my personal views about the working class people, the lower-middle class people and the part of the upper-middle class people and the rich people who are getting into downward social mobility as a person who experienced upward social mobility from the working class to academic world
i am talking about these things from the perspective of finnish society. i've lived in finland my whole life, so i am talking about finnish issues that can be probably applied into other societal issues with nordic countries. this text isn't formal, i am just gathering my own personal experiences which made me, in a way, "radicalize" myself to the point that it's hard for me to defend anyone i talk about in these texts.
so, i am not left-wing or right-wing, i think that we should throw political compass out of window and just think every political decision through philosophical and scientific framework. we all should be sciencists and philosophers, not ideologists. ideologies are no different from religious fundamentalism. they always try to label every thought as something that belongs into certain political party and you just can't use your own head. what if you don't agree with every single thing that party does? voting any party feels like ordering pizza that contains bunny shit.
i am not left, right, conservative, liberal or even centrist, i am epistocrat. i believe that we should reserve the right to vote ONLY to the people who have phd from good university. if your university isn't in any rankings and your alumnis don't do anything sensible, then it's pretty much same thing as not going to university at all.
okay, so why i became batshit crazy bitch who wants to every single uneducated person to be as low in the margins as possible? like, why wouldn't have any ounce of political autonomy? i was born into working class family and i managed to get into the academy, which in itself was a long process and journey that created a culture shock for me and with it a class traitor worldview.
i remember when i was 7 years old, i was given an acer laptop that was overheating and had windows vista and an internet connection. it's interesting to think that today's teenagers romanticize the time when everything was so frutinger aero. everything in that laptop was in english, so in order to even use laptop i had to learn english.
i remember my two culture shocks that i had. first, i had culture shock about finnish internet that what the fuck, all the finnish internet users are incredibly wise, reasonable and smart. then when i finally started to understand english without help of dictionary, i thought myself that what the fuck, your average anglophone internet user is even much smarter than smartest internet finn.
everyone in real life circles were so stupid. like, back then in internet it was self-explanatory that if you have views on something, you must have reasoning behind your argument. if you were just spouting and you didn't change your view even after your argument was debunked, they shamed you, called you stupid and it was the duty to make your thinking more sustainable. well in my irl circles people were like, oh how you dare to be questioning my bullshit? reasoning? i don't have to be reasonable. it is just this way. they take everything so fucking personally and the most annoying thing is that when their arguments run out, they just start lying.
i remember the irony which is still prevelant today. "katja, why you are so much in computer?" never answered the question but it was deep in my heart, i am on this computer because internet is full of better people. they are better that us. in every sense. they are more pleasant people to talk to, they aren't fucking dumb, they draw better than me and i want to become like them, they are so inspirational that they give you purpose to your life. i remember when i read a lot of stories of other people who were "internet addicts" back then, that many of them completely plugged their lives into internet because they also had extremely dumb irl circles, like working class, ghetto or white trash dysfunctional families and people bullied them in school. and for what reason? just because they had interests that weren't mainstream and especially, they were reasonable people.
me and other people who were escaping problems assosiated of lower social classes to internet, had zero class consciousness back then. we didn't realize that the reason everyone seemed smart, better, and nicer was because they were academical middle class and we were in working class families that are dumber, because the structures dictate where the stupid ones end up and where the smart ones end up.
back then, when i wasn't yet class-conscious, i didn't know that success in school was directly associated with meeting these people in real life. at first i listened to my parents and was like, "yeah, school is useless because my parents say so, and i agree with that myself because hey, you can get all the information from the internet, right?" no, in my case, you have to get good grades from school even when the quality of teaching is shitty and then you can get into upper secondary school that has much better teachers, smarter students and people are more motivated to make their thinking more sustainable.
oh so why it is that way? it's that way because when you have like ten schools all over the different parts of kouvola, some of them are in forest, some of them are in ghettos and some of them are in central part of kouvola. dumb poor people live in forest, and smart good income people live in central. so the school of central part will demand more on middle-class kids in education and therefore, they much smarter. and then of course the upper secondary school should always be harder than lower secondary, so the central upper secondary school have nonetheless higher standards.
not only that, but you should think this even at a national and global scale. upper secondary school in helsinki is always better than upper secondary in kouvola. upper secondary school in like motherfucking cambridge is better than the one in helsinki. the rich people who live and deserve to live in that area are just smarter than all of us, period.