Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to Examples? Sure

Actually, that's a very perceptive analysis.
ER — (archived)

There is a strong psychological/sociological component at work here.

Honest, hard-working, decent salt-of-the-earth types, or lazy, shiftless criminal slackers?
Enterprising, innovative and creative risk-takers, or greedy, money-grubbing, ruthless tyrants?

Or maybe we all belong to social classes defined by similar interests, and that even though we may often compete with members of our own class, we tend to pull together and support our own class because we feel more threatened by others than by rivals in our own.

My own perspective is straight from George Orwell, there is an upper, lower and middle class, the lower wants to be middle, the middle wants to be upper, and the upper wants to stay where it is.

Each class sees the one above it as a haughty elite that seeks to keep them in their place, but they dare not criticize it because that is the position they aspire to. Each class sees the one below it as uncouth slobs (or perhaps as pushy nouveau-riche) and ascribes to them all sorts of uncivilized behavior. The middle class gets it, and dishes it out, both ways. All three think the other two are ganging up on them.

But the funny thing is, if you ask any of them which class they belong to, they always answer "middle".

Overly simplistic analysis of a highly complex situation? Of course. But so are the median and mean values of any distribution.

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