Education, once a promise of a better future for all, now seems a desperate tournament by which some escape the miserable fate that awaits many others, and this in a country where cramming after-schools, as well as tutoring, are an industry. This insecurity about jobs and desperation to get into college is recognizable in America, of course, but to a far less alarming degree, so this is a good time to learn from Parasite.

The two families, Parks and Kims, have each two children, a boy and a girl, a sign of allegory, given the catastrophic demographics of South Korea, where Total Fertility Rates are around 1.3 children per woman, suggesting a population collapse in the next generation. Meanwhile, Parasite wants to show us the envy and imitative desire that drives the middle classes in our times—liberalism has taught people to chase fantasies like celebrity, and when that fails, hatred takes root.

The piety of liberalism, crying about oppression, has led critics, hipster audiences, and, I suppose, Academy voters, to think that Parasite is about income inequality, the upper class versus the lower class. But in fact both families are psychologically characterized as firmly middle class. One is rich, the other poor, but that seems to be a matter of circumstance, not class, and the poor do not think poverty is their lot.

Their poverty is a new development that conceals things we only learn gradually. Kim Ki-taek, the father, tried his hand repeatedly at entrepreneurship, only to fail and end up in debt. Perhaps the problem was too much ambition or envy of richer people. His son Ki-woo tried repeatedly and failed to get into the very prestigious Yonsei University, writer-director Bong’s own alma mater. Something fickle in him caused him to fail where his best friend succeeded.

After you notice this, you can see that there is something rotten in the Kim family—self-loathing, to start with, an inability to act with dignity. In their new poverty, neither Ki-taek nor Ki-woo is willing to act like a man and confront a local drunkard who habitually micturates right outside their semi-basement window. But Ki-woo’s friend Min does it out of instinct and puts an end to the disgusting show.

The manly Min is studious and chivalrous. He also offers Ki-woo a very good job tutoring the teenage daughter of the rich, respectable Park family. Ki-woo then gets his sister Ki-jung a job doing art therapy for the Parks’ young son. This should lead to happiness and contentment—finally, poverty is over and the parents, even though they don’t themselves have jobs yet, can be proud of their adult children and receive help from them!

Yet the Kims are incapable of feeling gratitude, of accepting the good things they have in such a way as to solidify by work new opportunities that might otherwise seem like mere luck. Instead of acting decently, they immediately do contemptible, conniving things to hurt innocent people who are also working hard for a living, just to take their jobs. They also fantasize about getting the wealth of the rich Park family employing them.

Only ideological blindness could cause critics to miss this very plausible characterization of the problem of a middle class that feels insecure and cheated out of dignity. People might start acting in vicious ways. The self-loathing of poverty might change them into people who want riches, but no longer care about their good names, despite the Korean insistence on social conservatism, on respectability, and propriety of behavior.

The behavior liberals ascribe to greedy rich people in America is the behavior of the poor Kims, not the rich Parks. This is no accident. Bong is admittedly a man of the Left. In South Korea, it was lefty students like him who protested against the right-wing military government to bring democracy and free elections. But he’s serious about the need to retrieve the old conservative virtues of pre-democratic times, since those virtues built Korean prosperity and society.

The rich Parks are clueless, but not wicked. They presume that their money buys them anything—but they’re neither greedy nor aggressive. They are only scared and hiding behind their money. They want comfort above all—no anxiety, no drama. The only time they hurt a person, it’s the poor Kims conspiring together to make it happen: To delude them into ruining the life of a hard-working old woman, leading everyone to tragedy.

That old woman is a reminder of old Korea: The extraordinary suffering of the Korean War, the difficulty of surviving, and the many virtues suffering created. The greedy and the clueless parts of the middle-class are now threatening to destroy it. She secretly has a husband living in a forgotten bunker under the house. She tries hard to keep him alive and they make telling jokes about North Korea, hinting at the possible unity of the country, despite the catastrophe of war and Communist tyranny.

That old woman is an expert housekeeper—nosy, busybodying, possessive, sure, but she also possesses all the virtues of love and practical care. People who would destroy such women, as much as the system that made them obsolete, are a deep moral-political problem. She is simple-minded, but incorrupt. She is Bong’s image of the good character and the natural good things that Korea is in danger of losing because of ever more sophisticated desires, intriguing, envy, and delusion.