e., magical thinking. Neuroses spiral downward because the more the claim is rebuffed or ignored, the more elaborate become the ego defenses, drawing more and more energy. Loss of personal efficacy results, blighted at its source—the creative individual. The psychoanalytic movement is itself fundamentally a product of the true middle class episteme.

A cultural-level effect of middleclasshood may be aggregation of millions of blighted personalities into a neurotically needy and deluded body politic. “Saving the American middle class,” as a current theme in political mass propaganda, aligns with the ego defensive needs of millions of “middleclass” voters seeking magical solutions.

For most Americans middleclasshood is probably a gross misperception—from my definitional vantage point—and I will, below, support this argument with theory, history and empirical findings. Further I suspect the misperception is harmful, albeit pleasurable or anxiety reducing in the short term, for it contributes to pain and frustration in the long run. And here I merely speculate based on observation and a historical knowledge of class as found in literature.

Moving along in this catalog of my wonderment, middleclasshood at its motivational heart also recalls the cargo cult, a quasi-religious social phenomenon recurring in colonial situations. Cargo cults, remarkably alike, have occurred when technically developed Western powers have rolled over undeveloped native cultures. The classic example is New Guinea, where virtually stone-age natives saw for the first time airplanes and other technological paraphernalia. Giant silver birds would deliver rich cargo to the Europeans: jeeps, rifles, food and other obviously magical devices. This demoralized indigenous people, who hitherto had found their tools and belief system satisfactory. They stopped working at the traditional pursuits that sustained them and focused on adapting the new brand of magic, borrowing both the religious and administrative magic that they were able to observe. Millenarian cults sprang up: a messianic god-savior in the volcano would send giant silver birds to the natives, loaded with rich cargo. Colonial officials were astonished to find imitation administrative compounds made from sticks, and natives, dressed in cast off western clothing, going through the motions of office work and typing. Imitation airstrips were cleared around airplane effigies. Rather than into sensible work, hope’s energy drained into ritual (Lanternari, 1963; Cavendish 1970) in a distorted mimicry.

The dark interior of the American continent may contain the largest ever cargo cult. Viewed thus, middleclasshood reads as an attempt to harness powerful class magic. Lacking knowledge, technique, connections, breeding, veridical thought and capital, colonized by corporatism and propagandizing elites, the lower classes approach the world of middle classes via the Universal American Religion of Consumerism. Consumption functions as the sympathetic magic of imitation. American couples buying their groceries with credit cards may have two new leased cars on the newly poured driveway of house obtained by interest-only mortgage on the assumption of refinancing when the principal becomes due. Easy credit combined with interest slavery to create the particleboard palace, a vinyl-sided oblation to middleclassdom. Many ritually consume higher education to get that “good job.” Such students appear to be going through the motions, interested only in what questions will be on the exam, the correctly mumbled incantation, without a lick of interest in comprehension or work as a creative process.

3.

Social class is definable with great precision, but definitional validity is another matter. Income is the most popular, convenient, precise, and possibly most misleading measure. No one doubts an association between class and income, but not all variance in class is explained by variance in income. A person does not plunge downward by earning $50,000 one year and $49,000 the next. Similarly, overtime pay does not vault a factory worker into the middle classes. The U.S. government defines a poverty level graduated to family size. But it too misleads. A graduate student living in university family housing earns little and yet may not be lower class in origins, outlook or destination. Whatever “official” listings may say, $100,000 annually in a double-income family is not necessarily middle class especially when earned in salary thralldom. Nevertheless, when people discuss class, they speak of income. But an example of conceptual drift over time, in the 1960s Nelson Rockefeller estimated $100K annual income would be considered middle class, equaling about $700K today.

A more valid definition need be multidimensional. Tropman (1998) suggested class as a function a stratification index based on money, power, prestige, information, and occupation. Similarly Lasswell (1934), the founder of modern propaganda research, discussed class as deference earned by power, money, or expertise in socially valued endeavors. American marketers use nuanced categories such as Pick-Up Trucks & Shotguns or Pools & Patios to pin down class. Coleman, Rainwater and McClelland’s (1978) sophisticated multidimensional index included occupational status, educational background of spouses, retirement expectations, club memberships and neighborhood choice, with six classes ranging from lower lower to upper upper.

Traditional distinctions retain explanatory merit, some older than Aristotle. The lower classes worked, which included artisans and craftsmen; the upper (noble) classes owned and ruled by right; and citizen (middle) classes rose up somehow in the lacunae. In more modern times, middle classes traditionally were mercantilists, entrepreneurs, publishers, industrialists, speculators and capitalists—but not the mere shopkeepers or grocers relegated to tradesmen’s entrance around back of middle class houses. The middle classes did not manually labor at a demeaning craft or art. Students in this study would call such people “rich.” The middle classes manage affairs, in part because they have tangible interests to manage, put together deals and ventures, serve as chief executives of major universities and associations, and otherwise carry on a conversation amongst themselves called “civil society.” They were once upon a time gentlemen and ladies—terms fallen from grace. Their efficacy is through knowledge, social connections, capital and the confluence of all these things. No gentleman or lady was an accountant, clerk, schoolteacher or salesman, or vice versa. They employed servants. Certain classes of people, middle and upper, had servants while certain other classes were servants, lower. Professor J.R.R. Tolkien, even before enrichment by book royalties, had a day servant (Grotta, 1978). The sociology of Lord of the Rings is based on class distinctions. Tolkien, that great imaginer, apparently could not imagine a world without. The Bagginses, gentlehobbits, had gardener Samwise, descended from a line of servants. Samwise by then becoming a manservant improved his station in life (Tolkien, 1954).

Traditional British distinctions seem on the face more valid than American perceptions. A British student once told me: “The middle classes are the people who dress for dinner.” The British earmarked classes by accent, e.g., Shaw’s Pygmalion, which seems to have made little impression on current Americans. Its American film popularization, My Fair Lady (Cukor, 1964), ends improbably with middle class Professor Higgins taking up with cockney flower girl Miss Doolittle, who although now speaks like a duchess, one wonders what her and the Professor could ever have in common of which to speak.

Contemporary U.S. class accents also speak loudly to those with ears. The east side factory worker identifies his origins as soon as he opens his mouth. Fussell (1983) discussed American indicators of class such as vocabulary, furniture and even body type, with his “proles” prone to a muscular obesity and sentimentality in language; his humorous illustrations contrast the hulking prole to the epicene middle class physique.

The term bourgeois strikes near the traditional mark. Petit bourgeois scrabble for higher station trying to keep up a pretense of not manually working. Marxist theory identifies bourgeois capitalists and proletariat workers, the exploiters and exploited. Gramsci, a Marxian derivative, ponders the “organic capacities of the working class,” which he saw as spasmodic at best left on its own: “the masses are static, like an immense body with a tiny head” (1926), requiring herding by radical intellectuals such as himself. The term proletariat is scrupulously avoided in American business, education, administration and political communication, despite having much explanatory leverage.

To be clear, the lower classes are the workers and people comprising the immense lower 7/8ths or so of the pyramid. Low and mid level management types are themselves underlings. The middle classes run or generate bureaucracies rather than staff them. The upper classes are not a general concern, as they cross few people’s orbits; one merely infers their existence from their gravitational force.

Class may also be viewed a social-psychological cage wherein people exist in a state of limited perception. Lower class people marry and associate with others much like themselves. Hence they know virtually nothing of the upper class, distant and not directly perceivable, and but little of the middle classes whose world begins at their limits of perception. They know too much perhaps, about their cage-neighbors. Others may reside at the cage bottom in conditions not so pleasant.

Defining lower class by what it is not, beyond money or capital it lacks independence. No bus driver, technician, plumber, or repairperson is middle class. The same is true of teachers at the elementary, high school or community college levels. Middle class status for most American university professors is highly suspect—based on my immediate peers, who resemble clerks more than entrepreneurs, I outright reject the notion—although middle class professors must exist somewhere. The more that modern universities become like manufactories, the more the claim erodes. The notion that any professional teacher of children is middle class—a task often reserved for poor but respectable women and men—is ridiculous. The middle classes are not nursemaids; nor shepherds, neither of beasts nor children; nor do they work for subsistence wages. They do, however, employ nursemaids, shepherds and menials.

A person can make a good deal of money and still be lower class. There exists the possibility of material success and comfort for the lower class in America, which no doubt contributes to widespread confusion about class identity, but of which I heard an Indian immigrant say, “It’s a great country where even poor people are fat.” Fussell (1983) describes successful “high proles,” whom he says are often among the most interesting persons with whom to talk because of their lack of class pretensions.

Middle class gentlemen and ladies enjoy nourishment generally unavailable to the working classes. William James wrote:

Compare the gentleman with the poor artisan or tradesman of the city. During the adolescence of the former, objects appropriate to his growing interests, bodily and mental, were afforded as fast as the interest awoke, and, as a consequence, he is armed and equipped at every angle to meet the world. Sports came to the rescue and completed his education where real things were lacking. He has tasted of the essence of every side of human life, being sailor, hunter, athlete, scholar, fighter, talker, dandy, man of affairs, etc., all in one. Over the city boy’s youth no such golden opportunities were hung, and in his manhood no desires for most of them exist (James, 1892, xxiv).

C. Wright Mills (1953) eroded this gentlemanly conceptualization. His saw the emergence of white-collar managerial class after the Second World War as a new American middle class, and the “old middle classes” as largely defunct. But I think him wrong here. Arguably, he was describing the emergence of new class perceptions, not class, accompanied by substantial improvements in the general standard of living, style of work and intra-class mobility in the form of new administrative-bureaucratic jobs. Workers dressed differently and acquired new tastes and pretensions. But what in this process would transform James’ tradesman into the gentleman? Certainly not the stint at business school where he learned “white collar” skills. This remains largely true today—where for the most part American university education is seen as training for work.

James distinguished, in effect, two cognitive worlds: perceivers, and non-perceivers. They navigate by distinct social cartographies (Patrick, 2008). The middle classes are aware of patterns and relationships, institutional and otherwise, allowing them a high degree of independence and control over their own lives and others. The lower classes live on a different plane, not barren, especially in the U.S., but in relative cognitive deprivation and consequent inefficacy.

C. G. Jung alluded to class as a cognitive state when he pooh-poohed the role of mere money in his early formative professional years, its absence the least of problems. But Jung was bred to knowledge of social institutions and networks that the worker perceives, if at all, as hulking structures and elusive chitchat beyond his ken.

Pierre Bourdieu elaborated three forms of capital, economic, cultural and social, that constitute class. Economic capital, the only sort many perceive, needs no explanation. Cultural capital manifests in “long-lasting dispositions of body and mind,” paraphernalia such as books and dictionaries, and in “institutionalized” states, such as college degrees that certify its presence. Social capital is membership in a “durable network” of “mutual acquaintanceship and recognition” (Bourdieu, 1983, 3). Regarding economic capital, its lack is the reason for vast churning financial aid office at universities. Regarding cultural capital, its lack produces conversations of the sort I once overheard in Rustbelt City where two working class mothers discussed buying “opera music” so their babies could “grow up to be smart.” So many students lack social capital that American consumer universities must strongly feature career counseling and job fairs.

A revealing exposition of traditional social class perceptions is the ingenious Flatland (Abbot, 1884). The book’s imaginary narrator hales from a two-dimensional world inhabited by various sorts of geometric shapes made up of straight lines. Social class in this world signifies an individual’s origins and likely destiny, and manifests outwardly in morphology. The more perfect, rational and developed, i.e., the higher in class, the more regular, more-or-less equal length sides the being possesses. Thus an entity approaching the shape of perfect isosceles triangle is higher class than one having unequal sides, an irregular acute triangle very low class. The more acute the angle between the two longest sides, the lower the class, for that is where the brain is located. The lower classes are used for labor such as hauling, soldiering and police work. The very lowest criminal elements are spear-like in angular acuteness, and can easily pierce and kill a higher form. God is of course a sort of perfect circle made up of an infinite number of infinitesimal regular straight lines. Females, mere straight lines, embody the biological irrationality accorded to them in Victorian-Freudian times: potentially dangerous, i.e., the sharp ends, limited, females needed watching over. The narrator, A. Square, is fairly well up in the overall class structure, although not especially high in the middle classes. An almost regular square, his morphology marks good character based on generations of respectable self-improvement. An attorney, he hopes that his offspring may continue to improve, perhaps some day to regular hexagonal shapes like the judges, or to octagons, or perhaps even higher yet toward polygonal perfection.

Abbot’s intent was apparently didactic, both socially and geometrically. Regarding class, he merely moralized on what people of quality presumably already knew. The lower elements were crude, disorganized and impulsively violent, and improving one’s station—i.e., social class—took much time, dedicated work, practiced virtue, careful attention and was a process of work that spanned generations. Money and status were merely epiphenomena of class, not causes.

4.

Looking at the class perceptions of students who helped inform this study, the 320 students made up 21 focus groups. After asking if they would volunteer their views on social class, an anonymous questionnaire was administered followed by group discussion. The questionnaire asked about social class, sources of this knowledge, employment, hourly wages, household income, student loans and demographics. All were enrolled in general education classes prerequisite for various academic majors.

Focus groups began with general and moved to specific questions, e.g., what social-economic class you belong to: upper class, middle class or lower class? What’s are the differences between classes? How do you know what class you belong to? What would you do if you woke up one morning and found yourself part of the lower class? Non-directive responses and probes were used frequently. Eventually more directive questions were asked about specific sources of this knowledge, e.g., media, schools, parents, etc. Other questions concerned attributes of the lower, middle and upper classes, e.g., What makes a person lower class? How is an upper class person different from a middle class person? Lastly, groups were asked about the possibility they might not be as middle class as they seemed to think, e.g., How can you or your parents be middle class if you have to do manual or office work for a living? Toward the end of the approximately 60-minute sessions questions were intentionally provocative, e.g., Don’t middle class people have trust funds? If you were really middle class wouldn’t you be at a better university?

Approximately 95 percent identified themselves as middle class. Only about two percent identified as lower class, the rest as upper. Average age was 21.3 years; female, 55 percent; 87 percent white; 67 percent worked an average of 23.1 hours weekly; average hourly wage $7.95; 65 percent owed college loans, average of $24K; annual family income average, $84K, ranging from $15k to $350k. This latter person, who had identified as upper class, also reported earning $6 hourly, an amount suggesting “work study” aid.

One qualified “middle class” status by saying she was really “lower middle class” and receiving government food stamps did not mean that she was lower class. Several others located themselves on the bottom edge of middle class. Two young men who placed themselves in the rare “lower class” category seemed to take pride in it; said one, “I lived it.” To almost all, however, their membership in the middle classes seemed so self-evident they were surprised to have it questioned.

Describing lower class, questionnaire answers included: povershed (sic), lazy, welfare, blue collar, low income, needing government assistance, struggling to get by, low level of education, lack of morals and values, survival mentality, jobs that don’t require much, you have to resort to welfare and other stuff to survive, low income housing, may be illerate (sic), working for minimum wage, own one car, rent a house or apartment, collecting unemployment, on welfare or living on the street, live in run-down area, food stamps, poor, broke and uneducated, not as many rights and material things, inner city, buying only what you need, people kind of look down on you, more violence, bankrupt, they have factory jobs and often a tough time keeping them.

Moral dimensions also surfaced in the focus groups: trash, drug problems, jail, lazy, don’t work, have problems, kind of fucked up, etc. Most felt superior. Asked what they would do it they somehow woke up one day and found themselves lower class, many believed they could will their way up by merely getting a extra job or two. One said, “Find myself a nice rich doctor to sleep with and support me,” others, “Kill myself” and “Cry.” Some mentioned “studying really hard” and “getting a good education” as a way back to middle classes, implying, one wonders, that perhaps they felt themselves presently pursuing a bad one.

Some became agitated when it was suggested it might be unrealistic to think they could become middle class even if they had two jobs, for they would still be working lower class—just working harder; or that even though they might eventually achieve respectable, successful working class status, e.g., a plumber, a sales rep, they would be lower class still. This also provoked animated discussions.

They often asked me, as facilitator, about class in terms of money, about the dividing lines. I told them I honestly did not know, but personally believed the income charts in the marketing and sociology texts to be nonsense. I shared some of the traditional ideas discussed earlier, giving examples of middle class persons, and suggested that it was unlikely that any of us were middle class. Often they explored what it meant to be rich; if the middle classes were so comparatively well off, then who were the rich? Athletic and entertainment celebrities were named, especially “Oprah”

Regarding classes above them, however, students on the whole acknowledged no difference except good luck and material things. Work, skill or knowledge did not figure in. No moral differences existed.

Middleclasshood seemed a matter of personal honor, and being called or perceived as lower class, a slight. Many associated “class” with usages such as “He’s got no class.” They had difficulty in reconciling themselves to the notion of a successful, admirable lower class person who is not poor, but works intelligently and enjoys the rewards of labor, e.g., the tradesman who lives well. This idea didn’t seem part of the general cognitive stock. Many distinguished status on the basis of consumer behavior, the pithiest statement: “The lower classes have to go without anything, the middle classes can afford what they need and the upper classes can get anything they want.”

Regarding origins of class knowledge, many gave virtually ontological responses, “I just know” or “Self thought” (sic). One seemed to notice her own assumption of middleclasshood for the first time on the questionnaire: “I just know, which is odd.” Responses included: My parents told me; looked around; in school when we learned about the different classes; how the government or society displays each class (sic); looking around I figured it out myself; and the astonishing everybody in my town is middle class. In several groups persons told of exposure to an apparently a standardized lesson plan: a football-shaped diagram, its long axis aligned vertically and divided it into three sections via horizontal lines, represented the proportions of the classes in America. The small ends represented the smallish proportions of upper and lower classes, the swollen middle, the middle class. A pyramid drawn alongside, similarly divided into three horizontal layers by means of lines, represented the class structure of the rest of the world—an infinitesimal upper class, a small middle class and a huge lower class beneath. America was allegedly the only country where the largest social class is the middle. Although absurd on its face, as socialization propaganda this lesson seems to have been effective.

Some learned from parents. Many reported comparing themselves with media representations. But many simply knew; they could give no specific source. This might be also a cumulative media or propaganda effect, by logical elimination, for from where else might this knowledge come? A senior PR practitioner I know claims that after being “marketed to” for their lifetimes by media appeals designed to flatter self worth, “Now everybody believes they are somebody.”

Approximately one third attributed their knowledge to relativistic comparisons. Common statements were, “I just figured I’m not homeless but I don’t live in a mansion so I must be in the middle,” and “I guessed.” Locating one’s self in the middle of a scale is a fairly common survey artifact. A few wondered if their parents were middle class but not themselves, based on the parent’s income.

The few who said they were upper class were, at most, lower middle class or petit bourgeoisie, but upper-lower might be a better estimate. One said his parents owned a grocery store and worked hard there every day so he didn’t have to work while at school. Traditionally this would signify ambitious lower class trades people. His report that his schoolmates were often “kind of crude,” highlights that major distinctions may exist even between the “respectable” and the less than respectable lower classes, e.g., the gulf between skilled and unskilled workers. A participant identified as upper class even though his reported family income was $50K annually.

A dozen or more participants later continued discussions with me at odd times. Some told of talking to a parent after the focus group and realizing that they probably were not middle class. One asked his grandfather, who was very amused and asked how the young man had ever gotten the crazy idea that the family was ever middle class. Other parents defended their middleclasshood, saying they had worked hard to achieve it. One father even claimed upper class status, mystifying his son.

Study participants may not have been a representative sample. They have been selected-for by admission processes that may filter out applicants perceiving themselves as low class, hence the high rate of declared middleclassdom. I believe otherwise. In graduate school I encountered students who were on the whole more middle class. In a class of approximately 100 students, a questionnaire revealed an average family income of more than $200K annually; and this was 15 years ago. These students were leagues ahead of Rustbelt’s students in background, sophistication, preparation, expectations, and the sort of opportunities and pastimes they pursued. Few worked. Many had credit cards for which the monthly bill went home to be paid by parents. They moved in a different world: summer internships in New York and DC, management jobs after graduation at major national banks and corporations.

Rustbelt U. students were comparatively fragile. They tended to work at the car wash, restaurants and landscaping services. Many worked 40-hour weeks while attending school. They had serious problems staying in school because of work demands, legal and relational problems. A drunk driving arrest, a minor stupidity to a middle class scion, is to the working class student an overwhelming financial disaster, with forced expenditures of $3,000 or more in legal fees, fines, lost work days, insurance costs and court-mandated “education” that the students refer to as “Drunk School.” Lacking generally in social sophistication and informed mentorship, these students are preyed upon. Lawyers charge them, essentially, for holding their hands in court. One wonders if the university is not preying on some of them, too, driving high enrollment with easy-to-obtain student loan financial aid. Credit card companies set up tables in the student union and give “free” t-shirts to students who sign up. One said the t-shirt was all she had to show for $5,000 in debt. A dismal example of dis-economics, some students dislike my habit of assigning free online custom “course packs” of articles and book chapters instead of an expensive textbook that they can later sell back at a fraction of original price. Because textbooks are charged to financial aid accounts held by the university, the buyback is all the cash they ever see. They would rather owe $100 plus interest in the long term to get $20 in ready cash than read for free. Such desperate behavior contraindicates middle class resilience.

5.

Speculating on middleclasshood effects, first, regarding individual consequences, class misperception may lead to an inability to recognize and negotiate the very real class barriers that exist in employment and education circles. Analytic and communication skills required to negotiate barriers remain undeveloped if the barriers are beyond the threshold of perception or if there is a sense of entitlement. As put earlier, if one has already arrived, what motivation is there to work effectively toward a higher, long-term goal?

The belief undermines veridical thought—i.e., the ability to recognize true circumstances and work at deploying one’s talents effectively in response. Phenomenologists be damned, there is a world out there with hard surfaces and sharp edges. And while life can sometimes be a pretty bad business, lack of veridical thought makes it worse.

It could be argued that the misperception is beneficial through increasing self-esteem and confidence. Self-confident ignorance, thus armed, moves out into the world where otherwise it might fear to go. Maybe. As a professor, though, I have seen unhappy effects when high self-esteem combines with low work or ability levels.

A major apparent effect, middleclasshood encourages an injurious level of consumerism—where a ritual of buying evokes the Spirit of Prosperity. This cargo cult like aspect of middleclasshood is pure sympathetic magic: “If I buy it, even on credit, it will come,” a poor substitute for work and prudent reality testing.

At the social level, the misperception seems to be hurrying, or perhaps completing, the erosion of many American liberal arts universities. Mass higher education flows with the market and middleclasshood, the dominant mode, is in the market for magical solutions. A few years may see the triumph of the consumer-model corporate university, run top-down by professional administrators, without tenured faculty, as substance is irrelevant in this mass market. A relatively few prestige liberal art universities for true middle and talented lower classes may remain. But the mass market seeks big magic that works on the instant, more or less, not the quiet sort of rational magic that informs the good life or the dynamic of civil society. For example, some large introductory philosophy classes at Rustbelt U. no longer require readings and discussions of texts that demand work to be understood. Instead they discuss pop issues. How does the student feel about carbon footprints or sustainability? Students indicate responses with “clickers.” The more consumer-driven higher education becomes, the more it resembles the cargo cult. I do not imagine that merely being middle class conveys any automatic understanding of philosophy—or anything else—but Enlightenment Age middle classes created the rational engine that produced the great works of the modern era, technical, social and political. Civil society and the liberal arts exist in a perceptual blind spot to middleclasshood.

One wonders how much of the current national economic crisis results from rampant middleclasshood. For years I have heard boasting (a lower class characteristic, by the way) about booming retirement plans, house investments, and mutual funds from people who didn’t seem to have any business speculating at such levels. This “signifying” seemed not the talk of knowledgeable investors, but rather consumers of plans sold by predatory firms. Such people would have been better pursuing more peasant-like survival strategies. Rather than mortgaged stick-palaces in new developments, bought on credit and speculation that prices would rise even higher, they should have held on to money and goods in more tangible forms.

As a propaganda of socialization, however, middleclasshood comes into its own. If the 95 percent rate of middleclasshood found in this study means anything, it suggests this particular American socialization propaganda has been effective. America: the place where almost everybody is somebody.

A great American export is socialization propaganda embodied in entertainment. It is no wonder that immigrants still teem to America. It is a commonplace that such immigrants work hard. This is because immigrants often do not regard themselves as a privileged middle class and have, therefore, ambitions informed by well grounded reality testing mechanisms. I have seen many examples of this at the university, where the native born so-called middle class American behaves in slug-like fashion, while the immigrant works. Middleclasshood often equates with torpor. In this it differs from the spirit of social advancement and opportunity.

A worrisome aspect of middleclassdom is the empowerment of demagoguery. “Saving the American middle class” resonates, although the income levels that the politicians bandy about seem solidly lower class. This seems a national lie, an unwholesome flattery at best, magical thinking rather than creative hard work. How does one save an illusory middle class? Add more illusion? The illusion was a partial effect of the astonishingly strong industrial economy and social mobilization of World War II and its aftermath. The entire operation has been running on promises and inertia for years. With greater demand for fantastical solutions—maybe a national law to make everyone middle class—the outcome is anyone’s guess, but it will involve even more propaganda, be assured.

Or perhaps the bough has finally broken.

6.

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