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"For the capitalist system to continue ruthlessly grinding
on (or for the capitalist system to 'succeed,' as you would say)
those of us bred for stupid and/or dangerous work must believe
we're not as smart as the people who boss us around. It's
critical. Capitalism needs simple explanations about why poor
people with lousy jobs take orders from men in suits. Lack of
brains fits the bill. (So does the lie that rich people work
harder. I'll tackle that in another essay.) Any noticeable class
divisions stem from differences in intellectual capacity.
Connected to this is the touting of 'American ingenuity' as the
doorway to upward mobility. It's as untrue as the existence of a
whole class of stupid people, but if enough people believe it --
even partially believe it -- this idea will reinforce and
strengthen capitalism. After all, if we believe brains lead to
success, we'll blame ourselves for not getting ahead. Personal
failure, not systemic oppression, explains why we're going
nowhere so very fast." -- Joanna Kadi,
Thinking Class: Sketches from a Cultural Worker
[
thanks to
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bcholmes
for quoting it where I'd see it]
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That said, intelligence is positively correlated with socio-economic status, and the standard of competence for a mook in a suit (who has to at least have some soft skills, unlike, say, someone who works at a meat-packing plant) is much higher, simply because mook-in-a-suitdom is an urban phenomenon, and the standard of competence is much, much higher in urban areas. (There's no dumb poor person like a rural dumb poor person.)
That said, if you're going to find someone who's generally all around dumb, at least in modern North America, chances are, they're also poor, and probably rural. Which is not to say that all poor people are dumb, but that many dumb people are poor; the game is rigged that way.
IMO, the divide between dumb people and smart people is less rich-poor than urban-rural, but in some societies, they're synonymous...
(no subject)