The Resentments of the Downwardly Mobile

If you, as I, like to keep track of such things, there are, in traditional Chinese thought, two ways to lose face. You can lose face when you are canceled, expelled from a group, shunned, ostracized and rendered a pariah. But, you can also lose face when you lose status, stature and privilege in society, or when you are demoted or downgraded. 

About the latter, as a rule we Americans disdain all thoughts involving social status or prestige. We think of ourselves as equals in all ways. We do not have an aristocracy of privilege, but that only means that we do not hand out status by genetic makeup.

Of course, our British forebears are sticklers for status and privilege. They even have titled aristocrats, God help us, who are presumed to set an example for the right and proper way to live one’s life. Sad to say, in today’s Great Britain, such is not very often the case. But, if you want to see the real thing, watch its fictional representation in a television show called Downton Abbey. 

While we are thinking about the British Isles, we also recall, from a movie called My Fair Lady that entitled subjects of the crown judged people, not by the color of their skin or the content of their character, but by their pronunciation and grammar. Use the wrong grammatical form or mispronounce a word and you would be relegated to a lower rank on the social status hierarchy.

Dare I say that these practices, which seem quaint and outdated to our modernized minds, are still in use, only we have decided, as a culture, to reward those who speak like common proles and to mock, even to cancel those who use correct pronouns. Our societal rage against privilege, against status and against social standing has produced a condition where we are not just dumbing down the next generation but are preparing them for lives of penury, financial and social. Watch what happens when the next bear market wipes out their trust funds.

Those who have been forced, by our totalitarian educational system and media mavens, to use bad grammar and incorrect pronouns, should understand that at some point in their lives they will find themselves excluded from the finer dinner parties and even business lunches, because no one with any sense will abide their pseudo-illiteracy.

Recognition to Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh for stimulating these thoughts. In his column this weekend Ganesh points out that the younger generation is suffering an epidemic of demotion. They go to fine schools, learn what their deranged teachers tell them that they must learn, and then discover that they cannot make a decent living. Given today’s rage against white privilege, white young people, in particular are being ruined and wrecked by educators. The reason-- if white people do poorly then people of color will feel better at doing poorly.

The rules does not apply to Asian parents, because they lack the requisite stupidity to buy into today’s educational race to the bottom. 

Now, those who are being demoted are creating a new world. Ganesh describes it:

If this blind spot for the downwardly mobile were just a loss to the bookshelves, stage or screen, I’d let the subject alone. But I fear the stakes are higher than that. Look around, and you’ll see a world shaped by the furiously demoted.

So, as Gen Z enters the workforce its denizens discover that they are largely underemployed. And why would this not be the case when their primary skill involves berating their managers for using the wrong pronouns. The notion that they might outperform their parents is risible.

The most persuasive explanation for the rage of today’s cultural left is that of “elite overproduction”. With too many graduates for too few jobs, the stock of articulate but underemployed youth grows by the year. Their absolute station in society remains enviable. Next to their parents’ lives, though, or their own expectations, the downgrade is glaring. Something has to come of all that eloquent anger. That something turns out, naturally enough, to be a theory of society as structurally rigged.

So, they have been cheated out of success, status and privilege. And they naturally conclude that the game was rigged. In truth, it is being rigged, as we speak, to punish those whose parents succeeded in America. 

We are manufacturing resentment. We are manufacturing outrage. The story does not look it is going to have a happy ending.