Classism

A brainworm of a sentence got revived out of me lately:

Everyone has the courage to hate the rich. But do you have the courage to hate the poor?

I don’t think it got enmeshed in me due to face value question, to hate. No, that’s not it.

What I like about the one-two punch is displaying an inevitability of classism and, more importantly, how classism perhaps reveals something more sinister.

How it calls out how most of “political thought” is about appeasing the downtrodden: it strikes at the heart of that underdog inclination. It’s also such a contrary question. To hate the poor is to boo the underdog! While turning toward everyone that’s rich, do they “deserve” to be so? (Not to imply anyone deserves anything necessarily…) Sometimes those that are rich had no part in it, or were favored by the Gods and thus enjoy the opulence.

Nothing is more tiring than those that use their wealth as evidence of high virtue or quality. But, theoretically, starting as a poor, what would be required to create an empire?

You couldn’t be spending your money on anything frivolously, for starters. Any sort of vice and that’s over. It requires a lot of other lifestyle changes, probably. Assuming you don’t sell your soul, necessarily.

To take the hike between a poor existence and a “well-to-do” living is to, inevitably, alienate yourself from your origins. Ascend enough and the way the poor live and how they act become foreign — not to imply any feeling of warm welcome in the higher strata waiting.

There are a few media pieces highlighting the coldness, but I was watching a YouTube video about some businessman in Hong Kong handing out loans to help randoms on the street “start their dreams”. The final shot felt like something out of “Parasite” where the rich are playing around with a poor as some pet and dog. Something amusing, something to baby; something not at all to take seriously. In front of all their well-to-do connections, random high-rise floor, so the host puts down another donation for the budding dream business. Ironically one could sense a tension in the room. To feel the concrete jungle more closely: adorning yourself with the jewels of other fleshly beings. Because you can.

With this clip so the two-punch statement forces you, for a moment, to consider the vantage of the mogul smiling and wrapping their arm around their toy. Carting along your caravan of gold and slaves and looking about the beggars asking for a coin… such a foreign view to inhabit. What is there to hate? The hate, justice ordained, is supposed be only toward you, mogul! With such wealth how could you find it in your heart to hate at all?

But the other day while driving someone careened past rather closely by me, chanting along lyrics in their cranked up Camry, flipping a bird at me going 50 in a 20. A flash of anger had me imagining disfiguring their head by dragging them along pavement. A flush of shame followed.

Sitting at a red light in critical self-reflection so revealed the mogul, right through the windshield, offering a hand to his vantage. Thus adorning my astral self with imagined jewels and a silk gown, a most mogul fashion, a split frame second, everything snapped into clarity.

Looking down on my iron gripped dishevelment from his position, definitely a poor by his standards, all I could see was a naive animal. Unpleasant. Because that’s what a lot of the average folk do: without any power themselves they always appeal to justice, and whenever a crumb of justice comes, such as the case of a 50 in 20, they turn into cannibals.

Everyone can hate the rich, but it takes a special case to hate the poor, because it requires realizing how ravenous we all are. Every single person walking about, with an injection of 50 million, would become gaunt with vice and adrenaline. Or adorned with great power, so they’ll revive petty disputes and humiliate them to oblivion. Of all the poor and their lot, how many, seriously, haven’t or won’t be corrupted?

The poor has this shield of the pure-hearted and earnest, innocent, but it’s only a disguise. Inbetween the appeals for rightness and morality so I hear the daggers twirling. The light turned green, and all hope of revolution exited me: all it would mean would be switching out one corrupted heart for another.

And as I passed the shopping center so, for a moment, I surged in a strange sympathy toward the mogul, however bootlicker I may appear. To be reminded of our true nature, amongst all classes, so something felt so reprehensible about pretending there’s anything good and virtuous.

Good and virtuous: the call-song of the downtrodden.