The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class
danco.substack.com
danco.substack.com
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
I suspect that baby talk is just how you answer to someone you can't relate to. I answer just the same when someone tells me about sports, or their racing horses. It's just what you default to when there's a cultural disconnect, but the desire to show respect.
One thing I am having trouble with is the connection between Michael and the "educated" ladder, even though a big portion of the article is dedicated to that. I will have to mull on it more before I can convincingly respond to "So you think Michael Scott represents the PhDs of the world?"
If you are the author, kudos to you.
Also do software engineers fall into upper middle class or high skilled labor? I think they’re in both. Or maybe I just don’t have any interactions with the middle ladder in real life and I’m clueless
And that very much is a social class, or more accurately, its a specific subset of a social class. Another subset of the same social class are book editors at the major publishing houses. Look around on LinkedIn. You'll find that easily 3 in 4 of them are female, went to a small-to-medium-sized liberal arts college, etc. They literally gatekeep both fiction and non-fiction, and its why self-publishing and alternative publishing outlets are on the rise.
There are likely other subsets of this same social class that I'm unfamiliar with, but I don't generally give it much thought, because I don't care and I don't have to care.
EDIT: Sorry, I meant 3 out of 4 of them are female, not 1-in-4.
> A very confused sexism.
To an uncritical thinker, it might definitely seem that way.
To address the "liberal arts college" aspect, I mean specifically they're insulated from a lot of the reality of the rest of the world. I specifically mean the Dartmouths, Browns, etc. of the educational world.
I mean people for whom a $200,000 education to have a $35,000 - $115,000 a year job is perfectly reasonable, because after all, they're not the ones paying for it in any capacity. Their family can easily foot the bill, and if they can't, then they end up married to a junior IB / exec type who can easily afford to pay back that pesky student loan.
Obviously this skews more female because of evolutionary dynamics, but you still probably get the occasional male for whom this might be an option of some kind.
So what are the implications of a majority female, thoroughly middle class-to-upper middle class group who attended the same or similar small liberals arts colleges?
Homogeneity. Women are statistically more willing to conform to the group, or rather, they're higher in trait agreeableness if you want to hash it out scientifically. This means a reluctance to champion a book that could cause controversy, much less intense controversy. We're seeing this already with Penguin having to deal with employees demanding that Jordan Peterson's new book not be published.
The second layer of homogeneity is that in order to do well at those colleges - to even be accepted beyond being the 'token' of your specific sub-divided little group - is that you need to speak a certain way, act a certain way, and think a certain way. That gets reinforced and becomes self-selecting. The location of the major publishing houses are all large cosmopolitan cities, cities where the concerns are, "Do I seem culturally accepting enough?", "Am I projecting the 'correct' values?", etc.
You need not take my word for it though. You can find plenty of authors who complain about these sorts of things.
EDIT: I should add... I know these people. I occasionally work with and consult for these people. The certainty of their positions relative to their utter lack of worldly experience is not just staggering, but offensive.
I've travelled all over the world, for over 19 years. I've been to 72 countries, I've lived in 12 different nations for over a year at a time. Women and men with the kind of credentials I've mentioned above are almost always the same. They're utterly convinced of their own moral superiority, whilst also being utterly ignorant of anything outside of their little bubbles.
Now I'm curious. The world you describe seems quite hostile to someone with your beliefs -- how and why are you in it?
That's because I don't have beliefs, I have data. I'm not interested in "beliefs". I'm interested in being able to concretely prove something with varying degrees of certainty, and I won't present my findings and conclusions unless I have the strongest available data to back them up.
To autopsy your assertion even further, you could extrapolate to the entire world. Most people in the world don't really want to know why the world is the way it is, or even why they do the things they do. People don't like that they can be quantified, that they can be predicted if someone, somewhere, with enough knowledge and understanding has enough data about them. Yet Facebook and Google and Twitter and YouTube do this every day, fairly easily nowadays I might add. It only upsets people when its in their face and clearly visible. When they can't turn away from it and deny it.
The nearly wholesale rejection of evolutionary biology, psychology, and the Big Five personality traits by a subset of certain people is hilarious because 1) its anti-science, which is made even more ridiculous given the credence these groups place on science and 2) it not only can be, but often is used against them by researchers who have no moral misgivings about the nature of the science and accept it for what it is - its neither inherently good nor bad, its just how we evolved based on the selective pressures nature placed upon our species.
> how and why are you in it?
The why is probably easier to answer than the how. By their own admission, I bring value to their organizations. When someone asks me what I do, instead of going through a bunch of technobabble and mathematics/statistics jargon I just tell them, "I bring order to chaos." It usually sparks more interesting conversations than talking about R, K-means clustering, Bayesian inference, and all the other jargon surrounding data science that frankly almost no one besides mathematicians, statisticians, and other data scientists will understand anyway. The second part of the "why" is "enormous consulting fees". :)
The how is a very long post that I just don't have time to type up right now.
Please do, I'm very interested.
But there seems to be this idea that I don't like working with these people, but that's not true. Most of these people are really good people who are good at their jobs, who want to be a force for good in the world, and they legitimately think they're on the side of righteousness. They're the modern day version of crusaders, frankly. And much like the crusaders of old their prejudices are borne from ignorance and their certainty is tempered by each other as they self-reinforce.
The conceit is that random lawyers and doctors wish they could be the kinds of lawyers and doctors that could get an Op-Ed published, but I don’t think it works. Maybe most Econ PhDs secretly want to be Paul Krugman. I doubt it, but maybe. But no way I buy most doctors secretly want to be Anthony Fauci.
I think the idea is that the communication styles from the first part carry over to the second. Which means that if you're an university-educated professional or a cultural leader, you mostly communicate through baby-talk and posture-talk. At least that seems to be the author's point, I'm not sure to what extent I agree.
That high-paid 60 year old man working for his state's labor department keeping the COBOL churning out unemployment checks? High-skill labor.
That university researcher who's working night and day to design a new machine learning paradigm? She's an elite creative (Hell, she might even be a Ph.D. and a blue check mark nowadays).
The Stanford / UCLA / MIT dropout who builds the next Uber / Instagram / Twitter / Facebook? Working rich. At least until he/she sells the company to someone and bails out.
- Coder/programmer (L1) - Software Engineer (L2) - Entrepreneur [in the software industry] (L3)
The same ladder that telephone users fall on.
But, omg, I can't imagine him surviving a chem lab. The whole place would be on fire within a few minutes.
So "the good place" is prestige TV! would not that be more like discussing the latest "in our time" about the plague of Justinian over the water cooler ?
I believe that the type of person the author thinks Michael Scott is exists and sucks (and I'm probably one of them), but I don't think Michael Scott is one of them.
> Posturetalk is everything said by Michael, Dwight and Andy, to anyone: the staff, the execs, or each other. Everything they say is some form or another of meaningless, performative babbling.
I only really remember the first four seasons of The Office, but I remember Michael as being a very skilled salesman and a very unskilled manager. But Michael's skill as a salesman comes from a genuine desire to connect with people and form relationships --- recall the episode where he takes a second job as a telemarketer and keeps deviating from the call scripts to ask people about their lives. In that sense, a big chunk of what Michael says is pretty close to the opposite of performative?
My point is that it's not one or the other- Michael is a great salesman because he wants to connect on a personal level, but man alive he sure spouts off a whole lot of posturetalk.
a lot of michael's behaviors are pretty naked attempts at gaining status. the irony is that he latches onto things that no one else actually respects. a good example is when he bought the sebring. michael did not buy that car because he liked it; he bought it because he wanted other people to see him in it, purely a flex. as is often the case, the joke was on him. no one thought the sebring was a cool car. just continuing on the car theme, look at what pre-breakdown jan was driving: a volvo, a nice vehicle befitting someone of her stature but not flashy.
Interesting classifications nonetheless...
I'm more interested in the "real talk" between Elites and Losers -- what's that look like?
Elites don't do this (as much) to the middle class because: 1) they (members of middle class) aren't as easily interchangeable 2) they're workhorses that produce a good ROI 3) the elites clearly see the delusional reality most of the middle class lives in, and are happy to egg it on to keep the machine churning.
I would hazard a guess that the closest thing to straight talk is at the possible inception of a union. Not after the union is formed and established - I don't think there's a lot of straight talk between UAW and GM nowadays - but if someone like Musk is afraid the gigafactory workers are banding together, he might be forced to talk to them directly. Unfortunately, I don't think this "real talk" is ever recorded or broadcast.
The most stark example I can think of is when Emperor Hirohito informed the Japanese citizens of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki[1], but funny enough that is mostly known for how confusing it was for the average Japanses citizen to understand what was going on.
Conversely, there's the Alex Baldwin monologue at the beginning of Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross.
Also, here we are at the point in history when even reclusive billionaires are starting to change and improve the way they contribute to the world. Some are even giving away all their money before they die, which was once seen as a feat the bible itself couldn't envision.
Michael Scott is also given occasional but shy credit on the show for being someone whose values freely interconnect with those of his workers, which to me was an understated win of the series.
The fact is, Michael can't be the best of everybody, even though he tries. But he can sure reflect their good back onto them, even when he's completely exploding an otherwise harmless situation! It's an underrated gift. We need more of that good-reflecting in the world, and less criticism of the kind that reflects a hopeless situation.
Of course, like any way to divide up people there is ample opportunity for harmful and mean stereotypes. But I don’t think that alone is why discussing class is so explosive in America.
The author refers to michael o church who had much clearer takes on the subject, not-withstanding a lot of other craziness that undermined some of his interesting opinions. He certainly was one of the first people to publicly call out that companies like Google and VC-backed startups spend a LOT of effort on PR that they are "social good" despite being as ruthlessly money-making oriented as any conventional companies they claimed not to be. He coined one of my favorite sayings that "Silicon Valley is just Wall St for people who can't wake up early." Those takes are a little less novel in 2021 now that everyone realizes how morally bankrupt companies like Google are but credit's due where it's due so I'd recommend checking out his old blog posts.
There was also Sun's business model, of free software (eg java) to sell hardware.
It's not that they were selfless... but their interests were aligned with others.
Of course, looking back, MS's open platform seems positively benign today, yet te were habitually vilified at the time... maybe today's corporations will seem similarly benign in hindsight? After all, you can't make money without some alignment with customers.
Or, maybe it's just "power corrupts".
(Incidentally I noticed a similar tendency in myself to think I had policing and Baltimore local politics figured out after watching The Wire. Did that show really teach me as much as I feel? Or do I have a false sensation of being informed, steming from my enjoyment of the show?)
I think one thing The Wire does is show you how bad equilibria can arise from mostly rational people making mostly rational decisions in response to the incentives around them, and seeing it play out in compelling dramatic form is a good way to cement the idea. So now it's pretty easy for me to come up with a plausible reason why bad thing x happens in my city y.
I think my main takeaway from watching The Wire in college was various ways of arriving at the conclusion that things are pretty complex. Except for the war on drugs, which should mostly end.
The office is basically a documentary about white collar work places, once again, with all the shenanigans happening more rapidly.
I don't know any city cops so I can't speak to the accuracy of Brooklyn Nine Nine.
As someone on the spectrum, this actually expanded on some of my own observations. For a large portion of society, much of what they do and say is driven by posturing. This posturing is driven by insecurity. It is especially predominant in the upper-middle class.
Spock said it best, humans are highly illogical. They don't say what they mean. They spend significant resources on posturing, trying to reassure themselves of their standing by convincing their peers.
This article probably isn't going to lead to epiphanies in many of the groups mentioned. It seems intentionally inflammatory, which will cause individuals with the described behaviour to become defensive.
Instead, I'm just left wondering which ladder I'm actually climbing at the moment (in this model).
On the other hand the middle ladder description the nail on the head which is why it makes people around here so uncomfortable.
The non software people climbed the hierarchy not because they are competent at their jobs, in fact a highly competent person will often be passed over for promotion because they are useful where they are - but because of how they negotiated very complex social networks.
A senior manager, my manager at the time felt that with very little skill to separate the people working at the company, ascendancy was about positioning yourself in bullying networks, and he described this this kind of 'baby talk' as a subservience signal in which you were surrendering to and accepting a manager as your patron and any further advancement you made was by their grace.
If you chose to do the 'honest talk' with someone senior to you, it came with a risk and a potential reward, you had to do it well enough to convince them you were a worthy formidable peer and an ally. If you did it unconvincingly you would be struck down.
This seemed to be a widely held worldview and therefore more or less the social reality in the non software parts of the business. I was free to do 'honest talk' because as a software person, I was clearly to the side of the game, it wasn't really possible for me to fall or climb too far.
I would love to hear more about what you think the difference is.
It's not that there's no insight in what the guy says. Some of it is quite accurate. I think I would say that (nearly all) the insight was delivered by The Office in the first place. I never saw the US variant, but I LOVE the UK version. We like shows like that because they do speak to us - we do recognize the appalling awfulness of middle managers, or how decent people get stuck in dead ends.
The problem is the attempt to systematize and generalize and make some deep "theory" out of all this. It just isn't worthwhile. There's no sensible theory where everyone at the top is a sociopath, and everyone at the bottom is a realist, and every middle manager is an idiot. I mean, come on. And this "theory" isn't meant to be tested, and never will be... at best, it'll be written down in some kind of fun, pseudoscientific book like Bullshit Jobs.
To sum up, this guy mistakes ∃ for ∀.
How do we allow for work like that to be done? I would hate for this kind of silliness to be lost because it isn’t rigorous enough.
Besides, the very people who would take this seriously are the same people who aren’t actively thinking and applying insights on how society interacts in their daily lives anyway.
However, Scott’s technique is both suboptimal and childish, his grasp of the sticks conforming to how children are taught to use chopsticks and offering less precision than techniques which adults use. [0] Furthermore, Scott’s not actually very skilled at using chopsticks. He’s a step above stabbing food with them or using them with one in each hand, but his mastery of the kids’ way of using chopsticks is barely better than rudimentary.
Often while lifting food from his from his plate and into his mouth, Scott will clumsily drop the morsel back onto the plate and chomp at empty air. Watching Michael Scott eat with chopsticks is to be embarrassed for him, while he himself remains oblivious and proud.
Michael Scott will replace his chopsticks with a spoon for the last 25% of his meal.
Lastly, the linked article is a marvelous troll guaranteed to rile even the most self-assured (and they are nothing if not self-assured) member of the Whytian Clueless.
[0] In my corner of South Korean culture, the kids’ way of holding chopsticks involves the thumb, index, middle, and ring fingers. The adult way omits the ring finger.
This article reminds me of a Karate School that doesn't spar. It looks impressive, but put it in an mma cage and it quickly falls apart.
In fact the more I think about it, the more this reads as an anti-academic screed - basically dunking on those with high educational attainments or artistic abilities, but only a middle-of-the-road income to show for it. And also triathletes.
I definitely accept that I'm not an elite. I am "wealthy" in a strictly relative financial sense but I have no political power/connections derived from it and have never tried to gain any. This has always been my personal distinction between say myself and the true elites. Wealth doesn't inherently get you power and I don't really even know how I would leverage what wealth I have to gain power despite this being a potentially viable avenue. Is this not a much better distinction?
It's why white collar workers are so bent on doing public speaking things, TED Talks etc.. It's hard to be a VP you have to somehow get everyone else to think you're 'that much better' than the workers.
Watch the news: almost every contributor is making a performance.
Trump's the 'Apprentice' is a giant bit of performance, nothing to do with reality.
The elite use leverage. Think of them as VCs. They don't 'work' like we do, they negotiate hard deals with workers and try to grab all the surpluses.
It's really just a basic take on working/middle class + capital class.
specifically the “Sociopath” as described in the Gervais Principle == the elite
I'm getting a lot of the same vibes from this piece. If you have disposable income and want to collect Japanese cookware then that doesn't inherently make you ignorant or detached from reality. The model is kind of interesting, but it mostly sounds like a dig by the author leaning heavily on stereotyping groups of people.
The more interesting question is what do you do in response to that? The Peter Principle books actually argued you should turn down that last promotion. But how do we avoid becoming Michael Scott?
After that it gets murky because everyone has their own abilities and willingness to do what it takes to compensate for their own flaws and take advantage of their strengths.
Also, the categories/ladders are looser than one would assume. Cultural and labor leaders, if determined, can seize power for themselves, as seen with the rise of the Soviet Union and Islamic Republic of Iran. I personally don't believe in the "babytalk" notion: this depends on individual character, and any common lingo would be based solely on the pressures of position the individual is in.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...
And not one mention of it in that entire substack either, though few others mentioned it on here before me. :) That's good.
I always enjoy discovering something backwards, e.g. through experience and then learn it's already documented.
But the idea that the blue collar workers and elites "get it" while the bourgeoisie are fooling themselves comes across as ... self loathing, perhaps?
You could just as easily make the argument that the aspirations of the blue collar are shallow and meaningless. And or the elites are sociopathic because, hey, we all turn to dust in the end.
Too bad he fell out of grace from the SV elite (and I can totally see why). I wish he continued writing as much as he was back in the time.
You have no need to worry about money other than the desire to upgrade status symbols. You have no real power or path to power, so you don’t understand that either. You’re floating blissfully in the middle reading about mushroom foraging while the poor get poorer and the elite siphon even more wealth and power.
The Office only takes place inside a small, mundane part of the Money game, and I think the middle ladder in the OP's post muddles Money and Knowledge. Note that all the games are used as backdrops, Power being the more usual pick: all legal/police/crime content inhabits that space.
Its also important to note that the Office takes place in the UK and America, winners of the second world war, and so the ones where the Games have grown in size and complexity monotonically for over 100 years, and the players are fat, rich, and lazy (characteristic of late stage capitalism). The lack of external stressor (e.g. competition, frugal clients, and so on) is what enables the company, and its employees, to be detached from reality and still survive despite these costly distractions. This detachment is the inevitable cost of great wealth and long periods of uninterrupted success, and is the mechanism by which large scale structures, like civilizations, regress to the mean.
The Gervais Principle was a great/cynical popular summary of some more refined ideas in management theory. Generalizing it to a theory of post-internet globalized class seems straight forward, with the caveat that it can only be as useful as any theory of class. It's the Marxist ceiling, like how classical Newtonian physics is fantastic for modelling coarse engineering problems, and loses coherence when applied to the nature of reality, and doesnt provide much more than some metaphors for things as normal as economics. Reading through it, I don't think this was written so much as an explanatory piece for an HN audience as it was to find others thinking about these problems.
I have spent too many unfortunate years at a big Enterprisey software development organization, and have concluded that the real sociopaths/incompetents/climbers lie in middle management. I would even go as far to say that if the middle management has no technical responsibilities, and as such entirely is detached from the work of engineers, nearly 100% of them come from the aforementioned categories.
Let me try to elaborate:
Upper management is generally characterised by a good awareness of market needs/conditions, what needs/can be delivered by the next release, and the available and required resources needed to deliver features on time. They have both the power to make significant decisions, and are usually held accountable for delivering features.
Non-technical management usually draws its ranks from MBAs who think of engineers as pathetic nerds, engineering people who either don't want to code or suck at it, and culty types who try to apply every hip development methodology/pop psychology hack to hopefully improve the performance of engineers (which is usually accompanied by universal resentment).
They usually have the luxury of playing head games with the people under them (I'm fairly convinced most pop management MBA bullshit exists to make their work and decision processes totally opaque/give them control to do whatever they want as well as to gaslight their 'subjects' about their perceived performance).
Since this is getting long I'll cherry pick 2 examples:
I spent 3 days (+overtime) debugging an issue that involved a bug in native code that created memory corruption in the Java side of the app, which naturally produced weird behaviour - I got berated for taking too long, as well as not writing a detailed enough post-bug report of the root cause of the issue (why was this even a thing).
Another time, some MM came up a great idea of improving software quality (which was shit due to the huge amounts of legacy code we weren't allowed to touch) - which essentially boiled down to filling out an extra field in Jira, making a compilation of said fields in a PowerPoint presentation, and having a 3 hour meeting about said fields, and based on the results, probably defining some extra wishy-washy action items to follow in the future. Naturally, this added an extra responsibility to our understaffed, overworked team, which was created a naturally hostile vibe in us. However one of the least competent, and morally flexible guys (the guy who literally couldn't solve a single problem on his own, but had a talent for making his problems somebody elses too - and advertise the result as 'teamwork') naturally stepped up to drive the idea - and was promoted to some management position a few months later, partially due to these efforts.
In summary, I feel like unlike upper management, and engineers, middle management serves no purpose in most organizations, and they know that, so they create their niche by mostly less then ethical purposes, so they get to play petty despots with some, but not much tangible power, and little to no responsibility/accountability.
A year or so ago, I was working on my undergraduate thesis project in deep RL, I had been working on the project for 8-9 months at the time. Due to covid, lack of support and computational resources from the university, I was behind, and making progress was difficult.
Shortly after I submitted the thesis, I felt an eerie disillusionment with the absurdity of the middle class, and whatever we are all doing, the pretentiousness, how we are all stuck in our own little bubbles where we find ways to feel special and 'serious' about things, how we focus and advertise the niche-ness of our field, and how we all advertise our lives in social media and so on.
Sam Esmail put it greatly in the first episode of Mr. Robot in Elliot's monologue on what in society disappoints him so much [1] and concludes that the reason is that we are all cowards, we are looking to be sedated. Which is absolutely true, capitalism feeds on that, bought something?, bam dopamine rush, got a promotion to the same shitty position but with more responsibilities ? congratulations, another dopamine rush. Buying overpriced sushi and eating it with that chopstick skill you have mastered, another rush. Sharing our lives on the internet bam rush, and you know what, of course we need to share pictures with our friends, it's the contract, we scratch each other's back here, and the funny thing is, it is never enough, and it will never be enough [2].
Deep down, we all know that the world is utter shit, but living in these bubbles allows us to pretend that it is not so bad, because that is easier, it allows us to live with the situation instead of taking the roads and demanding that things change, if anything, why should we demand a change if "it's working for us", if whatever we have gives us a dose big enough to forget but small enough to function? Heck, even if we start fixing the world, Machiavelli argues that given the opportunity, the middle class will bring it back [3], because the new state of affairs will not enable that kind of detachment.
The problem with this disillusionment is that you aren't willing to be sedated, not anymore, you realize how shit the world is, how everyone is pretending and is unwilling to accept it that we are not in control of anything.
But what the f do I know. All I can say is that I have seen and experienced the 'Michael Scott' behaviour from the people the author mentions, but again, I live in my own little bubble.
[1] https://soundcloud.com/flibber/mr-robot-101-elliots-monologu...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_adaptation
[3] In "il prince", when a new prince conquers a region with the help of aristocrats, if he changes the norm, he needs to squash any chance of future opposition as the previous norm worked for the aristocrats and they will try to revert back.
Edit:
I must have hit some nerves. Sorry for telling the silent part out loud, Michael.
You can live an authentic life, you just don't know how because 1, you're a kid with zero wisdom and 2, you don't yet know what is important (related to point 1).
I found that reading philosophy helps, even just a little bit. The absurdists figured it out I think. Absurdism also helps with coping with the belief in determinism I guess, but I am still in conflict.
I guess I lost that curiosity during the last parts of my thesis and covid lockdowns last year. The thesis and the internship after beat the curiosity out of me simply because doing *good* research was neigh impossible with my limited resources. I remember desperately trying to make progress but when everything takes ages to complete, it is easy to lose interest, and deadlines make everything harder.
I tried to get back to that state of mind, but it can be quite difficult at times.
Well, yes and no. On one hand, we're all destined to mortal frailty and death, and most of us will experience things worse than a nightmare and have to keep on going. On the other hand, to live is a precious gift with more beauty and potential than one can imagine, especially if focused on the other part.
This is also possibly just a re-articulation of age-old delineations between working/middle and upper class sentiments.
I think the working/middle class are the same ladder though and most of them share the same values in that they are no psychopath barbarians.
The right-hand ladder is actually 2 parts:
The ibankers belong squarely in the middle class rung. They are just workers like everyone else, and frankly, as preformative. Most of them are regular people and not sociopaths.
The difference with some 'banking' roles - is that they are playing in games of 'dealing and leverage' - not so much value creation.
So they're naturally going to acclimate to a different way of viewing thew world. They play zero-sum games whereas everyone else is doing work, or trying/pretending to.
They have access to the 'old money' class and they see the potentiality.
But really - the lower rungs of banking are just upper-class elite.
The 'old money' are not necessarily sociopaths - they are often quite nice people, they vary from down-to-earth to detached to egoist. Maybe not nice enough to give up their money but not necessarily bad people. And living off of a stipend of limited wealth can give a sense of the limitations of money and these people are not wagging their money in your face.
There is a hugely fundamental difference between 'barbarian' like Donald Trump, or Putin, and kids from the Bertelsmann family because those who are 'out of the game' and living off old money are super effete, it's not like they are going to be that important or influential. They are useless and they know it.
I also dispute the morale differentials etc. I think there's some truthiness there, but it's a function of aspiration: the 'working class' have more likely than not accepted their lot while the 'middle class' are competing for surpluses.
Finally, I'm not so cynical. Those 'middle class' people do important things. It's not easy to be a dentist, doctor, write software, manage people etc..
Triathlon hobby, “right amount of hops”, and PhD are the author’s examples of supposed middle-grade cluelessness.
Are those any different from a hunting hobby, “right caliber of gun”, and being a country club member? Presumably the latter would fall on the author’s sanctified leftmost ladder of Labor where people only talk straight and aspire for reasonable things. Yet the article makes no effort to justify why certain hobbies and pursuits are “loser real” and others are “clueless fake.”
If you think every person in life that has gotten a different outcome than you is a "sociopath" your are probably something a lot closer to a sociopath than average (ie a seeming total lack of ability to empathize with a vast swath of people based on superficial differences)