With a birthright caste, you're stuck. Even if you make a lot of money, you're still an untouchable.
In the US, if you make a lot of money, you can become upper class, even if you still have some "rough edges." I actually know a number of folks that have done exactly that.
I also know folks that have done the opposite. Started off on top of the heap, and ended up skint.
We definitely have strata. Hollywood stars represent an interesting one. They are sort of what folks aspire to be, but they are nowhere near the top of the heap.
In the UK, Elon Musk would never be a toff; no matter how much he has, but in the US, he's King of the Hill.
I guess that's where we part ways: just as the US is the world's richest 3rd* world country, I'd call ERM the richest upper-middle-class person in the US, but not exactly upper-class...
(just as a datum point: ERM is the opposite of an éminence grise, in just about any of its senses)
* in the economic sense. In the political sense, by definition the US is 1st world [after what happened to Yugoslavia (former leader of the non-aligned movement) I'm surprised Carney is brave enough to attempt to revive a "2nd World" ... surprised; but pleased!].
Compare: SV founders (including "broligarchs"(?)) will never say "cowboys" in vain, but East Coast financiers might :)
(How familiar are you with 1990s-2010s neo-hipsters?)
Edit: MPAA^W AMPAS will never think secret thoughts of "British upper middle class theatre" outside the occasional hire (for "diversity", these days). Is that why PG and Trevor moved to the UK ;)?
It's not reactionary centrism, but it's also not progressive centrism.. to always say never!
Q. How did the hipster wind up in the emergency room?
A. He fired his 3D-printed gun before it was cool. )
Not sure what you're getting at with cowboys, for me the intersection with SV is/was Gibson's console cowboy — "In the bars [Case had] frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh."
What is the opposite of relentless searching for the frontier? cottage-core?
hmmm: an arbitrary finite automaton can be decomposed into a collection of edges; can we decompose a reasonable philosophy into a collection of memes/greentexts/whatever the kids are doing these days?
(for that matter, I just assume the modal HN'er is ~13 now, but maybe that's an artifact of how the front page dynamic goldfishes the conversation?)
> I'd seen posters from the now fairly infamous 4chan /pol/, or Politics, board raiding other parts of the website in character as minorities or leftists before.
Seems like the idea that your (our?) concept of bigotry could be profoundly misguided could be the real unspeakable..
Have you read Lawrence of Arabia recently?
The dividing line maybe: I see --(well, viscerally) whom you may label-- bigots as adults (who may or may not require medical intervention); and you-- as children? To help you out on the trolling, I'm usually triggered by upper-middle class takes on Christ, like this guy:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46733577
LoA, I'm very ashamed to say, is in the category of: seen the inflight movie, but not even read "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" — should I remedy this sin of omission?
Jack and Leopold may well be centrist; I know all the thinkbois mostly by reputation, not as primary sources! (Indeed, I'm pretty sure I know who Jack must be, despite having bailed on his platform in its first year, but Leopold doesn't even ring a bell, unless he goes by a different handle?)
Here's my attempt to tl;dr my concept:
Soft bigotry: I know better than my neighbour how to live, so I deserve all sorts of good things. (Koerner notes that the way to spot social darwinists is that they're incessantly wringing their hands that the "unfit" are —somehow— outreproducing the "fit")
Hard bigotry: I know better than my neighbour how to live, so they deserve all sorts of bad things. ("patriots" get to kill "lunatics" in the street)
Now, I do believe some people do in fact know better than others how to live (unsurprisingly, I place myself among the former :-); I just also believe example works better than extortion as a means of proselytisation. (fishers of men should refrain from dynamiting the lake?)
Does the "kidult" have a large coupling constant with "growing old is obligatory; growing up is optional"?
Which M-H scales?
I'm surprised not to have run across alephnerd recently wrt Carneyism ["loz im gayn"? :)]; they seemed very great-game-adjacent, earlier...
Soft bigotry: all too happy to take Koerner to the "cleaners" :) in that there's actually something OG-Darwinism here, not even "social". I'm of the opinion that all personality-disorders are (genetically) adaptive one way or other. Maybe Regency aesthetes do find the dour Colin Firth look+manners as attractive as bronze agers found their perverts? Think PH had something about the sadist-masochist pairing having strong selective (coevolutionary) pressures at the moment of orgasm? It's very mechanical, so sorry that Sade was born a century too early.
Hard bigotry: I'm with you on this one, so let's look at
Sharp bigotry: projecting personal suffering on other tribes or, less sensibly, your own tribe. Upper middle class intellects- "existential suffering". From zero to minus one? (Original sin sounds like a weird rationalization for inventing laughter?)
The M-H scales that I like best right now are the ones that separate flawed democracies from the others :) it looks like we only have to rotate the emo-xpressivity axis by a small angle ;)
(Data from alephnerd)
Kidult. Yes. Minor correction to be explicated later
No. Thanks for the rec! (As I've mentioned too many times, Phil Dick had a special spot for the schizos but was probably (self-)diagnosed with OCD)
Yes, The happiness of Sisyphus is exactly what I think an update of the classical eudaimonia would uh formalize.
(I think it was Camus that predicted that the US would eventually lose its position as the leader of civilisation but I haven't been able to find the exact quote, or the context)
In India maybe. In the US (or some other places) it might be easier to have someone analyze your tax docs. "So what do you do?" is not a popular conversation opener these days..
(for 2025, see https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Degre... )