Projection of Attainment

      The various personal potentials in a community have been noted and categorized, both semantically and practically – whether for government mandate or for personal benefit. The various levels of trading potentials – dubbed “wealth” – have been cause for relational ability as well as a marking of difference. But, are these bases fundamentally correct? Outside of the numeric or tier-like representation of the potential itself, what are the societal and ethical implications? Is the wealth a cause, or an effect? In the musical My Fair Lady, one of the characters of what is commonly known as the “lower class” seems to think that the wealth is both. His moral philosophy – middle-class morality – involves the claim that the poor man is seen as undeserving and therefore is hardly quenched. In order to determine whether or not middle-class morality is a functional concept, it seems that we need to first identify the applicable verb “to deserve” and distinguish the real difference between the “lower,” “middle,” and “upper” classes.

           As taken from the novel which precedes My Fair Lady, middle-class morality as defined by a poor man is “just an excuse to never give me anything.” Along with the implication that the poor get less because they are perceived to deserve less is the implication that deserving can be a qualitative and 'relatable' condition that will cause people to act a certain way. To 'deserve' can have two kinds of contexts. In one, there is no conditional value that can be identified as being fulfilled or not. For example, he deserves the trophy because he is a good person. Being a “good person” is not a physically verifiable condition until it is defined and agreed upon by the people using the term. The other context is under a verifiable condition – he deserves the trophy because he won the game. Bystanders can all conclude that the condition “winning the game” has been fulfilled, and according to the rules of this particular game, you are supposed to acquire a trophy. In this second context, “deserve” may as well mean “has fulfilled the necessary condition in order to acquire.” While it may seem to be derived in the same way from the first context, the first is not relatable; the idea of a 'good' person is not defined in that way– and therefore impractical. Again, in the event that it is agreed upon amongst individuals what the condition of being a good person is, they can together imply that being so is also in merit of acquiring something.

         In order to make “deserving” a relatable concept no matter what the context, we need to strip it to its fundamentally affecting property in a bystander – being attracted to or avoiding of a particular outcome. That is, if a person thinks that someone “deserves” something, they would feel better if someone in that situation was rewarded something. If a person feels they don’t deserve it, it’s because they would feel worse than the status quo if it happened. If person A could think of all the possible items that person B could acquire, person A’s idea of deserving hinges on how satisfying it would feel if person B was given something. The more satisfying the rewarding to person B is thought to be, the more person B “deserves” it. This can be used very strictly in the first context given in reference to “deserving” – whereas the second is in the matter of fulfilling a condition, and the bystander’s satisfaction is dependent on a condition being fulfilled rather than the acquisition of something in general. We can apply this to a class system if we generalize the definition of deserving to “how attracted to or avoidant of a particular conclusion a randomly chosen person in a society would be expected to be, in observation of.” It appears to me that this definition would be the most likely to yield correct if actions were taken on the matter of rewarding in order to appease the greatest amount of people. I consider this conclusion to be practical, not from a utilitarian standpoint, but from a psychological egoist standpoint – which we all are, unarguably. (Even if you act for others, you do so for yourself.) Indeed, it would raise the chance of any randomly chosen person to be satisfied at any given moment.

      This definition raises a slight dilemma when we analyze a line made in reference to the middle-class morality – the major character claims that he is undeserving, yet still believes that he should be given more. This is a good example of the problem of the modern use of the word “deserve.” The word itself is totally socially subjective – it relies on a 3^rd party. So when the character says he is undeserving, he is actually referring to the fact that society would generally view him as undeserving – though he believes that he should get something. We can infer this directly from the fact that he wants something – which means that to him, a necessary condition has been fulfilled. This is why “deserve” can’t be used practically in a 1^st party sense, unless it is in an appeal to the 3^rd party.

        Still, the question remains: are the poor considered to deserve less? This doesn’t appear to ring true in today’s society. There seems to be many examples of humanitarian and low-income based aid programs. However, I believe that “poor” is often used as a generalization for those who don’t work hard, for which I would say that society prefers not to reward. Still, I don’t believe that this is the real issue at hand. I think it is more important to consider the implication in middle-class morality that it is difficult to move into the middle class – “up against middle class morality all the time. If there's anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it's always the same story: 'You're undeserving; so you can't have it.'”

In an even larger sense, a question is raised: how does your trade potential affect your personal valuing of wealth, resulting in the middle-class harboring of “anything going” from the lower class? I believe the answer lies in what I’ll call “projection of attainment.” The concept of “disappointment” relies on an expectation of attainment, and an outcome that falls short of that projection. Generally, wealth and trade potential offer the possibility of attaining a wide variety of items and feelings. For the “upper-class” attainment tends to be swift, easy, and common – their projection of attainment is large and the level of disappointment that is directly affected by the inability to acquire things using wealth as a medium is very low. Now, the “lower-class” has a very low projection of attainment. They are aware of their lack of trade potential and therefore rarely deal with disappointment in the acquisition of something. Of course, there is likely to be a general lack of satisfaction due to the fact that they aren’t often comforted or entertained with the material goods or affects they would have purchased, but that is basically unrelated to this point. They survive off of what they make, and have little room for investment or savings. The “middle-class” does not have the means to purchase everything they want, but they do have the means to save enough wealth to get some things, because they have more money than they need for basic survival. This opens them up to the possibility of investing their money and moving into the upper-class, and also provides them with the hope to acquire some things they really like. So, the middle-class may have a projection of attainment as large as the upper class, fueled by a positive self-bias (in potential). However, this opens them up to the possibility of the most disappointment of the three classes. They have a substantial expectation of reward and material acquisition, and no guarantee that they will achieve it. This near-inevitable feeling of periodic disappointment likely conditions the middle class to fight harder for what they have and garner a feeling of “deserving” because of the negative feelings they associate with not getting the projected attainment. This results in a comparatively high regard for money in terms of a physical representation of what helps them avoid disappointment.

     In many ways, this comparatively high regard for wealth that the middle-class is affected by could be seen as one of the culprits for what is being called middle-class morality. They, as a class, are more likely to feel deserving of material or financial acquisition, after being conditioned to avoid the disappointment which is felt more exclusively by the middle class due to their large and sometimes flawed projection of attainment. This “projection of attainment” certainly seems to causes rifts in class, keeping the lower class low, and making the race to upper class a concern for many in the middle. However, for the concept of middle-class morality as found in My Fair Lady to be one that is founded on principles of deserving, it needs to be viewed as one that is built on foundations of conditioned disappointment and attraction rather than one created primarily out of the inability to relate to the poor as a whole.