Close to the middle class come the white collar workers and the better paid blue collar workers. Their lives are cluttered with gadgets and fringe benefits. Their homes are paid for or bought on credit.
Below these more or less regularly employed workers on salaries and wages come the semi-employed, racial or class underlings living in poverty at or near the subsistence level.
Associated with this range of bourgeois occupations and often closely identified with it are owners of family farms, tenants and hired hands.
Outside of the employment range, but dependent upon the economy are the defectives and delinquents, the parasites who live on cake and the parasites who live out of garbage cans.
Beyond these categories, in the American Empire, there are the colonial compradors and handymen who enjoy standards of living comparable to their opposite members in the North America nucleus. Below them are the colonial masses who live their entire lives under conditions of uncertainty and insecurity.
Millions of young people across the planet, born into the complicated and bewildering social network of western civilization after war's end in 1945 and graduated from school after the onset of the Vietnam War in 1965, find themselves in a complex, frustrating jungle. Should they fit in or drop out? Those who are more conventional and adaptable fit in as best they can, although the recent high unemployment rate among the youth indicates that the adjustment is often difficult. Millions of the less adaptable drop out.
Such a situation could have been foreseen by the initiated. Preparations could have been made in advance to deal with it when it arose. In the absence of adequate preparation the result is the chaos incident to every downturn of the private enterprise business cycle, magnified in this case by the regressive forces released during the disintegration of the entire social fabric.
Two other areas require a word of comment. Among human faculties are ambition, imagination, ingenuity, inventiveness, creativity. Human beings are, to a greater or lesser degree, cosmically aware. In the physical field western civilization handsomely rewards initiative. In the social field it has been far less generous. Imagination and cosmic consciousness have been quite generally listed among the undesirable endowments of mankind.
Western civilization, in the early years of the present century, produced a generation of insecure, unsettled, anxious, worried, harried people. This is generally true of young, middle aged and old, of rich and poor. Rapid social transition from expansion and advance to contraction and retreat is a traumatic, hectic experience for any human being.
Western civilization in the early years of its decline has not brought out the more generous aspects of human nature. In the best of times a materialistically oriented society appeals to the more material and less spiritual aspects of human beings. A period of social decline leads away from principled conduct toward unashamed opportunism.