B.O.U.R.G.E.O.I.S

I have decided that I love the middle classes. After years being ashamed of my bourgeois status because of the many abject twats I knew who were middle class and all the possibly fake working class people who inverse-sneered at my accent, my bag of toffees and my taste for scrumping, I can confirm that I have embraced with open arms my non-humble, non-privileged background. It’s not just me, either. I’m a zealous convert: I think everyone should be middle class.

Now hold on. Before you hate me, allow me to explain. I don’t mean that we should all be coveting semi-detached houses in Chiswick. I mean that we should all be aspiring to the middle ground. See, when you’re a kid, you feel ashamed of being stuck in the middle; you envy the working classes their inviolable cause and you envy the rich their inviolable entitlement. But the bourgeoisie are great precisely because they occupy the middle.

It’s no coincidence that Buddhism, a religion based on maximizing happiness, is known sometimes as the middle path. That’s where everyone should be, you see, sharing the middle ground. That’s where I imagine we'd all be happiest, with the same amount of education, the same buying power, the same access to nice things, the same opportunity to determine our futures, the same heightened awareness and, hopefully, the same sense of conscience.

The problem with Brazil, if I may venture to say so, is that there isn’t enough of a middle class. As I have said elsewhere, society here is polarised between the very poor and the very rich, with a huge gulf in between. Into this gap, this non-existent middle-ground, fall the few professionals who think more progressively, but they seem to be actively squeezed out or antagonised by the inability of the economy in its present state to accommodate their needs.

Things are changing, however; the working classes are getting more and more strident in their demands for proper jobs, rights and education. They are improving themselves. In short, they want to be middle class in the purely abstract sense of wanting to have enough equality to determine their own futures (which, ironically, is something the middle classes of the first world may be losing, but that’s another story). The rich of Brazil, however, seem to be seeking to prevent this transition, because the elevation of some people makes others want it for themselves, and suddenly all the serving classes, all their babas and drivers and maids, don’t want to be babas and drivers and maids anymore; they want to go to college and become librarians, beauticians and teachers. In that order. And then where would the rich Brasileiros be? Using eHow to learn to boil an egg.