I Count, Therefore I Am.

The middle class has become the true battleground of contemporary capitalism: not to be annihilated, but to be kept in a state of functional tension-solid enough to produce income and tax revenue, insecure enough to never stop spending. On one side, marketing woos it with the precision of an algorithm that knows tastes, habits, vulnerabilities, and sleep schedules; on the other, the tax authority measures its payroll regularity as the most reliable form of supply, with withholding at the source, estimated payments, surtaxes, and true-ups that arrive as punctually as paychecks, but with the side effect of tightening the room for maneuver until it is reduced to a corridor. In between, the middle class holds the country together: it works, pays, consumes, raises children, sustains domestic demand; and precisely for this reason it is the preferred target of those who sell belonging and those who collect stability. Marketing knows its psychology better than its bank does: it knows that the greatest fear is not poverty but the loss of status, the idea of sliding backward without any longer being able to "make it" with decorum; and so it modulates seduction into non-negotiable "little yeses"-a "pro" plan that promises efficiency, the slightly superior car "for safety," the device upgrade "to work better," the weekend "to unplug and restart"-all justified by a vocabulary of good reasons that never asks for the full price, because it spreads it, hides it, fragments it. Meanwhile the tax authority does not seduce: it levies. It does not ask for emotional assent, but for accounting assent; and since evasion is not an option for those who live on fixed income, the pressure is unloaded onto the after-tax period, that is, onto that residue of freedom that remains at the end of the month and becomes the true field to be conquered by the market. This is where the combined strategy works: the net take-home pay determines capacity, advertising determines the use of that capacity, and autopay guarantees its continuity. The result is a cultural paradox: one works with constancy, contributes with discipline, consumes with apparent moderation-and yet lives with the feeling of not being able to absorb the unexpected, of having to ask the bank for "oxygen" for every boiler breakdown, extra servicing, or unanticipated tax. The bank, which knows the statistics of normality well, does not finance poverty and does not pamper wealth: it offers bridges to the middle class-credit lines, micro-installments, cards that "spread it out," "peace-of-mind" loans-because the ideal customer is neither the free one nor the desperate one; it is the one who stays in balance with debt without ever extinguishing it. And so the dignity of work finds itself wedged into the dignity of paying on time, which is a lesser, defensive dignity, with little narrative to it.