Working class people derive self-worth from their resilience through economic hardship

Evidence

I think the lower class of people are the important people. I think so because of the business end of it. Without us, I don’t think the businessman could survive. I mean if we don’t work—of course, they have the money, but, ah, a lot of times during the crash which was an awful thing, too, I think a lot of ‘em lived so high that they couldn’t stand it any more when they went broke, and they committed a lot of suicides there. But we were used to living that way, it didn’t bother us. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2189

Categorization

• SHARE: The irony that the wealthy were more vulnerable to the Depression because they lived so high that bankruptcy proved unbearable — a striking inversion of privilege-as-strength.
• XREF: connects to: The economy has become synonymous with all social life including self-relations — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 937