Of social classes

Social classes are funny little creatures. They consist of many different aspects, yet they are very elusive and difficult to nail down. Some attributes which define class can include education, net worth, background, and occupation. Yet defining who belongs to which class is somewhat difficult and often classes may not be that comparable between certain geographical regions, sometimes even within countries. A net worth of, say, some millions, would land you very high in Finland if you determine class by net worth. The same amount of money would quite possibly mean much less in Manhattan. Granted, this example might have its flaws in the sense that in both cases, on a national level, the individual might be considered as decently wealthy, possibly belonging to the upper middle class. But regardless, social classes, I guess, can be found from pretty much anywhere.

The issue with social classes, however, is that they are somewhat tedious as they blatantly pigeonhole people into a certain class, thus fragmenting the mindset of the general population. Interclass and intraclass rivalry might become nasty and bitter. And in a place like Finland, if you rank people by income or net worth, the variance around the average is very small. Regardless of what some Finns will tell you, there aren't really that many super rich Finns. Nor are there that many super poor Finns. There are poor and rich people but not to the extent that, say, America has. If you look at education, there are of course different classes in regards from vocational education up to post-graduate degrees. But within these classes, there is not that much rivalry, unlike if you compare some generic American university to an Ivy League school. It does not really matter that much whether you've graduated from Helsinki University of Technology or some other university. And I would even go so far as to suggest that we do not have that much of any type of blue bloodedness in Finland either; Finland has traditionally been an agrarian state and there is barely a handful, if even that, of families that are even remotely considered to be more prestigious in Finland.

That said, I am sure that you can classify Finns too according to traditional social classes, but the opinion I am promoting here is that the classification is more or less useless and based very much on the perceptions of individuals. It is a mindset issue. And people should get out of the mindset of classifying themselves in certain classes. I know it is very difficult and I might be slightly hypocritical in saying all this, as I sometimes also succumb to viewing the world through the social class lens. But inherently I don't think that one class should be viewed as more prestigious or "better" than some other. If you assume that the overall goal of an individual is to optimize his or her happiness and if you then consider that happiness of very much subjective, it is very possible that upper class individuals are less happy than lower class individuals. So if you do feel as if you need to have a class system in place to understand the world, the least one should do is to attempt to understand that the classes themselves do not inherently imply any value themselves, necessarily.