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The ongoing riots in the UK and the senseless destruction they have caused remind me of Bertold Brecht's famous poem he wrote in response to the 1953 East Germany strikes. While Brecht, himself a communist sympathizer, initially intended his poem to be a satirical polemic about heavy handed work quotas it recently struck me that he might have been more correct than even he had anticipated.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "to dissolve" as "to become dissipated or decomposed". After seeing the behaviour of the rioters right now as well as the rhetoric that has been coming from that class of people over the last few decades one must wonder if the right solution isn't really to dissolve the people. By this I don't mean immersing them in sulphuric acid until dissolution but rather dissipating their population density as a fraction of the whole country until there is no longer enough of a critical proportion of people which can light the fuse so to speak. There's a reason why even though there are far more "natives" in London than Sunderland the violence in the former has been more chickenhearted and more easily put down.
These rioters are generally low human capital people who take out a lot more over the course of their life than they put in. It's not scientists and lawyers you see giving the middle finger to police officers and pushing garbage bins in their general direction. I think it is perfectly fair to say that as a group they are best characterized as failures who have disappointed their betters and what's more don't even think there is anything wrong with their current state and behaviour. They are even confused and disoriented about the flashpoint of the current disorder: unlike what their prejudices told them the person who killed the three girls in Southport was not a fresh off the boat Muslim migrant but rather a black Welsh 17 year old child who had been born in the UK having a schizo moment. The true facts about the stabbing coming out did not placate their desire for an orgy of violence in the least.
Furthermore they live off the tax contributions of people like me and instead of being thankful for what they are given they blame us for making the country worse and want to bleed us even more. I like to quip that if the majority of people want to see a human parasite they would be better served by looking in the mirror instead of the Times Rich List and I think that applies perfectly here.
Another good example of a city that had some riots is Manchester; when the thugs tried their trade there they were met with swift counter protests bigger than what they could muster and were forced to disperse, leading to no public damage. It appears that the violence only really gets out of hand in the minor cities where the concentration of "natives" is too high. To prevent future riots the obvious solution is to reduce this concentration or namely, to dissolve the people.
Whenever there is dissolution there must be a solvent. And what would make the best solvent here? The usual answer provided by the left is something like "integration" where rich and well off people are asked to live amongst the lower classes in the hope that they will have a civilizing effect on the poors. Normally this is done by mandating the building of housing intended for poor people very close to housing occupied by the well off. While this may work at preventing tantrums from being thrown in the first place it won't do very much to quell them if they happen: a bunch of effete button pushers (Note: I count myself as among this group) doesn't put the fear of God into anyone. They would never have the guts to go up to the rioters and do this (choice moment: the rioter responding with 2 fingers when asked how many brain cells he has).
Instead the best solvent you can get is someone who will also stand up to debauchery when it rears its ugly head: migrants who are unafraid of giving it just as good as they get (see above video). And what's more, unlike the low tier "natives" who Great Britain is saddled with because they were born here the non-natives are all people who were either themselves selected by the UK as being positive for the country or descendants of such people which means they still have a portion of the net positive genetics (I'm ignoring refugees here because they make up a very small proportion of total migrants and something tells me the rioters of today wouldn't be happy if illegal migration stopped but legal migration continued at the same levels as today).
In fact a more reasonable word for these migrants would be "elects", since they are the chosen. Each and every single legal migrant in the UK has been collectively chosen as being worthy of being allowed into the country. They should be accorded the respect such an honour deserves instead of being told that they don't belong here. In fact the reason so many of them were chosen in the first place is because the "natives" have continued to disappoint the real decision makers day in day out for the last however many decades where importing so many migrants was the only choice left to keep a stable state going: firstly refusing to take care of older family members and foisting them onto the state and then refusing to have enough children if they're net contributors/having too many children if they aren't net contributors. Any attempt to talk sense to these people about how a welfare state with sub replacement birth rates and no migration is unsustainable was (and is) met with fingers in ears and "na-na-na can't hear you". Is it any surprise that with such a badly behaved lower class the elites decided to do away with them like you do with a bad employee and get someone new?
And we shouldn't forget that many of the migrants had far worse starting conditions than the gentlemen throwing bricks but through industry and positive sum contributions to human flourishing have managed to make something of themselves, only to be looked at enviously by the people who previously have been appropriating the wealth of the successful and now want to get even more at the elects' expense.
So yes, the elite class in the Western world has taken Bertold Brecht's words to heart. When confronted with unruly and disruptive lower classes it really is simpler for them to dissolve the people and elect another. I for one am looking forward to the consummation of this process; we'll probably end up with fewer riots at least.
I'm surprised by how many people assume you're posting in bad faith. Maybe it's because we've talked one on one, but I'm pretty convinced these are your real opinions.
Also, just for some context, these opinions are pretty bog standard for the vast majority of elites in the West over the last few hundred years. So it's not like they're crazy beyond the pale. Although I'll admit they're stated provacatively.
All that being said, I strongly disagree. My main disagreement stems from the way modern society is set up. When you create a distinction like 'elite' versus 'stupid peasant' there's an inherent assumption that the way we currently order society and assign social status is somehow correct or right. I strongly disagree with that assumption.
Our modern world order vastly overweighs 'rational,' left-brained, rules-following, logical types of intelligence. While at the same time totally disregarding and not rewarding intuition, vibes-fluency, social skills, grasping of the gestalt, right-brained thinking, religious thinking, et cetera. This situation is extremely problematic.
As others have said, if we had a society that promoted a more balanced, virtuous person to elite status, that would be cool and elitism would be more justifiable.
And while yes left-brained type thinking leads to extreme power over the natural world, it's all useless as hell if we can't actually get along with each other, or live happy productive lives. And right now most can't. I think that the vast majority of 'peasants' actually are much more in tune with their intuition than the majority of elites. They have to be because they don't have the intelligence to rely on. And the vibes are shit right now, my dude. Mainly because those in power don't care about the vibes at all and think they're pointless BS.
Anyway, while I can sympathize with your point a bit, I think you're missing a big part of the picture.
I've read a lot of books from the last few hundred years, and heard a lot of stories from my grandparents about what it was like growing up, and I've never once seen them sneering at the British working class. There was a status hierarchy, and probably a certain amount of selective obliviousness about how that hierarchy was kept in place, but in general it would never occur to the aristocrats of that time to sneer at working-class people for being working class. What else should they be? The elites of that time were Christians and believed that everyone had their role to play in society.
It's only postwar, when social mobility became possible and then expected, that you start seeing sneering like @BurdensomeCount. And even then, only really in the last 20 years as mass immigration and wokeness took off (and the economy died). When I was growing up the working class were treated with great respect. There was sneering at scroungers, but that was the working class sneering at those who couldn't be bothered to work.
There is also the memory of postwar socialism to consider. The socialist government made a concerted and largely successful* attempt to destroy the aristocracy and the capitalists, and those who remain aren't going to forget that in a hurry. My parents had bricks thrown at them in the 70s and they definitely haven't forgotten.
*The upper classes are still over-represented in positions of influence, but not as the upper class. It's the difference between, say, a plutocratic society where powerful people inherit companies, and a plutocratic society where powerful people get expensive volunteering opportunities to garnish their CVs.
You've read a lot of books and I read a comment on Saltburn... The gist is random redditor claims that it isn't unheard of for middle class kids to pretend to be working class because it carries more favor with the elite kids.
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