Debt, Tattoos, and Noise: The Map of Cultural Level

Debt, tattoos, and noise: indicators of low cultural level

Can you judge someone’s cultural level by their car, teeth, or bank account? This question underpins a list circulating for over two years, accumulating hundreds of comments and growing by addition: without a source, without a method, and with a striking mix of verifiable facts and mere annoyance. It started with eleven signals and is now a catalogue of foreign customs. The underlying question—whether this measures culture or income—has not been resolved in any segment.

The eleven starting signals: from overweight to the team shirt

The original list mixes very different issues: overweight, the iPhone, and trips paid on credit, believing Newton invented biscuits, wearing football team shirts everywhere, speaking loudly, travel photos on Instagram, vacationing in the Mediterranean in July and August on a crowded beach, poorly cared-for teeth, smoking or occasional drug use, and lack of hygiene. From there, everyone adds their own: tattoos, shirts with random English words, caps —especially indoors— and spelling mistakes. Stickers on the car and the habit of asking any acquaintance what they do and how much they earn also appear.

The inventory has one virtue and one flaw. The virtue is that it can be checked at a glance in three seconds. The flaw is that almost everything included is explained by the bill: dentist, gym, clothes, holidays.

Overweight: from status symbol to class marker

One of the most disputed points is body weight. A repeated argument holds that obesity was a status symbol in societies of scarcity and that today it functions as a marker of low social class, because cheap food is the most caloric and time to cook or exercise is scarce in lower income brackets. The counter-argument comes quickly: what does weight have to do with someone’s culture? And a third path adds that physique also depends on genetics and available income, not on the books one has read.

Teeth and hygiene do not always depend on judgment

Something similar happens with teeth, and here the objection is economic. It is pointed out that there are people of high cultural level who have chained precarious jobs and could not afford treatment, and that there are gum problems or decalcification that depend neither on hygiene nor on interest. In the same vein, another current defends that smoking or occasional drug use crosses all classes and distinguishes no one.

The most uncomfortable defense of the list is the one that maintains that intelligence and personal neglect often go hand in hand: brilliant people who isolate themselves, get hooked on something, and end up abandoning hygiene and routine. Self-destructive, says the most cited summary.

Noise and the exhaust pipe: when volume is the message

Noise has earned a fixed place. Needing constant sound —television at full volume, chained videos, music at the top during lunch— is described as a fairly reliable detector of inculture. In the same family comes the modified exhaust: who buys an artisanal pipe to make the car sound louder, versus who buys a model that is already noisy from the factory. The most repeated conclusion is that the problem is not the sound, but the need to be noticed. And the most reasonable of all: just do not bother the neighbor.

Car loan, gold watch, and seafood antiestéticast: spending as a thermometer

Ostentatious spending occupies the other major chapter. Going into debt to buy any material thing —except the main home— is considered a manual signal. The recurring example: paying 1,500 euros per month for the loan of a high-end SUV while the couple earns 900. Added to this are the gold watch with a thick chain on display, the used Mercedes or BMW brought from Germany with the undercarriage eaten by road salt, and the SUV as an extra point.

Some add travel: squeezing eleven months a year, relying on others' food, and spending twelve months' budget in ten days at a destination five hours by flight, with 37 photos and no museum visits. And those who boast of the largest screen in the living room, which according to this school reveals the owner.

Public debt, unemployment, and inflation enter the list

From a certain point, the list becomes politicized. Voters from the two major parties appear, the flag on the balcony turned into a bracelet, the republican bracelet, and rejection or adherence to certain social policies depending on who signs the list. One comment attributes the solution to the pension problem to the massive arrival of skilled foreign workers, and does so managing debt exceeding 170% of GDP, more than two million unemployed, and inflation rising each year: figures launched without a source. On the opposite side, saying the economy is going like a rocket or blaming Pilingui for inflation also scores, according to another intervention.

Some denialist assertions about the pandemic or climate slip in, without any evidentiary backing. And a response that disconcerts both sides: none of this measures culture, it measures something else.

The missing indicator: worrying about others' cultural level

In the end, irony turns against the exercise itself. Someone proposes as the definitive indicator 'making lists of low cultural level indicators', and another suggests that worrying about one's own cultural level is the lowest thing there is. One intervention recalls Unamuno, for whom the only cultured people left were the illiterate. Another distinguishes between IQ and culture, and maintains that the former explains socioeconomic status much better than the latter.

The list, more than two years later, continues to grow. The next low cultural level signal will probably be having participated in it.