Is there a concerted effort underway to break the West's middle class?

David Brin believes that there is such an effort underway.

I would propose the edits 1. Strike the West - this is a war on Europe. 2. You are making the severe error of trusting the Americans. You keep wishing Bezos being a Space Alien, but he is just American, like Dalio and the rest. They want Europeans divided, but buying American and above all dragged into all their military exploits through NATO. It is easy to answer your question: we are all busy climbing ladders, keeping families together, fighting disease and war, and watching Netflix and social media. History needs to become that to be understood. We keep being told what is happening by people looking through myopic lenses. People have become afraid to speak up, as the world has become visibly complex. A generation ago it was also complex, but we did not have it thrown in our faces, so we stupidly spoke our minds, and we got away with it. The net has made it evident that IQ measurements indeed reflect a half of the population that you can speak to all day long about what is happening and they will not get it. The problem is that the top half of the population will bicker until the cows come home about the detail. And so they think they get it, too, but beg to differ and so not improving the situation. And so it is not at all about the Middle Class as such, but an issue of what we decided to abandon - our values and by extension, the way we build and operate society. We are becoming more like a Communist society where spiritual values are maintained by communities that you cannot break, as they pass it on and being strenghtened in their faith and doubling up on spiritual development as their system hold all the roots of decline in it as the seven deadly sins rule. War, corruption and restricted personal freedom makes for a counterculture of survival, on display in Ukraine. In Western Europe we would likely not last that long in the face of bombardments, lack of electricity, water, food and public services. We are like this post-communist society only in the sense that the values preservation is left to citizens and their initiatives. We are unlike these societies as we come from a position of having what we need and sliding into the abyss, without the aspiration and capacity to struggle as we can see in Ukraine. My analysis is left incomplete and simplified here, but we need to foster our capacity to will an identity that is truly European - a layer that represents what you likely would attribute to the Middle Class - and which I would rather call by its functional names - society-building, cultural development, ubiquitous cognitive participation (educational system), and yes, the conservation of values. And this is where it all becomes politics, semantics of power, and the division bell is sounding. We could find political cohesion around the word protection, but see division if we used the equivalent term conservation. The least dynamic and most conservative socio-economic layers in society are the lower ones, mostly because the political system representing their interests would be out of business if they achieved their goals. Class struggles are perpetuated by political parties. The key to perpetuating division in such societies is the buying of the elected and self-selected few. Foreign influence peddlers have an easy time deploying schemes that perpetuate division. We are adapting fast as humans to change, but societies nevertheless adapt to change in ways that are toxic and destructive to values, cohesion and the fabric that invisibly held us together through past pandemics, wars, economic declines and dark ages in spiritual and cognitive dimensions. In our dynamism we developed from simple societies of a few mansions to complex societies where innovation is disruptive. We see this as heroic - kicking one class of workers out of work as we substitute our innovations for their experience and cognitive capacities. This is not really new - we have many sayings from old demonstrating that the unsuccess of one is feeding the other, but we never saw these disruptive transitions at scale. We are not a very dynamic society despite the above, as the fantastic growth in technologies and sciences in general has elevated all of us into specialization, but with no other result than the famous jack of all trades, master of none. We are curious, but increasingly ignorant about the work of the person at the next desk or counter. In this world, we seek community where we can find it and hence we run to cyberspace where we are physically safe and where we also can be more cognitively expansive. The Metaverse is a great safe place for our egos and we will increasingly also satisfy many of our needs there, including physical, cognitive and spiritual needs. We do not need Elon Musk nor Jeff Bezos to take us to Mars - we are totally fine with escaping to the neighborhoods of the cyberphysical continuum that allow us to live our aspirations increasingly denied us in the more limiting physical world. Shopping and working online is great, as it supports that being now rising in cyberspace, the one which looks like, acts and is received by others in ways we find harder to achieve out in the nasty neighborhoods where the postal service - eh, Amazon - still finds us. The worrisome trend concern you are raising is entirely to the point - our vantage points and semantics tend to differ. In my view, the solution must be sought in our basic composition of beings and how we organize our lives as individuals, families and groups, societies, nations, federations and planets. I like to suggest that we are in a series of major transitions that society and its members do not understand too well and so leaving us to struggle. I do not exempt myself from the cognitive or adaption parts, but here are some provocations: We are in a technology transition of society that in popular labels could be called smart - intelligent - cognitive, where the smart wave started in the early years of this century and the intelligent wave is taking over around this time. The cognitive society will be taking over from the end of this decade from a technology availability and deployment point of view and the following decade will be its defining moment. Yet, we still see "smart cities" being the label of conventions and initiatives not even starting to have an impact on economies and lives. I could agree that it is all about semantics, but every time I look in depth, I realize how we fall behind by failing to build capacity and models of society as dynamic entities serving the individuals for sure as physical, cognitive and spiritual beings - "complete persons". But it goes further, to the competitive capabilities of federations and the corresponding Power to Coerce as the EU High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell Fontelles aspires to in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. This is where we fail as a Federation, or risk failing if we keep this to forward-looking matters. We must accelerate our social development in a world that is disrupted not only by technology, but also visibly in conflict over economics, distribution of wealth, perceived physical security. We learned during the pandemic that supply chains matters and the perception of national security is not about borders, but about access to the full supply chain ingredients. Sanctions imposed since 2014 on Russia by the US mostly has often been challenged by its competing Federation, Europe. Why? Because sanctions limit access to basic materials, to means of transport, to human resources, to financial assets, and in the end, breaking out of that cage is characterized best by a territorial acquisition and a new Federation, perhaps similar to the triad that dissolved the dysfunctional Soviet Union. We did not see that process taking place until it erupted as war in our European back yard. Well, Germany and Austria leaders protested to the US in 2017. Industrial leaders protested ahead of that. Disruption at work in the cyberphysical continuum is not like that of our grandparents' world, but the result of war is as devastating, maybe in a shorter time. We cannot build "smart cities" in 2022, we must be building "intelligent cities" aiming for these to transition to "cognitive cities" already in the next decade. We need the expedience of government that we now see addressing war, and until recently exceptionally addressed a pandemic. The difference, though, is that we cannot repeat this experience with governments being unprepared for war, pandemics or the major transitions in the information and energy spaces. We still have people thinking the transition is to digital when the race is towards the quantum society. People freak out and are played to declare gas and nuclear renewable, rather than staying the course. We struggle with an unevenly defined reality paradigm and we see the vested interests being disrupted in panic and with brazen arrogance reaching for the honey in broad daylight. Wake up, Europe.

Nominal Productivity and GDP gains aside the size of the global middle class appears to be a zero sum game. The far east middle class has grown at the expense of their western counterparts. This was disguised for a long time through debt. This isn’t a conspiracy it’s a simple equilibrium.

Bit couldn't it be that the pressures on the middle class are the symptom of the west's collapse, and not the cause? Was the rise of the middle class in the west a result of productivity and wealth, rather than the cause of it? Are we not witnessing the collapse of western society?

’Life and Death in the Warehouse’ on BBC iPlayer - worth viewing to understand the direction of travel https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/mar/07/life-and-death-in-the-warehouse-review-the-terrible-true-cost-of-online-shopping