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Shefi1280's avatar

"High social tone deafness". I can sympathize (a little). Growing up middle-class, I had no contact with a higher class of people. Plus, education and media teach us middle-class folk that "upper class" are either bubble-enclosed twits who have no idea how "real" people live (think Monty Python's "Upper Class Twit of the Year", or PG Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster) or complete boorish snobs (e.g. William McCordle in "Gosford Park" or Mr. Hurst in "Pride & Prejudice"). Either way, they have nothing of value to offer. Austen's (and later Dickens') point was that finer feelings exist in different people regardless of social class.

Only in university did I interact with a few upper-class men. Some seemed to me almost caricatures of the popular imagination and I could not take them seriously ("the country is going to the dogs!" exclaimed one because the wait staff were slow in bringing him his food). Others were clearly more cultured and much better spoken than me, and that was clearly due to their upbringing, both family and school ("could we say 'the slings and arrows', here, sir?" offered one in a translation tutorial, and I admired the easy familiarity he had with Hamlet's words, which I did not, to my chagrin, immediately recognize, even tho I'd "studied" the play).

JT Gatto provided more concrete examples of how high-status people raise their children: certainly differently from how I was raised, and I suspect how most people were.

LT probably has no conception therefore that there is such a thing as higher status: everyone is fair game, and those that think they aren't are simply snobs who need to be taken down a few pegs. And he's the one to do it!

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John Samson's avatar

Modern society doesn’t help much because it’s fake and venal That social class/character issue is confusing. Honor culture is one way to think of it. I’m aware of my bloodline. But it’s really just character, and the desire of high character people to be around like. Extended, it’s high trust civilization.

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GAHCindy's avatar

Being raised by earnest Christians and conformed to that politer society gave me a higher-status attitude than 99% of the people in my social class. My higher intelligence helped a lot, too. I now find my actual rank to be a strange limbo between my lifelong class of poor, uninfluential people, and the higher class people I resemble more in my behaviors and influence. Don't quite fit anywhere, which is fine by me. And being wealthy and beautiful didn't do a thing to keep some other people in my experience from falling to very low status. Status isn't really a material thing at all, though you will find higher-status people attracting more material wealth.

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John Samson's avatar

The socio-economic dimension is complicating. Splitting economic and character let me focus on character, but they’re connected. Not totally though. I have been in very high and low socio-economic settings. The cultural codes and semiotics are different enough to feel like another identity. But the basics of character status are pretty consistent everywhere.

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Bfield^4's avatar

Gatto's dissection of education is still mind-blowingly brilliant. Thanks for reminding me.

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SirHamster's avatar

"One sentence and we know exactly what it is."

The impossibility of faking. You might get away with it for a moment, but you probably don't even know how many tells you're broadcasting by what you do and don't do.

Become content with what you are, and then learn how to build from what you have.

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J Scott's avatar

The metaphysical reflection is quite telling. These men must attack all status otherwise their true status in the hierarchy will become clear. That is the true evil of their life. Everyone should be on their level, or the universe is unfair.

Accepting that your have your place, and that the place is good is a powerful frame. Along with that focusing on doing your role as well as you can.

It is also true, which helps.

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Bfield^4's avatar

"What’s going on with a pathology like this?"

Not to invalidate anything you've brilliantly dissected in this post, but as a tangential thought, what if this pathology is intentional? As in, there's no "projected delusion" because the entire motive of the interaction is an attempt to destabilize...everything? I'm thinking along the lines of a double agent who deliberately sows dissent in a group it has infiltrated.

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John Samson's avatar

That’s probably the conscious motivation. Part 2 connects it to external obsession.

The biggest projected delusion that there’s a social commons where its text strings register at all beyond need for removal. The “exchange” it thinks we’re having only exists in its bubble. The two socialization patterns are parallel. No overlap, so it can’t be reached either. It’s banging on pots - probably for some other stalkers - and we’re resuming the adult conversation once it’s been escorted out. Then there’s the stupidity. That’s self evident from whatever it thought it was doing. And there’s no way it believes it’s that stupid.

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GAHCindy's avatar

I wonder if the gamma in question has made it over to the this substack to find out all about itself. What would those comments look like?

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Shefi1280's avatar

Perhaps Big Bear Owen Benjamin puts the matter most succinctly: "it's not that I can't take criticism, it's that I don't want to live in a Greyhound bus-station filled with screaming psychopaths."

https://odysee.com/@OwenBenjamin:6/episode1982:6?r=8B6P56PLHYdD6B7k6xmoRHM8yxC6JYFu&t=980

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John Samson's avatar

Exactly. I imagine someone with his career path would attract an inordinate amount of this kind of trash. Coming forward in the face of systemic rejection is triggering to system-dependent liars. Which is self-identification as low-character.

It boils down to whether or not comments to you are intended to communicate with you, or with some anonymous Ort Cloud of spectating retards.

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Shefi1280's avatar

Big Bear Owen understands this, I think. I used to think, why doesn’t he just let it go? But he explains that he fights to clear his name not just for his own sake but also to protect his subscribers and most importantly his family. His sons will grow up and one day read/hear these slurs against their father.

So, even tho the slanderers may be performing for others, he feels he cannot afford to ignore ignore certain slurs.

I don’t know if he’s right, but he has certainly provided me with food for thought and shown me a high moral standard.

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