The Fall

For some time I’ve been intrigued by the lives of Gen X and Gen Y cast-offs from middle class society. Admittedly, this observation served as a mirror to my own life as a new single parent; my radar detected no fewer than ten persons - two degrees of Facebook separation or less - who also fit the bill. Each of these individuals came from somewhat similar backgrounds and even though the families in which they grew up were fractured to varying degrees, the cultural advantages of being in that social stratum – immediate access to decent public education or the implicit expectation that one would go to college, for example - were still available to them. But at some point for each person there was a drop out; it may have happened early, as a freshman in college, or in the later post-graduate degree years of the mid-30s. At any rate, it certainly was not a lack of intelligence that caused the withdrawal.

For these people the meme of personal responsibility with respect to the American Dream of “making it” doesn’t resonate. A person must have a clear concept of his or her standing in society as a backing before taking steps to change the circumstances. Yet many don’t really know where they stand: while their cultural affinities suggest that they consider themselves middle class, a pervasive sense of insecurity blankets and alienates them from their more successful peers. This insecurity serves as a dampening agent that eventually becomes the modus operandi for their life decisions. (It is a theme endemic to the American population as a whole, initially observed by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America).

I suspect this social alienation is what leads so many in the fractured middle-class to internalize everything as a reflection of the self, resulting in a perception of the world that is little more than a scenery of affects to which there is no meaningful attachment, much less a capacity to manipulate. If we can assume for a moment that emotional anxiety arises as a consequence of not being able to assign significance to, much less negotiate, the external social forces that operate on people everyday, then it follows that the individual as a coherent and autonomous entity is diminished.[1]  AUDC described this condition as the human chameleon, “lacking either strong sense of self or a guiding plan, but instead constantly looking outward for social cues, seeking an appropriate background condition to settle upon so as to comfortably lose distinction from the world.”

When framed in terms of a re-stratification of classes in the United States it should be easy to see how the human chameleon would eventually drift to the bottom. Having not been provided with the social stability that would enable agency within a particular context, the motivations that drive the chameleon tend to be irrational and based upon transient emotion. Such a state of being – one that is dependent upon the continual elicitation of affect to maintain a baseline level of comfort and security – may preclude one’s capacity for long-term planning, which hinges on the ability to think rationally.

While the human chameleon – the castoffs of a fractured middle-class - emerges as the indirect result of the uncertain ebbs and flows of capital, conversely, capital’s reinvestment in the chameleon’s emotional scenery (Hot Topic, twee, dj-infused coffeebars, yoga spirituality) suggests a gentle, yet continual intellectual debasement of an overwhelming segment of American population into an animalistic state of being – a condition from which it may not be possible to recover.

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[1] The subsequent resurrection of the self can take many forms; for example, as cynical abjection (the Omega Male), or as a spirituality unto itself (best exemplified by Rielle Hunter in her interview with GQ, in which she details her rationale for having John Edwards’ baby).