It seems to me, at least here in North America, that the snobbery and virtue-signalling has gotten worse in lockstep with the ascendency of women in the ranks of the managerial class. Women are, psychologically, much more "agreeable" (and therefore more likely to conform with groupthink) and higher in negative emotion. Orwell was aware of this. A quote from 1984: “He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.” (FYI, don't shoot me, I am a woman!)
I think we are going to have to re-examine the Big 4 psychological theory and come up with a much more aggressive word for what is now called 'agreeable'. Because a lot of it is not about *conforming* with the groupthink, but rather one of positioning yourself as a member of an ascending social group. If you can predict where the consensus is going to end up, and join in on that side, it doesn't mean that you are more 'agreeable' -- just more duplicitous, and prone to intrigue. When I was young, 'conniving women' was a problem that was talked and written about. Now, crickets. But women have not stopped conniving/intriguing. And they are tops at ostracising those in social groups they would like to see fail, or punishing those who are outside of group affiliations altogether.
This is why relationships between men are so much simpler. It is understood that there is always a latent threat of physical violence, although it seldom comes to fruition. But you know where you stand, what the fundamental situation is. Men, in my experience, are also quite willing to forgive, forget and move on after an interpersonal conflict. To be a man who gets along with other men, you merely have to be congenial, pretty forthright, and - best of all - demonstrate a sense of humor! I've also noticed that a handful of men can go out for a long dinner with plenty of after-meal conversation covering a range of topics, from sports, economics, history, and so on, and never once ask each other about their fellows' wives and kids! Men can have a perfectly fine time with each other without even discussing their home lives. On the other hand, women when they get together seem to be engaged in a constant "hen party."
The idea that women inherently would make better political leaders because they're more agreeable or less aggressive is ludricous. They'll still agree to impose on you and then get someone else to enforce it. Authoritarians come with d@#s and c#@ts.
When I was a kid, I used to hear my older female relatives assert that if only women "ran the world" everything would be harmonious and peaceful. All you need to know to blow that absurd claim sky high out of the water is the history of Jian Qing.
Ffs you only have to listen to your wife after a day at work to realize that women have a completely different way of interacting with their sex and in the most part are driven by personal insecurities.
That said, when women feel physically protected will present views that deviate from their social conflagration, and will at times encourage male violence when with their partner. After any physical altercation will then attempt to minimise their part, lol.
I've been there many a time and manipulated to fight with other men while my wee wife launches a barrage of emasculation at other men and demands my support, haha,. Obviously, I attempt to de-escalate but she almost entirely undermines the de-escalation process and demands my loyalty, therefore as a loyal husband I am left with the immediate proposition and time-limited situation to respond.
Ultimately other males as I KNOW WELL do not react like women when challenged physically, they will on most occasions not back down and then it is roll about full on fighting scenario. Haaha, for me not too much of a hassle as I love fighting and always have, although I enjoy it more if I have a good reason to engage, women mostly don't have a good reason only personal insecurities that are then projected onto their male partners.
"seems to me, at least here in North America, that the snobbery and virtue-signalling has gotten worse in lockstep with the ascendency of women in the ranks of the managerial class"
Managers are leaders. it wasn't a refutation of Pairodocs comment but simply my remark on the claim often about women as inherently better leaders . Are u a comment monitor?
As a man with two decades of experience working in a woman-dominated field (teaching, ca 80% of teachers here are women) I can just hold up a banner reading "Hear hear!".
Realising how to "get out in front" of the group consensus and letting the Matriarch think it was her own idea, what you had sneakily suggested, was the only way us men could get our opinions heard, or make them matter in the slightest.
(Small wonder feminist men are the way they are, eh?)
The only alternative was to let the women decide what reality was, and then let them fail since they never looked at reality, they just decided things and became angry when things (such as students) didn't behave as decided. And woe betide any woman, especially if younger than average, that spoke out.
Us men might bully one another at times, but it's up front, right out there. Not sniping and gossip and passive-agressiveness. There's an expression in my language: "frysa ut" (freeze out) that captures it perfectly: any woman going against the group is shut out in the cold. In effect, she is made pariah and is unpersoned.
Whereas when I've had a woman boss in a male-dominated field,, those have been the best bosses because everything they had achieved, every iota of authority, they had earned by being and doing better, not by acting like some spawn of Loke.
True, but I'm willing to forgive them. As the weaker gender, and with a lot more at stake in the mating game, conniving and manipulation are hard-wired in to the female brain. These traits, like them or not, have contributed to survival of the species.
There is definitely a lot of that going on, and I think the word may be better, but again that is too passive a word for what I am talking about. This isn't a matter of 'I lack the courage, gumption, to be willing to disagree with the minority opinion' -- though that does, indeed happen -- but rather 'I want to be on the winning side' and 'I will selfishly manipulate things, often behind the scenes, to make sure that the side I picked wins'. There is nothing particularly _agreeable_ about being one of the leaders of a mob, though many of the active bullies involved will always insist that 'I only did it to get along, and I was only fitting in'. See Nellie Bowles recent article in the Free Press. https://www.thefp.com/p/nellie-bowles-morning-after-the-revolution . The standard big 5 explanation is that Nellie Bowles was too _agreeable_ to oppose her peer group. But I think this, or _conformity_ misses a large part of what makes the mob the mob, and why people actively advance mob goals.
I think wanting to be on the winning side is just part of human nature, probably the nature of all sexually reproducing biological organisms advanced enough to have anything like such a concept, since being on it is presumably advantageous to survival. There are a lot of reasons why the mob becomes the mob, not only conformity and peer pressure, and those of course exist for reasons relating to our biological ancestry.
Reading American psychologist Gustave Mark Gilbert's "Nuremberg Diary" lately, which is a psychologist's record of interviews and locker room talk with Nazis at the Nuremberg trials and jail, Hermann Göring strikes me as an interesting case study of being a proud supporter of the mob, but the complete opposite of the personality type you're talking about. Not pointing him out as any kind of refutation really, he's an exceptional individual, but you would probably find the record of him in this book interesting.
Göring comes across as very low in agreeability, very high in extraversion, low in conscientiousness (one may assume otherwise due to his status, position, and ambition, but yet he was an irresponsible, opportunistic, obese drug addict), low in neuroticism, and probably moderately high to even very high openness (less sure on that last one). Not a term I use lightly due to its overuse and the general lack of deeper understanding of the term, but he's an obvious psychopath, and the way he acts is insane in a way no conventional history book or summary ever tells you about such people.
Yet, he joined the Nazi mob willingly and even explains why he did it: everyone was forming revolutionary parties, and he didn't want to be left behind without the opportunities from joining one. Really, he comes across as completely amoral and believing in nothing but power, saying whatever he can to his benefit however diminishing the benefit to him will be on trial to face the death penalty. He has the personality of a serial killer, with no obvious reason to conform to anything or join any mob for any reason but self-interest, and he may well have instead been one under different circumstances.
I would think one such person is more dangerous than a thousand or maybe even ten or a hundred thousand agreeable conformists, as much as I detest "group think," etc, the same way people here obviously do. But they're less visible, and there's a lot more sheep than solitary, predatory beasts like him. Women of course can have all the same traits as Göring, and female psychopaths are less obvious, more subtle and underhanded than the males tend to be. Worse than agreeable conformists is those who herd people like sheep into mobs to start with.
As a woman who has been observing women for 74 years now, I 100% agree. From my earliest years I always preferred working with men because women were just too difficult, too know-it-all, too bossy, too rigid in their opinions, too emotional, and very often revenge driven. Decades ago the women's movement would always be talking about how much better the world would be if women ran things, and even in the youth and naiveté of my early 20's I remember thinking NO! Not so! Women running too many things would be disaster. We are definitely seeing that now.
I've never met a woman who has said she prefers working with other women. Dozens have told me similar stories to your own. This is reinforced in my observations of workplaces. Women have a hard time getting along at work.
Careful your woman card may be revoked. Are you sure you're not trans?
Idk about woman being more snobby than men but as far as conformism and under-representation among rebels and reformists groups I don't think there's much doubt. It's a matter of fundamental interests not intelligence or virtue, but as this article discusses interests are no longer acceptable as an explanation for behavior. So it's a bit of a tricky position women find themselves in here.
Very true! Perhaps we should place the blame on the men who voted to give women the right to vote! It reminds me of Adam accepting a bite of the apple from you know who.
I agree on the whole with a view that women in the workplace and politics have added a negative dimension to behavior policing and social anxiety that hadn't existed before "patriarchy" lost purchase, but largely disagree that an idea of women's "agreeableness" has much of anything to do with it. On the contrary, I think women use both subtle and overt disagreeableness in a competitive manner to dominate their arena, often in ways that are hypocritical and damaging. Women are rarely team players unless power is at stake. I have not witnessed this so much in men.
Good point. I am referring to "agreeableness" in the technical psychological sense. Agreeable people can be quite passive aggressive and nasty, they just won't undermine you directly to your face. And they care more about social approval than, say, the truth-- which often makes them prone to groupthink and very destructive to society.
The difference in attitude by sex is something that should never be ignored and can it be consoled by logic and rationale when subjectivity rules over objectivity. The opposing argument is that subjectivity must be balanced by objective posturing and a compromise between both. However, is the compromise a realism or is it merely a compromise of convenience or pragmatism?
Fussell is superb; if you haven't yet, read his The Great War and Modern Memory.
I've read in a number of places that the word "snob" has origins that harmonize with your observations: that in the "Oxbridge" universities, the "untitled" students had "sine nobilitate" -- marked "s.nob" -- next to their name, indicating their status. And, the story goes, it was these very s.nob-categorized students who were more likely to "put on airs," and generally preen and pretense their way through the halls and chambers of those universities.
Not sure if it's historically true; but it does seem psychologically accurate.
Agree about the pyschologically accurate. In my experience, the biggest snobs are fragile, fearful people trying to protect their egos. They can be quite amusing sometimes, although they don't think so.
If you have not read it already, Modris Ekstein’s “The Rites of Spring” covers similar ground to Great War & Modern Memory and is also superb. A vivid portrait of cultural upheaval.
Both my English grandfathers were conscripted into the British Army 1914-18 to fight in the French trenches against the Germans. It was a bloodbath where one million young British, mainly working class men, were deliberately sacrificed by the officer class to die for King and country.
I’m not going to fight about this, but what you’re describing simply isn’t true. The British “officer class” died at enormous rates, significantly higher than that of enlisted men. They led from the front and paid for it. You need only go to Oxford or Cambridge and see the memorials for the classes of 1900-1914. Thousands of dead from the elite. The *sitting Prime Minister’s son*, Raymond Asquith, was killed at the Somme.
If you’re not British I suppose ignorance is an excuse. If you are British, shame on you.
I was thinking more of the English Generals than gung ho junior officers, who got shot in the back when the conscripts were given the order to charge German machine gun fire.
I think this explains in a funny way why so many of my Vermont neighbors refuse to buy a pickup truck, despite their clear need for one. I’ve seen old Volvos towing trailers of trash, mountain bikes strapped on top of Porsches and mulch, lumber, brush, furniture, soil, trees, and even live goats loaded into a Prius, but since trucks are for “those” kind of people, no trucks for them.
That's funny! I live in the N. California foothills and it seems like almost everyone has at least one truck! But it would be different in the snobby elites areas of San Francisco, L.A. etc. They wouldn't be caught dead even in a new $100,000 truck.
I live in Arkansas, and I moved here from Vermont, where I drove a pick-up truck, but I'm neither woke nor a real Vermonter. I only lived there for five years. Here in rural Arkansas, you see cars of all sorts because lots of people can't afford to express themselves via their choice of vehicle and have to drive what's available to them, but the people with money who commute to jobs everyday favor enormous trucks, the beds of which are never sullied with mulch, brush or live goats. These trucks tend to be black and are decked out with "trim packages" that cost as much as serviceable used car.
You know, it's so strange. I must've been a uniquely fortunate American. There is nothing of gentlefolk about me, and I discovered sadly, when I traveled, that a European HS education was pretty superior to anything Americans got in the average college (of which I only managed barely a year's worth of credits), but everywhere I went--even in France!--I kept making fast friendships with Germans and Dutch and English people, and even the occasional person who found my Americanness distressingly obstreperous (the Scots and the Irish, strangely), I never felt looked down on. I had places all over I was welcome to drop in on if I ever got that far (never made it to Germany but I corresponded with two German girls for a few years and their sofas were waiting for me, I swear). They were all middle-class, normal people, each distinctively of their own cultures but not repelled by mine. Such a lost world. I'm glad I got to know it, a little bit.
Regarding basic education, I was in Spain a couple of years ago and a tv news report was on the local province having it its annual standardized testing for school teachers. There were hundreds and hundreds of people jockeying for a chance to teach. There were shots of the competitors studying diligently in the hallways. In the US we can hardly fill teaching positions and it was common knowledge in university as to what subjects the least capable students were majoring in, typically education or business. (This predates the proliferation of all the “studies” majors). I couldn’t help but think that the quality of teachers in Spain must be pretty high, given the level of competition and the use of standardized tests to determine merit.
When I was in HS, a shockingly long time ago but still within the modern era (or at least I still think so), middle-class girls with zero career ambitions went into teaching because it was a safe civil service job with fabulous benefits and the summers off, and it gave professional cachet.
A pair of sisters who were my childhood friends (and still are, with some gaps here and there) became teachers; one stayed in the profession, and I met some of her colleagues at social get-togethers at her place and geez.
It turned out my friend, though, happened to be an excellent elementary grade teacher herself. She cared about their futures and she understood the need for discipline that one sticks to--that actions have consequences. She was sometimes under a lot of pressure from moms and the school administration to "let the kid go on the field trip" etc. etc. even though the kid had well-understood the consequences to come of actions. She resisted that pressure and always refused to cave.
There was one kid she had, she warned the mother that he was a nice kid but very easily led by others and that a lot of care and oversight needed to be given to him. His mother accused her of blah blah of course. Eventually the kid, a few years later, was indeed led into something that put him in prison for a long time.
My friend retired at the usual age and is glad to be well out of it. The people in it now--I've had plenty of experience of them too, and I swear before God that normal kids go in as kindergartners and they come out gangsters and nobody hates little black boys more than black lady teachers, and that's what we got.
An Education degree from a Western university (at very least those granted in the past two decades) is an anti-credential. It certifies the unsuitability of its holder for the work of educating the young.
If Spain has better secondary education teachers it is because they have permanent unemployment rates around 30% in the under 30 demographic. Is that a price worth paying? I think otherwise.
In Spain the high number of candidates for school and secondary school teachers is mainly because once they pass the testing (oposition), they have access to a civil servant job with conditions stratospherically superior to the private sector: way higher average pays, contract for life, less weekly working hours, more hollydays, strong unions due to being an un-fireable collective, etc.
Because of this, the number of aspirants is high, but the vocational ones are not that many.
Re: education - my experience as a teacher and a student is that american FE students were singularly knowledgable of US history, including colonial era, and equally ignorant of world history. Often, a US student was at a very high level in (1) subject, and at very basic levels in others. Say f.e. english literature: they could easily hold an equal conversation with a tutor or a professor, but would be stumped when the topic sedged into semantics and semiotics.
More point, less width, so to speak.
Standards have been dropping since the late 1990s though - that's when the Old Guard of teachers started retiring en masse - I was in the last year that got the old training (PhD eq. or better in any subject you are going to teach). Now, they teach from the same book the students use, and the only know what's in the books for each respective year - the teachers themselves don't have any in-depth knowledge of their subjects.
The reason for this (to be very brief) is de-professionalisation. A real teacher with real degrees and diplomas from an actual real university had a professional integrity, a code of conduct and did not obey or answer to jumped-up politruks and apparatchiks; in the 1990s, this was all changed so that teachers became a kind civil servant. A clerk, basically, tasked with teaching according to a centrally defined and mandated protocol.
Since then, average national IQ has dropped 5-7 points comparatively, and universities now encounter students who can't solce simple equations, nor can tey read the textbooks.
In the 16th century when the bible was translated to swedish, illiteracy was lower than today. We know this from records from back then; the priests were charged with ensuring everyone could read the scripture, and a priest failing to do so could censured.
I went to school in one of the best districts in NYC at a time when education was supposed to be of high standard (and I was in the accelerated middle school track), and if I sound like an educated knowledgeable person it's because I've been reading broadly to my tastes since I was able to walk to the neighborhood library on my own. I remember how disappointing the elementary school library was.
I see the self-destructing tendency of our Western liberalism this way: The same post-Enlightenment dynamism that spawned the inventor and entrepreneur also spawned a resentful leisured intelligentsia - one that wanted to see itself as more sophisticated than thou by unpicking our culture's moral compass. And these types made a b-line for the public-funded universities and the rest of our polity was foolish enough to let this up-itself, malcontent intelligentsia to entirely colonise them and sheep dip the rising generations of the professional/managerial elite with their bogus race and gender victimhood cults. The rest is history:
Snobbery is self regard on the cheap and seems a ubiquitous part of human character. Supercilious moral sanctimony requires no more of a person than the ability to lift ones nose, squint and make a banal, but critical comment. It is, however, so much easier than the hard work and honesty required to accomplish something tangibly laudable.
2020 featured two deeply appalling and scarring events: The grotesque, sudden tyranny that accompanied the virus hysteria crisis, and the way that the US' Democrat party positively invited roving packs of brutes to burn down our cities.
Somewhere inside me now will always reside a basic unease. I saw how awful my own neighbors became, and how quickly! Any guard rails that exist in American society are about as thin as cardboard.
Glad to hear I'm not the only one. I had a measured disrespect for humanity, but now it's immeasurable. What Covid taught me: the entire field of health policy is futile. There will never be a time in the future when human beings will improve the human condition through health policy. We're literally not capable of it and we will never come close, not if we survive another million years. Individual brilliant doctors will sometime find new ways to improve the human condition, but they will always have to overcome "health policy" people to do so; "health policy" people will never ease their way.
For me it's so much deeper than that. If I had to put words to it, Covid taught me that ordinary people are the great enemy of mankind. Not only are they natural slaves, but they will do everything they can to drag their betters down to their level.
The best "public health policy"? That each individual exercise, eat well, sleep enough, avoid unnecessary physical risks, and - most importantly! - maintain a healthy weight. And none of this costs the public fisc a cent.
As I began to emerge from the protective bubble of college in the very early 1990’s, I became aware of a certain narrative among the political elites (here in the US). This narrative was that huge swaths of the US populace are “stupid, xenophobic, homophobic, racist, Nazis”. In other words, this “deplorable” narrative has been around for quite some time. Now, it should have been easy to see that this was the standard divide and conquer technique employed by the elites to distract everyone from the fact that they were and are being fleeced by the political and corporate elite. However, this narrative has such a long history in the US as to be a part of the cultural background noise.
How long? Back to the start of this entity we know as the USA.
The British and other European monarchies saw the colonies in the New World as perfect places to unload their prisoners, radicals, and especially their poor. Anyone who was deemed a problem for the monarchies, for any reason, was to be dumped into the New World by force. A good book on this is “White Trash” by Nancy Isenberg. The colonies were often viewed as wasteland and emunctories to rid the body politic of the wretched, poor, and any other undesirable.
The snobbery and arrogance of this attitude is truly epic. The American elites in politics and academia may not be as charismatic as their European counterparts, but the Americans surely did learn well from their European forebears.
As someone who was born and raised in small towns in the Carolina’s, I have chafed under this snobbery and arrogance for decades. To the point where all I really ask from the people who lord over us is to at least come up with a new insult. However, given that our elites cannot even define what a woman is, I don’t think a new insult is in the offing.
You are quite correct to note that this cultural divide between American cultural elites located in big cities and universities goes back to the early history of the republic, It is not however rooted solely in the history of the American colonies as a dumping ground for the "off scourings," as Hofstadter once commented, of Europe's slums. Since independence, if not before, American elites have always suffered from a cultural inferiority complex. During the early national period, American writers, artists and others wanted to create a distinctively American culture equal to or even superior to that of Europe. They wanted European intellectuals to acknowledge the quality of American writing, arts and music, but they always feared that they couldn't measure up. Meanwhile, Europeans often held American arts to be little more than contemptible imitations. Hence the inferiority complex.
Meanwhile, elites sensed that European elites held them in contempt because American society was primarily populated by uncultured louts. In short, American cultural elites have typically looked down upon ordinary Americans because they were embarrassed by their countrymen, rather like adolescents are often embarrassed by their parents. Naturally this is centered in the universities.
This elite contempt for the "masses," became a signature characteristic of American urban progressives in the twentieth century as described admirably in Fred Siegel's, The Revolt Against the Masses. What we are seeing today is a further intensification of this cultural / religious division under the impact of modernization, secularization, and globalization which unites American and global elites in hostility to populist patriotism.
America's coastal elites certainly are and always have been clueless about what the rest of the country thinks. Hillary Clinton expressed it perfectly from their perspective: A basket of deploreables. I wish electricians, plumbers, car mechanics and the like would en masse suddenly refuse to service the elites and their needs. Oh that would be wonderful to behold.
One of the more annoying virtue signaling habits that presents itself in the U.S. is the yard sign. It is a simple corrugated plastic sign placed on a metal frame that has two wire legs that are sunk into the grass in one's yard. Yard signs have a long history in the U.S. during political campaigns, but are now used constantly to signal correct opinions on a variety of issues. This new use became ascendant in the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election, won by Donald Trump. The most laughable of these was the "Hate Has No Home Here" sign. The "4H" sign was a signal that you possessed a properly virulent level of hatred for Donald Trump and roughly 50% of your fellow countrymen.
The next version was the "Black Lives Matter" sign, which was a favorite of upper class suburban whites, eager to tell the World how non-racist they were. These signs were also employed by numerous businesses in riot-prone urban areas, in a fashion similar to the ancient Hebrews slathering lamb's blood over their doors in hopes that judgment would pass over them.
The most recent iteration is the "I Stand With Ukraine" sign, which is a corollary to the "4H" sign, since standing with Ukraine also demonstrates that you stand against Putin. Standing against Putin demonstrates your belief that it was Russian bots that handed Donald Trump the 2016 election. An optional accessory to the "I Stand With Ukraine" yard sign is the Ukraine flag, which many people still mistakenly fly upside down.
Yard signs are the ultimate cost-free way of broadcasting one's views to any passerby, 24-7, which is part of what makes them so annoying. Is there a similar phenomenon in Germany or elsewhere?
Finding snobs at the opera - touché, Eugyppius! You caught me listening to an old recording of Renée Fleming singing “O Mio Babbino Caro” while reading your barb. Although Puccini legitimately deserves a place in Olympus for his sublime music, I blame my late mother for my upper class pretensions, as she was a farm girl from North Dakota who fled to the big city, mesmerized by the lifestyle portrayed by “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. However, due to influence of Hollywood morality censorship of Truman Capote’s novella, I highly doubt she was aware that the Holly Golightly character played with such charm by Audrey Hepburn was, in fact, an escort.
I adore that song, but I've never been to an opera. I was studying Italian for fun when I was in grad school, and my Italian professor played a lot of wonderful opera for us and I became a fan....of some of it.
You should definitely go see any Italian opera by Puccini, Verdi, or Donizetti - or maybe something lighter and more fun like Offenbach (foreign language skills not prerequisite, as most theaters are equipped with surtitles in English). My only complaint with operas are their extended length: understandable as they were written during a period prior to the constant interruptions of our smart phones, so most of the leisure class back then had much longer attention spans.
"What precisely “vibrancy” might be is not always clear, but most often it seems to be a term for the noise and chaos that remind our upper-middles of their tasteful holidays to authentic destinations in the developing world".Had to chuckle here. Yet I am not sure prole drift, fake cultural show -off that it is, truly signifies genuine support for left politics (at least economic).
I’ve often noticed that vacuous Hollywood celebrities, college professors, scientists, virtue signaling leftists, and guilt ridden liberals, seem to put on their political opinions like young girls put on their outfits in the morning, only to shift them tomorrow when the styles change. But I never connected this with the status anxieties associated with the shifting fortunes of varying social classes—much less with the end of aristocracy and the rise of a highly mobile (both upward and downward) middle class.
"In the absence of aristocratic appeal, this most influential of social classes has entered a self-cannibalising downward spiral, and nobody can say where it will end."
What you've described is an end-stage variety of Girardian mimetic crisis. "Who can we imitate in order to be authentic?" This is ominous, for when the self-cannibalisation peaks there will be a new era of society wide scapegoating violence to restore order of some sort.
You can feel it in the air, which may explain the deranged "cancelations," the pro forma "celebration" of moral defectives and the shaming of their victims and of ordinary people, the censorship, the suspension of rights long taken as granted, and the general state-enforced and -perpetrated fang-baring confusion. People who say they want to be "on the right side of history" are desperate to be seated when the psychotic game of musical chairs stops and the scapegoats are chosen from among those standing. Only then will they be able to stop eating themselves and get relief by eating others.
It seems to me, at least here in North America, that the snobbery and virtue-signalling has gotten worse in lockstep with the ascendency of women in the ranks of the managerial class. Women are, psychologically, much more "agreeable" (and therefore more likely to conform with groupthink) and higher in negative emotion. Orwell was aware of this. A quote from 1984: “He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.” (FYI, don't shoot me, I am a woman!)
I think we are going to have to re-examine the Big 4 psychological theory and come up with a much more aggressive word for what is now called 'agreeable'. Because a lot of it is not about *conforming* with the groupthink, but rather one of positioning yourself as a member of an ascending social group. If you can predict where the consensus is going to end up, and join in on that side, it doesn't mean that you are more 'agreeable' -- just more duplicitous, and prone to intrigue. When I was young, 'conniving women' was a problem that was talked and written about. Now, crickets. But women have not stopped conniving/intriguing. And they are tops at ostracising those in social groups they would like to see fail, or punishing those who are outside of group affiliations altogether.
It's just sooooo much easier to punch someone.
Spoken like a true man! Good on ya, Ryan!
This is why relationships between men are so much simpler. It is understood that there is always a latent threat of physical violence, although it seldom comes to fruition. But you know where you stand, what the fundamental situation is. Men, in my experience, are also quite willing to forgive, forget and move on after an interpersonal conflict. To be a man who gets along with other men, you merely have to be congenial, pretty forthright, and - best of all - demonstrate a sense of humor! I've also noticed that a handful of men can go out for a long dinner with plenty of after-meal conversation covering a range of topics, from sports, economics, history, and so on, and never once ask each other about their fellows' wives and kids! Men can have a perfectly fine time with each other without even discussing their home lives. On the other hand, women when they get together seem to be engaged in a constant "hen party."
Exactly. Well said
The idea that women inherently would make better political leaders because they're more agreeable or less aggressive is ludricous. They'll still agree to impose on you and then get someone else to enforce it. Authoritarians come with d@#s and c#@ts.
When I was a kid, I used to hear my older female relatives assert that if only women "ran the world" everything would be harmonious and peaceful. All you need to know to blow that absurd claim sky high out of the water is the history of Jian Qing.
Ffs you only have to listen to your wife after a day at work to realize that women have a completely different way of interacting with their sex and in the most part are driven by personal insecurities.
That said, when women feel physically protected will present views that deviate from their social conflagration, and will at times encourage male violence when with their partner. After any physical altercation will then attempt to minimise their part, lol.
I've been there many a time and manipulated to fight with other men while my wee wife launches a barrage of emasculation at other men and demands my support, haha,. Obviously, I attempt to de-escalate but she almost entirely undermines the de-escalation process and demands my loyalty, therefore as a loyal husband I am left with the immediate proposition and time-limited situation to respond.
Ultimately other males as I KNOW WELL do not react like women when challenged physically, they will on most occasions not back down and then it is roll about full on fighting scenario. Haaha, for me not too much of a hassle as I love fighting and always have, although I enjoy it more if I have a good reason to engage, women mostly don't have a good reason only personal insecurities that are then projected onto their male partners.
I don't see any references to or claims about leadership in the comments higher up in this thread.
I was commenting on Pairodocs comment, not Eugypius's post per se.:)
I see nothing in Pairodocs' that can be interpreted as her claiming that "women inherently would make better political leaders."
"seems to me, at least here in North America, that the snobbery and virtue-signalling has gotten worse in lockstep with the ascendency of women in the ranks of the managerial class"
Managers are leaders. it wasn't a refutation of Pairodocs comment but simply my remark on the claim often about women as inherently better leaders . Are u a comment monitor?
As a man with two decades of experience working in a woman-dominated field (teaching, ca 80% of teachers here are women) I can just hold up a banner reading "Hear hear!".
Realising how to "get out in front" of the group consensus and letting the Matriarch think it was her own idea, what you had sneakily suggested, was the only way us men could get our opinions heard, or make them matter in the slightest.
(Small wonder feminist men are the way they are, eh?)
The only alternative was to let the women decide what reality was, and then let them fail since they never looked at reality, they just decided things and became angry when things (such as students) didn't behave as decided. And woe betide any woman, especially if younger than average, that spoke out.
Us men might bully one another at times, but it's up front, right out there. Not sniping and gossip and passive-agressiveness. There's an expression in my language: "frysa ut" (freeze out) that captures it perfectly: any woman going against the group is shut out in the cold. In effect, she is made pariah and is unpersoned.
Whereas when I've had a woman boss in a male-dominated field,, those have been the best bosses because everything they had achieved, every iota of authority, they had earned by being and doing better, not by acting like some spawn of Loke.
Women mentalize, men brutalize. Same thing, different weapons.
I am reminded of the ridiculous character Hyacinth Bucket ("It's pronounced Bouquet") from the old Britcom 'Keeping Up Appearances'.
True, but I'm willing to forgive them. As the weaker gender, and with a lot more at stake in the mating game, conniving and manipulation are hard-wired in to the female brain. These traits, like them or not, have contributed to survival of the species.
There is definitely a lot of that going on, and I think the word may be better, but again that is too passive a word for what I am talking about. This isn't a matter of 'I lack the courage, gumption, to be willing to disagree with the minority opinion' -- though that does, indeed happen -- but rather 'I want to be on the winning side' and 'I will selfishly manipulate things, often behind the scenes, to make sure that the side I picked wins'. There is nothing particularly _agreeable_ about being one of the leaders of a mob, though many of the active bullies involved will always insist that 'I only did it to get along, and I was only fitting in'. See Nellie Bowles recent article in the Free Press. https://www.thefp.com/p/nellie-bowles-morning-after-the-revolution . The standard big 5 explanation is that Nellie Bowles was too _agreeable_ to oppose her peer group. But I think this, or _conformity_ misses a large part of what makes the mob the mob, and why people actively advance mob goals.
maybe 'clique' is a better word than mob?
I think wanting to be on the winning side is just part of human nature, probably the nature of all sexually reproducing biological organisms advanced enough to have anything like such a concept, since being on it is presumably advantageous to survival. There are a lot of reasons why the mob becomes the mob, not only conformity and peer pressure, and those of course exist for reasons relating to our biological ancestry.
Reading American psychologist Gustave Mark Gilbert's "Nuremberg Diary" lately, which is a psychologist's record of interviews and locker room talk with Nazis at the Nuremberg trials and jail, Hermann Göring strikes me as an interesting case study of being a proud supporter of the mob, but the complete opposite of the personality type you're talking about. Not pointing him out as any kind of refutation really, he's an exceptional individual, but you would probably find the record of him in this book interesting.
Göring comes across as very low in agreeability, very high in extraversion, low in conscientiousness (one may assume otherwise due to his status, position, and ambition, but yet he was an irresponsible, opportunistic, obese drug addict), low in neuroticism, and probably moderately high to even very high openness (less sure on that last one). Not a term I use lightly due to its overuse and the general lack of deeper understanding of the term, but he's an obvious psychopath, and the way he acts is insane in a way no conventional history book or summary ever tells you about such people.
Yet, he joined the Nazi mob willingly and even explains why he did it: everyone was forming revolutionary parties, and he didn't want to be left behind without the opportunities from joining one. Really, he comes across as completely amoral and believing in nothing but power, saying whatever he can to his benefit however diminishing the benefit to him will be on trial to face the death penalty. He has the personality of a serial killer, with no obvious reason to conform to anything or join any mob for any reason but self-interest, and he may well have instead been one under different circumstances.
I would think one such person is more dangerous than a thousand or maybe even ten or a hundred thousand agreeable conformists, as much as I detest "group think," etc, the same way people here obviously do. But they're less visible, and there's a lot more sheep than solitary, predatory beasts like him. Women of course can have all the same traits as Göring, and female psychopaths are less obvious, more subtle and underhanded than the males tend to be. Worse than agreeable conformists is those who herd people like sheep into mobs to start with.
As a woman who has been observing women for 74 years now, I 100% agree. From my earliest years I always preferred working with men because women were just too difficult, too know-it-all, too bossy, too rigid in their opinions, too emotional, and very often revenge driven. Decades ago the women's movement would always be talking about how much better the world would be if women ran things, and even in the youth and naiveté of my early 20's I remember thinking NO! Not so! Women running too many things would be disaster. We are definitely seeing that now.
I've never met a woman who has said she prefers working with other women. Dozens have told me similar stories to your own. This is reinforced in my observations of workplaces. Women have a hard time getting along at work.
@Pairodocs Which subgroup is more prone to snobbery: young women or middle-aged Karen stereotype women?
Quite possibly both - along with certain types of self-obsessed males. Other genders are apparently available.
I'd call it "conformity policing by clique" and young women are the chief enforcers.
Heather MacDonald (also a woman) would seem to agree with your analysis. https://www.city-journal.org/article/hysterics-for-hamas
Careful your woman card may be revoked. Are you sure you're not trans?
Idk about woman being more snobby than men but as far as conformism and under-representation among rebels and reformists groups I don't think there's much doubt. It's a matter of fundamental interests not intelligence or virtue, but as this article discusses interests are no longer acceptable as an explanation for behavior. So it's a bit of a tricky position women find themselves in here.
My husband will be very upset if I turn out to be trans!
Very true! Perhaps we should place the blame on the men who voted to give women the right to vote! It reminds me of Adam accepting a bite of the apple from you know who.
I agree on the whole with a view that women in the workplace and politics have added a negative dimension to behavior policing and social anxiety that hadn't existed before "patriarchy" lost purchase, but largely disagree that an idea of women's "agreeableness" has much of anything to do with it. On the contrary, I think women use both subtle and overt disagreeableness in a competitive manner to dominate their arena, often in ways that are hypocritical and damaging. Women are rarely team players unless power is at stake. I have not witnessed this so much in men.
Good point. I am referring to "agreeableness" in the technical psychological sense. Agreeable people can be quite passive aggressive and nasty, they just won't undermine you directly to your face. And they care more about social approval than, say, the truth-- which often makes them prone to groupthink and very destructive to society.
The difference in attitude by sex is something that should never be ignored and can it be consoled by logic and rationale when subjectivity rules over objectivity. The opposing argument is that subjectivity must be balanced by objective posturing and a compromise between both. However, is the compromise a realism or is it merely a compromise of convenience or pragmatism?
Fussell is superb; if you haven't yet, read his The Great War and Modern Memory.
I've read in a number of places that the word "snob" has origins that harmonize with your observations: that in the "Oxbridge" universities, the "untitled" students had "sine nobilitate" -- marked "s.nob" -- next to their name, indicating their status. And, the story goes, it was these very s.nob-categorized students who were more likely to "put on airs," and generally preen and pretense their way through the halls and chambers of those universities.
Not sure if it's historically true; but it does seem psychologically accurate.
Fussell, yes. He's wicked good.
Agree about the pyschologically accurate. In my experience, the biggest snobs are fragile, fearful people trying to protect their egos. They can be quite amusing sometimes, although they don't think so.
If you have not read it already, Modris Ekstein’s “The Rites of Spring” covers similar ground to Great War & Modern Memory and is also superb. A vivid portrait of cultural upheaval.
Both my English grandfathers were conscripted into the British Army 1914-18 to fight in the French trenches against the Germans. It was a bloodbath where one million young British, mainly working class men, were deliberately sacrificed by the officer class to die for King and country.
I’m not going to fight about this, but what you’re describing simply isn’t true. The British “officer class” died at enormous rates, significantly higher than that of enlisted men. They led from the front and paid for it. You need only go to Oxford or Cambridge and see the memorials for the classes of 1900-1914. Thousands of dead from the elite. The *sitting Prime Minister’s son*, Raymond Asquith, was killed at the Somme.
If you’re not British I suppose ignorance is an excuse. If you are British, shame on you.
I was thinking more of the English Generals than gung ho junior officers, who got shot in the back when the conscripts were given the order to charge German machine gun fire.
I’m snob enough to point out that if that folk etymology were true, it would be “sine nobilitate” – ablative case, old chap.
Yup, you are indeed correct, wrote that without thinking. Thanks!
Here are two takes on that word: 1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/snob-word-history-origin 2. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=snob
I think this explains in a funny way why so many of my Vermont neighbors refuse to buy a pickup truck, despite their clear need for one. I’ve seen old Volvos towing trailers of trash, mountain bikes strapped on top of Porsches and mulch, lumber, brush, furniture, soil, trees, and even live goats loaded into a Prius, but since trucks are for “those” kind of people, no trucks for them.
That's funny! I live in the N. California foothills and it seems like almost everyone has at least one truck! But it would be different in the snobby elites areas of San Francisco, L.A. etc. They wouldn't be caught dead even in a new $100,000 truck.
I live in Arkansas, and I moved here from Vermont, where I drove a pick-up truck, but I'm neither woke nor a real Vermonter. I only lived there for five years. Here in rural Arkansas, you see cars of all sorts because lots of people can't afford to express themselves via their choice of vehicle and have to drive what's available to them, but the people with money who commute to jobs everyday favor enormous trucks, the beds of which are never sullied with mulch, brush or live goats. These trucks tend to be black and are decked out with "trim packages" that cost as much as serviceable used car.
You know, it's so strange. I must've been a uniquely fortunate American. There is nothing of gentlefolk about me, and I discovered sadly, when I traveled, that a European HS education was pretty superior to anything Americans got in the average college (of which I only managed barely a year's worth of credits), but everywhere I went--even in France!--I kept making fast friendships with Germans and Dutch and English people, and even the occasional person who found my Americanness distressingly obstreperous (the Scots and the Irish, strangely), I never felt looked down on. I had places all over I was welcome to drop in on if I ever got that far (never made it to Germany but I corresponded with two German girls for a few years and their sofas were waiting for me, I swear). They were all middle-class, normal people, each distinctively of their own cultures but not repelled by mine. Such a lost world. I'm glad I got to know it, a little bit.
Regarding basic education, I was in Spain a couple of years ago and a tv news report was on the local province having it its annual standardized testing for school teachers. There were hundreds and hundreds of people jockeying for a chance to teach. There were shots of the competitors studying diligently in the hallways. In the US we can hardly fill teaching positions and it was common knowledge in university as to what subjects the least capable students were majoring in, typically education or business. (This predates the proliferation of all the “studies” majors). I couldn’t help but think that the quality of teachers in Spain must be pretty high, given the level of competition and the use of standardized tests to determine merit.
When I was in HS, a shockingly long time ago but still within the modern era (or at least I still think so), middle-class girls with zero career ambitions went into teaching because it was a safe civil service job with fabulous benefits and the summers off, and it gave professional cachet.
A pair of sisters who were my childhood friends (and still are, with some gaps here and there) became teachers; one stayed in the profession, and I met some of her colleagues at social get-togethers at her place and geez.
It turned out my friend, though, happened to be an excellent elementary grade teacher herself. She cared about their futures and she understood the need for discipline that one sticks to--that actions have consequences. She was sometimes under a lot of pressure from moms and the school administration to "let the kid go on the field trip" etc. etc. even though the kid had well-understood the consequences to come of actions. She resisted that pressure and always refused to cave.
There was one kid she had, she warned the mother that he was a nice kid but very easily led by others and that a lot of care and oversight needed to be given to him. His mother accused her of blah blah of course. Eventually the kid, a few years later, was indeed led into something that put him in prison for a long time.
My friend retired at the usual age and is glad to be well out of it. The people in it now--I've had plenty of experience of them too, and I swear before God that normal kids go in as kindergartners and they come out gangsters and nobody hates little black boys more than black lady teachers, and that's what we got.
An Education degree from a Western university (at very least those granted in the past two decades) is an anti-credential. It certifies the unsuitability of its holder for the work of educating the young.
If Spain has better secondary education teachers it is because they have permanent unemployment rates around 30% in the under 30 demographic. Is that a price worth paying? I think otherwise.
In Spain the high number of candidates for school and secondary school teachers is mainly because once they pass the testing (oposition), they have access to a civil servant job with conditions stratospherically superior to the private sector: way higher average pays, contract for life, less weekly working hours, more hollydays, strong unions due to being an un-fireable collective, etc.
Because of this, the number of aspirants is high, but the vocational ones are not that many.
Re: education - my experience as a teacher and a student is that american FE students were singularly knowledgable of US history, including colonial era, and equally ignorant of world history. Often, a US student was at a very high level in (1) subject, and at very basic levels in others. Say f.e. english literature: they could easily hold an equal conversation with a tutor or a professor, but would be stumped when the topic sedged into semantics and semiotics.
More point, less width, so to speak.
Standards have been dropping since the late 1990s though - that's when the Old Guard of teachers started retiring en masse - I was in the last year that got the old training (PhD eq. or better in any subject you are going to teach). Now, they teach from the same book the students use, and the only know what's in the books for each respective year - the teachers themselves don't have any in-depth knowledge of their subjects.
The reason for this (to be very brief) is de-professionalisation. A real teacher with real degrees and diplomas from an actual real university had a professional integrity, a code of conduct and did not obey or answer to jumped-up politruks and apparatchiks; in the 1990s, this was all changed so that teachers became a kind civil servant. A clerk, basically, tasked with teaching according to a centrally defined and mandated protocol.
Since then, average national IQ has dropped 5-7 points comparatively, and universities now encounter students who can't solce simple equations, nor can tey read the textbooks.
In the 16th century when the bible was translated to swedish, illiteracy was lower than today. We know this from records from back then; the priests were charged with ensuring everyone could read the scripture, and a priest failing to do so could censured.
I went to school in one of the best districts in NYC at a time when education was supposed to be of high standard (and I was in the accelerated middle school track), and if I sound like an educated knowledgeable person it's because I've been reading broadly to my tastes since I was able to walk to the neighborhood library on my own. I remember how disappointing the elementary school library was.
I see the self-destructing tendency of our Western liberalism this way: The same post-Enlightenment dynamism that spawned the inventor and entrepreneur also spawned a resentful leisured intelligentsia - one that wanted to see itself as more sophisticated than thou by unpicking our culture's moral compass. And these types made a b-line for the public-funded universities and the rest of our polity was foolish enough to let this up-itself, malcontent intelligentsia to entirely colonise them and sheep dip the rising generations of the professional/managerial elite with their bogus race and gender victimhood cults. The rest is history:
Quite agree. Define them all. That would be a start.
Thank you, Eugyppius, for this terrific post.
Agree. Spectacular post.
The best part is that Eugyppius, is so amusing!
He keeps getting funnier.
That's why I like E, Bray, gato and SimComm.
They can go from dead serious to deadpan funny on a dime.
Snobbery is self regard on the cheap and seems a ubiquitous part of human character. Supercilious moral sanctimony requires no more of a person than the ability to lift ones nose, squint and make a banal, but critical comment. It is, however, so much easier than the hard work and honesty required to accomplish something tangibly laudable.
People really suck, don't they?
they are terrible.
One might even say, fallen.
This is one of the ways Covid changed me. It released in me a misanthropy I had not felt since adolescence.
Yup. Pretty sure I'm going to harbor that for the rest of my life.
Post Traumatic Disillusionment Syndrome.
Same here.
2020 featured two deeply appalling and scarring events: The grotesque, sudden tyranny that accompanied the virus hysteria crisis, and the way that the US' Democrat party positively invited roving packs of brutes to burn down our cities.
Somewhere inside me now will always reside a basic unease. I saw how awful my own neighbors became, and how quickly! Any guard rails that exist in American society are about as thin as cardboard.
Like x 1000! Very funny!
Glad to hear I'm not the only one. I had a measured disrespect for humanity, but now it's immeasurable. What Covid taught me: the entire field of health policy is futile. There will never be a time in the future when human beings will improve the human condition through health policy. We're literally not capable of it and we will never come close, not if we survive another million years. Individual brilliant doctors will sometime find new ways to improve the human condition, but they will always have to overcome "health policy" people to do so; "health policy" people will never ease their way.
For me it's so much deeper than that. If I had to put words to it, Covid taught me that ordinary people are the great enemy of mankind. Not only are they natural slaves, but they will do everything they can to drag their betters down to their level.
The mob.
The best "public health policy"? That each individual exercise, eat well, sleep enough, avoid unnecessary physical risks, and - most importantly! - maintain a healthy weight. And none of this costs the public fisc a cent.
Time for a Dennis Prager quote: "Humanity sucks, but there are a few good people."
I don't think Mr. Prager uses that kind of language, but the sentiment sounds right.
Eugyppius sounds more and more like Thorstein Veblen. (That's a compliment.)
Indeed.
Really excellent post 🎯
As I began to emerge from the protective bubble of college in the very early 1990’s, I became aware of a certain narrative among the political elites (here in the US). This narrative was that huge swaths of the US populace are “stupid, xenophobic, homophobic, racist, Nazis”. In other words, this “deplorable” narrative has been around for quite some time. Now, it should have been easy to see that this was the standard divide and conquer technique employed by the elites to distract everyone from the fact that they were and are being fleeced by the political and corporate elite. However, this narrative has such a long history in the US as to be a part of the cultural background noise.
How long? Back to the start of this entity we know as the USA.
The British and other European monarchies saw the colonies in the New World as perfect places to unload their prisoners, radicals, and especially their poor. Anyone who was deemed a problem for the monarchies, for any reason, was to be dumped into the New World by force. A good book on this is “White Trash” by Nancy Isenberg. The colonies were often viewed as wasteland and emunctories to rid the body politic of the wretched, poor, and any other undesirable.
The snobbery and arrogance of this attitude is truly epic. The American elites in politics and academia may not be as charismatic as their European counterparts, but the Americans surely did learn well from their European forebears.
As someone who was born and raised in small towns in the Carolina’s, I have chafed under this snobbery and arrogance for decades. To the point where all I really ask from the people who lord over us is to at least come up with a new insult. However, given that our elites cannot even define what a woman is, I don’t think a new insult is in the offing.
You are quite correct to note that this cultural divide between American cultural elites located in big cities and universities goes back to the early history of the republic, It is not however rooted solely in the history of the American colonies as a dumping ground for the "off scourings," as Hofstadter once commented, of Europe's slums. Since independence, if not before, American elites have always suffered from a cultural inferiority complex. During the early national period, American writers, artists and others wanted to create a distinctively American culture equal to or even superior to that of Europe. They wanted European intellectuals to acknowledge the quality of American writing, arts and music, but they always feared that they couldn't measure up. Meanwhile, Europeans often held American arts to be little more than contemptible imitations. Hence the inferiority complex.
Meanwhile, elites sensed that European elites held them in contempt because American society was primarily populated by uncultured louts. In short, American cultural elites have typically looked down upon ordinary Americans because they were embarrassed by their countrymen, rather like adolescents are often embarrassed by their parents. Naturally this is centered in the universities.
This elite contempt for the "masses," became a signature characteristic of American urban progressives in the twentieth century as described admirably in Fred Siegel's, The Revolt Against the Masses. What we are seeing today is a further intensification of this cultural / religious division under the impact of modernization, secularization, and globalization which unites American and global elites in hostility to populist patriotism.
America's coastal elites certainly are and always have been clueless about what the rest of the country thinks. Hillary Clinton expressed it perfectly from their perspective: A basket of deploreables. I wish electricians, plumbers, car mechanics and the like would en masse suddenly refuse to service the elites and their needs. Oh that would be wonderful to behold.
One of the more annoying virtue signaling habits that presents itself in the U.S. is the yard sign. It is a simple corrugated plastic sign placed on a metal frame that has two wire legs that are sunk into the grass in one's yard. Yard signs have a long history in the U.S. during political campaigns, but are now used constantly to signal correct opinions on a variety of issues. This new use became ascendant in the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election, won by Donald Trump. The most laughable of these was the "Hate Has No Home Here" sign. The "4H" sign was a signal that you possessed a properly virulent level of hatred for Donald Trump and roughly 50% of your fellow countrymen.
The next version was the "Black Lives Matter" sign, which was a favorite of upper class suburban whites, eager to tell the World how non-racist they were. These signs were also employed by numerous businesses in riot-prone urban areas, in a fashion similar to the ancient Hebrews slathering lamb's blood over their doors in hopes that judgment would pass over them.
The most recent iteration is the "I Stand With Ukraine" sign, which is a corollary to the "4H" sign, since standing with Ukraine also demonstrates that you stand against Putin. Standing against Putin demonstrates your belief that it was Russian bots that handed Donald Trump the 2016 election. An optional accessory to the "I Stand With Ukraine" yard sign is the Ukraine flag, which many people still mistakenly fly upside down.
Yard signs are the ultimate cost-free way of broadcasting one's views to any passerby, 24-7, which is part of what makes them so annoying. Is there a similar phenomenon in Germany or elsewhere?
These people will always fall for "the current thing." They just can't help themselves. They are so virtuous.
in an affluent SoCal city, I saw a gay personal ad with "Black Lives Matter....for god's sakes!", evidently used as somewhat of a scolding filter.
Also flags:
Rainbow flag, trans flag, Ukraine flag - good, virtue signal
US flag - bad, prole signal
Finding snobs at the opera - touché, Eugyppius! You caught me listening to an old recording of Renée Fleming singing “O Mio Babbino Caro” while reading your barb. Although Puccini legitimately deserves a place in Olympus for his sublime music, I blame my late mother for my upper class pretensions, as she was a farm girl from North Dakota who fled to the big city, mesmerized by the lifestyle portrayed by “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. However, due to influence of Hollywood morality censorship of Truman Capote’s novella, I highly doubt she was aware that the Holly Golightly character played with such charm by Audrey Hepburn was, in fact, an escort.
I adore that song, but I've never been to an opera. I was studying Italian for fun when I was in grad school, and my Italian professor played a lot of wonderful opera for us and I became a fan....of some of it.
You should definitely go see any Italian opera by Puccini, Verdi, or Donizetti - or maybe something lighter and more fun like Offenbach (foreign language skills not prerequisite, as most theaters are equipped with surtitles in English). My only complaint with operas are their extended length: understandable as they were written during a period prior to the constant interruptions of our smart phones, so most of the leisure class back then had much longer attention spans.
"What precisely “vibrancy” might be is not always clear, but most often it seems to be a term for the noise and chaos that remind our upper-middles of their tasteful holidays to authentic destinations in the developing world".Had to chuckle here. Yet I am not sure prole drift, fake cultural show -off that it is, truly signifies genuine support for left politics (at least economic).
I’ve often noticed that vacuous Hollywood celebrities, college professors, scientists, virtue signaling leftists, and guilt ridden liberals, seem to put on their political opinions like young girls put on their outfits in the morning, only to shift them tomorrow when the styles change. But I never connected this with the status anxieties associated with the shifting fortunes of varying social classes—much less with the end of aristocracy and the rise of a highly mobile (both upward and downward) middle class.
Thanks for the insight!!
"In the absence of aristocratic appeal, this most influential of social classes has entered a self-cannibalising downward spiral, and nobody can say where it will end."
What you've described is an end-stage variety of Girardian mimetic crisis. "Who can we imitate in order to be authentic?" This is ominous, for when the self-cannibalisation peaks there will be a new era of society wide scapegoating violence to restore order of some sort.
You can feel it in the air, which may explain the deranged "cancelations," the pro forma "celebration" of moral defectives and the shaming of their victims and of ordinary people, the censorship, the suspension of rights long taken as granted, and the general state-enforced and -perpetrated fang-baring confusion. People who say they want to be "on the right side of history" are desperate to be seated when the psychotic game of musical chairs stops and the scapegoats are chosen from among those standing. Only then will they be able to stop eating themselves and get relief by eating others.