We keep talking about the gap between the rich and the poor.

But that’s not the real problem. The poor, while deserving of all the help we can give them to better themselves, are a relatively small minority.

The real problem is the gap between the rich and the average person.

When we talk about the rich versus the poor, we are unconsciously accepting the rich person’s definition of poverty, which is basically “everyone who is not rich”.

And yet, us middle class types don’t think of ourselves as poor like the rich people do. When we think of the poor, we think of people living in squalor in some terrible slum, or living in a shotgun shack on a mountainside somewhere.

That, in turn, gives us permission to think of the problem as something that affects someone else. People we may well feel for and wish all the best for, but at the end of the day, they are Not Us, and so we don’t feel like we are the ones under attack.

This exploits a serious loophole in middle class thinking : the inability to ever think of ourselves as poor.

Take my own case. My income is around $1300/month. That translates to around $15,600 a year. By all rational standards, I am not merely poor, I am dirt poor.

And yet, because I was raised middle class, I have enormous difficulty thinking of myself as poor. I can’t be poor. I know what poor people are like and I am not like that. Poor people are other people. The Venn diagram of me and the poor has no overlap and it never will.

And it’s not like I was raised in some kind of gated middle class enclave full of snobbery and privilege and presumption.

I grew up surrounded by working class families and never saw any sort of separation between us and them. My parents have (and had) absolutely zero snobbery^[1] and so neither do us kids.

And yet, that inability to think of myself as poor is there.

And this has serious real world consequences because it blinds us to the fact that we, too, are being oppressed. That to the one percent, we are all dirty peasants, and that we also suffer when they gut our social programs so that there is more money left over for them to steal.

And they dare to call the poor (and remember, that’s all of us) parasites!

That’s why I want to re-frame it as the rich versus the average person. The rich versus everyone else, essentially, but phrasing it as the average person does a better job of including everybody without invoking any ghosts of socialism.

Because working class, middle class, or no class, everyone thinks they are average.

And we need that kind of populism. We need to unite the working class and the middle class against our common foe, the rich, and show them that all their money means less than nothing if the populace unites against them in their own defense.

Thinking of ourselves as in separate camps or even as competing with one another only provides aid and comfort to our oppressors.

So does that pernicious infection known as upward mobility. As long as middle class people keep wanting to be like the rich people who live on the hill, and who therefore traitorously identify with people who see them as less than shit, the rich will continue to rob the poor (all of us!) to pay themselves.

Politics and government are both riddled with reverse Robin Hoods.

And only when everyone who they think of as poor unite against them to topple their towers of gold and bring them down to our level that we can take our government back and make this a true capitilist democracy for the betterment of all once again.

By the people, for the people, motherfuckers.

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Wow,. I really do write, like Nietzche said, with words of blood and fire across the sky.

I could be a rabble-rousing firebrand, like my hero Martin Luther, if I could get my words out there somewhere where they might catch fire and spread.

I would be happy to be known as the person who started the fire than burned all the corruption and sin out of the body politic like a fever. I think the average person should be good and angry about the state of the world, as well as being made fully aware that this is not something outside of our control.

The people killing us have names and addresses and need our continued compliance in their wickedness in order to maintain their power.

But they don’t own us. We own us. This is our world and we are perfectly free to change whatever rules do not seem to be working out in our favour and cast down anyone who has accumulated a freedom-threatening amount of political power by corrupting the system as easily as a surgeon cuts out a tumour.

And for the exact same reason.

Their continued parasitism is dependent on keeping up thinking we are powerless. That there is nothing we can do because really, what can one person do? And we dare not interfere with the economy, because economies are complicated things that we idiotic drudges could not possibly understand, so we have no choice but to let the rich people’s pet economists write our laws and control our lives.

Well that is bullshit. We know damned well what is right and what is wrong, and if we decide the rules have to change, we can change them, and capitalism will simply have to adapt to the new reality.

That’s the beauty of capitalism. It’s so responsive and adaptable. As long as people still want to make money, capitalism will adapt to any new ruleset we choose.

And to hell with the economic priest class telling us that they are the only ones who understand the will of the Great God Mammon, and that if we do not do what they say, Mammon will strike us down with poverty and ruin for our heresy.

Fuck that. Mammon works for us, not the other way around.

And it’s about time someone boxed its ears till it understood that again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.