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Elite Fear and Loathing
Why are so many of the most privileged people in all of human history so meanspirited and narcissistic? The educated elites in the developed world have a higher standard of living than has ever existed. Instead of a sensibility of gratitude, generosity, and open-mindedness, they (we?) are spiraling into a mindless tribalism in which signaling membership has replaced a substantive moral perspective.
They adhere to a mandatory oversimplified model of the most complex phenomena on earth (climate) in which ideology punishes inconvenient observations and calls that “science.” They opt for “solutions” like the demonstrably silly Paris Climate Treaty which is hideously costly and would have no measurable effect on climate. But that “solution” accomplishes the tribe’s usual dual purpose of (1) appearing to Do Something, and (2) disproportionately hurting the non-elite.
The “revolution” from 1960s radicals which the modern elite carries like a low-grade contagion has seeped into society resulting in the degradation of every social institution large and small, mostly to the detriment of the nation’s lower socioeconomic classes. The malformation of our young men is especially troubling but none of that can be discussed because the tribe offers no self-aggrandizing signals on such topics.
This is why Gun Control is such a sacred signal. Like the Paris or Kyoto Accord, these regulations offer zero curative effects but they distract from discussions that might reflect badly on the weltanschauung of the tribe. They are a form of harassment and a beatdown of non-elites and they strongly signal what now passes for virtue and a clean conscience.
The utterly incoherent immigration positions cheered by elites signal the tribe’s transcendence over outmoded and tacky allegiances such as patriotism and national identity. If implemented (even by inaction and legislative stalemate), they would disproportionately impact the non-elites as it already does by ratcheting down wages, creating troubled neighborhoods, and draining limited social welfare resources. But as a means of signaling, it’s a major win-win for those eager to remain in the tribe.
My mother’s southern family fiercely distinguished themselves from “poor white trash” by a sustained almost aristocratic demeanor even as the Great Depression greatly reduced the economic difference between them and their lessers. I see something similar in the tribe. The fear of falling out of the elite triggers an intense hatred of a caricature of the non-elite. The latent moral pull of the religion and traditions of immediate ancestors must be fought with a denigration of all religious people lest they be dragged back into less self-celebrating practices and duties. (Islam, Buddhism, and Native American religions have no such ancestral claims and can be safely respected like dolphins or the rainforest.)
We see millions of privileged young people in horrific debt to pay for bloated college administrative salaries (I fear I could endorse a revolution that focused on these people first). Their intellectual formation is noticeably inferior to that of older alumni, which makes them less able and far less confident about questioning the common wisdom. The sheer worthlessness of that education must foment an abiding feeling of vulnerability, as if they could be dragged down to live among the deplorables at any moment. Thus, the need to signal and affirm an utterly vacuous yet putatively elite sensibility is especially strong. We have produced a privileged class with little noblesse oblige and lots of fear and loathing.
Published in General
We should prohibit the shipment of beef into Boston, New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles in order to help the movement to insure these cities don’t go under water due to climate change.
The hypocrisy of the rich greenies is beyond parody. Flying private jets to energy intensive resorts to discuss climate change is like a convention of abolitionists using slaves to prepare and serve meals.
I don’t think this is really fair. I don’t think they purposely hurt the non-elite, they just don’t care if their policies do.
I don’t know if this is true either. We just raised the wages we plug in when estimating for the third time in five years. At least half of our work-force is Hispanic.
Shutting down factories and mines, taking away SUVs, pickups and bass boats is probably almost as pleasurable as taking away guns or forcing deplorables to bake cakes and wave pride flags. I no longer believe it is mostly indifference.
Well, maybe. If you can characterize “fastening onto our necks like lampreys and sucking us dry” as unintentional, then you’re right. They’re just feeding on us – not particularly doing any intentional harm.
If this is not true the immigration positions of both the US Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO for decades are based on a faulty premise. It is not possible that the fact of millions of unskilled workers willing to be paid under the table has no effect on job design and wage structure. How much of an effect is an open question. I also wonder how good the numbers are for employers and workers with a very strong incentive not to report.
Being a “progressive”, in today’s sense, allows one the safety and comfort of aligning with the Establishment….while at the same time the thrill of feeling like a bold revolutionary. It’s a pretty attractive psychological mix for a lot of people.
And for those who enjoy Cruelty, it also offers a set of safe targets for (at least) verbal attac.
Maybe it’s because we need to hire skilled labor.
A long time childhood friend, now a former friend, who happens to be a Catholic nun, has expressed great dismay over my attitude on the nation’s borders. She feels it is unChristian to not desire endless rampant immigration.
Meanwhile she undertook the separation of a young first grader from the 68 year old nun that was the only family the boy had had in order to save money for the Church and to ensure her own promotion inside her order. (She is now President of some conclave or another.)
One of her justifications for doing this was that the foster mom nun didn’t have the money out of her pocket to provide for the boy. How could she have the money out of her own pocket – she was a nun!
The fact that I am often living pay check to pay check didn’t allow my former friend to feel it was inappropriate to offer up mounds of verbal disdain for the poverty that the other nun allowed herself to live inside.
So apparently narcissism is not a condition a person can escape by taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
Is it part of Western society? My spouse spent six weeks or so in the mountains of Northern India, surrounded by people who come from the heart. (Voltaire once wrote words to the effect that modern man has a cash register where the heart should be.) He returned from this trip in a state of wonder and grace – filled with appreciation for the smallest thing.
Six weeks after his return, that bright hearty-ness and loving aspect was ebbing. It is a hard thing to maintain in our society.
It sounds like you run a fair and decent company, Randy. If only everyone else did as well.
When I lived in Marin County, 1984 to 2005, it was estimated that at least half the restaurant jobs in the county were handled by people being paid under the table.
One perfect example of what this involves: for a good four or five years, a Ms Lum was continually commended for her charitable work among the poor. During holiday times, she would be photographed handing a blown up check for this or that amount, anywhere from 1K to 5K to some group that needed money for a food bank or day care or school books for kids who lived in The Canal district of San Rafael. She often was awarded the Woman of The Year award, for participating in such compassionate activities.
Constant mention was made of the fact that although she had succeeded in making her Chinese restaurants successful, she still had the time for these things.
Then all the positive publicity ended. It was discovered that her own employees were paid under the table, often for less than $ 4 an hour. In addition, Lum was part of the mule team enterprises that had brought these Chinese people to our shores. The workers received their pittance of a salary. Then she was the middle man in terms of taking back a majority of their wages, to pay off the mules who had brought them her. She got her cut out of these garnishments as well.
One newspaper account of this criminal activity reported that some employees would have been paying off the fees owed to Lum and their mules for another 20 to 30 years!
Don’t forget that it’s easier for the elites to oppress the deplorables if the deplorables don’t have guns.
Sorry if I gave the impression I run the company. I just work there.
Market forces are market forces. Concrete is hard work, and you have to pay what you have to pay to get workers.
Fascinating! I have this picture of a person desperately clinging to a tiny tree at the end of a cliff, looking down into the abyss. I’d never pictured the Left so despising the rest of us that they’d do just about anything to avoid having to “mix with the deplorable mob.” They must maintain the gap, the polarization, in order to survive. How ugly. Excellent post, @oldbathos
As are all of the left’s solutions. Or should I say the “elite’s” solutions, because there are elites on the right who have also drunk the cool aid.
“Rules for thee and not for me” is a trademark of these elites. It used to be the elites could get away with multiple failed marriages fueled by infidelity, drug use and addiction, children born out of wedlock, drug use. Why? They had money. Wealth can help overcome mistakes. Don’t believe me? The elitist left can hire the finest lawyers money can buy when they get caught. The poor who try to mimic their lifestyle? Public defenders . . .
[Not to demean public defenders, but let’s face it – a public defender has little chance against a Robert Shapiro type, blind justice be damned.]
But things have reversed when it comes to morality. Enough (but not all) of the leftist elites follow conservative principles (raising children within marriage, staying faithful, controlling finances, little or no illegal drug use) while at the same time supporting the removal of guardrails (social norms) that lets the hoi polloi live by Hollywood standards without judgment: children born out of wedlock, excessive drug use, promiscuity, etc.
Pretty much OT, but your image reminded me. When I was in the 9th grade I was given this in English class for charades. “The height of folly: an elephant hanging over a cliff with its tail tied to a daisy.”
I can actually visualize that picture. There’s a lot of truth to it.
Great Post Old Bathos.
Several commenters have commented to the effect that the Progressive Left is just misguided – they are not really purposely destroying the civil order and hurting millions in the process.
Bullcrap.
While it is true that millions of the minions of the Progressive Left are not intentionally hurting people- largely because they don’t know what is going on, because the Left’s narrative is seductively fashionable and because the Left’s minions simply don’t care enough to devote the time and energy to understand what’s really going on under the hood of all these problems, that cannot be said at all for the upper echelon of the Progressive really Marxist Left.
The minions of the Progressive Left have been played – big time. Almost all of the Left’s talking points and memes are designed to frame the narrative as if only the cruel meanies on the Right would do the patently obvious right thing to do and give in to a Universal Wage, Free Health Care, Free Housing for the Needy and Homeless, Free Education, Peace in our Time, No guns, and Open Borders the world be a Nirvana of Peace, Harmony and Goodness. All this claptrap has been framed to give the impression that one cannot be a good person and more importantly a fashionable person worth even talking to if you don’t believe wholeheartedly the narrative in it’s entirety. Unfortunately, these Progressive memes sound reasonable to those who don’t know better and don’t know the history of Socialism and Marxism.
That is why our Children have not been taught history and have been brainwashed and indoctrinated in this Progressive belief system for decades over many generations. That is no coincidence: from early Marxist Antonio Gramsci:
“In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”
The problem with the idea that the Progressive Left is just misguided not purposely evil, is that they have over 100 year track record of destruction, poverty, tyranny, oppression and murder where they have never took stock and tried to correct their course to something that works.
The ideas of the Progressive Left that destroy society are not new; they are straight out of Lenin’s playbook; some quotes from Comrade Lenin:
• “The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”
•” One of the basic conditions for the victory of socialism is the arming of the workers Communist and the disarming of the bourgeoisie the middle class.”
• “It is necessary – secretly and urgently to prepare the terror.”
Lenin’s aim was to crush the middle class and if they were not communist – the working class. Similarly, the aim of the Progressive now is to bring is to bring the middle class and the working class to their knees so they will feel they must be dependent on government.
Preach, brother! A righteous comment, that. Thanks.
My suspicion is that many of them secretly suffer from impostor syndrome. I can’t read minds, but how plausible does it seem to you that many in the “elite” feel that their status is somehow unearned and thus signal in the ways Old Bathos outlined above to blend in with their peers? The way they carry on is not the way a secure confident individual acts.
It would be worth funding the research to find out how much of a factor this is. I’m willing for your taxpayer dollars to be spent on it, anyway. (Seriously.)
I’d add:
And they either refuse to look at the carnage they cause, or they do and attribute the failure to “evil forces” standing in the way of their socialist Utopia.
Evil forces:
Christianity
Conservatism
Republicans
The US Constitution
Rush Limbaugh et al.
Fox News
Hillsdale College
The US military
Private charity
Non-government run schools
Heterosexuals
Anyone else remember the days when the Koch brothers were on that list?
Because the most privileged people throughout human history have almost always been meanspirited and narcissistic. It is just perpetuating a trend that has always existed. That is what aristocracy is all about. And make no mistake, despite the veneer of meritocracy, today’s elite are an aristocracy, with limited access to its membership.
There are only two ways to make yourself better than everyone else. You can become better than everyone else. You can make everyone else worse than you. Guess which one of these two is easier? Creation is hard; destruction is easy.
Rather than work hard to better yourself, it is a whole lot easier to tear everyone around you down until they are below you.
Yes, you might be worse off than if you left others alone, and got pulled up by the goods they produced. On the other hand, that means there are people who are better than you. Frankly there are a lot of people who would rather live in a run-down shotgun house if their neighbors all live in tarpaper shacks than live in a modern suburban 3-2-2, if that means they have neighbors living in mansions.
And if you are a person with that type of personality, and you already own a mansion? Think of the almost orgasmic joy it would give you to see everyone living in a modern suburban 3-2-2 being shoved into tarpaper shacks. Then you could distribute largess to them and have you kiss your hand in gratitude (or starve if they refuse to). Keeping most of the stuff for yourself, like some fantasy dragon guarding its hoard.
Yep. That’s why the left destroyed the Boy Scouts instead of creating their own “Woke Scouts” . . .
In the British Empire, it was expected that the privileged serve in the military or other public service and to maintain moral standards befitting an upper class. The Spartans, who treated helots with utmost cruelty and contempt still regarded their place as something that must be earned (even if opportunity to prove worth was expressly limited) not purely a matter of birth or SAT scores. What makes our elite so disappointing is that (a) we live in a democracy based presumptions of moral and legal equality so it is a threat to our core values when a meritocracy behaves like an unaccountable aristocracy and (b) no other upper class in history has as its core value utter contempt for their own nation, common people, traditions, mores and heritage.
And it is so disheartening to know this truth.