A Secure Middle Class Is Autonomy's Fuel
Photo by Fons Heijnsbroek on UnsplashThe poor and the rich in complex, agriculture-based civilizations like ours have one thing in common: less interpersonal freedom than those born into the insecure middle classes. By understanding the psycho-social limitations of poverty and intergenerational wealth, we can better understand how middle-class heavy societies like America breathe “social autonomy” as a necessary fuel. And why we might unwittingly forsake it when it no longer delivers financial security.
So, let’s look at America’s social extremes for cultural insight into the vast middle of American society.
The Rich Live-in Lifestyle Prisons Based on Extreme Consumption and Public ReputationOnce wealth transfers across generations in quantities that make working for a wage unnecessary to support an expensive lifestyle, you are what I’m loosely calling “rich.” I’m referring to intergenerational wealth. This definition excludes nouveau riche billionaires and millionaires like Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and, on the low end of the continuum, my own father. They haven’t transferred anything. Yet.
Historically, the rich in agricultural civilizations controlled vast amounts of income-earning land. This was the economic fuel of all aristocracies and is the original form of intergenerational wealth.1 Today, though, stock market investments create intergenerational wealth like never before. Land converts to investment cash pretty quickly. One result is America’s ~7,000 Family Offices, which, in the aggregate, control $7.6 trillion in wealth (and who quietly fund some of the early-stage companies I work with).2 The tiny percentage of people who have either kind of intergenerational wealth (land or investments) tend to live in prisons of social status maintenance, severely restricting acceptable marriage and career options. They are raised to see narrower, ‘suitable’ options. This is even true in America today, where the “rich” desperately try to mask their enormous economic power in public. Anderson Cooper can ‘work’ for a living and be gay, sure, but he can not marry a gay oil rig worker (unless his name is Robert Dupea). He was raised not to see the latter as a valid option.
The “rich” (i.e., transgenerationally wealthy) lose a lot of social autonomy because society has socially captured their families. What? Since intergenerational wealth is almost always tied to intergenerational institutions, titles, and status roles in local society, local communities expect the “rich’ to perpetuate a particular ultra-elite lifestyle. We expect the Rockefellers and Ambanis to live like the “rich” because they have always been “rich people.” We expect the rich to perpetuate their ultra-wealthy lifestyle like the sun rises and sets. And we gossip loudly via the media whenever one of their members forsakes the clan (e.g., the 24/7 crazy coverage of Prince Harry’s renunciation in 2020). Even if your “rich” family is not well-known nationwide, you are usually known locally as an intergenerational wealthy family. The locals have captured you symbolically. For the rich, as I define them here, the vast majority of careers and sexual partners become “less than” and “unworthy” choices. You have fewer alternatives than the average person. You could pursue the unsuitable, yes, but you will lose status in your family, perhaps access to money and privileges, and, if disowned, transition to an outcast, middle-class lifestyle. The total capture of the “rich” occurs because it’s not just your family trying to contain you in your “rich” lifestyle - it’s most of society around you. You are a prisoner of extreme, society-wide expectations. If you’re a rich introvert, this has to be a truly bizarre form of hell-on-earth. This ‘capture’ haunts any individual who has fallen back into the working middle class because their parent squandered their chunk of the family fortune.3
Should a “rich” young person desire to rebel against a narrow range of acceptable careers (managing the family money, philanthropy, or the arts) or marriage pools (i.e., other “rich” people), historically, they have had to be willing to throw away a luxurious lifestyle and rebuild their social status from scratch on earned wealth.4 Very few rich individuals have ever made such status-demoting choices.5 Siddartha was an early documented case in ancient India (he became the Buddha of Indian legend). Patty Hearst was another rare example from 20th-century America; she wound up in federal prison. Prince Harry also rebelled in spectacular form recently, partly because he and his Hollywood wife have enormous social media platforms to generate ‘media money.’ He knew he could re-earn his consumption lifestyle very quickly.
Despite the prison of “rich” social status, Hollywood loves to make up fanciful aberrations for an individualistic, middle-class audience. A great example from the film world is Robert Dupea, a near psychopathic black sheep from a rich Pacific Northwest dynasty played by Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces. These are the ‘rich folk’ Americans love - the rich who escape the lifestyle prison of being born rich and give their “family” the middle finger. Paul Newman demonstrates the imprisoned feeling of the southern “rich” in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - a feeling made worse by coming of age as a young man in a highly individualistic, post-WWII America.6 Most of Brick’s school buddies probably did not bear his particular “rich boy” burden.
In America, intergenerational wealth has an odor of illegitimacy because we are now a fully realized, achievement-based society whose wealthiest people are usually the nouveau riche (the initial robber barons and, today - Musk, Bezos, Blakely, Ellison, etc.).
The nouveau super-wealthy have almost always eclipsed the mere “rich” in American social life, even with a lower net worth. We have fantasized about creating ultra-rapid wealth since Rockefeller and Carnegie. It is the most crass expression of our idealization of the self-made person.
Most of us assume the “rich” have more social autonomy because they have more opportunities to accumulate (and spend) wealth. This misunderstanding originates in a conflation of intergenerational wealth with wealth itself. The rich (i.e., intergenerational wealthy) have enormous consumption autonomy. That’s about it. In reality, though, they have traded off tremendous opportunities in lifestyle autonomy for opportunities to remain in consumption lifestyles almost no one else can sustain.
Most "rich” folks also desire to maintain the family's public reputation. This is very ironic in America, where your reputation in your field of work is the only thing that matters anymore. You can be a philanderer, a psychopath, an asshole, or a quiet abuser, and it won’t affect your personal life if it does not affect your career. We are not an honor-based culture reinforced by public shaming. However, the “rich”, even here in America, have all their behavior scrutinized, as all families did in 16th-century England.
However, in modern society, you can not even have a family reputation to protect until wealth transfers across generations in massive quantities. This partly explains why the super-wealthy nouveau riche engages in some of the most eccentric, messed-up behavior you can imagine (and could care less what you think about their behavior) but not their equally wealthy, “rich” peers. Remember, the nouveau riche person is just a super-wealthy middle-class mind anchored in an individualistic achievement ethos.
It’s important to remember that this "rich" group is far less than 1% of any nation’s population (excluding the Vatican). It’s a super tiny group. We see them primarily in the media, not in real life.
The Poor Remain Trapped by a Lack of Earning Opportunities AND a Desire for ProtectionOn the other hand, the poor may desire a more comfortable lifestyle, sure, but few feasible opportunities to escape endemic poverty will ever appear in front of most of them. I say ‘feasible’ because escaping poverty involves -
Luck - those who escape poverty, when you dig around in individual cases, tend to have had some ‘dumb luck’ thrown in their lap at a young age. My father’s luck was having his working-class town placed inside the Hanover, NH school district, probably the best school system in the state in the 1950s. It is a perfect place for a high-IQ kid from a low-earning household to thrive. The second piece of luck was having a guidance counselor who insisted he apply to Ivy League schools with his 4.0 grades. Imagine being that good in school and not realizing this potential yourself. That is a key component of cultural ‘impoverishment.’ Someone must slap you into seeing the opportunities right before you.
Networking for opportunities - those who escape have to have some networking charm. They are good in school. They have a pleasant disposition. They do not display the anger that poverty continuously feeds. The raging A-holes in the ghetto don’t get middle-class opportunities presented to them by anyone. Instead, the angry will more readily see gangs as a productive way to earn money. The least angry poor who do well in school are suited well to escape. Among this tiny pool, those who naturally look for opportunities and desire to ‘get out’ from an early age are best suited. This also leads us to those least involved in local social networks in poor neighborhoods.
The partial or total abandonment of natal family and local social networks. Again, no one likes to talk about this, but any social historian knows what I’m talking about. In America, this abandonment of family can be and has often been emotionally severe for the socially mobile. The pull of impoverished social networks is immense, unlike in middle-class suburbs where everyone is quietly raised to flee the locality for opportunities. Yet, the poor (or even struggling working-class individuals) often need the local community's protection and the ability to share resources. The poor have a powerful incentive to be more group-oriented and less individualistic to survive. The most violent inner cities still demonstrate this every day. Escaping poverty requires a particular kind of neurology - one that is ultimately pretty damn antisocial. I say “antisocial” because abandoning one’s natal social world is about throwing away access to protection and resource-sharing (i.e., going it alone). Most of us leave our hometowns so easily that we think this is normative behavior nowadays. Those who do not bond easily with others, therefore, most easily escape poverty. The psychopathic and high-functioning autistic have a considerable advantage here (yet no social mobility experts I can locate ever discuss this possibility). These abnormal folks do not have the oxytocin chains binding them to their natal families. These emotional attachments keep some from pursuing opportunities put before them - opportunities most likely requiring long-distance resettlement.
The more your everyday life is survival, the more you will see others in your world, your family, as sources of protection and survival. This is a huge psychological inhibitor to escape that few acknowledge. You need the ‘luck’ of opportunities - elevators out of the pit - but you must be psychologically primed to see them as positive. In reality, many poor and disadvantaged folks find these opportunities downright terrifying because, to pursue them, you must let go of the “village.” Steinbeck was one of the first American writers to depict this emotional capture of the poor by the poor in beautiful, almost alluring prose that no one will ever replicate again (because today’s writers are too busy trying to reproduce their upper-middle-class social status).
Radical Social Autonomy is Largely a Middle-Class PhenomenonIf the rich are imprisoned by multi-generational wealth, elite social status, and costly consumer lifestyles they do not want to abandon; the poor are imprisoned by a multi-generational lack of opportunities to escape and by their strong attachment to natal social networks critical for basic survival (and emotional succor) in poor communities. A gravitationally heavy lifestyle pull is essential to the experience of poverty and intergenerational wealth. It is very hard to escape voluntarily when one is habituated to either.
So, who are the most autonomous members of a modern society? Free to work, love, and befriend as they choose?
It is the socially insecure middle class. These people must constantly re-earn their social status with each generation and their ability to consume as they did growing up. I am one of these folks. Our desire for maximal autonomy is born of a need to maximize opportunities for status re-earning. Our primal insecurity is that we need some kind of cash flow from wages or business earnings to fund our lifestyle. The money must continually come in. We do not sip on inherited wealth. Free-range careers and marriage strategies allow the middle classes to accumulate incremental chunks of social advantage. We have so many more alternatives than either the rich or the poor. This autonomy also allows people to make disastrous decisions and walk into tar pits of their own making. The middle classes are not surveilled as tightly as the poor and the “rich” are. This is why the most nervous social climbers tend to be highly religious, even fundamentalist. Deep down, they know that excessive autonomy is dangerous for individuals, even if it allows them to earn a better lifestyle.
A middle-class adult marrying an upper-middle-class person accesses an enhanced consumer lifestyle and more financial security. This is just one example of how broader life choices fuel greater social autonomy for those not stigmatized by poverty or socially captured by extreme family wealth.
The root of the middle class's need for autonomy is social and financial insecurity:
The middle classes are always financially insecure, even the intergenerational middle class.
The “rich” do not maneuver for financial security. That is assured from birth.
The “poor” never have financial security because they can not access middle-class social networks for marriage or middle-class employment.
Radical middle-class autonomy appears most eccentrically among the children of business owners and professionals (across cultures and time). The most cash-flow rich of these families are most likely to raise the most autonomous wanderers, entrepreneurs, and eccentrics. The upper-middle-class family’s relative lifestyle comfort when they were growing up (think upper-middle-class) confuses their children into a sense of financial security that the poor never have. They take more risks to re-earn their social status and consumer lifestyle. They have some cash safety net from earned parental wealth to warrant taking these risks. And, for the most part, these more affluent middle-class folks generally do a good job of reproducing the lifestyle they grew up with (or enhancing it). They had every advantage in preparing for the competition to re-earn their status. Sometimes, though, they slip—more than we Americans tend to discuss. Why would we discuss an autonomous failure?
The French Revolution was arguably the most violent cry of a repressed proto-middle-class in modern times. In the 18th century, social class consumption at modern middle-class levels involved a tiny % of any European society. This early, cash-heavy, urban middle class was buried politically inside France’s Third Estate (mostly landless peasants). These nouveau riche businesspeople had above-average wealth but limited voting power, no more than a peasant (!). As this class of business people and nouveau riche grew in a booming 18th century with accelerating global trade, their political frustration became impossible to contain. Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities is a searing, brilliantly written depiction of how the French Revolution began among the literate urban business elite, not the illiterate, rural peasantry. Disenfranchising the middle class is a recipe for disaster no modern, democratic nation would ever consider today. It’s now considered that dumb of an idea, except in Venezuela and Syria.
A vast middle class can not form in any nation without radical autonomy being possible for most of its citizens. Without this autonomy in careers and marriage, individuals can not maximize their opportunities to re-earn or slightly upgrade their consumer lifestyle.
The irony here is that nations built on a vast middle class also morph into societies featuring mass status anxiety and interpersonal status competition. The latent fear of financial insecurity is more palpable among the middle class than the poor because the middle class generally has sporadic financial security. They taste it and have something to lose. Talk to someone who has gone in and out of financial security, and you will not find a ‘woke’ campus activist.
When too many in the middle classes feel perpetually insecure financially, when their career and marital choices don’t guarantee financial security, a nation harbors a ticking time bomb. This is because the upper-middle-class, though now larger than ever in American history, can not contain the frustration of middle-class insecurity. We can only ratchet up our spending to create the appearance of a thriving macro-economy (weighted bizarrely to the spending of the “rich” and nouveau riche).
If you build an entire cultural ecosystem around middle-class autonomy so that individuals can pursue financial security, but then it stops delivering this outcome to a large percentage…then…the appeal of fascism and authoritarianism is remarkably easy to understand.
Even in a nation like ours that fought fascist Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union.
NEWS
- I recently gave a podcast interview about my new book that may interest many of you. It exposes the trade-offs the middle class makes in being highly autonomous social actors. It’s not normal in human history and we are still not good at figuring this out. We increased financial security for the majority, but at what cost?
The original, award-winning film starring Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor was adapted from a Tennesse Williams short story - “Three Players of a Summer Game.”
2https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam...
3This happens in America more than we acknowledge. I speculate that it happens more in our inheritance system than in others. One fascinating aspect of the American “rich” is that our bilateral inheritance customs have vastly expanded the number of “rich” offspring who can quickly sponsor multiple intergenerationally wealthy family lines. We do not automatically condense wealth control onto one male offspring. Our open-minded inheritance model encourages the broad spreading of wealth in the first generation of offspring (e.g., the Walton family), tons of resulting family infighting, and, potentially, a rapid squandering of diluted wealth (another fascinating American tradition few discuss publicly). The American approach does not ensure the inherited children have had any serious financial management training (versus a single male inheritor model where the boy grows up trained intensely to manage everything). The result is that third generations can witness individuals falling back into a middle-class lifestyle but with an ironic surname.
4Since the early 20th century, the ability for the rich to marry partners from affluent upper-middle-class families (including the children of the nouveau riche) has expanded their marriage pool a lot (vs. the aristocrats of the pre-WWI era).
5This discussion excludes inheritance systems where the eldest son captures all the inherited wealth and involuntarily creates siblings without direct access to family wealth.
6This 1958 film derives from Tennesee Williams’ short story - Three Players of a Summer Game
