I do often wish that the US had a more overt ruling class. The fiction that there is some kind of Democracy is very draining. Not only do I NOT know who is actually running things around here, but I’m told that the problems we face are because We Voted For Them. Blaming the victim. Nobody I know “voted” for any of this. And no matter who we vote for, nothing changes.
And there we have the great advantage of a more formal aristocratic system: we know who's in charge. So long as they perform their functions adequately, they can stay in charge; should they get a bit too useless, they get a rope party. Aristocrats have always understood this basic truth: that their privileged position is in large part a polite fiction that everyone agrees to abide by on the understanding that they meet their responsibilities to the degree that they enjoy the perks of their station.
From the point of view of a managerial oligarchy, the great strength of liberalism is precisely the camouflage it provides. The ruling class can blend in with the bureaucracies, diffuse responsibility between them until the buck does not obviously stop anywhere, and wash their hands of their decisions by claiming to have simply been following policy, or the science, or whatever.
Absolutely right. We don't even know who to invite to the rope parties, which is the whole point. Obviously Biden, Trudeau, Macron and Jacinda are not the ones "in charge" -- they're far too stupid, and obviously so. And so those of us who have caught on to the charade argue amongst ourselves who's running the show. I work in a govt bureaucracy and nobody seems to be in charge of anything, at any level. I was given two sets of equipment, and then got a lecture when I gave one back. I was handed a combination lock, the combination of which is posted on a public spreadsheet "in case I forget it." Emails go "up the chain" and they might as well be in helium balloons because you never get an email back down with an answer. I've been trying to find out for two weeks if I can work after 6 pm. Nobody knows. How is this even possible???
The CFR is not the seed, but a leaf. council on foreign relations. they have staffed the whitehouse for 50 years on both democrat and republican positions for many secty o state, defence, treasurey etc. They are a starting place and all their globalist likeminded ilk. the un, the families, rockefeller, chase, bank of england, britain, germany etc. globalist cabal. they obviously despise the commoners by their constantly drumming up hatred. 2 cups hatred, stir, bake and explode. let them eat cake. more inflation. let them eat cake, more inflation, let them eat cake. i say prepare the guillotines
yes. It was naive of us (especially Americans?) to think the aristocracy would just go away to hide in shame once we "invented" Democracy. They regrouped and control us more than ever....
I find that, for things like the 6 pm problem, the thing to do is what you want to do. Whoever should make the decision will soon let you know then if they don't agree.
I once asked if I needed to attend what had become a tedious weekly meeting. Answer came there none, so I skipped it. As soon as the meeting finished, I had my answer in the form of a blustering general manager. Problem sorted (I was indisposed' for as many of the following meetings as I could manage).
Very true. This is similar to the reason that the English brought Charles II back after the English Civil War. The rights, responsibilities, and limitations of the monarchy were traditionally established and well understood. Under Cromwell however, the country was ruled by an unaccountable cult of personality. As Lord Protector, Cromwell and his followers operated under few limits.
We've all voted for people who promised to advocate and fight for something important to voters and, once in office, did the opposite. Obama and health care are a glaring example.
That's not even the worst of it, though, It's what they do that wasn't even talked about during campaign season, things that didn't appear on anyone's policy platform. Did anyone vote for lockdowns or vaxx mandates? Nope.
Don’t forget the checks and balances that the Legislative Branch is supposed to provide. Remember, we (the citizens) continue to vote the do nothings in for DECADES . Never being held to account by the uninformed voter.
I got the full measure of Obama when he popped by to tell the UK to stay in the EU, otherwise he'd be annoyed and we'd be 'at the back of the queue' (his word!) when the trade deals were handed out.
Ohh--I missed that. I was rooting (from US) for Brexit and so relieved when it happened. But didn't the rulers drag out its 'implementation' for as long as possible?
Only 6 years or so. I seem to remember that joining up took a lot less time, but then, we were going to be stumping up cash, rather than withholding it.
Car insurance seems to work pretty well. But we can buy car insurance from any state. Why is health insurance limited to your state of residence? Not to mention the cost incurred by litigation.
Not something I have delved into, but suspect that the 'existential' difference between cars and bodies (you can get a replacement car, not so with body) may be involved. Murky waters in the health insurance business I do believe.
Didn’t Trump end various wars, and try to give up the US role as the global policeman? The deep state and its puppet Congress, of course, had other ideas.
it is very frustrating after what we have seen in the last 2+ years to read people who are still parroting the establishment party line —from either party—without recognizing that we have a uniparty running this country. there is no striking fundamental difference in the two parties anymore only rhetorical ones
Yes. I believe every minute spent on divisiveness is a minute wasted, that could have been better spent on problem-solving and working together. The powers that be have intentionally created and perpetuated this divisiveness. They’re laughing at us!
It's the same problem in Canada. All power is now concentrated in the secretive PMO so we never know who really is calling the shots. Right now, the WEF is a popular target for example. But always ask 'cui bono?' and follow the damn money. Like we're seeing with the vaccines. Once this crop of douchebags like Walensky and Marks are done serving their paymasters, watch how they end up sitting on pharma boards.
It's the same problem in every Western country. The locus of power is shifted out of view.
In the case of Canada, I rather doubt the PMO is really calling the shots. It's more like a power behind the PMO. The system is doubly secretive in that respect.
Have been watching Justin Castro since late Jan.--he really appears on the low-intelligence side. You'd think his father would have bestowed brains on the lovechild. But a weak-minded pretty boy is the best puppet for....Klaus?
concentrate on local/state they're the ones that matter most. It's all the bloated gov bureaucrats that run our country with the backing of big money controllers.
I’m working on the same thought. Check out Circulation of the Elites substack as it opens up interesting possibilities on who is actually running things (at least in the US). Add Eugyppius insight to the equation and I think I’m getting closer to 20/20 vision.
However, seeing more clearly still leaves me wanting to know how do we get out of this mess?
I have spent so much time in prayer in the last 2 years---that's a silver lining to this cloud. I feel just kind of light (gravitationally speaking) from happy complete reliance on Him.
the CFR has staffed MUCH of the upper positions in the white house, including secty o state, secty of treasry, secty of defense. the council on foreign relations is not the seed but a leaf, it is clear their interests are only of a global nature and not of the people of this country. you would enjoy the first half (forget the alternate currency discussion - as it's irrelevant) the ruling class postion currnetly ' let them eat cake' will not allow any alternate to compete. however, the first half is so extremely fantastic. https://youtu.be/mC43pZkpTec
I find these essays creatively unique, a bit of actual original thinking, and far from the usual hackneyed bullet points that are chronically vomited up by the usual suspects in the 'divide'. Always something worth thinking about in your work. Thanks for that.
Avoid bias toward sophistication. It seems right now, the simplest and least-nuanced views are fundamentally correct. All of the "sophisticated takes" just serve to obfuscate this.
It's absolutely serious. "Sophisticated takes" serve to delude, more often than not.
Reality is simple. They are trying to kill us - or first enslave us, then kill us. That's it.
All "highly sophisticated takes," by highly educated people, which deny that this is happening, are a form of self-hypnosis to avoid seeing what is obvious, just dark.
If you see a stranger in your living room, and he's carrying out your TV, the most straightforward explanation is correct. You're being robbed. If you deny what's obvious, and wax philosophically about how your eyes deceive you, and try to find sophisticated alternate explanations, it's because you can't accept a world which contains robbers.
Once you accept that you are being robbed, you can be sophisticated in your analysis. But the obvious must be acknowledged, otherwise the sophistication is self-deceit.
To be fair, Eugyppius confirms they're "rapacious and hostile" in the current context. So, robbing, enslaving and killing are not excluded from those categories. I doubt most here would disagree that that is what is actually happening. Much of what I've seen of Eugyppius' analyses and online twitter-rants seems to confirm just that (correct me if I'm wrong!). The million-dollar question, of course, is that of motive and intent. Greed is motive in itself. The "elites" of our time are, simply, greedy - and seem to have no compunction in curbing their appetite. They are compelled to exploit humanity's current misery for personal gain. It is an all-consuming hunger. Enslaving and killing? They wouldn't think so, of course. I doubt many have the self-reflective capacities to recognise it as such. More likely, it's an overweening desire for control. A secret "relief" if there is a bit of a "cull" of the great unwashed. A secret "satisfaction" if people's movements and contagions can be curtailed at the flick of a digital switch. Because a rampant proletariat, unfettered and uncontrolled, is a direct threat to the uncluttered and pristine paradise that they feel is their due. They don't really think or say it out aloud, but it resonates in their very bones. The other million-dollar question, of course, is if there are truly evil masterminds. Or if it's just a clusterfuck of clusterfucktards who are so unbelievably arrogant or stupid that they think they are doing the right thing, and won't back down no matter how bad things get. I think it's a bit of both. The main evil being in the deflections and coverups and suppressions. Still don't know what to make of Gates and that Swab creature.
I didn't have any major problems with the previous framing, but this is much clearer.
I agree wholeheartedly with your description of the malignancy of elites. When the notion of elite status was more clearly delineated, and societies didn't pretend hierarchy didn't exist, the liberal tradition brought us the concept of noblesse oblige- this was reinforced by the moral underpinnings of largely Christian tradition- and thus elites, again as you stated sharing ethnic and cultural identities with their social subordinates, had at least some cultural training that caused them to (at least more often) see their subjects as being of kind and that their own great privilege and advantage obliged them spiritually to use at least some of that power to better their society.
When you pretend elites don't exist, so too goes any moral prescription that goes with being elite.
Yes. But that underscores the importance of the shared christian beliefs. We are witnessing what happens to a society that forgets God. Same thing happened under Lenin. Same thing happened under Mao. Many, many more. If the elite have no one that they have to answer to, then they have no reason to be gracious. Their greed and hedonism can rule them completely. As this quote says:
"More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
Thank you for corroborating the belief I have had for 5? 10? years. Those in power have dismissed God, but they are left with a God-shaped space in the soul, when must be filled. What to fill it with? Why my myself and I!
Why the term "elites", though. In what are they elite? Intellect, ethics, culture? Maybe not. They seem mostly to be good at large scale manipulating a society to get what they want, completely lacking common human inhibitions there. I'm not sure I'd like to call that "elite". My preferred term is the "parasite class". (but not like Marx would made his adepts consider anyone who has more of anything than themselves as that. I mean people for who it is _the_ game they play. E.g. George Soros did not produce any value, he's been a huge net drain on the world, destruction for own gain.)
My understanding is that, when social scientists use the term "elite," they mean the 1-2% of the population that has an outsized influence on society. That 1-2% can be parasitical or not. It depends on time and place.
I would agree. The only thing that I think is truly unusual about today's elite is their power is borderless and not necessarily dependent on high relative wealth.
Trans-national or at least multi-national elites were widespread in various empires of the past. If we treat the West as an Empire - then nothing new under the sun.
> not necessarily dependent on high relative wealth
Their personal wealth might be relatively small, but the resources they control is what matters
Well, I do not see anything wrong with dictatorship per se. Another word for dictatorship is "monarchy".
What you probably mean is global totalitarianism and tyranny. I do not think the present elites are competent enough to achieve that. My fear is that it's going to be much worse than that - as in the world sliding into a dark age. All modern technology - including societal technologies - gone.
We have- relatively briefly- occupied an unprecedented period in history where "power" and "wealth" are not NECESSARILY conflated.
I think the definition of "elite" needs to be value-neutral to have any consistent meaning.
I would say "elite," if it is to hold its meaning across history into the present day, need to mean "the ability to wield social power largely unchecked from below by normal social channels."
This would place Soros and many ultra-rich, like Gates, who wield vast social power without the approval, permission, or appointment by the democratic societies they operate in.
By this measure, importantly, the President of the United States is not intrinsically, however impermanently so, a member of the elite.
There are different types of elites and variations in elite systems. Hereditary rulers, hereditary wealth, even political dynasties on the one hand. And acquired eliteness on the other - or at least eliteness that is achieved in free and open competition and through hard work. An exceptional footballer from an African slum or Brazilian favela can be projected to worldwide fame and incredible wealth very quickly. Some of them even turn out to be able to turn their talent to other things once the sports career is over. Hereditary systems seem to work better when there is some discretion in how power is passed on - compare the Arab monarchies to the hollowed-out male primogeniture European monarchies.
I'm not advocating Arab monarchy as a form of rule, merely observing it's been quite effective at holding on to power for those in power. That's obviously not our goal as a society, but it is a winning formula in the evolutionary arms race. North Korea is the same, even if the Kim gene pool seems to have run out of steam.
And yes, we are cursed by the likes of Gates elites, but there is also a Musk elite. And they tend to go away. A feature of this money elite is that it doesn't last long. You don't know anything about Bill Gates' children. You don't know what the descendants of the 1850s American money elites are doing.
<i>Hereditary systems seem to work better when there is some discretion in how power is passed on - compare the Arab monarchies to the hollowed-out male primogeniture European monarchies.</i>
I don't know about that -- giving the monarch discretion over whom to choose as a successor often leads to intrigues over who gets to be chosen, and can cause a full-blown succession crisis if the monarch doesn't nominate a successor before his death.
Before ever entering the political and power realm, my idea of "elite" was along the lines of "elite university" where the best of the best would be.
While the kids of those social "elites" tend to be at expensive places of education, they're not necessarily the most brilliant (with Gates dropping out, or G.W. Bush being not particularly successful either, IIRC)
But one thing that EVERY graduate of an "elite" school like Harvard has when they're done, whether they got a 4.0 or dropped out, is membership in and access to a network of undemocratic soft power.
Which is why I insist elite has nothing to do with strength or weakness of performance, or even high relative wealth. It's the ability to control others against their will, or to ignore social consequences.
Then I guess there is a divide between a sociological/historical vs. a loose colloquial definition of the word. I say that because, colloquially, "elite" seems to have a positive connotation, outside of certain niche circles. In which case using that label may be perceived as flattering.
There's nothing wrong in avoiding that word for those people either way. I'll continue to refer to them as the toxic parasite class they are - in case of the people who fall under that label today.
My only point is that if we describe them as a class, and assume we're talking about roughly the same class of people throughout history, today included, it's about what they can DO rather than what they ARE or how we feel about them.
Some elites have used their power to create incredible public good at scale. Many have wrought oppression and misery in the process of self-enrichment.
But a dude sitting in a $500M house with a gold-plated helicopter on the front lawn isn't an elite until he throws some of that cheddar at a local election to get that thing he wants.
Do please bear in mind the concept of the bell curve--when only the top 5% of high school graduates can enter these schools, their straight-A high school record can experience a mild shock. You choose such a school not to be the small pond's big fish, but the opposite. Speaking from personal experience--from when those schools really were elite and the education offered was worth its price.
I despise the term “elite” as well, all men being created equal. Even though I have no problem acknowledging the societal structure that puts some people above others, to actually call the top tier “elite” is to vocally defy the foundational principles of liberalism, and the founding declaration and enumeration of who we are as a people. (I speak of the USA.) In studying the Declaration and Constitution, one is left with understanding that our leaders, far from being an elite club, were designated to be servants, receiving their just powers by the consent of the governed.
Maybe a better term is needed, as they cannot be determined by any measurable standard. From my observation, elites are everywhere, usually at least one or more in every family. They exist across every race and culture. Perhaps they can be viewed as God's surrogates on earth, guaranteeing a minimum level of functionality in His physical absence. Elites tend to have an innate sense of honor. They enjoying being in charge. It's a blessing and a curse. One such attribute is a self-sufficient spirit, thus spiritually is their Achilles heal.
There are the regular everyday elites, and then there is the club of Davos Bankster Psychopaths who control the regular everyday elites, more or less. Guys like Musk can carve their own path, until they start stepping on the toes of the Bankster gang and then as you are seeing now, he's getting a backlash. These creeps at the very top will assassinate those including Musk or even a President of the US who are too much of an obstruction to their NWO or World Totalitarian Fascist State goal.
You make an excellent point, but there's a caveat to that- giving people a clear target can also be a built-in misdirect for the PTB. As an example, I'm out for a hell of a lot more blood from government officials and globalist quasi- agencies than most millionaires, who I could generally care less about.
The DNC has been doing yeoman's work in stoking "eat the rich" bullshit when they know perfectly well they're the ones we should be furious at.
> the liberal tradition brought us the concept of noblesse oblige
Related: "aristocracy" literally means "rule of the best". If the best are truly the best - i.e. in terms of various human virtues - what kind of rule can be better than that?
It's in their very nature to do so. They appeal to the lowest common denominator--the passions. There is nothing wrong with an elite dedicated to the high, the noble, the transcendent, the great in man and to forcing the rest of us to look up to and take our bearings by that. That is true aristocracy, not oligarchy or plutocracy. The problem is, that is not self-sustaining. The effectual truth of every regime, ultimately, is oligarchy.
I'm not referring to them as an aristocracy. I am referring to an elite that takes its bearings by the true, the good, and the beautiful--or at least tries to earnestly--as an aristocracy. Entertainment and media oligarchs are disgusting pilferers and scam artists, purveyors of smut and debasing shite. As dependent as we may all (myself included) be on them, we can still recognize that they are, essentially, garbage.
Liberal - let me think about your position statements and consider their ramifications to me and society at large.
Progressive - EVERYTHING before today was wrong, and I will give you what is right, tomorrow, if you're worthy.
Leftism - FUCK YOU ALL, I AM THE ONLY ANSWER, I AM THE ONLY CONCERN, I AM ALWAYS BETTER THAN YOU!!!!!!
Conservative (one if the categories not discussed) - Change for the sake of change is dangerous. The old ways have worked well for the most part, meritocracy rewards effort, and social connections are sometimes a reward of extra effort to gain power, but show me your reasoning for change and we will consider it.
Your final point that elites, in conjunction with the low-ranking members of their alliance, “aim is to appropriate the cultural and political capital that these middle ranks accumulated in the course of the Industrial Revolution and the first half of the twentieth century,” is so spot on. A work in progress over the past 60 years accelerated in the past fifteen. Our assets are being sucked from us more boldly than ever before, and we’re being re-labeled as racist bottom feeders who don’t deserve our place in society, let alone the ill-gotten fruits of our labors.
"... aim is to appropriate the cultural and political capital that these middle ranks accumulated in the course of the Industrial Revolution and the first half of the twentieth century ..." and once they do so, they destroy the initiative, knowledge and labor that produced and sustains the very world they live in.
A most lucid anatomisation. The British historian David Starkey (among others) has also suggested that "social values", like societies themselves, are always a product of time and place, a distinction which implies that ethnicity is fundamental. The major problems arise when people, notably the French Jacobins and their Leftist heirs, insist that their "values" - a worldwide society of (absolute) equals - or 'liberal equalitarianism' - are not only unimpeachably good, but universally applicable to all of humanity simultaneously.
This always leads to two predictable outcomes: when released from the dream-space between the ears of its architects, the idea that the slowly-evolved history and human differentiation of different peoples in different places are gigantic mistakes and must be substituted with a standardised system (Year Zero), the universalist project collides with two obstacles that expose the utter fallacy of its presuppositions.
Firstly, a proportion of the people subject to it fail to become the peacefully co-existing Noble Savages dreamt up by Rousseau, betraying stubborn ties to the order that is being toppled. As the ideas are secular models of perfection, they are above questioning, and therefore "resistors" (like "anti-vaxxers", perhaps) must be either evil or mad - a dehumanising conclusion that leads to escalating coerciveness and ultimately to murderousness.
Secondly, every step towards the new standardised Utopia results in it retreating further from actualisation, an intractable elusiveness that generates paranoia (the failures must be caused by bad actors), continually redoubled efforts, and the public persecution of the Saboteurs of New Eden.
Gulags, labour camps, torture and brutal social abjection, up to and including execution, await these unfortunates.
Just a thought about forced universalism that your excellent little essay evoked
I mostly agree, although I'd include the US along with the Jacobins. Granted the US' universalist values are less extreme than those espoused by the French Revolution (I don't think any US President has tried to introduce a ten-day week because multiples of ten are more "rational" than multiples of seven), but the continual efforts to export US social and political customs are there, as are the disastrous consequences (cf. Wilson, Iraq, Afghanistan).
A sound point, Mr.X; I think our contemporary neocon and neolib Jacobins have a lot to answer for in trying to universalise what was in essence the the birth of a new nation by predominantly English people who enshrined ancient English Common Law in their new Constitution.
Customs and traditions of true longevity tend, it seems to me, to have their roots in time and place and ethnicity, and as such do not to export at all well. The debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan testify tragically to that fact, sadly, as indeed do the calamitously irreversible experiments in accelerated, mass-immigration-fed multiculturalism in the West.
It's so sad that we only seem to understand and appreciate the value of tried and tested institutions and customs after they have been effectively destroyed.
TBH I think the rot set in when the Founding Fathers replaced the Rights of Englishmen with a purportedly universal and self-evident right to rebellion as the justification for their new country. If the Declaration of Independence had read something like "It is a well-established right of Englishmen to renounce their allegiance to their sovereign, if he is doing a bad job, as witness the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. The current sovereign is doing a bad job for X, Y, and Z reasons, and we are accordingly imitating our ancestors' example and setting up a replacement government," later generations of Americans might not have been so quick to assume that the rest of the world wants/should want to be a clone of America, or that American institutions can and should be transplanted into radically different contexts.
My particular situation forces me, at least for the time being, to live in a woke libtard enclave in a big blue city surrounded by the noisy nihilistic turmoil of black ghettos. It is hellish. It is demoralizing in sundry ways. But that, I am beginning to gather, is the point. That is what these activists in charge want to do to normal people from whatever background (ethnically, racially, etc.): they want to demoralize us. If you complain, they will pass the buck and then end up "deplatforming" you in some way, thus emasculating you (if you're a man) further. It's all so maddening.
Yes, like George W Bush's plan to impose democracy upon the middle east. It has taken Europe (and thus the US as its child) 2000 years to work out valid system of representational government. It cannot be superimposed, or injected like a vaccine(!) in the blink of an eye. And let us not forget that the idolized-by-the-left Rousseau casually fathered bastards and casually wished them upon foundling homes. What a noble thinker.
I honestly think you could make a strong case for Rousseau being the single most harmful person in modern history, because virtually every blood-soaked utopianist scheme drew inspiration, directly or indirectly, from his works.
Very interesting. I am pleased to say that I read the real Rousseau (same for Voltaire), sophomore year in college, 18th C. French. Difficult but worthwhile. Don't suppose he is really much less difficult in English.
“Progressives believe that the present is better than the past….” & yet they are ALWAYS aping the past by thinking that the worst of socialism / communism / totalitarianism didn’t work out because they’re so much smarter & now in charge. Always w/ the same horrific outcomes in deaths & societal collapse
That's the progressives that have stolen the word progressive and applied it to themselves. i.e. There is no f'in way in hell that a true progressive is pro-War, and yet these so-called progressives just f'in love war. In fact are in a cozy alliance with the neoCon warmongers.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the West is very much run on usury, and usury destroys a nation's capacity for magnanimity. Additionally, the disappearance of a FORMAL elite has destroyed the notion of noblesse oblige, which creates a hostile aristocracy not bound by a traditional sense of duty, charity, grace, etc. As BAP says, the elevation of the merchant or the banker to the height of society discredits the very idea of society.
<<In fact, I think one of the greatest defects of modern liberal democracy, is its promotion of an informal elite – people who, for reasons of birth or social standing, wield significant power, but because of liberal democratic principles, are allowed (or compelled) to do so in underhanded, informal, less-than-legible ways.>>
Thank you! I've been screaming this for years, especially when certain Americans I know sneer at the Brits. I'm like, at least they don't hide it and they get some pageantry with it and noblesse oblige. Our (American) aristocrats are becoming increasingly unabashed with their autocratic rule. But we've been sold the idea that if you work hard enough that you too can be an elite. If that was ever the case, it was in a vanishingly short amount of time in our history.
Funnily enough, British people seem to be less deferential towards their elites than Americans, which I've seen ascribed to Britain's more openly-acknowledged class system, as people are less likely to believe that the rich and successful must be inherently better.
Exactly so. People in the U.S. seem to have begun worshipping presidents and certain senators and congresscritters like they're God-emperors. It's creepy.
An excellent discussion of modern ideologies. I have only a remark. As we do not know much about the élites, who they are and how they make decisions, it may well be that the current ideologies are not "real", but only tools in order to remove some cultural obstacles. Nothing new, in fact. According to Livy, the first remark of a Roman consul on learning about the Epicurean philosophy by a Greek philosopher was that it would be good to diffuse such ideas among the Samnites.
Exactly right. The current craze of Identity Politics began simultaneously and Worldwide just after the big Financial Rip-off of 2008. Just another example of Divide-and-Conquer. It at any point in the future they see BLM/Antifa are a liability they will drop them like a worn out shoe.
Agree. I think Glenn Greenwald has written about this; that a lot of the modern identity virtue signalling is simply a cover for bad actor like the CIA, warmongers, etc. "We're still going to bomb your village, but at least now the drone pilot will be trans", and crap like that.
Thank you for the thinking points. I’ve been struggling with how I’ve always considered myself more liberal than my upbringing suggests, but have been unable to reconcile being “liberal-minded” with the current runaway circus of political ideology.
Yes, that's a good article. I think a lot of the tacit support from liberals for leftists is a kind of vicarious thrill watching others challenge power structures, often physically and/or violently, in ways they lack the courage to. And also, I think a lot of middle class people, both conservative and liberal, have a genuinely hard time accepting the revolutionary mindset - that people may be motivated by ends other than comfort or living and let live.
I wonder if it's something to do with the Rousseauist belief in human inherent goodness that most on the left seem to share. If people are inherently good, then all bad things about there are due to their circumstances, i.e., to society. Hence those who seek to destroy society and social norms are the heroes, and the only villains are those who seek to defend society against its enemies.
Youre the only substack I pay for specifically because of articles like these. Also, I suggest reading Disintegration by Andrei Martyanov. The coming collapse of the US and western world order is, at this point, unavoidable. Keep up the excellent work eugyppius.
The end of your article has reminded me of the tale of a very rich Marquis (I knew him personally, and I believe that the tale is false, but it is also very illustrative).
The thing is that the Marquis had an employee, the "Administrador", that managed the Marquis' assets. As it was customary for aristocrats of that time, the Marquis did not want to get involved in business issues, because they were below his high rank. The Administrador took advantage of that situation to profusely steal from the Marquis.
This was well known, and close friends of the Marquis were mystified. But when they asked the Marquis about it, they received this answer:
Of course I know that my Administrador is robbing me. In fact, his father was also the Administrador of the late Marquis, my father, and he also robbed him. But I cannot fire him. He has been stealing from me during the last 30 years, so he is already very rich. Thus, he only steals a little more each year. If I fire him, I will have to hire another Administrador, who will be poor and will have to steal from me very fast, considering my age. It is true that I am still very rich, but I reckon that a new Administrador would wipe out the rest of my fortune. So, I cannot afford to hire a new Administrador.
I have been thinking lately that in the West we fired our old, rich Administrador, and we are now experiencing what the Marquis feared.
Supposedly Aesop, the fable guy, was once accused of corruption in political office, and defended himself using basically the same argument (although of course he dressed it up in a cute story about a dog and a tick).
I do often wish that the US had a more overt ruling class. The fiction that there is some kind of Democracy is very draining. Not only do I NOT know who is actually running things around here, but I’m told that the problems we face are because We Voted For Them. Blaming the victim. Nobody I know “voted” for any of this. And no matter who we vote for, nothing changes.
And there we have the great advantage of a more formal aristocratic system: we know who's in charge. So long as they perform their functions adequately, they can stay in charge; should they get a bit too useless, they get a rope party. Aristocrats have always understood this basic truth: that their privileged position is in large part a polite fiction that everyone agrees to abide by on the understanding that they meet their responsibilities to the degree that they enjoy the perks of their station.
From the point of view of a managerial oligarchy, the great strength of liberalism is precisely the camouflage it provides. The ruling class can blend in with the bureaucracies, diffuse responsibility between them until the buck does not obviously stop anywhere, and wash their hands of their decisions by claiming to have simply been following policy, or the science, or whatever.
Absolutely right. We don't even know who to invite to the rope parties, which is the whole point. Obviously Biden, Trudeau, Macron and Jacinda are not the ones "in charge" -- they're far too stupid, and obviously so. And so those of us who have caught on to the charade argue amongst ourselves who's running the show. I work in a govt bureaucracy and nobody seems to be in charge of anything, at any level. I was given two sets of equipment, and then got a lecture when I gave one back. I was handed a combination lock, the combination of which is posted on a public spreadsheet "in case I forget it." Emails go "up the chain" and they might as well be in helium balloons because you never get an email back down with an answer. I've been trying to find out for two weeks if I can work after 6 pm. Nobody knows. How is this even possible???
The CFR is not the seed, but a leaf. council on foreign relations. they have staffed the whitehouse for 50 years on both democrat and republican positions for many secty o state, defence, treasurey etc. They are a starting place and all their globalist likeminded ilk. the un, the families, rockefeller, chase, bank of england, britain, germany etc. globalist cabal. they obviously despise the commoners by their constantly drumming up hatred. 2 cups hatred, stir, bake and explode. let them eat cake. more inflation. let them eat cake, more inflation, let them eat cake. i say prepare the guillotines
yes. It was naive of us (especially Americans?) to think the aristocracy would just go away to hide in shame once we "invented" Democracy. They regrouped and control us more than ever....
And now they have gone too far and are destroying their own nest.
Unfortunately, this time in the form of an unabashed kleptocracy.
I find that, for things like the 6 pm problem, the thing to do is what you want to do. Whoever should make the decision will soon let you know then if they don't agree.
I once asked if I needed to attend what had become a tedious weekly meeting. Answer came there none, so I skipped it. As soon as the meeting finished, I had my answer in the form of a blustering general manager. Problem sorted (I was indisposed' for as many of the following meetings as I could manage).
Yes, the fastest way to figure it out is to do it wrong. Lol.
Very true. This is similar to the reason that the English brought Charles II back after the English Civil War. The rights, responsibilities, and limitations of the monarchy were traditionally established and well understood. Under Cromwell however, the country was ruled by an unaccountable cult of personality. As Lord Protector, Cromwell and his followers operated under few limits.
Follow the money.
Kissinger: "If you control the money supply, you control the World".
We've all voted for people who promised to advocate and fight for something important to voters and, once in office, did the opposite. Obama and health care are a glaring example.
That's not even the worst of it, though, It's what they do that wasn't even talked about during campaign season, things that didn't appear on anyone's policy platform. Did anyone vote for lockdowns or vaxx mandates? Nope.
Don’t forget the checks and balances that the Legislative Branch is supposed to provide. Remember, we (the citizens) continue to vote the do nothings in for DECADES . Never being held to account by the uninformed voter.
I got the full measure of Obama when he popped by to tell the UK to stay in the EU, otherwise he'd be annoyed and we'd be 'at the back of the queue' (his word!) when the trade deals were handed out.
Ohh--I missed that. I was rooting (from US) for Brexit and so relieved when it happened. But didn't the rulers drag out its 'implementation' for as long as possible?
Only 6 years or so. I seem to remember that joining up took a lot less time, but then, we were going to be stumping up cash, rather than withholding it.
Car insurance seems to work pretty well. But we can buy car insurance from any state. Why is health insurance limited to your state of residence? Not to mention the cost incurred by litigation.
Not something I have delved into, but suspect that the 'existential' difference between cars and bodies (you can get a replacement car, not so with body) may be involved. Murky waters in the health insurance business I do believe.
Everything is a catalyst for B/B outrage. They hate our society.
Didn’t Trump end various wars, and try to give up the US role as the global policeman? The deep state and its puppet Congress, of course, had other ideas.
it is very frustrating after what we have seen in the last 2+ years to read people who are still parroting the establishment party line —from either party—without recognizing that we have a uniparty running this country. there is no striking fundamental difference in the two parties anymore only rhetorical ones
Yes. I believe every minute spent on divisiveness is a minute wasted, that could have been better spent on problem-solving and working together. The powers that be have intentionally created and perpetuated this divisiveness. They’re laughing at us!
Well, the “divisiveness” is the nature of competing ideologies. So long as send pragmatists to fight ideologues we are doomed
It's the same problem in Canada. All power is now concentrated in the secretive PMO so we never know who really is calling the shots. Right now, the WEF is a popular target for example. But always ask 'cui bono?' and follow the damn money. Like we're seeing with the vaccines. Once this crop of douchebags like Walensky and Marks are done serving their paymasters, watch how they end up sitting on pharma boards.
It's the same problem in every Western country. The locus of power is shifted out of view.
In the case of Canada, I rather doubt the PMO is really calling the shots. It's more like a power behind the PMO. The system is doubly secretive in that respect.
Have been watching Justin Castro since late Jan.--he really appears on the low-intelligence side. You'd think his father would have bestowed brains on the lovechild. But a weak-minded pretty boy is the best puppet for....Klaus?
Thank you, O reader of Cicero!
Remember when Obama campaigned on eliminating lobbying, and promising he wouldn’t appoint any lobbyists? All lies.
concentrate on local/state they're the ones that matter most. It's all the bloated gov bureaucrats that run our country with the backing of big money controllers.
Of course you didn't vote for it. Current governing types never revealed the destructive (revolutionary) measures they were actually willing to take.
I’m working on the same thought. Check out Circulation of the Elites substack as it opens up interesting possibilities on who is actually running things (at least in the US). Add Eugyppius insight to the equation and I think I’m getting closer to 20/20 vision.
However, seeing more clearly still leaves me wanting to know how do we get out of this mess?
I have spent so much time in prayer in the last 2 years---that's a silver lining to this cloud. I feel just kind of light (gravitationally speaking) from happy complete reliance on Him.
the CFR has staffed MUCH of the upper positions in the white house, including secty o state, secty of treasry, secty of defense. the council on foreign relations is not the seed but a leaf, it is clear their interests are only of a global nature and not of the people of this country. you would enjoy the first half (forget the alternate currency discussion - as it's irrelevant) the ruling class postion currnetly ' let them eat cake' will not allow any alternate to compete. however, the first half is so extremely fantastic. https://youtu.be/mC43pZkpTec
They have brains, it’s their souls that are missing
Absolutely agree. Empty of brain and soul. Robots.
I find these essays creatively unique, a bit of actual original thinking, and far from the usual hackneyed bullet points that are chronically vomited up by the usual suspects in the 'divide'. Always something worth thinking about in your work. Thanks for that.
Avoid bias toward sophistication. It seems right now, the simplest and least-nuanced views are fundamentally correct. All of the "sophisticated takes" just serve to obfuscate this.
is this a joke comment
It's absolutely serious. "Sophisticated takes" serve to delude, more often than not.
Reality is simple. They are trying to kill us - or first enslave us, then kill us. That's it.
All "highly sophisticated takes," by highly educated people, which deny that this is happening, are a form of self-hypnosis to avoid seeing what is obvious, just dark.
If you see a stranger in your living room, and he's carrying out your TV, the most straightforward explanation is correct. You're being robbed. If you deny what's obvious, and wax philosophically about how your eyes deceive you, and try to find sophisticated alternate explanations, it's because you can't accept a world which contains robbers.
Once you accept that you are being robbed, you can be sophisticated in your analysis. But the obvious must be acknowledged, otherwise the sophistication is self-deceit.
To be fair, Eugyppius confirms they're "rapacious and hostile" in the current context. So, robbing, enslaving and killing are not excluded from those categories. I doubt most here would disagree that that is what is actually happening. Much of what I've seen of Eugyppius' analyses and online twitter-rants seems to confirm just that (correct me if I'm wrong!). The million-dollar question, of course, is that of motive and intent. Greed is motive in itself. The "elites" of our time are, simply, greedy - and seem to have no compunction in curbing their appetite. They are compelled to exploit humanity's current misery for personal gain. It is an all-consuming hunger. Enslaving and killing? They wouldn't think so, of course. I doubt many have the self-reflective capacities to recognise it as such. More likely, it's an overweening desire for control. A secret "relief" if there is a bit of a "cull" of the great unwashed. A secret "satisfaction" if people's movements and contagions can be curtailed at the flick of a digital switch. Because a rampant proletariat, unfettered and uncontrolled, is a direct threat to the uncluttered and pristine paradise that they feel is their due. They don't really think or say it out aloud, but it resonates in their very bones. The other million-dollar question, of course, is if there are truly evil masterminds. Or if it's just a clusterfuck of clusterfucktards who are so unbelievably arrogant or stupid that they think they are doing the right thing, and won't back down no matter how bad things get. I think it's a bit of both. The main evil being in the deflections and coverups and suppressions. Still don't know what to make of Gates and that Swab creature.
What! You expect us to believe our lying eyes?
And I think that Eugyppius is much better when dealing with the specific, than the general.
Its OK to discuss these kind of high-flown issues, but don't expect them to go unchallenged!
I didn't have any major problems with the previous framing, but this is much clearer.
I agree wholeheartedly with your description of the malignancy of elites. When the notion of elite status was more clearly delineated, and societies didn't pretend hierarchy didn't exist, the liberal tradition brought us the concept of noblesse oblige- this was reinforced by the moral underpinnings of largely Christian tradition- and thus elites, again as you stated sharing ethnic and cultural identities with their social subordinates, had at least some cultural training that caused them to (at least more often) see their subjects as being of kind and that their own great privilege and advantage obliged them spiritually to use at least some of that power to better their society.
When you pretend elites don't exist, so too goes any moral prescription that goes with being elite.
Good point. Without that noble obligation you come back to social Darwinism—“you’re not rich because you’re defective.”
Yes. But that underscores the importance of the shared christian beliefs. We are witnessing what happens to a society that forgets God. Same thing happened under Lenin. Same thing happened under Mao. Many, many more. If the elite have no one that they have to answer to, then they have no reason to be gracious. Their greed and hedonism can rule them completely. As this quote says:
"More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The full speech is absolutely worth a read.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-men-have-forgotten-god-speech/
Thank you for corroborating the belief I have had for 5? 10? years. Those in power have dismissed God, but they are left with a God-shaped space in the soul, when must be filled. What to fill it with? Why my myself and I!
Why the term "elites", though. In what are they elite? Intellect, ethics, culture? Maybe not. They seem mostly to be good at large scale manipulating a society to get what they want, completely lacking common human inhibitions there. I'm not sure I'd like to call that "elite". My preferred term is the "parasite class". (but not like Marx would made his adepts consider anyone who has more of anything than themselves as that. I mean people for who it is _the_ game they play. E.g. George Soros did not produce any value, he's been a huge net drain on the world, destruction for own gain.)
My understanding is that, when social scientists use the term "elite," they mean the 1-2% of the population that has an outsized influence on society. That 1-2% can be parasitical or not. It depends on time and place.
I would agree. The only thing that I think is truly unusual about today's elite is their power is borderless and not necessarily dependent on high relative wealth.
>their power is borderless
Trans-national or at least multi-national elites were widespread in various empires of the past. If we treat the West as an Empire - then nothing new under the sun.
> not necessarily dependent on high relative wealth
Their personal wealth might be relatively small, but the resources they control is what matters
Except in this case their power is worldwide and if they aren't stopped it will be total World Dictatorship.
Well, I do not see anything wrong with dictatorship per se. Another word for dictatorship is "monarchy".
What you probably mean is global totalitarianism and tyranny. I do not think the present elites are competent enough to achieve that. My fear is that it's going to be much worse than that - as in the world sliding into a dark age. All modern technology - including societal technologies - gone.
We have- relatively briefly- occupied an unprecedented period in history where "power" and "wealth" are not NECESSARILY conflated.
I think the definition of "elite" needs to be value-neutral to have any consistent meaning.
I would say "elite," if it is to hold its meaning across history into the present day, need to mean "the ability to wield social power largely unchecked from below by normal social channels."
This would place Soros and many ultra-rich, like Gates, who wield vast social power without the approval, permission, or appointment by the democratic societies they operate in.
By this measure, importantly, the President of the United States is not intrinsically, however impermanently so, a member of the elite.
There are different types of elites and variations in elite systems. Hereditary rulers, hereditary wealth, even political dynasties on the one hand. And acquired eliteness on the other - or at least eliteness that is achieved in free and open competition and through hard work. An exceptional footballer from an African slum or Brazilian favela can be projected to worldwide fame and incredible wealth very quickly. Some of them even turn out to be able to turn their talent to other things once the sports career is over. Hereditary systems seem to work better when there is some discretion in how power is passed on - compare the Arab monarchies to the hollowed-out male primogeniture European monarchies.
I'm not advocating Arab monarchy as a form of rule, merely observing it's been quite effective at holding on to power for those in power. That's obviously not our goal as a society, but it is a winning formula in the evolutionary arms race. North Korea is the same, even if the Kim gene pool seems to have run out of steam.
And yes, we are cursed by the likes of Gates elites, but there is also a Musk elite. And they tend to go away. A feature of this money elite is that it doesn't last long. You don't know anything about Bill Gates' children. You don't know what the descendants of the 1850s American money elites are doing.
<i>Hereditary systems seem to work better when there is some discretion in how power is passed on - compare the Arab monarchies to the hollowed-out male primogeniture European monarchies.</i>
I don't know about that -- giving the monarch discretion over whom to choose as a successor often leads to intrigues over who gets to be chosen, and can cause a full-blown succession crisis if the monarch doesn't nominate a successor before his death.
Bear in mind that Arab monarchs, thanks to their Muslim-sponsored polygamy, have a considerable pool of talent from which to choose.
Before ever entering the political and power realm, my idea of "elite" was along the lines of "elite university" where the best of the best would be.
While the kids of those social "elites" tend to be at expensive places of education, they're not necessarily the most brilliant (with Gates dropping out, or G.W. Bush being not particularly successful either, IIRC)
But one thing that EVERY graduate of an "elite" school like Harvard has when they're done, whether they got a 4.0 or dropped out, is membership in and access to a network of undemocratic soft power.
Which is why I insist elite has nothing to do with strength or weakness of performance, or even high relative wealth. It's the ability to control others against their will, or to ignore social consequences.
Then I guess there is a divide between a sociological/historical vs. a loose colloquial definition of the word. I say that because, colloquially, "elite" seems to have a positive connotation, outside of certain niche circles. In which case using that label may be perceived as flattering.
There's nothing wrong in avoiding that word for those people either way. I'll continue to refer to them as the toxic parasite class they are - in case of the people who fall under that label today.
I 100% get where you're coming from.
My only point is that if we describe them as a class, and assume we're talking about roughly the same class of people throughout history, today included, it's about what they can DO rather than what they ARE or how we feel about them.
Some elites have used their power to create incredible public good at scale. Many have wrought oppression and misery in the process of self-enrichment.
But a dude sitting in a $500M house with a gold-plated helicopter on the front lawn isn't an elite until he throws some of that cheddar at a local election to get that thing he wants.
Do please bear in mind the concept of the bell curve--when only the top 5% of high school graduates can enter these schools, their straight-A high school record can experience a mild shock. You choose such a school not to be the small pond's big fish, but the opposite. Speaking from personal experience--from when those schools really were elite and the education offered was worth its price.
I despise the term “elite” as well, all men being created equal. Even though I have no problem acknowledging the societal structure that puts some people above others, to actually call the top tier “elite” is to vocally defy the foundational principles of liberalism, and the founding declaration and enumeration of who we are as a people. (I speak of the USA.) In studying the Declaration and Constitution, one is left with understanding that our leaders, far from being an elite club, were designated to be servants, receiving their just powers by the consent of the governed.
Soros was lucky in one great monetary squeeze and has levered that quite well. He enjoys destruction and benefits from that.
Maybe a better term is needed, as they cannot be determined by any measurable standard. From my observation, elites are everywhere, usually at least one or more in every family. They exist across every race and culture. Perhaps they can be viewed as God's surrogates on earth, guaranteeing a minimum level of functionality in His physical absence. Elites tend to have an innate sense of honor. They enjoying being in charge. It's a blessing and a curse. One such attribute is a self-sufficient spirit, thus spiritually is their Achilles heal.
And blind guides, yes. Referring to the elites.
There are the regular everyday elites, and then there is the club of Davos Bankster Psychopaths who control the regular everyday elites, more or less. Guys like Musk can carve their own path, until they start stepping on the toes of the Bankster gang and then as you are seeing now, he's getting a backlash. These creeps at the very top will assassinate those including Musk or even a President of the US who are too much of an obstruction to their NWO or World Totalitarian Fascist State goal.
And clearly delineated hierarchy gives people a clear target. You know who to fight against when that time comes.
You make an excellent point, but there's a caveat to that- giving people a clear target can also be a built-in misdirect for the PTB. As an example, I'm out for a hell of a lot more blood from government officials and globalist quasi- agencies than most millionaires, who I could generally care less about.
The DNC has been doing yeoman's work in stoking "eat the rich" bullshit when they know perfectly well they're the ones we should be furious at.
> the liberal tradition brought us the concept of noblesse oblige
Related: "aristocracy" literally means "rule of the best". If the best are truly the best - i.e. in terms of various human virtues - what kind of rule can be better than that?
You're quite right, if such a thing existed.
I lack the ego to imagine I could objectively sort out the most virtuous among us to be placed in positions of permanent leadership.
Patriarchy is not in itself a negative term. A father looks out for the health of his children.
The three-headed hydra. While the right was asleep, the left took over media, entertainment and education. It took decades but here we are.
Media and entertainment are fields that are incentivized to push the envelope. Perhaps that takeover was inevitable.
It's in their very nature to do so. They appeal to the lowest common denominator--the passions. There is nothing wrong with an elite dedicated to the high, the noble, the transcendent, the great in man and to forcing the rest of us to look up to and take our bearings by that. That is true aristocracy, not oligarchy or plutocracy. The problem is, that is not self-sustaining. The effectual truth of every regime, ultimately, is oligarchy.
The media elite?
Yes, "Media and entertainment."
Well, it's unusual to refer to the media elite as an aristocracy. Tinsel Town is more apt.
I'm not referring to them as an aristocracy. I am referring to an elite that takes its bearings by the true, the good, and the beautiful--or at least tries to earnestly--as an aristocracy. Entertainment and media oligarchs are disgusting pilferers and scam artists, purveyors of smut and debasing shite. As dependent as we may all (myself included) be on them, we can still recognize that they are, essentially, garbage.
Epater les bourgeois.
Big tech too... I’d be fired if I stated my opinion.
Same in education.
With you on that. Left it behind 17mos ago.
Same in the clergy in UK
Im a traditional Catholic and heard last night that some of the younger priests who are more traditionally minded meet in secret
Shorter definitions, for consideration.
Liberal - let me think about your position statements and consider their ramifications to me and society at large.
Progressive - EVERYTHING before today was wrong, and I will give you what is right, tomorrow, if you're worthy.
Leftism - FUCK YOU ALL, I AM THE ONLY ANSWER, I AM THE ONLY CONCERN, I AM ALWAYS BETTER THAN YOU!!!!!!
Conservative (one if the categories not discussed) - Change for the sake of change is dangerous. The old ways have worked well for the most part, meritocracy rewards effort, and social connections are sometimes a reward of extra effort to gain power, but show me your reasoning for change and we will consider it.
Man I like your defs. That conservative sums me up nicely. Thanks! Motto of the conservative should be: festina lente.
Your final point that elites, in conjunction with the low-ranking members of their alliance, “aim is to appropriate the cultural and political capital that these middle ranks accumulated in the course of the Industrial Revolution and the first half of the twentieth century,” is so spot on. A work in progress over the past 60 years accelerated in the past fifteen. Our assets are being sucked from us more boldly than ever before, and we’re being re-labeled as racist bottom feeders who don’t deserve our place in society, let alone the ill-gotten fruits of our labors.
"... aim is to appropriate the cultural and political capital that these middle ranks accumulated in the course of the Industrial Revolution and the first half of the twentieth century ..." and once they do so, they destroy the initiative, knowledge and labor that produced and sustains the very world they live in.
Agreed. Explains why the most dysfunctional dirtbag I have the displeasure of knowing shares the same ideology as the academics I know.
EEWW what a name! Why did you choose to be koprophagic?
Just a pseudonym I thought was funny. Often accompanied with the image of a blowfly or a dung beetle.
My Greek tells me it's shit eater. Hence my wondering. Jimmy Carter was said to have a coprophagic grin.
A most lucid anatomisation. The British historian David Starkey (among others) has also suggested that "social values", like societies themselves, are always a product of time and place, a distinction which implies that ethnicity is fundamental. The major problems arise when people, notably the French Jacobins and their Leftist heirs, insist that their "values" - a worldwide society of (absolute) equals - or 'liberal equalitarianism' - are not only unimpeachably good, but universally applicable to all of humanity simultaneously.
This always leads to two predictable outcomes: when released from the dream-space between the ears of its architects, the idea that the slowly-evolved history and human differentiation of different peoples in different places are gigantic mistakes and must be substituted with a standardised system (Year Zero), the universalist project collides with two obstacles that expose the utter fallacy of its presuppositions.
Firstly, a proportion of the people subject to it fail to become the peacefully co-existing Noble Savages dreamt up by Rousseau, betraying stubborn ties to the order that is being toppled. As the ideas are secular models of perfection, they are above questioning, and therefore "resistors" (like "anti-vaxxers", perhaps) must be either evil or mad - a dehumanising conclusion that leads to escalating coerciveness and ultimately to murderousness.
Secondly, every step towards the new standardised Utopia results in it retreating further from actualisation, an intractable elusiveness that generates paranoia (the failures must be caused by bad actors), continually redoubled efforts, and the public persecution of the Saboteurs of New Eden.
Gulags, labour camps, torture and brutal social abjection, up to and including execution, await these unfortunates.
Just a thought about forced universalism that your excellent little essay evoked
I mostly agree, although I'd include the US along with the Jacobins. Granted the US' universalist values are less extreme than those espoused by the French Revolution (I don't think any US President has tried to introduce a ten-day week because multiples of ten are more "rational" than multiples of seven), but the continual efforts to export US social and political customs are there, as are the disastrous consequences (cf. Wilson, Iraq, Afghanistan).
A sound point, Mr.X; I think our contemporary neocon and neolib Jacobins have a lot to answer for in trying to universalise what was in essence the the birth of a new nation by predominantly English people who enshrined ancient English Common Law in their new Constitution.
Customs and traditions of true longevity tend, it seems to me, to have their roots in time and place and ethnicity, and as such do not to export at all well. The debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan testify tragically to that fact, sadly, as indeed do the calamitously irreversible experiments in accelerated, mass-immigration-fed multiculturalism in the West.
It's so sad that we only seem to understand and appreciate the value of tried and tested institutions and customs after they have been effectively destroyed.
TBH I think the rot set in when the Founding Fathers replaced the Rights of Englishmen with a purportedly universal and self-evident right to rebellion as the justification for their new country. If the Declaration of Independence had read something like "It is a well-established right of Englishmen to renounce their allegiance to their sovereign, if he is doing a bad job, as witness the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. The current sovereign is doing a bad job for X, Y, and Z reasons, and we are accordingly imitating our ancestors' example and setting up a replacement government," later generations of Americans might not have been so quick to assume that the rest of the world wants/should want to be a clone of America, or that American institutions can and should be transplanted into radically different contexts.
The entire woke frenzy is essentially Americanism, isn't it?
America's a weird best: the blue states are probably the wokest parts of the west, and the red states are among the most anti-woke.
My particular situation forces me, at least for the time being, to live in a woke libtard enclave in a big blue city surrounded by the noisy nihilistic turmoil of black ghettos. It is hellish. It is demoralizing in sundry ways. But that, I am beginning to gather, is the point. That is what these activists in charge want to do to normal people from whatever background (ethnically, racially, etc.): they want to demoralize us. If you complain, they will pass the buck and then end up "deplatforming" you in some way, thus emasculating you (if you're a man) further. It's all so maddening.
Yes, like George W Bush's plan to impose democracy upon the middle east. It has taken Europe (and thus the US as its child) 2000 years to work out valid system of representational government. It cannot be superimposed, or injected like a vaccine(!) in the blink of an eye. And let us not forget that the idolized-by-the-left Rousseau casually fathered bastards and casually wished them upon foundling homes. What a noble thinker.
I honestly think you could make a strong case for Rousseau being the single most harmful person in modern history, because virtually every blood-soaked utopianist scheme drew inspiration, directly or indirectly, from his works.
Very interesting. I am pleased to say that I read the real Rousseau (same for Voltaire), sophomore year in college, 18th C. French. Difficult but worthwhile. Don't suppose he is really much less difficult in English.
“Progressives believe that the present is better than the past….” & yet they are ALWAYS aping the past by thinking that the worst of socialism / communism / totalitarianism didn’t work out because they’re so much smarter & now in charge. Always w/ the same horrific outcomes in deaths & societal collapse
That's the progressives that have stolen the word progressive and applied it to themselves. i.e. There is no f'in way in hell that a true progressive is pro-War, and yet these so-called progressives just f'in love war. In fact are in a cozy alliance with the neoCon warmongers.
Most futurists believe it will be better because of technology. Some of these futurists are technocrats.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the West is very much run on usury, and usury destroys a nation's capacity for magnanimity. Additionally, the disappearance of a FORMAL elite has destroyed the notion of noblesse oblige, which creates a hostile aristocracy not bound by a traditional sense of duty, charity, grace, etc. As BAP says, the elevation of the merchant or the banker to the height of society discredits the very idea of society.
Who is BAP? (Good comment, btw.)
Bronze Age Pervert, a classicist with a very insightful podcast and book
Thanks!
<<In fact, I think one of the greatest defects of modern liberal democracy, is its promotion of an informal elite – people who, for reasons of birth or social standing, wield significant power, but because of liberal democratic principles, are allowed (or compelled) to do so in underhanded, informal, less-than-legible ways.>>
Thank you! I've been screaming this for years, especially when certain Americans I know sneer at the Brits. I'm like, at least they don't hide it and they get some pageantry with it and noblesse oblige. Our (American) aristocrats are becoming increasingly unabashed with their autocratic rule. But we've been sold the idea that if you work hard enough that you too can be an elite. If that was ever the case, it was in a vanishingly short amount of time in our history.
Funnily enough, British people seem to be less deferential towards their elites than Americans, which I've seen ascribed to Britain's more openly-acknowledged class system, as people are less likely to believe that the rich and successful must be inherently better.
Exactly so. People in the U.S. seem to have begun worshipping presidents and certain senators and congresscritters like they're God-emperors. It's creepy.
An excellent discussion of modern ideologies. I have only a remark. As we do not know much about the élites, who they are and how they make decisions, it may well be that the current ideologies are not "real", but only tools in order to remove some cultural obstacles. Nothing new, in fact. According to Livy, the first remark of a Roman consul on learning about the Epicurean philosophy by a Greek philosopher was that it would be good to diffuse such ideas among the Samnites.
Exactly right. The current craze of Identity Politics began simultaneously and Worldwide just after the big Financial Rip-off of 2008. Just another example of Divide-and-Conquer. It at any point in the future they see BLM/Antifa are a liability they will drop them like a worn out shoe.
Agree. I think Glenn Greenwald has written about this; that a lot of the modern identity virtue signalling is simply a cover for bad actor like the CIA, warmongers, etc. "We're still going to bomb your village, but at least now the drone pilot will be trans", and crap like that.
Thank you for the thinking points. I’ve been struggling with how I’ve always considered myself more liberal than my upbringing suggests, but have been unable to reconcile being “liberal-minded” with the current runaway circus of political ideology.
I think you'll appreciate this article.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/suicide-of-the-liberals
Thanks. Very interesting to see how history repeats itself.
The article has also helped me understand some of the stuff in Crime and Punishment a bit better.
Yes, that's a good article. I think a lot of the tacit support from liberals for leftists is a kind of vicarious thrill watching others challenge power structures, often physically and/or violently, in ways they lack the courage to. And also, I think a lot of middle class people, both conservative and liberal, have a genuinely hard time accepting the revolutionary mindset - that people may be motivated by ends other than comfort or living and let live.
I wonder if it's something to do with the Rousseauist belief in human inherent goodness that most on the left seem to share. If people are inherently good, then all bad things about there are due to their circumstances, i.e., to society. Hence those who seek to destroy society and social norms are the heroes, and the only villains are those who seek to defend society against its enemies.
Enlightening and succinct.
Youre the only substack I pay for specifically because of articles like these. Also, I suggest reading Disintegration by Andrei Martyanov. The coming collapse of the US and western world order is, at this point, unavoidable. Keep up the excellent work eugyppius.
i really like martyanov, but i haven’t read that one yet. i will tho
The end of your article has reminded me of the tale of a very rich Marquis (I knew him personally, and I believe that the tale is false, but it is also very illustrative).
The thing is that the Marquis had an employee, the "Administrador", that managed the Marquis' assets. As it was customary for aristocrats of that time, the Marquis did not want to get involved in business issues, because they were below his high rank. The Administrador took advantage of that situation to profusely steal from the Marquis.
This was well known, and close friends of the Marquis were mystified. But when they asked the Marquis about it, they received this answer:
Of course I know that my Administrador is robbing me. In fact, his father was also the Administrador of the late Marquis, my father, and he also robbed him. But I cannot fire him. He has been stealing from me during the last 30 years, so he is already very rich. Thus, he only steals a little more each year. If I fire him, I will have to hire another Administrador, who will be poor and will have to steal from me very fast, considering my age. It is true that I am still very rich, but I reckon that a new Administrador would wipe out the rest of my fortune. So, I cannot afford to hire a new Administrador.
I have been thinking lately that in the West we fired our old, rich Administrador, and we are now experiencing what the Marquis feared.
Supposedly Aesop, the fable guy, was once accused of corruption in political office, and defended himself using basically the same argument (although of course he dressed it up in a cute story about a dog and a tick).
This!