Class Subconscious
On the 4th of December 2024, the CEO of UnitedHealthCare [sic], Brian Thompson was short dead in the streets of Manhattan, New York. The current suspect is Luigi Mangione who, at the time of writing, appears to have been motivated by the predatory nature of health insurance American, and his own debilitating and expensive experiences with a serious back injury.
The death of Brian Thompson was met with celebration.
Both liberals and conservatives, mainstream and fringe, not only had little sympathy for the death of a CEO responsible for the deaths of thousands denied health coverage but also romanticised the suspected shooter. This rare display of bipartisanship confounded established media and pundits, especially for the murder of a CEO, once a profession held in great esteem.
It would appear America was on the cusp of a class revolt.
But no.
This is the same America that weeks before re-elected Republican and real estate tycoon Donald Trump, bankrolled and backed by tech insiders and corporatists like JD Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Elon Musk, each earning cabinet positions. While corporate involvement isn’t anything new in politics, it’s never been as blatant as it is now, with them as the government.
How can this be? How can a country with such deserving scorn for the most heartless in society vote for an administration openly in favour of deregulation, isolationism, and draconian legislation towards racial, sexual, and religious minorities? How can a country so diverse be so supportive of societal homogeny? How can a country be just as in favour of class deconstruction as it is in favour of oligarchy?
The song “Rich Men North of Richmond” by Oliver Athony holds parts of the key to understanding. The lyrics begin;
“I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day
Overtime hours for bullshit pay
So I can sit out here and waste my life away
Drag back home and drown my troubles awayIt’s a damn shame what the world’s gotten to
For people like me and people like you
Wish I could just wake up and it not be true
But it is, oh, it isLivin’ in the new world
With an old soul
These rich men north of Richmond
Lord knows they all just wanna have total control
Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do
And they don’t think you know, but I know that you do
’Cause your dollar ain’t shit and it’s taxed to no end
’Cause of rich men north of Richmond”
What we have here is a pretty good addition to the long history of American folk music, reminiscent of “Sixteen Tons”, laying bare the dissatisfaction of the average worker. On the surface, the blame for the struggle can be laid squarely upon the “rich men north of Richmond”.
But read the next verse;
“I wish politicians would look out for miners
And not just minors on an island somewhere
Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat
And the obese milkin’ welfareGod, if you’re 5 foot 3 and you’re 300 pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds
Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground
’Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down.”
Now the message becomes muddles with the introduction of the conspiracy theory that all politicians are child traffickers, and the blame is shifted onto welfare recipients. Oliver, after the song became popular in conservative circles, clarified he wrote the song about both political parties, telling Variety, 2023;
“It’s aggravating seeing people on conservative news try to identify with me, like I’m one of them… It’s aggravating seeing certain musicians and politicians act like we’re buddies and act like we’re fighting the same struggle, like we’re trying to present the same message… It was funny seeing my song at the presidential debate, because I wrote that song about those people, you know. So for them to have to sit there and listen to that, that cracks me up. It was funny seeing the response to it. That song has nothing to do with Joe Biden — it’s a lot bigger than Joe Biden. That song is written about the people on that stage — and a lot more, too. Not just them, but definitely them.”
In Oliver’s defence, the song is catchy, and he does have enough self-awareness to admit the difficulty of condensing a political message into only three minutes, but a song about the struggles of the average worker somehow feels the need to equate welfare recipients and conspiratorial paedophile rings as tangible factors as, if not more so than, the owner class. Intentional or not, the message creates a false equivalency; you’re poor because of your boss, AND welfare recipients, AND conspiracies, AND etc. Oliver seems like a genuinely empathetic person and a great songwriter, but, by his own admission, even he struggles to disentangle the knot of class consciousness from internalised resentment.
This is a bizarre position we find ourselves in, and it isn’t solely an American issue. Ireland has always struggled with housing, living expenses, and life satisfaction. We are a country that has only ever had two parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, forming an unholy union in 2020. As Ireland creeps ever closer to our centenary as a republic, there is no one else to blame for every case of mismanagement. Despite this, in recent years a sickening trend of xenophobia and racism has arisen to lay the blame upon immigrants and asylum seekers. What’s amazing is how Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are blamed for governmental mishandling of housing, health, infrastructure, and such, but only in relation to immigration. Much like the Americans, people know who to blame, but they’re trying to tack on additional gripes. There’s a conflation of material factors (housing, finance, resource) and superficial factors (culture, rhetorical, sensationalism). In nearly every Western country, concentration of wealth is acknowledged by the average person, but only in so far as it relates to inflammatory topics. The problem, seemingly, isn’t that there’s a concentration of power, but that it’s not in their favour.
How can people be so close to fulfilling class consciousness yet so frustratingly far?
Karl Marx, the economic theorist and philosopher, suggested that at some point the working and adjacent classes (workers, lower middle, the destitute, the peasantry) would realise their shared oppression, organise, and overthrow the ruling class, taking control of the means of production through mutual collaboration and democratic participation. He called this realisation “class consciousness”, the awareness of one’s position in relation to production, theorising that revolt was inevitable. This was also the original meaning behind the term “woke”, referring to those who are “awake” to systems of oppression, especially in support of class supremacy. The appropriation of the term, and subsequent inability to define it by conservative commentators, can be linked to class unconsciousness; the lack of awareness and rejection of criticism toward the status quo. As with “woke”, one can be “asleep”. As the comedian George Carlin once quipped;
“It’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe in it.”
But can there be a “sleepwalking” state between consciousness and unconsciousness; a cognitive dissonance of economic frustration and self-imposed denial? It would seem so.
The Soviet Union adhered for most of its existence to the strict doctrine of pronatalist nationalism, continuing the criminalisation of queer relations and identities first adopted under religious dogmatism and colonialism, flying in the face of communist ideals of secularism and equality. Their ideals were abandoned to recuperate loses during both world wars, mass emigration, and famine caused by governmental mismanagement. On that note, it’s important to remember much revolutionary theory questioned statism, arguing that any vanguard party must be transitional and temporary, not a permanent fixture. Not only was this also abandoned, cabinets were filled with loyalists to the leader. The Tsar was traded for the chairman. It’s unfortunate the word “revolution” literally means revolving.
You can argue opportunism will always derail, but considering a couple million Europeans, Asians, and South Americans were “conscious” enough to have started and supported the world’s largest socio-economic restructure, how were these political ideals so easily surrendered, especially at the expense of the majority, unless there was a disconnect between rhetoric and practice?
Other examples include American founders flirting with George Washington becoming king, the French republic getting trigger happy with guillotines, Iranians replacing a monarchy with a theocracy, and the Irish seizing control from the British only to give our schools, government, and children to the Catholic Church. For each of these revolutions, the most devasted victims were the very people who made them possible in the first place. While ideological purity can be a slippery slope, these betrayals are antithetical to the very foundations they were built upon.
Those in power before revolutions were, in many cases, able to either bankroll the rise of these movements, buying favours, or else were able to weather them out in relative comfort. The American founding fathers were landowners, slave owners, and traders with strong commercial ties to the United Kingdom, before and after the war. Maximilien Robespierre was supported by pre-existing members of the courts, the military, the clergy, and, ironically, noblemen more interested in securing positions in the republic than the ideals of it. The Catholic Church, who had supported the Norman (and later British) invasions of Ireland, were still all too happy to establish itself as the de facto state religion (having learned their mistake letting the English have a king).
Beneficiaries of established power structures, though erring for traditionalism, are adept at surviving the tides of change, knowing it doesn’t matter who’s in charge, as long as someone is.
The presumption made with class consciousness is that it’s all only a matter of awareness. Not a bad guess, considering the time. This was 19th century Europe we are talking about. Political dissidents were regularly imprisoned. Public schools and institutions were still heavily scrutinised by the state, the church, and the wealthy. You can’t know what’s wrong when someone’s deciding what you’re allowed to know.
There was no way to have predicted the two greatest hurdles to class consciousness in the modern age; media saturation and aesthetic appropriation.
The history of communication is a history of societal schizophrenia. Once upon a time, to communicate you needed to actively speak and be heard by those in the immediate area, most commonly your family, tribe, or community. It wasn’t hard to not be heard, or to not hear, when you could just walk out of ear shot. Communication was consensual, determined by time and space. There was no way to hear what was said two hours ago, nor from half a mile away. Someone who was there could tell you, but now the message had been distorted by hearsay and recollection.
As humanity evolved, squares and neighbourhoods were awash in criers and heralds, soup boxes and debates, all within earshot of your home, your work, your market. You couldn’t help but overhear. In fact, you could witness an event on Monday and read about it on Tuesday. And, if it was a big enough historical event, your children and grandchildren would study it in school. Now you had two or three different accounts of the same story, all of which may heighten different aspects but still simultaneously exist. How are we living today?
In my country alone there are over one-hundred-and-forty in-print newspapers, over seventy active radio stations, over three hundred tv channels, and an infinite number of websites, streamers, and platforms accessible to us. We are only an island of six million. The distinctions between these mediums have blurred beyond recognition; the radio is on your phone, films are on your e-book, the news is on your smartwatch. We are drowning in a media tsunami. Every news story is reported by thousands of sites and broadcasters around the world, with millions streaming, posting, and recording their opinions, forever. And that’s not even considering the ocean of misinformation out there from disinformation campaigns, trolls, and now AI.
This proliferation of media is so overwhelming it buries itself, destroying diversity, forcing you to wade though near identical content to get anything close to the new or truthful. It’s easy to think there’s no alternative to what you see, as it’s impossible to comprehend just how much information there is on offer. There’s just too much to ever realistically debunk everything. You’re forced to just accept what you see and hope you come across contrary information. This is how easily class consciousness can be derailed by bombarding people with as much information as possible. Who knew the key to censorship was unfettered freedom! This allowance for any and all discussion runs the risk of becoming self-interested; discussions about discussions. This is why culture wars are so useful; the point isn’t what’s being talked about, it’s that nothing but talking ever happens.
As Noam Chomsky put it;
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
A bonus of constant discussion is the willingness of some portion of the public, especially those in the dominant in-group, to question the humanity and rights of another group, yet never concede to expertise nor experience. Why should they, when they apparently have the same information at their fingertips? Whether it’s the Jews of Europe, the African slaves and Natives in the Americas, or the Irish and Indians under British rule, every time a group are seen as a question to be solved (e.g. the Jewish question, the Slavery question, the Irish Question, the Indian question, etc), it has led to horrific consequences (partition, segregation, famines, the Holocaust). I fear “The Trans Debate” will end likewise. Never trust anyone who says they’re only asking question but already has an answer in mind.
Debate IS the status quo. Until everyone agrees, nothing changes. Who does that benefit?
Due to the open nature of mass media (both established and online), there is an overlap of language, familiarities, and internal politics. You don’t have to be on opposite sides to disagree. You can be exposed to different opinions, and, while still objecting, become accustomed to their methods and styles. What emerges is a common tongue of media, a “Contentus Franca”, an understanding of cross-political vernacular, memes, and movement. It’s why terminology in a leftist context can become used by the right earnestly.
What happens here is aesthetic appropriation.
This isn’t new. One of the reasons why groups like the National Socialists of Germany were named such was to appropriate the appeal of leftists. While the party was supported by capitalists, factory owners, and some established politicians, they understood the appeal of looking like outsiders and welcoming the unemployed, military, and academia. It also helped that the term “socialism”, at the time, was more strongly associated with a style of governance than with the ideology (a more accurate term would have been “statism”). The appropriation worked so well that to this day there are still those who believe Hitler was more aligned with communists than the modern day ADF.
Radicalism has always been “cool”. It’s active, it’s subversive, it’s romantic. You get to smoke Chinese cigarettes, read Foucault, and drink in anarchist cafes. I’m being hyperbolic (I’ve only done two or those things), but you get what I’m saying. Lefties are poets, artists, academics, wild cards, rebels, hackers, the old-school heads, students, the gays, hipsters. They’re all unemployed too, but still! And all the people with money, jobs, and careers look at them longingly.
As media cross-pollinated, and terms become detached from their meanings, it’s easier than ever to appropriate the terms, iconography, and performance of radicalism. Movements like the TEA Party, the Sovereign Citizens, the Oath Keepers, and the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones try to invoke imagery reminiscent of the US revolution. These are used to denote a continuation, acting in the same way as all Western powers draw parallels to the Roman empire, either through political ritual, architecture, or academic studies of the classics and the arts. What’s unique about the modern adoption of leftist lexicons is how it acts as a selling point.
Two features of the Internet age led to the adoption of “Rewashing”; spaces catering to political affiliation, and the scrutiny of corporations. Not only were consumers more politically conscious, able to research and discussion boards, but were more aware of how products they purchased aligned or unaligned with these beliefs. A precursor to this would have been the boycotts of South African or Israeli good, and the “Buy American” campaigns in the wake of 9/11. People were now actively tracking how corporations were impacting them. Why should I give money to Disney, or Coca Cola, or Microsoft if it’ll only go to corrupt politicians, pollution, or invading privacy? Why should I support a company that isn’t supporting me? Companies, especially those wishing to hide their more unsavoury dealings got the message; they need to sell progressivism.
Why would a company need to let me know their stance of social issues unless it was profitable? Consider for a second what a clothing retailer has to do with the LGBT+ community when they sell pride merchandise. They aren’t part of the community, nor owned by it, nor are they supporters donating their profits. Even if they did, they still don’t offset the harm done by fast fashion, sweat shops, and underpaying their staff. Why spend money pretending to be progressive when they could just as easily practice what they preach (or sell, in this case), unless it was profitable?
It’s the same reason shops dress their fronts for holidays like Christmas or Easter. It’s the reason streamers will promote black centric media during Black History Month but not the other eleven months of the year. It’s why McDonalds and Coca Cola, profiteers in obesity and diabetes, are official sponsors of the Olympics. It’s about the association. It sanitises them. You can’t think about them without conflating them.
In 1929, the advertiser Edward Bernays, considered the father of public relations, pioneered the “Torches of Freedom” campaign, by hiring women to march in the New York city’s Easter parade and smoke heavily. It was taboo at the time for women to smoke in public. For women, it was an act of feminist rebellion. For Bernays, it meant profits for his employer, the American Tobacco Company. The association was “our product sets you free”.
Did it help liberate women? That wasn’t the point. Had the campaign failed, neither ATC nor Bernays would have shed a tear for any woman scolded for the stunt, just as they didn’t for the women who died from smoke related deaths. Regardless, the lesson had been learnt; products weren’t just material, they were ideals.
What has happened in the age of “conscious marketing” is the illusion that progressive ideas have become the norm, no longer the realm of political fringes. In fact, this performativity is so pervasive that it falsely positions conservatism as the truly radical position. “Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition” is now considered the battle cry of this generation. Tradwives, women who embrace a pronatalist patriarchal lifestyle, are some of the fastest growing influencers online. The “Manosphere”, the online subculture that perpetuates a hypermasculine world governed by “body counts” (sleeping with as many women as possible), physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, has flooded the minds of young boys and girls alike. I’m not even going to touch MAGA!
To a certain degree, I understand. It’s a bit like how anti-smoking, anti-drug, or anti-drinking PSAs had a blow-back effect. The messaging, meant for children, is so hyperbolic, so sensationalist, and so disproportionate that it waters down the very real consequences. When the reality isn’t as severe as you’ve been taught, you can fool yourself into thinking everything is just as hyperbolic. Something similar happens with progressivism. When it’s seen as “cool” or “hip” to be the out-group, it gives the false impression that the truly radical position is the status-quo. Being within the in-group, however, doesn’t translate to immediate power nor control, especially when class, wealth, ability, and other factors are considered. When you feel uncatered to, you’re going to search for where you feel accepted, even at the cost of more pressing factors. It is why workers will support anti-union candidates because they appeal to their religious values. It is why people will vote against free trade if it also mean ending immigration. It is why material benefits are sacrificed to have emotional reassurance.
The aesthetic appropriation in media, unless created with intentionality, has a habit of being surface level. It’s easy to disengage with the material presented, both as an audience and as a creator. The Harry Potter series is often read as an allegory against racism. Textually speaking, this conflicts with the narrative. The status-quo of the magically world openly discriminates against people and creatures who are seen as lesser than. The magical government practices a form “one-drop-rule” to determine rights. Slurs like “Muggle”, “No-Maj”, “Squib”, “Half-Bloods”, and “Mudbloods” are just openly said, even by children. Any attempt to petition for change, notably by Hermoine and Dobby the house elf, are mocked. Goblins are depicted dangerously close to an anti-semitic caricature (hooked nose, greedy, untrustworthy, swarthy, bankers and jewellers). This is the status quo worth preserving? The good guys are only mildly discriminatory? And I didn’t even mention the author!
What about when both the show and the creator are conscious. What about Squid Game and its creator Hwang Dong-hyuk capturing a visceral demonstration of the dehumanising nature of performance, poverty, and the mythology of meritocracy? Hwang had first hand experience, falling into debt during the 2008 credit crisis. He told Variety, 2021:
“I wanted to write a story that was an allegory or fable about modern capitalist society, something that depicts an extreme competition, somewhat like the extreme competition of life. But I wanted it to use the kind of characters we’ve all met in real life.”
There’s a cruel irony to Squid Game’s success. With its world-wide appeal and acclaim, surely the themes were felt universally, right?
… Right?
The most popular Halloween costume of October 2021 was the pink jumpsuit guards who execute players. Online commentators referred to it as promoting communism. The Youtuber Mr. Beast and the show’s streamer, Netflix, both rushed to create their own real life Squid Game competitions (with less murder, for liability reason). There’s merchandise, games, and branded sponsorship deals tied to a show about people killing each other for money.
With the second season released, and the third in June 2025, Hwang told Variety;
“I’m so exhausted. I’m so tired. In a way, I have to say, I’m so sick of ‘Squid Game… I’m so sick of my life making something, promoting something… I’m just thinking about going to some remote island and having my own free time without any phone calls from Netflix… Not the ‘Squid Game’ island.”
The products sold are incongruent. They appeal to an internal desire, but don’t fulfil it. The result is an unfulfilling customisation of identity within the confines of capitalism. You can be anything you want, even if it doesn’t make sense, so long as you pay.
What we have, both through media saturation and aesthetic appropriation, is a problem that tries to be its own solution. Selective Politics, where the world you wish to birth is seen as more important, and in many ways more tangible, than the steps you take and obstacles you overcome to get there. It’s cognitive dissonance.
This isn’t a call for ideological purity. Accord to memetics, the study of how ideas can evolve and pass on like genes, ideas should cross pollinate, breed, fight, die, and evolve freely without human interference. Just as “pure breeds” lead to defects, forced ideas can lead to terrible results, like brutalism, or slam poetry. Variety is the spice of life, as they say. The same goes for ideals.
This is a call for consistency.
We have religious groups who preach charity, humility, and fraternity, yet their practitioners profit from tithes, demean the meek, and call for genocide. We have those on the left who say they support the poor, the working class, and the othered, yet object to soup kitchens, welfare protections, and take voters for granted. We have those on the right who say they’re in favour of entrepreneurship, innovation, and individualism, but cut supports, punish industries deemed “woke”, and demand homogeneity. Why? Because we’re allowed to. We afforded the chance to be hypocrites.
We get to vote against our interests but still reap benefits. We can call for the removal of rights yet be safe in the knowledge that our rights are secure. We can denigrate the poor but still claim welfare. We can belittle the silenced, but insist our speech be heard. We can tell people what to do with their bodies but demand ours be separate.
In short, we’re spoilt.
Your inconsistency is being used against you. It’s a weak spot that can be used to confuse and distract you, while more of your freedoms are taken away. Would you accept anyone telling you what you can do without reason or cause? Would you accept it if they strongly believed you shouldn’t have certain rights? What if they were rights you never exercised? Travel, assembly, speech, participation, research? Even if you don’t use certain rights, do you believe anyone should be able to limit you? Whether you use them or not, they are still your rights. Why would you be in favour of anyone, especially those who don’t have to live with the consequences, having control of your life? The point isn’t what’s left behind, it’s the fact anything of yours was taken in the first place.
The presumption of class consciousness is that at some point things would get so bad that they could no longer be denied. It, however, presumes the perception of the world would align with material factors. We forgot how extraordinarily good we are at fooling ourselves. The world is dictated by the material, but humans are dictated by something else. Whether it’s idealism, spirituality, social constructs, hopes, dreams, biases, stereotypes, or “vibes”, we are all subject to the immaterial. Yes, we starve without food, freeze without shelter, and drown in the ocean, but we don’t see the world through our animal bodies. We see it through our human arrogance. We are monkeys poisoned by ego.
If you feel as though something is wrong, you’re correct, in so far as something’s wrong. That doesn’t mean what you think is wrong is correct. I heard a phrase lately that perfectly explains this seeming paradox; “Feelings are valid, but they’re not facts”. As much as it pains me to admit, I think the conservative commentator, Ben Shapiro, may have had a point (if a mean-spirited one) when he said;
“Facts don’t care about your feelings”.
No amount of evidence, pragmatism, facts, nor debate will win everyone over. It’s hazardous to act as though they can, as we’ve seen with the media saturation, aesthetic appropriation, and selectivity. We must accept the uncomfortable truth that some people, deep down, don’t agree with equality, or democracy, or even decency, but are in denial about it. In the same breath, there are those who would support these ideals, but are also in denial. When these people are given the time and support to realign themselves, much in the same way psychology encourages people to fully explore and accept all facets of themselves, even the uncomfortable parts, then and only then will they experience true consistency and authenticity in their beliefs, their actions, and life.
The subconscious would finally become conscious.
#HI
