In Defence of the Bad, White Working Class

A Hillbilly Elegy type article from Australia. I think many of the same social dynamics are playing out across the Anglosphere.

It's hard to excerpt. It's a well-written essay and it is well worth reading in its entirety. But here's something I think will resonate here:

Even if I was wronged or oppressed or marginalised, claiming victim status seemed absurd (since I often came across people who were more unfortunate than me), limiting (since there were other, enriching aspects of life to focus on), humiliating (because in the working-class world self-pity is reviled), and self-defeating (because if you allow yourself to think and behave like a victim, you quickly fall into lumpen despair).

At university, I discovered that this ethos didn’t apply. A season of despair would not send middle-class teens spiralling into a life of drug-addled indigence; they could simply brush themselves off and enrol again next year. Strong, class-enforced safety nets meant that self-pity could be accommodated, and victimhood could even form part of a functional identity.

Indeed, the willingness to expose your wounds is another sign of privilege. Those for whom injury has a use-value will display their injuries; those for whom woundedness is a survival risk, won’t. As a consequence, middle-class grievances now drown out lower class pain. This is why the wounded lower classes come to embrace conservative discourses that ridicule middle-class anguish. Those who cannot afford to see themselves as disadvantaged are instinctively repulsed by those who harp on about disadvantage.

Language is another site of class-conflict. I grew up in violent environments. For people like me, ‘symbolic violence’ or ‘offensive speech’ were, if anything, a benign alternative to real violence and real hate. It was often registered as a joke—or yes, banter—because we understood its relative harmlessness. When I first came across someone who reacted to something that was said to him as though something had been done to him, I thought he was insane. But he wasn’t. He was from a lower middle-class family and was unfamiliar with our habits of speech. He’d never been beaten, so the words felt ‘violent’ enough for him to react in a way that was, in our environment, laughable.

12 comments:

Tom said...

One more paragraph here, following the last paragraph above:

"When I was six or seven, a slow-witted uncle held me down and repeatedly spat in my face, because I’d called my stepsister a nasty name. Another time, he savagely beat his disabled wife as we looked on, after she dared to question my stepmother’s maternal qualities. I’ll never forget the slap-thumping sounds as she cringed in her wheelchair, and the sight of blood streaming from her nose and lips, or her swollen black eyes and laboured breathing in the night. Nor will I forget the image of my father pinning my stepmother to the ground after she bit and scratched and tore at my stepsister, or my mother remorselessly punching and gouging a boyfriend who refused to lay hands on her, or my stepmother breaking wooden spoons over my knuckles (yes knuckles, not palms), or my father walloping me hard enough to leave perfect, purple, hand-shaped bruises imprinted on my back and chest after hearing me swear, or … That, to me, is what the word ‘violent’ describes."

There are a lot of privileged people in the world, but skin color has a lot less to do with it than whether you've grown up with something like that or not.

ymarsakar said...

The human trauma consciousness memory is embedded into the DNA itself for a few generations. It's why traditions and cultures often can't get themselves unstuck in ME and Africa.

Also, due to other reasons and powers.

Tom said...

Here, too.

Grim said...

Truth is, the ones I’ve known who missed it are worse off. The ones who’ve known violence have a cleaner sense of reality. It’s a privilege of a sort, if an expensive one.

tom said...

Quite an expensive one, although maybe growing up is always expensive in one way or another.

I grew up ... less violently than the author, but it was a normal part of my childhood. There are some things I cannot emotionally do. I see others connect in ways I cannot.

At the same time, there's a freedom there as well, for me.

When it comes down to it, I think I deal better with violence than they do, but they deal better with peace than I do. That's how our childhoods prepared us.

On balance, Americans spend a lot more time in peace than violence. Who's better off? Most of the time, they seem to be. Every once in a while, maybe I am.

I don't know.

Grim said...

Yeah, maybe.

Let’s talk about that in a few days, when we’ve had time to think about it.

ymarsakar said...

Why would anyone talk about their wounds... opsec violation, like sharing your sn or bank info. Not necessary. Free info to assassins and death squads.

Recent political assassinations in usa prove the point.

American family lines near grim are a good choice for souls wishing to transform their previous mistakes. The conditions are useful. Which is powers that should not be, have been trying to destruct usa.

ymarsakar said...

There are some things I cannot emotionally do. I see others connect in ways I cannot.

Known in my art, field, as soul fragmentation.

Due to the inherent helplessness of children, they develop coping mechanisms including stock holme syndrome. Their abusers tend to also be caretakers or allies of caretakers. Thus the survival ego creates survival habits. If a part of yourself threatens your survival, it is cut off. Why would it threaten you,? Because it set the adults off. These elements tend to be individual thought, empathy, or divine memories. Humanity by definition is broken and gets triggered by stuff that brings them to look at certain problems. Alcoholic might get angry when drinking problem is brought up.

I usually know when people begin getting triggered by reading what i write. Then because i am curiois, i will intentionally repeat certain things to see if that is the trigger. I know that it does nit anger me, yet i feel anger which i cannot detect as outside or inside. So i poke the fire.

Most people have no idea what is happening. As my skills improved over last 3 years, a quantitative difference developed.

The classic defense against me was defending by attacking a ymar quality. Now a days people are too freaked out to even do that. After all, i have cold read people s emotions back to them. Those that knew i was doing it, verified them as accurate. Others just find it too freaky to even engage.

ymarsakar said...

In the last 3 years alone, i have obtained a deep understanding of these abilities.

Now i can recall all the times that i picked up incomprehensible feelings and reactions from people, such as one tortured soul at blackfive.

In order to regather one s soul fragments, the part of the child rejected has to be accepted and loved by the adult that is now. They have to accept the parts of themselves that they cut off by feeling compassion for themselves.

Given the number of broken humans walking around and leftist zombies, that is harder than it looks.

when a person gets close to a repressed part of their soul, psyche, this is a trigger. If they are not ready to look at the darkness, the easiest way to defend themselvrs is to lash out at the closest safe source. Afterwards they may not even understand why they got so angry. The anger distracts from the pain. Touch animals where they are wounded and they will often fight, claw, bite, as a warning. Esp pets.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

The number of things one has to overcome is important. It's good for you to have a few, whatever they are. As they add up, however the spiral out of control and people go under the waves. People later writing for websites and blogs are not typical, and are likely a select group. Consider, for example, the slow-witted uncle in the story above. He likely grew up in violence, and it doesn't seem to have improved his character any, beating a woman in a wheelchair.

Those of us who have reached adulthood and in some way overcome obstacles may tell ourselves that we were better for it. It may be so, or we might be fooling ourselves, who knows? But if we look at the whole picture, of the people who did these things to us, it's hard to claim that they "overcame" anything in a positive way.

My two Romanian sons grew up with enormous violence and privation until they got to the Christian orphanage at 14 and 12. One shrugs it off now, when he thinks of it at all, the other still shows signs of damage, though he has put much behind him. I doubt either of them would say those experiences were good for them in any way, and many of the kids they knew from those days, even if they did get adopted to America, did not become fully functional adults.

I liken it to exercise and fitness. You have to have something to strain against, something that breaks muscles down so that they can rebuild stronger. But if you have too much weight fall on you, you just die.

Anonymous said...

When I was in college the first time, in the mid 1990s, one-downs-manship and victim status was starting to become important. I didn't play the game well, because I was on an academic scholarship, not a need-based one. Yes, I'd been physically assaulted multiple times in school, but that wasn't anyone's business, and wouldn't have "counted," anyway.

I think, even with all the warping I sense in myself, I still came out better than the kids who think that disagreeing with their ideas is the same as beating the living daylights out of their physical bodies.

LittleRed1

ymarsakar said...

Humanity overall is divided. Brother against sister. Child vs parent in mao s red movement. Forgot their name.... red sonya or guards.

So long as slaves are divided, they will not unite and set their fangs in rebellion. The human genetic and cultural inheritance of survival and trauma, needs to be re unified and repurposed against the real true enemies of humanity.

Miyamoto mushashi was quite the violent figure. But he achieved enlightenment ir nearly so, by facing so many death defying threats.

Yeshua s father or higher self, planned for a martyr sacrifice but he revived or was healed. Many others could not follow that example. They could liberate themselves from bitterness but not the genetlral pop.

I advised the godhead and divine counsel that humanity needs a final battle and war. A way to achieve unity and have the slaves grow fangs and bite the masters. This secret war is not enough.

Harness the power of violence to awaken the general pop. Just reduce casualties.

Odds still open on asteroid or fake invasion before or after nov 2020.