How to Become Intellectually Fashionable

It’s a Tuesday morning in LA, and I’m reading “Ethics” is Advertising by David Chapman.

Chapman discusses the endless time we spend signaling about who we are and what social class we’re part of.

The bulk of this conspicuous activity goes on within the ranks of the middle class, where lines between middle-middle and upper-middle are most fiercely defended.

Here’s Chapman’s description of the middle class:

“To be lower middle class, you only need to have the right general attitudes, which is easy because there’s only a handful. The most important is wanting to move up within the middle class. To do that, you know you need to be ‘respectable.’

To be middle-middle class, you need to have all the correct opinions. (You are allowed to choose the leftish set of opinions or the rightish one, of course.) This requires memorizing endless lists of taboos and shibboleths, which is a conspicuous waste of time. “The news” and the political internet are tools for this. The high cost of keeping track of all that meaningless noise, and the ease of verifying it by asking your opinion of last night’s synthetic outrage event, makes it an effective signal.

To be upper middle class, you need to be able to figure out, on the fly, what would be the correct opinion about…