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Comment by s_kilk | Hacker News Reader

A lot of that barely-scraping-by class see themselves as aspirants to the middle and upper classes, which is equal parts laughable and understandable. The term generally applied to this phenomenon is "False Consciousness", as opposed to Class Consciousness.

If they want to identify a parasite class in society, they should be looking up, not down.

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This is precisely true. The ideological currents within bourgeois economy and politics do so much to promote false consciousness. On the other hand, most people do not view themselves as ideological, but is that not the paradox? To accept ideology, it must first be presented as non-ideological. The reader of the bourgeois papers, the person who is apathetic to his society's material conditions, the voter, the buyer of Starbucks because for each cup they give a few pennys to some improvished farmers. Their ideology is in fact simple: that they live in a post-ideological world.

dafuq are you talking about?

I think the parent may be referring to some of the ideas of Slavoj Zizek. The class consciousness / false consciousness concept he is replying to is a Marxist theory.

There is a huge amount of income redistribution that is built in to the system. You have to be earning about £30k to even be a net contributor. We are all parasitic to a certain extent. And a lot of higher earners are dependant on the government in ways that should make a conservative blush.

Seperating ourselves into contributors and scroungers is self deception at every level. It makes it impossible to set tax or benefit levels that people will consider "fair". Everyone feels a sense of grievance and gets to be angry at other groups. Greate for pushing a political agenda!

It is incorrect and contemptuous to say it is laughable that they think they will go into the upper middle class. See posts elsewhere in these comments showing with data that they do have a decent shot.

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