My girlfriend and I were planning on going camping today, but my girlfriend's white suburban middle class parents wouldn't let us, saying it was 'dangerous'. Both her and I agree that white middle class people are way too afraid of everything for some reason, but I don't know why. Any ideas?
The Reactionary Mind is a good book about this. Reactionaries—and the American middle class is pretty reactionary—have this very "supple" brain which allows them to sense danger that may be completely out of proportion to what exists in reality. This is at least partly why chuds rant about Biden being a communist. They can sense the danger in having a president who is at least nominally supposed to be doing something for people who are not already insanely rich. When you give the poor a finger, they might take the whole hand!
I also want to establish that this "supple" brain is a dialectic and not an example of idealistic deterministic calipers. One is born into the middle class, one is infected with its habitual terror of everything (generated by the alienation inherent to capitalism and suburbia), one then limits oneself to nothing but mayo thoughts and people and experiences, and this makes that supple brain even more supple, and on and on.