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I went the other way (grew up working class) and I still, decades later, find middle class folk (in the UK) to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence.

I can't pinpoint exactly "what I mean" but basically traditional values. More willing to accept the fact that men and women are going to find each other attractive, that you probably don't want your wife or husband to have a "platonic" friend of the opposite sex that they meet up with one on one, etc etc.

Whereas the highbrow view is more like - okay but if we accept those things then women can't work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes. We want women to be able to work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes, anything else is unacceptable, so we should sanitise all of the interactions and punish everyone for being human and then we might be able to make it work, sort of kind of but not really, everyone will be miserable but we pretend.

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I think universal conscription is a good idea for the sole reason that everyone should get a bit of this perspective. The people who’ve never left the nice-people bubble of college and professional employment will go to completely inappropriate lengths to avoid feeling offended. You said the manager’s idea was maybe not as good as the other thing in a meeting? You just made an enemy for life. Meanwhile soldiers have productive and respectful working relationships with people who they physically fight with the day before because that’s a better alternative to however UCMJ allows your commander to screw up your life.

It’s a great exercise in personal growth for coping skills.

> universal conscription

No thanks, Ill take anything that isn’t involuntary labor

Look at it more like part of the education system.

Because that is what it is. Nobody gets sent to Afghanistan as part of conscription.

And, in my opinion, it has been some of the most valuable education I have got and something I'd definitely recommend my kids and my friends do if offered the opportunity.

I have quite a few German friends who looking back speak highly of their experience doing the civilian alternative service (they objected to military service). This was before the conscription was abolished in 2011. Even though it was not military service, it put them in situation and workplaces that were different from their own experience and environment.

Similarly, in France some engineering schools required an internship in a factory to learn the perspective of blue-collar workers that the student might eventually manage but at 8 weeks only I don't think it gives as much perspective as what my German friends had.

"Nobody gets sent to Afghanistan as part of conscription".

You should be more careful with such statements as that's more exception than rule. If you're country goes to war, and it's not just some peace keeping mission, you can bet that whoever is at the time in army could be sent to the frontline.

Yes, but most 1st world nations have all-volunteer armies, not conscription.

All Nordic countries, Switzerland and probably Austria.

Same goes for Taiwan and Israel.

Germany does not at the moment but can reintroduce it at a moments notice, and also they are taking steps to encouraging voluntary conscription like service.

Probably more 1st world nations, these were just the ones from the top of my head.

But how many of those will send conscripts abroad to fight? Norway won't, they rely on volunteers who have at least completed conscription or proffessional soldiers. Can't imagine that any of the others does it differently.

AFAIK everybody who was sent to Afghanistan was either professionals or ordinary soldiers who applied.

If we end up in an attack on our homelands thats another thing.

But even then no ordinary conscript that reads HN (ok, possible exception for russians, but even they try to maintain a veneer of "voluntary" on it when they send conscripts) will be sent to abroad.

There are hundreds of thousands of people alive in the US right now who were drafted to fight in Vietnam. The only war with conscripts that the US didn’t send people abroad for is the civil war in the US

We didn’t have any conscripts in Afghanistan because we don’t have any conscripts at the moment. I can say that there were a lot of people that were deployed in the Middle East when they didn’t want to be. Especially for second and third tours. I personally have a friend who was told he was going to be on a ship in the Navy who ended up in Iraq.

> you can bet that whoever is at the time in army could be sent to the frontline.

Of course?! We've had a volunteer army for the last half century?! How can you claim professional service members are being conscripted and sent to conflict?

> No thanks, Ill take anything that isn’t involuntary labor

And involuntary restrictions of basic freedoms like what and when to eat and where and when to sleep.

Did you take two years of your life to go into the military in your early 20s?

Four years.

Did you choose to do that because you were going to "completely inappropriate lengths to avoid feeling offended" after being in a "nice-people bubble of college" ?

Wasn’t that Mao’s idea of forcing city kids to the countryside to make them better party members?

I worked with a very well educated Chinese man who had been caught up in that. He had a terrible, and on occasion terrifying, time. I'm pretty confident that it didn't make him a better party member. As far as I remember from what little he was willing to say about the time the only thing it made him better at was catching stray dogs to eat.

Xi Jinping himself had an awful time too according to a podcast I listened to about his life. But he later changed his tune in recent years when hyping up the old times became popular again, similar to the Stalin years is popular again in Russia.

Some variation of this was not uncommon in general. In USSR, college students were routinely used as forced agricultural labor during harvest season for up to 30 days. AFAIK something similar existed in other Soviet bloc countries.

My parents hated it, and I don't think I have ever met anyone who remembered that experience fondly for any reason. If anything, the kind of stories that people tell about it seem to imply that it was more divisive than uniting - the rural folk who were doing that as a permanent job were both resentful of "city slickers" and annoyed at the fact that they can't do it "properly", while the students would very quickly tire of being yelled at and start treating their hosts with contempt.

> find middle class folk ... to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence.

I think it's the betwixt and between dynamic: working class folk know they're living on what they have coming; upper class folk know they're living on what they have; but middle class folk, no matter how they live, are only middle class folk if other middle class folk agree they are — hence the insecurity, and at one reason for the conformity.

(in the UK, I think U vs non-U started as a joke, yet was popularised by exactly the people it had been meant to be taking the piss from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English )

Well it's not UK specicfic but as there's only really workers and owners, they could be insecure about being a slightly better paid worker?

Also, an owner - of a very limited amount. Junior partner, at best.

There are many taxonomies of people. Workers vs owners is one, and relates to the relationship between people and the means of production. Other taxonomies are young vs old, male vs female, and class structures with more than two classes. Notice that this thread has been about social class, more than economic class.

That's one way of looking at it. But there are other ways of slicing and dicing an populace and it's capital.

One point that Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System makes over and over (maybe never quite explicitly, but implicitly, throughout) is that Fussell’s “middle class” is essentially defined by being thoroughly pathetic. They’re the most class-concerned, by far, desperately anxious to signal higher class, while having no clue how to correctly do that. An Upper-Middle spots them a mile away, to say nothing of Upper. To Proles, their preferences and behavior are grating or risible. They end up jockeying awkwardly for position only amongst themselves.

Right, the trichotomy in Venkatesh Rao’s The Office… was clearly influenced by Fussell (who was in turn inspired by Veblen)

GP indicates another trichotomy- past, future and present orientation..

>Now they hide, not merely from envy and revenge but from expose journalism much advanced in cunning and ferocity since Veblen's time, and from an even worse threat, virtually unknown to Veblen,foundational mendicancy, with its hordes of beggars in three-piece suits constantly badgering the well-to-do.

Update for XXI to take into account (YC vs) “fakers” & the finally selfaware 4th estate

One good FNORD way to hide is to convince the low the mid are somehow* "elite" and therefore no one need look past them to the high.

(the proles aren't any less status conscious than the outer party; what else could explain tracksuit chic and luxury brand revenue? "Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children.")

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPPpjU1UeAo (the video features a nice 20' day sailer, but is a little short on horses)

EDIT: * διαίρει και βασίλευε, known in our times as "let's you and him fight". The brits played this game well during their imperial period, but looking at the world map of frozen (and hot) conflicts, maybe they played it too well.

Convince the present oriented that the future oriented are past oriented?

to the middle class, higher education from a good institution provides skills that ought to prove useful in the future; to the working class, proof of higher education from a good institution is a gate which demonstrates how much free cash flow one's parents had in the past?

(I might assign the labels differently though: working class is future oriented [live in expectation of what you have coming]; upper class is past oriented [live on what you already have]; middle class is present oriented [performative in the now]. The first two are economic; the last social. bien-pensant/What would Mrs. Grundy think?)

I see. I went from interacting constantly online and being surrounded by people in post-secondary and higher-level academics to working alongside immigrants in a tough and (frankly) undignified job. This coincided with some other major changes in life and it definitely changed my view of what's "normal". I had to think about my previous life and where I actually derived happiness and value.

I got the impression that the highly educated types are wrong in a lot of ways, and the blue collar labourers are wrong in completely different ways, so I took the intersection of their worldviews and now ...well I'm probably wrong in every way ;) We can but try.

> I got the impression that the highly educated types are wrong in a lot of ways, and the blue collar labourers are wrong in completely different ways

Couldn't agree more!

Where do you derive your happiness now?

What is wrong from the view of each? (As someone who interacts both with phds and high school graduates on a daily/weekly basis I find the differences interesting).

Biggest surprise for me was the sense of community that seemed present in the lower earners.

It's hard to put into words. I think the essence of you questions is "what is your philosophy now, and how does it differ from before?" That's a question I've been struggling to conceptualize myself for a while now, so I can't describe it with any sense of coherence in a public forum.

I will say that, at the root of it all, we are who we orbit.

> Biggest surprise for me was the sense of community that seemed present in the lower earners.

I was once in an environment where, depending upon how I was dressed, I would either be addressed in english and called "Sir" or addressed in spanish and called "Paisano".

Why was the community surprising? (I mean, my mental model is that most dyadic social interactions can be approached with either authority or community, so I'm not surprised that groups without much authority tend to play the community card instead)

> find middle class folk (in the UK) to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence

This isn't just a UK thing. Seems fairly universal at least across the western world.

Right. In Britain at least at some point this flips and if you're proper old money you go back to not giving a shit again. Classic example is Prince Philip.

Middle class is always more insecure. A middle-class individual could move either up or down, this causes anxiety.

> I went the other way (grew up working class) and I still, decades later, find middle class folk (in the UK) to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence.

I find the same (also in the UK) from having lived in (and grown with) a non-western culture. One that is also uptight (much more so in many ways, and definitely sexist) but in a different way.

> Whereas the highbrow view is more like - okay but if we accept those things then women can't work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes. We want women to be able to work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes, anything else is unacceptable

I am quite surprised at the extent to which gender stereotypes are pervasive. At a bonfire last weekend kids were being sold illuminated toys, and all the little boys had swords, and the girls had unicorns. My daughters would have wanted swords (they are teen and adult) but I have realised that is unusual.

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