I recently wrote a few blog posts on the middle and upper class distinction recently (cf. income differentials, status trap, elite socialization). In this article, I want to tie together some of my observations. Thinking more about middle/upper-class issues, I came to the conclusion that the defining characteristic of the middle class is adherence to societal rules, regardless of whether they are real or imagined. Many of the people in this social class behave like well-trained dogs. In contrast, the upper class has a much different perception of rules, viewing them more as “rules” than can be interpreted differently, ignored, or perhaps even changed.

Obviously, in order to run any organization, no matter whether it is a formal or an informal one, a large or a small one, a public or a private one, you need some kind of formally stated or implied rules. Nothing would get done if everyone just did what they wanted. There is a somewhat popular right-wing meme that contrasts normie and high/low IQ takes on various issues. While the social classes are not fully correlated to IQ, you can surely safely assume that people in the lowest stratum of society are less intelligent than those on the upper end. Also, many of those who make it to the upper end of the middle class or even break into the upper class are surely highly intelligent. In contrast, a lot of well-adjusted members of the middle class are undoubtedly also very intelligent, and their rule-following instincts ensure that they will neither descent into the lower class nor ascent to the upper class. Rule-following instincts seem to similarly be tied to IQ and social-class. Arguably, in the bottom-tier of society, you have people ignoring societal rules because they do not understand them or cannot assess the consequences of their actions whereas in the upper classes people are instead fully aware that rules are somewhat arbitrary and maybe not always apply. I summarize this in a meme I just created:

While my argument has not been mainly based on IQ, in practice IQ is obviously very relevant. A high-IQ middle-class drone, for instance, will arguably never reach his maximum potential because he or she is too concerned with fitting in and following the herd. Thus, these people have no problem with adjusting to whatever talking points the mainstream promotes. More interesting are the upper and lower ends of the IQ spectrum in this regard. The higher you sit on the status totem pole, the more slack people will cut you. If you are rich and do not care about certain social norms, you are labelled an “eccentric”. In contrast, if you struggle financially but exhibit similar behaviors, you can easily have nasty run-ins with the law, which gets you branded as maladjusted, socially deviant, or possibly even downright criminal.

Of course, you can acquire an upper-class view on rules as a member of the middle class as well, but this is surely more of an exception rather than the rule. If you do not have at least a mild rebellious streak, I am not sure that this is even possible. I consider myself a somewhat eccentric character and in terms of societal expectations, I surely did not behave in ways that are expected from members of my social class. My parents are in the middle class, and certainly not belong to the upper middle class. Yet, probably partly due to long-lasting conflicts I had with my parents, I did not care much about pleasing them socially. In my adolescence I was almost a walking cliche, letting my hair grow long, and dressing like a member of a grunge band. This was not how people behaved in the village I grew up in, or the nearest town. After moving to Berlin, which was in itself a somewhat rebellious act, I found people who were similarly maladjusted, but I was socially savvy enough to not get involved with people who were genuinely messed up. I could not connect with such guys as I did not talk like them, so this was obvious for me and them, and with girls I simply did not get involved with if saw obvious red flags, like a chick telling you about her father hitting her. They tell you this in order to emotionally manipulate you, by the way. I also stayed clear of women with obvious drug and alcohol problems as well as women who exhibited self-harming tendencies. One of the worst experiences in that regard you can have is your hand making its way up the smooth thighs of a mini-skirt wearing super-sexy slut, only for you to feel the scar tissue from her cutting herself.

In the big cities I lived in I fell in with people who were eccentric but not idiotic. One girl I briefly dated told me that she despises such people because “for them it is just like play-acting as they can all go back to their nice middle-class lives, picket-fence and all, once they are done”. To her, these people did not really belong to the alternative club and party scene. There was probably some truth to that. Some of the guys I hung out with during that phase in my life came from households that were so well off that they did not even need to work. I knew a guy who was given 2.000 euros a month, perhaps even 2.500 euros, in pocket money. This was in the mid to late 2000s and at that time, this much money was well above the average income in Germany, let alone Berlin, which suffered from high unemployment and low salaries at that point. Both his parents were university professors and I got the impression that they had old money as well. Another guy was living in a very nicely furnished 80 m2 apartment all by himself, full of antique furniture. For American standards, this may not sound like a lot, but many families of three or four do not have this much space in Berlin. His father was a successful lawyer and his son spent his time partying, drinking, doing cocaine, and banging sluts. I recall that he eventually cleaned up his act and went to law school.

In London, I often partied with people attending art or fashion school. They had by far the most attractive women, and they were quite adventurous, too. I remember a party at Slade School of Fine Art in London, which was just a short walk from my accommodation. I knew nobody but I simply followed the music. I had barely made my way to the party area when a tall, hot blonde came out of nowhere and greeted me by tonguing me down. That was a great start to a fantastic party! As I later learned, you normally only embark on a career in the arts if your family is at least well off. Quite a few of the girls I met even had inter-generational wealth. Obviously, these women would not marry a pleb but they surely liked having fun. As absurd as it may sound, I learned quite a lot from these people in terms of mindset and attitude. On a related note, I was reminded of the prevailing attitude in this crowd when I recently watched The Girl Next Door (2004) with the phenomenally talented Elisha Cuthbert. She plays a seductress who widens the horizon of an overly well-adjusted high-school kid. The phrase “just go with it!” stuck in my head:

This leads back to the understanding of rules. Sure, there is the aspect of delinquency, and while I surely would not take a swim in someone else’s pool, I have done plenty of trespassing in social settings. The first time I was with a group that suggested hanging out in some yard I felt conflicted and was nervous as it was clear to me that this was not quite right. Of course, encouraged by a cute girl I came along. They assured me by rhetorically asking, “What’s the big deal?”, or stating that nothing was going to happen. There is surely a limit to that, but if you hang out with some friends or acquaintances in someone else’s yard in the early morning hours, don’t make noise or play music, and are respectful in case one of the tenants bumps into you, most certainly nothing is going to happen. Similarly, I recall that a while later I was hanging out with a girl at Victoria Park in London — I recall the Chinese Pagoda so I could just look up the name of that park. Victoria Park has no fixed closing times. Instead, this park closes at dusk, which I thought was quite romantic. It was nearing closing time but I did not feel like leaving so I said that we will stay a bit longer. She giggled and asked me what would happen if we got locked in to which I responded that in that case, we will simply climb over the fence. We had a great time, being all alone in this park for easily another hour or two. Then a warden showed up and lit in our faces with his pocket lamp. I apologetically stated that we completely lost tack of time. As he was looking at a tall, well-mannered guy and a cute girl who was clearly smitten by me he smiled at us, walked us to the nearest exit, and wished us an enjoyable rest of the evening.

Now you may wonder what all of this has to do with life outside of adolescence. As it turns out, quite a lot. In my professional career, I often benefit from my somewhat rebellious nature. At a previous job, I had started more or less at the same time as a female peer and I partly suspected that there was a competition in place and only one of us would be kept around. She had started a few weeks earlier and was supposed to explain some engineering policies to me. I questioned a few of them, and she responded, a bit impatiently, that “this is what we are supposed to do so we do it”. I thought that some parts were quite nonsensical, causing a lot of work without any benefits. In fact, I was able to quickly discover the root cause of some inefficiencies, and made a formal proposal. A few months later, my female colleague was asked to resign while I kept my job. I later got a (female) manger who did not like my personality at all, so questioning the status quo is not always good and once there is a track record of you successfully pushing for changes as well as sometimes upsetting the apple cart, you have removed the option to just go along to get along. Besides, had I just followed the rules and regulations, chances are that someone would probably have concluded that I did not “add enough value”. I think that it is better to have an impact even if you risk being called out for allegedly not being a “team player” later because in that case at least you added something to your list of achievements.

A more important example, on a societal level, is politics. If you are wealthy and influential, you can simply get rules changed in your favor. This is the ultimate goal of lobbyism, i.e. making politicians change laws or create new laws so that you benefit from them. This relates to someone with a middle-class mindset following rules in a corporate or social environment and someone with a bit of an upper-class mindset assessing rules, deciding which ones to ignore, which ones to follow, and which ones to influence. These class-mindsets do not necessarily correlate with wealth. For instance, I think that a guy like Andrew Tate, despite his upper-class-level riches, is incredibly uncouth. He has gotten into significant legal trouble as a consequence of his behavior. Had he conducted himself differently, he surely could have had a similar level of success. Yet, he went really overboard. Then again, as I pointed out in another article, such rise-and-fall stories would not even get off the ground if the personality of the protagonist was less deficient. There is no parallel universe in which Andrew Tate becomes famous yet does not have problems with the law.

Going back to the meme I shared above, the difference between low-class and high-class rule-breaking is an understanding of consequences. High-class rule breakers expect to get away with it, even though they not always do. In that case, they take into account probabilities as well, albeit they can also be misled by greed. In contrast, low-class rule breakers do not seem to care about long-term consequences at all, or not care about them. Instead, they are fully focused on the immediate positive impact of their actions, even ignoring negative immediate consequences. To give a simple example: slinging dope on a street corner as part of a crime gang can be a way of becoming rich, but the risks are substantial, and they come at an enormous social cost. In the worst case, someone from a rival gang murders them. In contrast, attempting to skirt the laws via financial engineering if not downright fraud is almost a gentleman crime. You can obviously get caught and pay a hefty price, but if you go to jail, minimum-security prison awaits instead of getting locked up with rapists and murderers. Probably you do not even get excluded from polite society over such a “hiccup”. Seriously breaking the law is nothing I encourage, obviously, but interpreting rules not as something given but merely as made can go a long way towards leading a much richer, and much more exciting life. As it turns out, banging art-school sluts is fun in the short-term and still pays dividends years later, if some of their attitude rubbed off on you.