Class mobility’s central psychology is double betrayal and shame about that shame

Evidence

Potter’s theme was very much one with which the Sixties would be preoccupied, in music as much as drama. Consider the Kinks (“Rosy, won’t you please come home”, “See my friends/they cross the river”) or the Who (“I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth”). Like Dickens’ Pip, Nigel is profoundly torn; unwilling to give up the privilege and status he has newly acquired, unable to accept and enjoy them as one to the manner born, simultaneously holding onto his roots and repudiating them, never forgetting where he has come from, but ashamed of the stains that his origins have left upon him. And ashamed of that shame. Never comfortable amongst the masters, but no longer at home in the community which produced him. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 331

Categorization

• DEFINE: The spiral of class mobility shame — ashamed of origins, then ashamed of that shame — is a precise psychological formula worth keeping.
• XREF: Mirrors the ‘double consciousness’ idea and the torn-scholarship-boy dynamic; also recalls The Namesake’s identity-between-two-worlds theme. — connects to: Shame precedes reflection and arises from an opaque self-relation; Being perceived as an object by another creates communal shame and alienation; Shame is fundamentally experienced in the presence of another person — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 659 (+3 more)
• SEED: An essay on the working-class-intellectual double bind across literature — Dickens’ Pip through Potter through The Kinks.

Broader Connections

• The class-traveller’s performative identity can be enjoyed even while betraying one’s parents #contradicts (0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 333
• Shame precedes reflection and arises from an opaque self-relation #expands (0.75)
• Shame is fundamentally experienced in the presence of another person #qualifies (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 659
• Shame arises from individual isolation and dissolves within collective action #complicates (0.75) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 735
• Shame is the recognition of being as the Other sees one #qualifies (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 660
• Being perceived as an object by another creates communal shame and alienation #complicates (0.72)