Underconsumed Knowledge

Why The First Amendment Is Rightly First

Much politically-minded discourse today argues in favor of censorship to combat “misinformation,” and ultimately, against the spirit of The First Amendment of The Constitution of the United States.  Amongst mainstream outlets, there is a paltry defense mounted in favor of the First Amendment.  So, as a starting point, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. The idea of democracy is that The People rule.  Today, this remains the First Amendment’s most compelling defense, even if our supposed self-rule may seem suspect [https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study] at times.  If the United States is a democracy, free discourse must be allowed to exchange and flourish.  That we have actual lawmakers [https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/10/25/cens-o25.html] at the Federal level calling for internet censorship is an atrocity.  If it turns out that the United States is, in fact, an oligarchic dystopia and not a democracy, how then are we to fix it?  Should The People want review-panels at Facebook, bribed Congress-people, or both making calls on what is and is not accurate “information?” How do you fix problems you can’t talk about?  Therein lies the problem of any form of speech regulation or censorship.  In Thomas Edsall’s recent NYT op-ed [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/opinion/left-right-moral-chasm.html], political scientist Richard Hanania is quoted as saying, Women are having more of a role to play in intellectual life, so we’re moving toward female norms regarding things like trade-offs between feelings and the search for truth. Whether or not you agree with Hanania’s assessment of truth being a non-female norm, there can be a hard-heartedness to the truth.  The truthful answers to a lot of questions in life are not always pleasing or pleasant, if someone honestly answers.  Furthermore, teasing out the truth is not always a straightforward task. If we are to care for one another as human beings, and indeed, to run our own government, free discourse is tantamount.  If answers to questions are written off before they can be asked, potentially correct answers dismissed from the get-go.  “Blaming the victim” suggests that everyone with a problem is always a victim of some external cause.  If potential suggestions to fixing problems (personal or political) are deemed hateful Wrongthink (things which, “You just cannot say”), how do We The People run the government and regulate ourselves?  If it is deemed “racist” to suggest that the Coronavirus could have originated in a lab in China [https://www.wsj.com/articles/jon-stewart-wuhan-lab-leak-theory-china-covid-origin-11629755765], a strong contender for the virus’ origin is eliminated.  If it is deemed “marginalizing” to suggest there is a strong correlation between methamphetamines and homelessness [https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/sam-quinones-on-addiction-and-bouncing?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxNTYwOTI5MywicG9zdF9pZCI6NDM3NDU3NzMsIl8iOiJkSXFuTCIsImlhdCI6MTYzNzAzMTczMiwiZXhwIjoxNjM3MDM1MzMyLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNjEzNzEiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.wgzjkVppq2DvPjFmOlu_Ow1oNbWv6-WBTfi9pnhVTgE], potential solutions to fix homelessness will remain forever feckless. The idea that words can cause harm is easily brushed aside by brash types like Joe Rogan.  Yet, the pop-psychology books I read offer compelling evidence contrary to this dismissal.  But the diagnosis and the prescription are two different things.  The lifeblood of a liberal democracy is freedom of expression.  Without it, the road to Orwell’s Oceania is but a blip in the history of humanity.  In the words of Jonathan Rauch, “[T]he liberal intellectual system, whatever else it may be, is not ‘nice.’”  Some might retort, “Well, it should be nice!”  But therein lies the problem; some third party then gets to decide what is nice and what is not, and potential avenues for problem-solving are off the table.  And in the blink of an eye, the oligarchy that already basically controls everything actually controls everything, and life becomes a permanent afternoon in line for Josef K. at the California DMV. “Words aren’t violence, violence is violence” is thus a more nuanced statement than it might seem.  In a liberal democracy, words must never be violence, by definition.  If words are violence, any thought, idea, or dream can be contorted to be violence, as defined by some third party; potentially the same third party that does not want to relinquish political power.  If words are violence, democracy cannot exist; there can be no self-rule. Without the First Amendment, slavery would never have been eliminated, nor would have separate water fountains. The only way these terrible things ceased to be was through the free exchange of ideas that were once considered heretical by then-subsets of the population.  One of the staunchest defenders of freedom of expression, Noam Chomsky -- a man who could find a problem with the way the United States glanced at a cloud -- has gone so far as to defend the rights of French anti-Semites to freely express their views.  Chomsky, a Jew, knows that the antidote to bad ideas is more ideas, not a restriction of expression.  Speech that is political in nature, however factually incorrect, is not libel, and is not crying fire in a crowded theatre.  To regulate such speech, whether by a regime of tech oligarchs or through government intervention, is the undoing of democracy. If you have a problem -- say, that globalization gutted the American Heartland (a claim some might dispute), and it led to the rise of a “populist,” “racist,” “demagogue” like Donald Trump -- trying to censor the symptom of the problem does not make the original problem go away.  Furthermore, free speech is a release valve to indicate that things are going wrong.  If you restrict the ability to speak, problems fester, and solutions cannot develop. If we are to rule ourselves politically, we must be able to express ourselves freely.  If you stand against oligarchic power, as does Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and you argue in favor of speech censorship, you are a walking contradiction. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underconsumed.substack.com [https://underconsumed.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Biking from Santa Monica to New Hampshire

This is an interview with Andrew, a fellow car-less cyclist, who rode his bike from his current home in Santa Monica, California to the opposite coast where he is originally from in New Hampshire.  I thought the photos of his trip were amazing and wanted to learn more about it from him.  Here is the link to Andrew’s trip photos [https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPb3g0ntHBZ2ELZPUnfzY4fp2WgoM9TBZbjT_1iceAYhtze6OK3mCCxLvmbAzw4JA?key=MmZKNklGRVVwT0tRTEtWMFR1aHVfQ3BkTm95Q1ln] and all his trip stuff: https://linktr.ee/andrewsbicycletour [https://linktr.ee/andrewsbicycletour]. Andrew just started riding a bike as a means of transportation less than five years ago, and I think his cross-country story is incredibly inspirational. “I think a lot of people think they can never do something like that. It sounds so difficult. And as flippant as it might sound, it was surprisingly not that difficult.” Listen to our talk above and be sure to check out Andrew’s own trip photos [https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPb3g0ntHBZ2ELZPUnfzY4fp2WgoM9TBZbjT_1iceAYhtze6OK3mCCxLvmbAzw4JA?key=MmZKNklGRVVwT0tRTEtWMFR1aHVfQ3BkTm95Q1ln] as you listen along. Andrew’s mother in her mid-sixties did over 800 miles with him! From Ohio to New York: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underconsumed.substack.com [https://underconsumed.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Jerry Springer's 2008 Northwestern Law Commencement Speech

Yesterday I saw a re-run of Jerry Springer on a television at a restaurant. The episode was about "Sex With a Pregnant Stripper." This led me to do some Googling about Jerry Springer, and I discovered that he delivered Northwestern Law School's 2008 Commencement Speech. I couldn't find the video online, so I have reverse-transcribed it to audio. The text is hosted on Northwestern's website [https://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/fall2008/feature/springer.html]. It regards life, ethical considerations, and the American Dream. Forty years ago this week I sat where you now do, degree in hand, the prestige of this great law school on my résumé and, perhaps immodestly, a real sense of achievement in my heart, but no sense of what my future would be or if in fact there would even be one. Please understand, I was not alone in my uncertainty — for this was 1968, and America was unraveling. Our cities were burning, and Vietnam was beckoning. Martin Luther King Jr. had just been assassinated, Bobby Kennedy was about to be, and within a few months and a few miles from here, Chicago would explode around the dysfunction of the Democratic National Convention. I remember thinking that our sheltered existence at law school, however prestigious, seemed totally detached from the chaos that consumed the world outside. There were 190 of us in my graduating class, and believe it or not, only two of the 190 were women. Of the 188 men, only one was African American. As a class we were too white, too male and too privileged. And though it certainly took too long to change, what comfort it is today to look out at all of you and see the racial, gender and ethnic diversity that really is America. But as happy as I am to look out and see all of your faces, I understand there are a number of you who aren't too happy to see mine. To the students who invited me — thank you. I am honored. To the students who object to my presence — well, you've got a point. I, too, would've chosen someone else. But once asked it would've been kind of arrogant, or at least unappreciative, for me to have said "no." So, here I am. I've been lucky enough to enjoy a comfortable measure of success in my various careers, but let's be honest, I've been virtually everything you can't respect: a lawyer, a mayor, a major market news anchor and a talk show host. Pray for me. If I get to heaven, we're all going. Let's assume that your prime discomfort with me is based on the ethics of what I do for a living. Well, that's a fair question, worthy of a serious response. I can tell you with some confidence that you, too, will likely deal with these very same ethical considerations, no matter what path your career takes. Surely, in every one of my chosen professions there were ethical "red flags" rising virtually every day. When I was Cincinnati's mayor, there were two or three issues I really wanted to focus on. But how much would I compromise on other legislation just to get the votes I needed on my priorities? And how much pandering would I do to the voters, rationalizing that if I didn't get re-elected I wouldn't be able to get anything done? Then for 10 years I became a journalist — perhaps the most ethically challenging profession of all. You see, I knew that 90 percent of what's in the paper or on the television news, we don't really need to know. And yet, how often do we go with a story anyway because it will make a great headline, sell papers or drive up ratings, even if we know it might embarrass or hurt the business or career or family or reputation of the person we're reporting on? That is a daily ethical question that I can tell you is almost always ignored. And then, of course, there is my profession now as host of a crazy talk show. Well, at least I can rationalize that the show is only open to those who really want to be on it, and they get to choose the subject matter, what is revealed and what must not be revealed. Even with this I grapple with ethical questions. What about the career most of you will be choosing, that of an attorney? Think of the ethical issues you will have to deal with. Will you work for a corporate client who perhaps is polluting? Will you walk into your senior partner's office after having been asked to prepare a memorandum in support of this client's case and say, "I'm sorry, I'll have to leave and find another place to work," and then explain to your family why there won't be a paycheck coming in this month? I'm not suggesting that these moral dilemmas don't have answers. But what I am saying is that whatever you plan to do with this diploma, the ethical questions will never stop. Welcome to life. Unavoidably, you will all join me on this witness stand of conscience, trying your best to figure it out — never perfectly but, hopefully, always sincerely. It is perhaps inevitable that we are inclined to always judge others. But let me share this observation. I am not superior to the people on my show, and you are not superior to the people you will represent. That is not an insult. It is merely an understanding derived from a life spent on the front lines of human interaction. We are all alike. Some of us just dress better or have more money, or perhaps we were born into better circumstances of parental upbringing, health, brains and luck. On this great day when we honor your achievement, we might also say thank you to God in full recognition that whatever we achieve in life is 99 percent a gift. Life is a gift — as is living in America. And I know that from personal experience. You see, I am not the first lawyer in my family. My dad's brother was. His practice was cut short, as was his life — in Auschwitz. My grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins — they met their end as well in Chelmno, Theresienstadt and in camp after camp, Hitler turning my family tree into a single vine. Mom and Dad, by the grace of God, survived, enabling them to bring my sister and me ultimately to America. With four tickets on the Queen Mary, January 1949, we sailed into New York Harbor. In silence, all the ship's passengers gathered on the top deck of this grand ocean liner as we passed by the Statue of Liberty. My mom told me in later years (I was 5 at the time) that while we were shivering in the cold, I had asked her "What are we looking at? What does the statue mean?" In German she replied, "Ein Tag, alles!" (One day, everything!) She was right. In one generation here in America, my family went from near total annihilation to this ridiculously privileged life I live today because of my silly show. Indeed, in America, all things are possible. So as we honor your achievement, may it be for you as it was for me, "Ein Tag, alles!" One day, everything! Thank you for having me. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underconsumed.substack.com [https://underconsumed.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Questioning Life Assumptions (Audio Version)

This is the audio version of a blog post I wrote in May 2021. Everyone eventually reaches a point in life where the need to question assumptions arises; this may manifest in different ways at different points in life.  Whenever I pass the apartment nearby my girlfriend’s house where the teenager loudly plays the electric guitar, I like to joke, “You don’t understand me, mom!”  My girlfriend says the teenager and the mother actually seem to get along quite well. A lot of people might look around in their twenties and say, “Why are all these people doing this?” Or, they might pose this question’s twin sibling, “Why am I not?” Cultures, beliefs, assumptions evolve over decades, centuries, millennia.  The end result for beings who can think and feel is, ultimately, the perpetuation of the human race, the reward of evolution.  So, if you feel like something is “missing” or if you aren’t happy, maybe it’s time to take a step back and evaluate, because evolution doesn’t necessarily reward us with happiness. Karen Horney was a psychoanalyst.  I, decidedly, am not, nor am I a psychologist or a therapist; I’m just a person trying to figure things out.  I excitedly read Karen Horney’s 1950 book Neurosis and Human Growth after finding it as a footnote in another book by a social psychologist named Carol Tavris (I would recommend both her books Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion and Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)).I really liked Neurosis and Human Growth, though I am told by Dr. Tavris, whom I emailed about it, that psychoanalysis has fallen out of vogue and is quite dated.  But, I still find a number of things Ms. Horney has to say to be extremely compelling. She talks about our expectations of life, of others, and of ourselves, dubbing this, “The Tyranny of the Should.”  This is how things “should” be, as we esteem them, as individuals, societies, and cultures; I “should” be doing this, you “should” be doing that, you “should” be treating me a certain way.  She illustrates what she calls a “neurotic claim” (Dr. Tavris also informed me psychology students today would no longer use the word “neurosis”) with an example about a train not being available when she wants to take it, and the resulting frustration that can result.  The train “should” be available at 2:30PM, when I want to take it; how stupid that it is not available then!  Certainly some injustices in our day-to-day life are more grave than others, but when you learn to see how you think about little things such as the dawdling pedestrian crossing the road or the driver who is having a hard time parallel parking, you can start to calm down a bit and go through life giving other parties a bit more benefit of the doubt. People often assume they are omniscient, as any connoisseur of Fox News or CNN might notice.  We think we have all available facts, that if you just do X, Y, and Z, life will fall into place, and a magical happiness and utopia will result.  And in a lot of ways, if you do the things you “should” do, you might be setting yourself up for success.  But, evolution didn’t reward human happiness; it rewarded the conditions that led to seven billion humans on Earth, a number that has increased over 10-fold in the last 500 years.  If you’ve ever been to the natural history museum, humans are really old;like hundreds of thousands of years old.  So, you don’t have to be a math whiz to gather that modernity and civilization are, relatively speaking, kind of a new thing. In light of this, if you are feeling unsatisfied, unfulfilled, unhappy, maybe that, actually, makes quite a bit of sense.  Modernity isn’t quite as soul-crushing as history was, so we have a lot more time to think, take it easy, and ponder what exactly is going on.  If you are feeling “something is missing,” maybe a personal re-evaluation of your philosophy of life, your “shoulds,” so to speak, is in order.  My friends are all doctors, lawyers, engineers, are having children, have expensive real estate, and here I am holding a uniform from Hot Dog on a Stick and I live with my parents.  To a certain extent, a lot of “should” can put humans in a place where they can achieve happiness; it is easier to be happy when you have a little extra money in the bank.  But if you become addicted to a certain kind of lifestyle, that potential for lasting and intrinsic happiness can morph into a form of slavery, and then you’re stuck making boat payments. To be sure, many people genuinely like having a boat, others maybe would be just as happy without one.  I am sure there are just as many satisfied and happy parents as there are parents who wished (or think they wished) they had never had children; and surely their answers will differ ten and twenty and forty years from now.  Different things have different meanings for different people; what do you want your life to mean for you? Jonathan Haidt and Carl Rogers both point out how inescapably social creatures humans are; if we did not care what others thought, we would be sociopaths.  But, as you get older, you can start to question some of the assumptions that are core to our historical human function.  Yes, it is impolite and rude to fart loudly on the subway, and we really ought not to shoot other people in the head for cutting us off in traffic; I think most people, on any given day, would feel these to be simple truths.  But humans are no longer on the savanna with prehistoric creatures, and a lot of the impulses and feelings we evolved with have overstayed their practical welcome.  You might start to question, as you get older, the up-keeping of appearances, and start to do the things that you want to do.  Social isolation can be lonely, but it is fair to assume we will still have friends and be allowed at the grocery store if we pull up in a Nissan Versa instead of a BMW.  Carl Rogers said, “When an activity feels as though it is valuable or worth doing, it is worth doing... I have never regretted moving in directions which ‘felt right,’ even though I have often felt lonely or foolish at the time.” Learning to trust what you want from life doesn’t have to mean a descent into booze-fueled nihilism coupled with a fast car and lots of drugs.  A lot of the post-WWII pop-psychologists like to talk about listening to your inner dictates, being your true self, self-realization, so on and so forth.  What they’re really saying is that you need to do some things with your life that you genuinely want to do.  Rob Kurzban is a psychologist who writes about the “modular mind,” and how we evolved with different brain “modules” that achieve certain evolutionary goals; there is no “self” in there, in our brains, running the show.  This is another way of saying that all of the potential things which could be considered humanly good do not necessarily add up to all being compatible.  There is no final life solution.  Life has paradoxes.  There is nuance.  And, there are tradeoffs. What do you want from life?  What do you want from the World?  These are big questions.  Humans are sexually reproductive creatures.  If you want the pretty girl, a BMW might help.  Others will tell you that if you are relying on the fancy car to get the girl, you’re getting the “wrong” kind of girl.  Do you want to start a family?  If you aren’t sure, maybe you should put the idea on ice until you’ve better sorted out your personal life philosophy. We have some modern society-wide assumptions that go like this; you should go to college, you should have nice stuff, you should have a family, and you should get a good job.  And if you want things from the world, and from other people, a lot of these things will be mutually complementary. I did all of the things.  I was married at 23, I had a mortgage not much later, and a graduate degree in marketing.  And all I wanted to do was to sock away enough money so that we could pay off the mortgage so that I could “stop working.”  I felt this deep hatred for my work, which for me was a career in internet marketing that eventually became somewhat lucrative.  Eventually, couples therapy failed, my marriage went kaput, and I entered a fumbling figuring-myself-out in my late twenties; things people like my own parents had to figure out while being married to one another and having two young children.  And it took about ten years of fumbling and doing the same thing until I finally had saved enough money to say I could quit my job, if not forever, at least for a good long while.  I had had enough and wanted to embark on “something else.” My something else wound up entailing a lot of reading.  I started with “Winners Take All” by Anand Giridharadas.  I read a lot of non-fiction books, books about politics, something which I had an undergraduate degree in and had always been interested in.  Then I found my way from political books to pop-psychology books, since politics involves people, as well as philosophy.  I eventually wound my way to literature, having previously deemed the genre of fiction as mind-smut, and non-fiction as the way one learns things.  And in the course of all this reading, I accidentally found my own, better, personal philosophy of life, and realized some life lessons of my own. Dostoevsky, a Russian literature author, pointed out that existence is in fact slavery, and while this sounds like a bleak assessment on the surface, it is objectively true, in a sense.  We have to eat, thus, we need to get food; it so happens that now food comes from the store and not from the savanna.  I think a lot of the modern discontent which exists is a rejection of this fact, a desire to spit in its face, the dislike of reality.  Philosopher Karl Popper wrote of, “a deepfelt dissatisfaction with a world which does not, and cannot, live up to our moral ideas and to our dreams of perfection... a reaction against the strain of our civilization and its demand for personal responsibility.”  The “Closed Society” of history is gone; our roles are not predestined, we must find them for ourselves. Humans have capacities and need to use them.  We want to work, even if it’s not what we think of as “work,” as George Orwell pointed out.  A lot of political philosophy revolves about how we will re-make the World to somehow better link what we want to do with our lives versus what we must do economically in the World that has evolved.  This usually involves the bloody death of those deemed to be evil.  Suffice it to say, a paradox of “work” exists. There might be some fortunate people who find productive work which is both economically and personally rewarding.  I imagine things like physical therapist or medical doctor to be amongst these professions.  I cannot say what it is like since my profession is on the more soul-sucking/evil end of things.  But, I have come to embrace that which provides me with a roof over my head, food in the fridge, and have learned to better appreciate my fortune. Not all things which are economically productive in life are going to be rewarding, and vice versa; this is an irresolvable conflict in a society which has any form of freedom.  Ultimately, the question of whether you get to lead a happy life or not, resides with you.  People adopt philosophies of life, and if your current life philosophy is coming up short; you need to figure out a new one.  Australian “spirit master” Barry Long said, “The truth is you are responsible for your life.  If you’re not responsible, it’s not your life; and that’s absurd.  Similarly, if you blame something else for what happens to you, you’re giving up responsibility by giving it to others.  To be responsible is to be responsible for everything that happens to you, unfolding as your life.  Indeed, there are continual difficulties you have to face.  They may seem to have been caused by other agencies.  But you have to do your best to sort them out.  That’s life.” I never wanted to have a family because I saw it as an elongation of my slavery, manufacturing something which needed to be supported via doing those things I already hated doing so much.  Perhaps it is a decision that I will regret in older age, though I think I have mostly moved passed living with regrets.  I quit my job to do what “I wanted to do,” and that was to think about “fixing” politics, and to try to help people, somehow.  I came to realize one of the best ways I could do something to “help people” was to lend financial assistance to young children in my own extended family who had the misfortune of being born with no fathers in the picture and are being raised by their grandmother; this very same something that I had previously found to be a very frustrating financial burden.  The idea that somehow people can be okay with bringing children into the world and then not loving or taking care of them has always been deeply troubling to me; I always viewed having children as an enormous responsibility.  So, I can do what I can to try to right this wrong, however inadequate. Leo Tolstoy’s character Pierre, near the end of War and Peace, gave good color to the need for perspective in life.  As a political prisoner of the invaders from Napoleonic France in his own native Russia, he discovers the Aurelian truth that all is perspective.  Pierre suffers from blisters on his feet from marching as a prisoner of war.  Tolstoy writes, “While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still another new, consolatory truth — that nothing in this world is terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together; that the person in a bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as he now... and that when he had put on tight dancing shoes he had suffered just as he did now when he walked with bare feet that were covered with sores... He discovered that when he had married his wife — of his own free will as it had seemed to him — he had been no more free than now when they locked him up at night in a stable. Of all that he himself subsequently termed his sufferings, but which at the time he scarcely felt, the worst was the state of his bare, raw, and scab-covered feet. (The horseflesh was appetizing and nourishing, the saltpeter flavor of the gunpowder they used instead of salt was even pleasant; there was no great cold, it was always warm walking in the daytime, and at night there were the campfires; the lice that devoured him warmed his body.) The one thing that was at first hard to bear was his feet.” Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and author of Man’s Search For Meaning, implores his reader to ask, what does life demand of you.  Not to ask, what is the meaning of life.  Because, the meaning of life cannot be known to humans.  So, we must make our own meaning.  Our greatest freedom is the choice of how to respond to life.  The determinists, those who think all is pre-ordained and nothing can be changed, would say we do not even have this freedom.  But if we do not have this freedom, why should we live? In my quest to do “something else” with my life, I strangely find myself back in a similar place, doing internet marketing part-time so that I can fulfill financial obligations to help my family.  But I do not think of it as I thought of it before.  I can think of no better use of my time to contribute, financially and spiritually, to two young children in my own family with no fathers.  I still do not like my line of work, not genuinely, but it provides me with financial freedom and time to write things such as this. People make decisions.  A lot of people choose prisons of their own making, maybe inadvertently, maybe on purpose.  The determinist says people don’t make decisions, “[W]ith them one is always a ‘victim of the environment’--and nothing else!” Are our own abilities to evaluate our lives a product of our social environment?  It surely plays a role, but we must play the cards we are dealt.  If you can learn to trust yourself, your “inner dictates,” a sea of anxiety and self-mistrust can begin to wash away, in time, and you can begin to live your life more in accordance with what you think you should do.  I believe this because I feel it myself; I recognize my good psychological fortune in having been raised by two loving parents in a small rural Ivy League town.  I like to have time to ride my bicycle and read books; riding my bike brings me great joy, and provides me with a source of happiness.  Helping my family brings me a source of meaning, and one day I’d like to try to help others figure out how to better succeed at life in ways that I have.  I do not accept that the only way to contribute to humanity is to have children, that there is something wrong with me because I am in my late 30s, have no car, and live with a cat.  I am not here on Earth to somehow preserve someone else’s standards for living. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underconsumed.substack.com [https://underconsumed.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

George Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier (1937) On Class & Power

Orwell explains in 1937 the disposition of the typical “socialist” living in England, and why it is so many people become averse to socialism because of these people alone, comprised of bourgeois intellectuals who have no actual affinity for the working classes, and working-class scribblers who work their way into the intellectual literati but are so hostile to everything that it seems they just want to burn it all down.  Orwell questions, what is it these people, these “Socialists”, really want?  When they seem to have no love for their fellow man.  He suggests that, for many of them, socialism is a way to institute control on society, to implement order amongst those who do not share their cultural values.  Orwell begins with descriptions of working conditions for miners in Industrial England, whom he went to live among and observe; it sounds like very difficult and back-breaking work, indeed, and their living conditions do not sound so great; many went without luxuries such as sheets, taken for granted across the world today for many years now.  In the second part of the book, he gets to the meat on class and the reigning economic order of things; though I believe his beliefs that central planning and “socialism” are not the answer, he thoroughly explains issues of class, and why it is that socialism so quickly morphs into Fascism.  He explains how the average socialist does not see what socialism would actually be as truly revolutionary – which, it is, in theory.  The socialist, whether he is of proletarian origin or middle-class, imagines a World much like the existing one, except one maybe with less poverty, but still having the pub down the street, and the corner store selling all the wares you would want.  In England, the bourgeois classes would disdain someone more “conservative”, who spoke of the superiority of England to other nations; but those same people would speak of the superiority of their own region in England to the other regions as if it were nothing.  He outlines how little actual commitment to the idea of brotherhood and love for one another there is amongst the ranks of socialists, hateful men such as George Bernard Shaw who disdain the non-intellectual classes, and whose “radical” ideas “change to their opposite” at the first sight of “reality.”  He explains the typical middle-class socialist as a 1937-era stereotypical Ultimate frisbee-playing type hippie, a “Sandal-wearer” who wants to go around doing yoga and ordering others about.  As Dostoevsky points out, the normal human response to such a person is to give them the middle finger and to tell them to pound sand.  If you look beyond the fact that Owell was not an economist, his argument is really that we ought to love our fellow man, which is in essence his argument for socialism.  His illustration of class difference points out the inherent fact that humans have values.  These value judgments are made from the conservative religious classes to the woke vegan-cheese eating, Prius driving classes.  Orwell really argues for the need for mutual toleration, at the very least. “A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role.  He does not act, he is acted upon.  He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that “they” will never allow him to do this, that and the other.  Once when I was hop-picking I asked the sweated pickers (they earn something under sixpence an hour) why they did not form a union.  I was told immediately that “they” would never allow it.  Who were “they” ? I asked.  Nobody seemed to know; but evidently “they” were omnipotent.” “A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants... “educated” people tend to come to the front... their “education” is generally quite useless in itself, but they are accustomed to a certain amount of deference and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander. That they will come to the front seems to be taken for granted...” Thus, expectations of what ones role in society is inevitably has a role on how someone acts in it.  Whether or not one is willing to try and buck authority has less to do with being educated, and more to do with ones mindset.  This parallels some of the points made by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliars about children who learn to “come to the front” and insert themselves in situations that will further their interests. "Talking once with a miner I asked him when the housing shortage first became acute in his district; he answered, ‘When we were told about it,’ meaning that till recently people’s standards were so low that they took almost any degree of overcrowding for granted.  He added that when he was a child his family had slept eleven in a room and thought nothing of it, and that later, when he was grown-up, he and his wife had lived in one of the old-style back to back houses in which you not only had to walk a couple of hundred yards to the lavatory but often had to wait in a queue when you got there, the lavatory being shared by thirty-six people...” On efforts to try to alleviate these conditions, there are premonitions of Arnade’s Dignity. “...are definitely fine buildings.  But there is something ruthless and soulless about the whole business.  Take, for instance, the restrictions with which you are burdened in a Corporation house.  You are not allowed to keep your house and garden as you want them—in some estates there is even a regulation that every garden must have the same kind of hedge.  you are not allowed to keep poultry or pigeon.  The Yorkshire miners are fond of keeping homer pigeons...”  Thus, you can take the help, but it is a bargain with the devil where you can no longer determine how your own life is lived. Of his time spent with the miners, who were of a different class and culture than him, “I cannot end this chapter without remarking on the extraordinary courtesy and good nature with which I was received everywhere.  I did not go alone—I always had some local friend among the unemployed to show me round—but even so, it is an impertinence to go poking into strangers’ houses and asking to see the cracks in the bedroom wall.  Yet everyone was astonishingly patient and seemed to understand almost without explanation why I was questioning them and what I wanted to see.  If any unauthorized person walked into my house and began asking me whether the roof leaked and whether I was much troubled by bugs and what I thought of my landlord, I should probably tell him to go to hell.”  I think this mirrors experiences of traveling in the Midwest, of people who are extremely nice and generally welcoming, despite what is depicted in the media about their politics and thoughts. On anonymity and the city, “Until you break the law nobody will take any notice of you, and you can go to pieces as you could not possibly do in a place where you had neighbours who knew you.” “...you can’t command the spirit of hope in which anything has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you...” “It is a deadly thing to see a skilled man running to seed, year after year, in utter, hopeless idleness.  It ought not to be impossible to give him the chance of using his hands and making furniture and so forth for his own home...” “But no human being finds it easy to regard himself as a statistical unit.  So long as Bert Jones across the street is still at work, Alf Smith is bound to feel himself dishonoured and a failure.  Hence that frightful feeling of impotence and despair which is almost the worst evil of unemployment—far worse than any hardship, worst than the demoralisation of enforced idleness...” “A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards.  A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children.  I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion.  The Great War, for instance, could never have happened if tinned food had not been invented.  And the history of the past four hundred years in England would have been immensely different if it had not been for the introduction of root-crops and various other vegetables... and... non-alcoholic drinks... and... distilled liquors.” “The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots.  And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food... when you are unemployed, which is to say, when you are... bored and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food.  You want something a little bit “tasty.””  When you have nothing else, you can at least have food that you enjoy. “There exists in England a curious cult of Northernness, a sort of Northern snobbishness.  A yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior... the North... is ‘real’ life...” “Here you have an interesting example of the Northern cult. Not only are you and I and everyone else in the South of England written off as "fat and sluggish," but even water, when it gets north of a certain latitude, ceases to be H2O and becomes something mystically superior. But the interest of this passage is that its writer is an extremely intelligent man of " advanced " opinions who would have nothing but contempt for nationalism in its ordinary form. Put to him some such proposition as "One Britisher is worth three foreigners," and he would repudiate it with horror. But when it is a question of North versus South, he is quite ready to generalise” You have Americans who denounce people who are Patriotic, who denounce those who think that there are too many immigrants coming and taking the jobs, or whatever it is.  But those same Americans, those "citizens of the World", are just as prejudiced against non-"multiculturalists."  You don't see woke hipsters looking to saddle up with a can of Bud to watch some NASCAR and praise Jesus.  They think that they are better, that their values are better, that everyone should go get an education and stop living in Indiana.  So, each class of society has prejudice, it takes different forms.  There is an inherently antagonistic relationship between the classes because each thinks its way of living is the right way.  In a Democracy, in theory, we say that you are free to determine how to live for yourself. “To be working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly... there is much in the middle-class life that looks sickly and debilitating when you see it from a working-class angle.”  Thus, the two different approaches to life and living. “This scene is still reduplicated in a majority of English homes... Its happiness depends mainly upon one question—whether Father is in work.  But notice that the picture I have called up, of a working-class family sitting round the coal fire... belongs only to our own moment... and could not belong either to the future or the past.  Skip forward two hundred years into the Utopian future... In that age when there is no manual labour and everyone is ‘educated,’... The furniture will be made of rubber, glass and steel.  If there are still such things as evening papers there will certainly be no racing news in them, for gambling will be meaningless in a world where there is no poverty and the horse will have vanished from the face of the earth.  Dogs, too, will have been suppressed on grounds of hygiene.  And there won’t be so many children, either, if the birth-controllers have their way... Curiously enough it is not the triumphs of modern engineering, nor the radio... but the memory of working-class interiors... that reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad one to live in.”  Thus, everything that defines happiness and the meaning of life for the working classes is what the classes of progress want to kill.  Progress says, your life is meaningless. “To me in my early boyhood, to nearly all children of families like mind, “common” people seemed almost sub-human.  They had coarse faces, hideous accents and gross manners, they hated everyone who was not like themselves, and if they got half a chance they would insult you in brutal ways.  That was our view of them, and though it was false it was understandable.  For one must remember that before the war there was much more overt class-hatred in England... in those days you were likely to be insulted simply for looking like a member of the upper classes... the time when it was impossible for a well-dressed person to walk through a slum street without being hooted at...”  This, the inherent antagonism between the classes. “If you treat people as the English working class have been treated during the past two centuries, you must expect them to resent it.  On the other hand the children of shaby-genteel families could not be blamed if they grew up with a hatred of the working class, typified for them by prowling gangs...” “I have dwelt on these subjects because they are vitally important.  To get rid of class-distinctions you have got to start by understanding how one class appears when seen through the eyes of another... snobbishness is bound up with a species of idealism...” “Suggest to the average unthinking person of gentle birth who is struggling to keep up appearances on four or five hundred a year that he is a member of an exploiting parasite class, and he will think you are mad...In his eyes the workers are not a submerged race of slaves, they are a sinister flood creeping upwards to engulf himself and his friends and his family and to sweep all culture and all decency out of existence.  Hence that queer watchful anxiety lest the working class shall grow too prosperous... for miners to buy a motor-car, even one car between four or five of them, is a monstrosity, a sort of crime against nature.”  The poor man of middle-class origin fears for the middle class who wants to sweep away everything that is dear to him, his meaningless learning and culture. “Look at any bourgeois Socialist... he idealises the proletariat, but it is remarkable how little his habits resemble theirs.  Perhaps once, out of sheer bravado, he has... [sat] indoors with his cap on, or even [drank] his tea out of the saucer... I have listened by the hour to [bourgeois Socialist] tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners... Why should a man who thinks all virtue resides in the proletariat still take such pains to drink his soup silently? It can only be because in his heart he feels that proletarian manners are disgusting.  So you see he is still responding to the training of his childhood, when he was taught to hate, fear, and despise the working class.”  The working class “smells” indeed. “In the war the young had been sacrificed and the old had behaved in a way which, even at this distance of time, is horrible to contemplate; they had been sternly patriotic in safe places while their sons went down like swathes of hay before the German machine guns. Moreover, the war had been conducted mainly by old men... by 1918 everyone under forty was in a bad temper with his elders... a general revolt against orthodoxy and authority... The dominance of ‘old men’ was held to be responsible for every evil known to humanity, and every accepted institution... was derided merely because ‘old men’ were in favour of it. For several years it was all the fashion to be a ‘Bolshie’... England was full of half-baked antinomian opinions. Pacifism, internationalism, humanitarianism of all kinds, feminism, free love, divorce-reform, atheism, birth-control—things like these were getting a better hearing than they would get in normal times... At that time we all thought of ourselves as enlightened creatures of a new age, casting off the orthodoxy that had been forced upon us by those detested ‘old men’. We retained, basically, the snobbish outlook of our class, we took it for granted that we could continue to draw our dividends or tumble into soft jobs, but also it seemed natural to us to be ‘agin the Government’.”  Thus, the ebb and flow of left to right, and the lack of actual, genuine revolutionary spirit amongst the so-thought progressive classes. Of his own insolence and class-bias as the protector of the 1% but disdainer of the 90%, “So to the shock-absorbers of the bourgeoisie, such as myself, ‘common people’ still appeared brutal and repulsive. Looking back upon that period, I seem to have spent half the time in denouncing the capitalist system and the other half in raging over the insolence of bus-conductors" Of smelling the sweat of other soldiers, “All I knew was that it was lower-class sweat that I was smelling, and the thought of it made me sick.” On the wrongness of foreign occupation, “...no modem man, in his heart of hearts, believes that it is right to invade a foreign country and hold the population down by force. Foreign oppression is a much more obvious, understandable evil than economic oppression... people who live on unearned dividends without a single qualm of conscience, see clearly enough that it is wrong to go and lord it in a foreign country where you are not wanted. The result is that every Anglo-Indian is haunted by a sense of guilt... All over India there are Englishmen who secretly loathe the system of which they are part..” On the inhumanity of prisons and capital punishment, “I had begun to have an indescribable loathing of the whole machinery of so-called justice... It needs very insensitive people to administer it. The wretched prisoners squatting in the reeking cages of the lock-ups... the women and children howling when their menfolk were led away under arrest—things like these are beyond bearing when you are in any way directly responsible for them. I watched a man hanged once; it seemed to me worse than a thousand murders... the worst criminal who ever walked is morally superior to a hanging judge.” "… I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and that people can be trusted to behave decently if only you will let them alone. This of course was sentimental nonsense. I see now as I did not see then, that it is always necessary to protect peaceful people from violence. In any state of society where crime can be profitable you have got to have a harsh criminal law and administer it ruthlessly; the alternative is Al Capone. But the feeling that punishment is evil arises inescapably in those who have to administer it.” “I had reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong: a mistaken theory, but the natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself” regarding his feelings in Colonial Burma “I had carried my hatred of oppression to extraordinary lengths.  At that time failure seemed to me to be the only virtue. Every suspicion of self-advancement, even to ‘succeed’ in life to the extent of making a few hundreds a year, seemed to me spiritually ugly, a species of bullying.” On the inescapable nature of class difference, echoes Dostoevsky in Dead House. “I washed at the kitchen sink, I shared bedrooms with miners, drank beer with them, played darts with them, talked to them by the hour together. But though I was among them, and I hope and trust they did not find me a nuisance, I was not one of them, and they knew it even better than I did. However much you like them, however interesting you find their conversation, there is always that accursed itch of class-difference... It is not a question of dislike or distaste, only of difference, but it is enough to make real intimacy impossible... I found that it needed tactful manoeuvrings to prevent them from calling me ‘sir’; and all of them... softened their northern accents for my benefit. I liked them and hoped they liked me; but I went among them as a foreigner, and both of us were aware of it.” Of the sentimentalist (John Galsworthy) vs. Reality... “But is it so certain that he really wants it overthrown? On the contrary, in his fight against an immovable tyranny he is upheld by the consciousness that it is immovable. When things happen unexpectedly and the world-order which he has known begins to crumble, he feels somewhat differently about it... This is the inevitable fate of the sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality.”  Another version of this same quote, “...the opinions of the sentimentalist change into their opposites at the first touch of reality.” “For in the last resort, the only important question is. Do you want the British Empire to hold together or do you want it to disintegrate?” The answer for man, maybe most, is no; the status quo is just fine. “The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes. That is the very last thing that any left-winger wants. Yet the left-winger continues to feel that he has no moral responsibility for imperialism. He is perfectly ready to accept the products of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who hold the Empire together.” Of the propensity for words to attempt as a substitute for action, “Hence the temptation to believe that it [class difference] can be shouted out of existence with a few scoutmasterish bellows of goodwill... Let’s pal up and get our shoulders to the wheel and remember that we’re all equal...” “For me to get outside the class bracket I have got to suppress not merely my private snobbishness, but most of my other tastes and prejudices as well.  I have got to alter myself so completely that at the end I should hardly be recognisable...”  People have standards, and this is to be human. “For it is not easy to crash your way into the literary intelligentsia if you happen to be a decent human being... being the life and soul of cocktail parties and kissing the bums of verminous little lions” “I have pointed out that the left-wing opinions of the average ‘intellectual’ are mainly spurious. From pure imitativeness he jeers at things which in fact he believes in... It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are... This at any rate is what he says,... the bourgeoisie are ‘dead’ (a favourite word of abuse nowadays and very effective because meaningless), bourgeois culture is bankrupt, bourgeois “values” are despicable, and so on...” On trying to break down class barriers, “If you secretly think of yourself as a gentleman and as such the superior of the greengrocer’s errand boy, it is far better to say so than to tell lies about it.  Ultimately you have got to drop your snobbishness, but it is fatal to pretend to drop it before you are really ready to do so.” “Any Socialist, he probably felt, could be counted on to have something eccentric about him... I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say ‘whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian’. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people. And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person but of touch with common humanity.” On how “socialist” literature is incomprehensible to normal people, “You can see the same tendency in Socialist literature, which, even when it is not openly written de haut en bos, is always completely removed from the working class in idiom and manner of thought... As for the technical jargon of the Communists, it is as far removed from the common speech as the language of a mathematical textbook.” “…no genuine working man grasps the deeper implications of Socialism. Often, in my opinion, he is a truer Socialist than the orthodox Marxist, because he does remember, what the other so often forgets, that Socialism means justice and common decency... His vision of the Socialist future is a vision of present society with the worst abuses left out, and with interest centering round the same things as at present—family life, the pub, football, and local politics.” Of Orthodoxy, “One of the analogies between Communism and Roman Catholicism is that only the ‘educated’ are completely orthodox. The most immediately striking thing about the English Roman Catholics—I don’t mean the real Catholics, I mean the converts… is their intense self-consciousness. Apparently they never think, certainly they never write, about anything but the fact that they are Roman Catholics; this single fact and the self-praise resulting from it form the entire stock-in-trade of the Catholic literary man.  But the really interesting thing about these people is the way in which they have worked out the supposed implications of orthodoxy until the tiniest details of life are involved. Even the liquids you drink, apparently, can be orthodox or heretical; hence the campaigns…  against tea and in favour of beer... tea-drinking’ is ‘pagan’, while beer-drinking is ‘Christian’, and coffee is ‘the puritan’s opium’... [W]hat I am interested in here is the attitude of mind that can make even food and drink an occasion for religious intolerance. A working-class Catholic would never be so absurdly consistent as that. He does not spend his time in brooding on the fact that he is a Roman Catholic, and he is not particularly conscious of being different from his non-Catholic neighbours. Tell an Irish dock-labourer in the slums of Liverpool that his cup of tea is ‘pagan’, and he will call you a fool... It is only the ‘educated’ man, especially the literary man, who knows how to be a bigot.” “The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard… Take the plays of a lifelong Socialist like Shaw.  How much understanding or even awareness of working class life do they display?  Shaw himself declares that you can only bring a working man on the stage ‘as an object of compassion… At best his attitude to the working class is the sniggering Punch attitude... he finds them merely contemptible and disgusting.  Poverty and, what is more, the habits of mind created by poverty, are something to be abolished from above, by violence if necessary; perhaps even preferably by violence.  Hence his worship of “Great” men and appetite for dictatorships...” “The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders.” “The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight.” “This, then, is the superficial aspect of the ordinary man’s recoil from Socialism... The whole thing amounts to a kind of malaise produced by dislike of individual Socialists... Is it childish to be influenced by that kind of thing? Is it silly? Is it even contemptible? It is all that, but the point is that it happens, and therefore it is important to keep it in mind.” “Work, you see, is done ‘to provide us with leisure’. Leisure for what? Leisure to become more like Mr Beevers, presumably.” Regarding the disdain for work of progressives, and the love of the machine. (John Beevers, World Without Faith). “The truth is that many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain or difficulty...” “The truth is that when a human being is not eating, drinking, sleeping, making love, talking, playing games, or merely lounging about—and these things will not fill up a lifetime—he needs work and usually looks for it, though he may not call it work. Above the level of a third- or fourth-grade moron, life has got to be lived largely in terms of effort. For man is not, as the vulgarer hedonists seem to suppose, a kind of walking stomach; he has also got a hand, an eye, and a brain. Cease to use your hands, and you have lopped off a huge chunk of your consciousness...” “The nomad who walks or rides, with his baggage stowed on a camel or an ox-cart, may suffer every kind of discomfort, but at least he is living while he is traveling; whereas for the passenger in an express train or a luxury liner his journey is an interregnum, a kind of temporary death.”  A good analogy for cycling vs. Cars. “They [Socialists] have never made it sufficiently clear that the essential aims of Socialism are justice and liberty. With their eyes glued to economic facts, they have proceeded on the assumption that man has no soul, and explicitly or implicitly they have set up the goal of a materialistic Utopia. As a result Fascism has been able to play upon every instinct that revolts against hedonism and a cheap conception of ‘progress’. It has been able to pose as the upholder of the European tradition, and to appeal to Christian belief, to patriotism, and to the military virtue...”  The Socialist and Communist seek to dismiss all those things which normal men hold dear, and tell them they are not men, and that what they desire in their soul is wrong or false. On Fascism, a good analysis that could be applied to modern China, “...it is quite easy to imagine a world-society, economically collectivist—that is, with the profit principle eliminated—but with all political, military, and educational power in the hands of a small caste of rulers and their bravos. That or something like it is the objective of Fascism. And that, of course, is the slave-state, or rather the slave-world; it would probably be a stable form of society, and the chances are, considering the enormous wealth of the world if scientifically exploited, that the slaves would be well-fed and contented. It is usual to speak of the Fascist objective as the ‘beehive state’, which does a grave injustice to bees. A world of rabbits ruled by stoats would be nearer the mark. It is against this beastly possibility that we have got to combine.” On accepting the blessings of your Orthodox leaders vs. Actually evaluating something on its merits, “an incensed reader wrote to say, ‘Dear Comrade, we don’t want to hear about these bourgeois writers like Shakespeare. Can’t you give us something a bit more proletarian?’ etc., etc. The editor’s reply was simple. ‘If you will turn to the index of Marx’s Capital,’ he wrote, ‘you will find that Shakespeare is mentioned several times.’ And please notice that this was enough to silence the objector. Once Shakespeare had received the benediction of Marx, he became respectable. That is the mentality that drives ordinary sensible people away from the Socialist movement.” Orwell wonders of his status in society as a relatively poor writer, “Economically I belong to the working class, but it is almost impossible for me to think of myself as anything but a member of the bourgeoisie. And supposing I had to take sides, whom should I side with, the upper class which is trying to squeeze me out of existence, or the working class whose manners are not my manners” “But if you are constantly bullying me about my ‘bourgeois ideology’, if you give me to understand that in some subtle way I. am an inferior person because I have never worked with my hands, you will only succeed in antagonizing me. For you are telling me either that I am inherently useless or that I ought to alter myself in some way that is beyond my power.”  Echoing Dostoevsky and how progressives antagonize the people whom they should be trying to persuade. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underconsumed.substack.com [https://underconsumed.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]