The Bourgeois Mind

Nikolai Berdyaev

All people are bourgeois and that goes for both the rich and poor. Being bourgeois which connotes a certain degree of self satisfaction is a survival mechanism. Even pathological self-haters exhibit the bourgeois aspiration for homeostasis. Naturally it follows from this that most animal and even plant life are bourgeois. Nikolai Berdyaev wrote a book called The Bourgeois Mind where he sees the bourgeois as a  materialist--something that both capitalists and communists have in common. In his famous  "Masscult and Midcult" Dwight Macdonald excoriates middle brow or bourgeois culture--with its facile accessibility. Both Berdyaev and Macdonald would probably agree that the bourgeois inhabitants of the middle class wouldn't make good candidates for revolution--lacking a romantic aspiration to transcend to a new state, whether spiritual or political. But who is? Place Lenin, Stalin it for that matter Pol Pot in a dacha with all their needs taken car of and even they turn out to be bourgeois. 

read "The Chapbook Lady" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

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