brookes77, 3/17/09

“ The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: “i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal consequently also controls the means of mental production” (39) This quote really made me think in class when we had to choose between different products such as cars or drinks (etc.), of which out of the two were the ruling class and why. An example we were showed was a fancy, personalized new car parked on the open road verses a older red color car parked in the middle of a parking lot. Immediately I thought that the ruling class would be the older average car that was parked next to another red car and with other examples shown I thought that the ruling class would be GM, and Budweiser. I understand the other side and how people think that the ruling class would be the “higher class” products but the majority of people do not have the ability to be selective with their products so to me, ruling class, is what people have, what people settle for rather then what they desire. People settle for what is in their means, what they are capable of, there is only a select amount of people who have what others desire. The desire to have what we do not have is an ideology that is ingrained in our heads and to some extent it does rule what we wish we had, but since that is not reality the ruling class is the less valued products because it is what is normal, and normal always rules over abnormal.
Also I agree that branded things are the ruling class over something that is not branded even if it is more valuable. Our society feeds off of what is safe, normal, known. This is like the example we used when talking about the nice Italian restaurant versus the Olive garden, in this case the Olive Garden would rule over the small authentic Italian restaurant. We discussed why the Olive garden is so much busier then the nice, organic expensive Italian restaurant. It is what is known to people it is what people are surrounded with, and that classifies the average products to be the ruling class above desired products.