(Sidebar: I don’t think of these folks as ‘welfare queens’ or anything so idiotic.Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld – and all their tax-feeding cronies – are the real welfare queens, along with the senior management of TBTF banks, defence contractors and other parts of the tax-bezzle: the amount those vermin collectively take out of the tax pool makes the pittances doled out to the bottom decile look like a $5 tip on a $1000 meal)

And the kids understood the parents’ sacrifice, and understood that their education was their ‘shot’ at rising living standards.

(My partner’s family story is *identical* in all important respects: her grandfather was a carpenter with 5 kids… all except one of those kids have PhDs, and my partner’s generation are lawyers and so forth).

The Lovely and I are ‘fortunate’ to have come from that background, but we absolutely acknowledge that we owe the prior generations for two things: their sacrifice, and their insistence that we don’t fall into the ‘shirtsleeeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations’ problem, where the 3rd generation is dissipative and louche, and squanders the accumulated capital of those who gave up luxury. (Also, we both graduated in the top handful of our respective degrees (me: Economics and Econometrics; her: Law) and worked long hours… so if anybody deserves to have a household income in the ‘1%’, we think it’s us lol).

But back to the ‘zombie with the sugar diet of a housefly’.

I don’t ‘admire’ the common fella as such – I empathise with him, because he has been told for generations that his failure is his fault: that if he worked hard and so forth, his living standards would rise… that’s simply not true for the most part – median wages in real terms are unchanged since the Eisenhower administration, and income-decile mobility is actually pretty low, even across generations.

So he looks about himself – he has a big-screen TV (bought on credit), stone benchtops (funded by a mortgage drawdown), a newish car (financed at 0% but about to go to 5%)… but he knows that all of it will be lost if he is out of work for any period longer than about 2 months. Deep down, in the place where cognitive dissonance can’t reach, he knows he needs a miracle. So he gives up.

I admit that for a long time (decades) I held exactly the same view as you outline: namely, that the mass man is a sluggardly, cowardly, idiot.

Nowadays I have a more nuanced view (which is also less judgmental, which is odd, for me!): the apparent stupidity is a result of a ‘hostile’ environment as opposed to the pure outcome of 4 generations of subsidising the breeding behaviour of the bottom half of the Bell curve. The latter is the dominant explanator for the enstupidation of the bottom quartile – they are the lucky ones in that they are not remotely introspective, and have horizons measured in hours at best (e.g., the time until the next hit/cigarette/tattoo). That is not to say that there aren’t people in the bottom quartile who are ambitious, but their ambitions are to be the best ‘beatboxer’ or to appear on reality tv or something equally noxious: their ‘selection universe’ is as truncated as their horizon.

But that changes once go above the ‘deltas’ – the multi-parental ‘baby-daddies’ and ‘baby-mommas’ (the terms are not race specific – inner urban white trash is worse than either its hillbilly or inner-urban black counterpart).

Once you get to around the ‘middle’ – the meat of the labour market – the things I mention start to ‘bite’. Poor (State) education + Poor nutrition + stress + financial insecurity + **unrealistic expectations (fostered by media portrayals of how your life is supposed to be)** -> a systemically weak individual.

Also, “cowardice” (a refusal to confront the beast) is rational: the costs of doing so are certain, large, immediate and concentrated, whereas the benefits are uncertain, small (per person), delayed and diffuse. If you’re already financially precarious, the balance-sheet hit becomes too hard to bear – a risk-averse individual with diminishing marginal utility of wealth would want to avoid the additional volatility.

The urge to buy the ‘big gulps’ also probably comes from the metabolic changes wrought by a diet high in wheat (bread etc): gluteorphins are addictive, and make the body change metabolically so that it craves sugar.

Novel over… lol.

I’ll add that many principal anchors probably live under the influence of an empathy deficit. Some are probably essential psychopaths, absolutely egoistic since the moment of their conception. Such people, if they learn to imitate normal people, become professional con artists. Their inability to experience remorse or scruples gives them an edge over others to climb up the political or corporate ladder.

I have no idea who Williams is, but the hypothesis that he is an essential psychopath is more compatible with this article than the hypothesis that he is a mentally normal man who has cheerfully accepted to hurt the human community at a large scale for personal gain beyond a decent living.

As long as most essential psychopaths don’t understand the matrix any more than normal people, we are doing fine. If normal people develop this understanding before the essential psychopaths, they will get humanity through a highly favorable paradigm shift, arguably ending the war system.

Love,

Let’s see if they remain so smugly glib as the Fukushima ELE inevitably amps itself up into becoming a global ELE as infrastructure that was keeping other reactors from going into meltdown gets shattered and destroyed.

I’ll bet dollars to donuts they won’t be feeling so smugly glib as they lie dying from radiation sickness. Uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhea tend to make one not seem quite so ‘personally cute-wutesy’.

………..I thought they were the only reasons to rebel K. You almost had me there till I read…

” I can’t begin to imagine how stressful life must be for people making $100k, let alone those who make $20k or $30k … and we have no kids!”

You see the truth is the details.

My Irish Catholic grandfather, a fine upstanding man, and his mates rebelled against Harland & Wolff (The ‘Titanic’ ship builder) the large ship builder in Belfast purely because they were maiming and disfiguring and crippling 14 and 15 year old boys.
They could legally be made to work in those days, ya see. My grandfathers sons worked beside there father when they were young.
These men worked on average 12 hrs a day, six days a week. For starvation. In times of rush contracts 16 hrs. No overtime then, no workmans compensation. You got hurt you frakked. The only reason they did’nt work 7days a week, is because the Catholic Church wanted their tuppence in collection plate on Sunday.
There were too many kids crippled for life. They rebelled and almost burned the shipyard to the ground. Lives were lost, in the struggle and bodies broke. But it giave birth to the ship workers union. Which raised the minimum age fro hiring at 16 years old. Small steps considering there was no safety equipment in those days.

The Russian revolution was a cause fought on the same principals. Need I go one.

The common man is dumbed down and as doe-eyed as a calf. He is sound asleep and going through the motions of a life. He refuses to think because its painful. Because have to stand alone on certain issues.
He has handed over his thinking and bitching to likes of John Stewart and Bill Maher.
He is atrophying into a gelatinous mass of cowardice. He knows he is making himself sick, but he just can help buying those big gulps.
He has stopped educating himself, he no longer reads, all he can accomplish is the thumbing beat on his iPhone.
I admire your admiration of the common fella. But he’s not there anymore K, he has been replace by a zombie with the sugar diet of a housefly.

In life one is either in struggle or one is asleep.