Comment on Monthly Bragging Thread July 2015

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 19:01:46 GMT

Not that much of a rags-to-riches story, I'm afraid. My parents both have working class backgrounds, and neither went to university, but my upbringing would probably get coded as lower-middle class. I had one attempt at university already, fifteen years ago, but dropped out after one year of an Astrophysics degree. Also my jobs for those six years were mid-range software dev/tech professional tybe jobs. It's not like I've been shovelling coal or anything.

Some of the things I was thinking about class in relation to that comment were on this sort of topic. I dropped out of my first degree in part because I was a feckless 19-year-old who didn't know any better, but also in part because I didn't have any academic role models and all the education I'd received up until that point had lulled me into a false sense of security. On a fundamental level, I didn't know how to study at a university, and there wasn't anyone in a position to show me how.

Your talking about class-based memetic toxicity rang some bells along these lines. Education has a bunch of "soft skills" that parents can pass on to their kids, and presumably stuff like relationships, money management, interpersonal conflict resolution, etc. have similar sets of soft skills which you simply won't learn unless they're in your environment.

Also, this is going to sound like a bit of a non-sequitur, but I'd been thinking about Game of Thrones, and what feudal lords must look like to serfs. If you're well-fed, well-groomed and well-educated in a malnourished, dirty and illiterate world, you're not only going to look like a qualitatively superior sort of person to Pete the Peon, but you will operationally outperform him in a number of ways. I wonder to what extent this sort of pattern is prevalent in contemporary Western class systems.

Discuss