The BBC have created
this survey (You'll need to register for a BBC ID, but this is easy and free):
https://ssl.bbc.co.uk/labuk/experiments/class/
As if we haven't been divided-and-ruled enough through
creed, colour, gender and religion etc, our rulers have seen fit to categorize
us into "socio-economic classes", and constantly remind us of how
much we should identify with our place in this class structure and how little
in common we have with those in other places within it. The class system is
something emphasized and fixated upon by all political and cultural stripes.
For Marxists and socialists on the Far Left it's the fulcrum of the entire
human world; they see it as something that defines all of human history, and
that it has to be abolished by a revolution and replaced with a classless
communist utopia. For the aristocracy it is a product of breeding and tradition
that has to be preserved and defended to maintain social order... as well as
their own privileges of course. Whether the class system is something natural
or whether it is an artificial construct is something I'll come on to later;
but whether it is or is not, the way the authorities try to socially engineer
us is something I find very distasteful and worrying. In the modern world there
are now seven discernible classes apparently, when there were originally three.
Here's a BBC Radio interview about it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22012935
I must concede that I am what would conventionally be known
as "working class", but I really hate being thought of as a class. I
never identify being in a class and I strenuously avoid thinking of others in
those terms. Therefore I filled in the survey hoping I could make the BBC
computer go phut! like a Star Trek
robot. The survey begins by asking what kind of neighbourhood you live in, what
kind of holidays you have, about when you eat out and your musical tastes. Then
it asks about the education and the professions of yourself and the kinds of
people you know. Then they ask you about the kinds of newspapers you read.
Luckily they never said "buy" because I never buy any newspapers and
never have. They also ask many questions that make me think Common Purpose have
their grubby finger-marks all over the survey; for instance they ask whether
"people can be trusted". At the end of the survey I got presented
with a huge data readout describing exactly where I strand financially and
socially. Then it told me about another aspect of myself using a very Orwellian
and sinister word: "social capital"! Yuck! Apparently I have a lot of
it, but it's almost all through t'Internet! My social life was so ingrained
into my hospital that when I was kicked out of it I lost everything. I still
keep up with a few of my old Bro Po's now and again though. I have a lot of
"cultural capital" despite my being officially "working
class"; because I'm very much an amateur intellectual and like reading
books etc. They've even given me a novelty coat-of-arms, and you'll get yours too if you complete the survey.
Maybe it's because of the recent implementation of the
Welfare Reform Act that this subject is topical. Because this move by the
Government will increase the "precariat" many-fold; there's even talk
of a New Dark Age, thanks to Iain Duncan Smith and his determination to suck the
poor for every penny he can get while tiptoeing around the bankers whispering
with incredible care in case they think he's begging for a single penny! Am I
sounding like a Marxist who thinks class has to be destroyed? Well, no I'm not.
Despite what I said above about not wanting to be identified as a class I don't
reject the concept as a whole. I don't believe "universal equality"
is possible, and if it were possible it wouldn't be healthy. In fact the futile
and deceptive quest for "universal equality" has been used as a Trojan
horse for a lot of the increasing authoritarian and Conformist aspects to
politics and culture that I'm always complaining about on HPANWO. Somebody once
said to me in a "Charles"-like way (see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/charles-doing-washing-up.html):
"There will always be rich and poor, Ben. That's natural; it's just the
way things are." I don't agree at all; I think there will always be rich
and "less rich", but poverty is a product of contrived scarcity and
is completely avoidable. However rich and "less rich" is natural. In the same way that people
of different creeds and colours are different from each other, so are people
within a single social group. I think some kind of natural hierarchy will
emerge in the post-Illuminati world; there would be an upper-caste of political
leaders or industrial directors and the "rest of us" which will
comprise of an entirely new kind of social class consisting of people in all
kinds of occupations earning a wide scale of income and owning comparatively
diverging amounts of property. But, I repeat, there's no reason a single person
should be poor anywhere in the world. We may not all be born equal, but we are
all equally valuable; we all have the same worth as human beings. What we have
in today's world is a very unnatural hierarchy
that is the source of the power on Earth for a tiny elite few that are so far
up that class ladder that they are beyond it. They hover above it in the clouds
of secrecy; the rest of us can't even see them. They are the invisible, detached
capstone hovering above the rest of the pyramid, controlling us all, from "precariat"
to aristocrat.
4 comments:
I took the quiz and it was very short. No asking what newspapers I read or where I lived just about money, what occupations of people I associate with and leisure activities. The 'elite' they refer to should be renamed the sub-elite as it represents 6% of the population. The elite represents much less than that.
That's right, Lemsip. It's misleading in the extreme. There are far fewer than that number. In the 6% they are "cattle" mostly like the rest of us.
I took the survey and it asked all the questions you mentioned, Ben. I am in the US so I just messed up their data, sorry :) One funny observation, on the part where it asked where I live and gave all those pictures of homes - they literally all looked the same to me! I had to read the descriptions to guess what came closest to where I live. In the US, housing is much more diverse than that. In general, I agree with what you have said about poverty and how unnecessary it is. However, I will point out that in the US class is completely denied. No one wants to admit that we have a class system here also (George Bush was a guy you could have a beer with!). Everyone thinks that if a kid just works hard enough she can become one of the Kardashians or something. It is important to be aware that class exists, because it does.
Cheryl Ann, the Govt has just ordered all of us Precariats to declare war on the Emerging Service Workers LOL
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