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Something else that gets on my nerves is the bourgeoisie or the middle-class. Don’t get me wrong. I like the middle-class and I think it must continue to exist. The middle-class is essential to the preservation of democratic life. It is a recurring fact that where democracy doesn’t exist or is deficient, just by coincidence these are countries where the middle-class is almost non-existent. My point is that the middle-class lives in a paradise of ideas, theories and concepts that lead it to become estranged from the reality of the political life of its own country or territory. How is that? Simply because in any society, the rich exploit the poor. The rich know that they exploit the poor and the poor know that they are exploited by the rich. But what happens with the middle-class or the bourgeoisie? Well, because they are not the ones exploiting the poor and that they don’t experience directly the exploitation made by the rich, they tend to deny that this exploitation is even happening, they try to downsize it or they express relativist ideas about it.
By personal experience, I know how difficult it is to explain to someone from the middle-class how the world really works. They have all those theories learned at the university or at their workplace about the various aspects of life. They play with a lot of concepts such as: the Right, the Left, social currents, capitalism, communism, Third-World, etc, and obviously, they absolutely have no clue about what these concepts really refer to. Among other sources of phony DisneyLand theories about the world that they express, I have to mention the academic discipline of Sociology. It is incredible the amount of stupidities that it can produce. Sociologists build these gigantic theories about the world and yet it is obvious that they don’t understand the fundamentals. You see, they build their models of the world as if secret societies, intelligence agencies, blackmail, death threats, smear campaigns, double agents of all kinds, infiltrators, etc, wouldn’t exist. It is incredible the naivety of those people.
And the other problem that is revealing itself when we try to alert the minds of bourgeois about the state of the world, is that they have all those nice jobs with social positions and classes that go with them. Are they ready to put that into jeopardy for some « conspiracy theory » proposed by a friend or a family member? I don’t think so. They say to themselves: « If that were to be true, they would have talked about that on CNN or in the Washington Post ». That’s how it works. They’re willing to accept anything that comes from the corporate media without counter-examination or criticism but ready to reject the same that is not reported in the big media. It seems that their whole view of the world is determined by what they are told in the corporate media.
So the bourgeoisie feeds on these theories and gets carried away on a disneylandesque fantasy that brings it to a state of complete hypnotism, unconsciousness and profond sleep. Am I ready to throw the towel on the bourgeoisie? Not yet. But I am getting tired of it. I would like to see more consciousness on its part. That’s probably what Jesus meant when he said that the Kingdom of God belong to the poor. Remember that there was no middle-class in Israel at the time he lived. Even if there was, it probably wouldn’t have understood how the world works anyway, like the middle-class of today.
Je ne sais pas si vous êtes comme moi mais depuis que Luc Ferrandez est arrivé à la mairie d’arrondissement du Plateau-Mont-Royal, on dirait que rien ne va plus dans le quartier. Je suis arrivé à Montréal en 1993. Spontanément et sans le savoir, j’ai loué un appartement sur le Plateau, à l’époque où il y avait presque autant de logements disponibles que d’habitants et où les prix étaient encore abordables. En fait, le quartier était assez pauvre. Ça, c’était avant qu’il ne s’embourgeoise. Aujourd’hui, les logements locatifs sont devenus rares et très dispendieux et pas seulement sur le Plateau. Aussitôt que j’ai emménagé, j’ai noté que le Plateau était animé d’une vie palpitante, excitante. Les citoyens de tous les quartiers et d’ailleurs aimaient venir s’y retrouver. La circulation automobile, cycliste et en patins était abondante et les jours d’été, des milliers de passants venaient agrémenter les trottoirs et terrasses. Lorsque le quartier s’est embourgeoisé vers la fin des années 1990, je n’ai pas noté de baisse d’achalandage de la circulation, ni de l’activité commerciale ou autre. C’est seulement la clientèle qui a changé. La classe moyenne s’est installée et l’on a vu la classe des travailleurs, dont j’étais, et les pauvres, être chassés vers la périphérie. Le condominium a alors envahi le marché de l’immobilier, ne laissant plus que des banlieusards-toujours-en-ville pour peupler le quartier. En passant, pour voir les effets de l’embourgeoisement d’une population, voir cet article précédent.