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The new underclass, so the customary reproach runs, shuns education, is work-shy and has lost its orientation to upward social mobility.139 The status anxiety of the middle class leads among other things to the economic interpretation, negative classification and devaluation of weaker groups, as shown in Wilhelm Heitmeyer’s long-term study on xenophobic attitudes among the German population Deutsche Zustände.140 To a certain degree the middle class has abandoned solidarity with the weak; it has built security by shutting itself off. Where there was previously a certain liberality, more rigorous ideas of morality, culture and behaviour have now returned. With increased fears of ‘contamination’ and ‘infection’, people seek the greatest possible distance and strict isolation from the ‘parallel society’ of the lower class.141 They are generally less inclined to accept society’s ‘encouragements to diversity’.142 The precarious middle classes, who actually experience relative downward mobility, count this as personal failure. Here individualistic and fatalistic interpretations of their own work prevail. They seek at almost any price to integrate into society by competition at work. This also has the consequence of resentment towards the weaker, the supposedly lazy or those considered less motivated.143
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