I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about class. I grew up in Nova Scotia and spent more than twenty years in Los Angeles, living in Inglewood while working in Beverly Hills. That harsh contrast never left me, and it sits beneath far more of our disagreements than we like to admit.
What’s become clearer to me over time isn’t just that class matters, but that we don’t have a shared way of talking about it without immediately sliding into blame, politics, or theory. The knowledge exists—in economics, psychology, history, and everyday life—but it often breaks down the moment people try to use it.
This series isn’t about choosing sides. It’s about developing a shared language—a kind of moral truce language—words that don’t assume bad faith right out of the gate. I’ve come to think that what we often call “class warfare” is really the absence of that language.
I’m writing this series to slow that conversation down. Not to flatten experience or arrive at a single truth, but to describe how people behave under different levels of pressure in a way real people can recognize themselves in.
If this work does anything useful, I hope it helps keep difficult conversations possible.
Most of the arguments we’re having right now feel moral on the surface. They’re loud, emotional, and often framed as battles between good people and bad ones—compassion and cruelty, progress and backwardness.
I don’t think that’s what they actually are.
I think most of our arguments are about order, not values. About sequence. About what gets solved first—and what we pretend is already solved.
Here’s a line I’ve been returning to lately, not because it’s comfortable, but because it keeps explaining things that otherwise feel incoherent:
Class is how many bad months you can survive without your personality changing.
Not your politics.
Not your beliefs.
Your personality.
How patient you are.
How generous.
How curious.
How willing you are to listen.
When we look at life this way, a lot of behavior that gets moralized starts to look… mathematical.
I’ve lived long enough in different systems to recognize that people aren’t lying about their experiences—they’re doing different math. Perception itself is subsidized. Comfort lets people live in ideas. Pressure forces people to deal with what’s right in front of them.
That’s why the same system can feel like it “works” to some and feels actively hostile to others.
When basic things—housing, healthcare, policing, infrastructure—begin to weaken, comfortable societies experience a sharper psychological shock. Not because they’re fragile, but because they were told the cushion was the point.
There’s a term in academic writing—systemic imperialism—but I don’t mean it the way it’s usually used. I mean something quieter: when the language and expectations of comfort are imposed on people who aren’t comfortable, and disagreement is treated as moral failure rather than math. It’s the imperialism of abstraction over necessity.
Which brings me to another line I’ll unpack later in this series:
A poor man judges the rich man because he can’t dig a hole, while the rich man judges the poor man because he has to.
That sentence isn’t an accusation. It’s a description of people missing what the other is actually responding to. People close to survival tend to value competence. People farther from it often mistake necessity for failure. Neither is acting irrationally. They’re responding to different realities.
Modern systems didn’t replace survival intelligence; they layered on top of it. Trouble begins when we forget the order.
I’m not writing this to predict collapse or to scold anyone. I’m writing because it feels like we’re entering a phase where basic things are getting harder, and the systems that are supposed to help aren’t moving fast enough. When that happens, people stop hearing one another. Tempers shorten. Certainty becomes seductive.
Before that hardens further, I want to slow things down and describe the math as cleanly and compassionately as I can.
Not to win an argument.
But to keep talking to one another while we still can.
by Ben Brooks