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The Virginia Giuffre suicide brought to mind an idea I've been thinking about for a while: populism works best without the people. Rob Henderson and many others have talked about how certain ideas promoted by the upper class disproportionately harm the lower class. In his book Troubled, he wrote:
The problem is that people who entertain populist ideas like the above wind up shoved into the same part of the political spectrum as all these people who rave about "pedophile rings." Along with the internet personalities who won't endorse QAnon outright but pander to their QAnoner supporters with equivocating crap like "why can't they release the Epstein documents? I'm not saying there's a conspiracy, I just want TRANSPARENCY IN GOVERNMENT. Just asking qwestchins!" The populist movement winds up embracing the same mentality of helplessness Henderson is criticizing. Many of the Epstein victims admit they did it voluntarily for money, but you can't say that because it gets in the way of the narrative of helpless proles victimized by evil sex-trafficking finance guys.*
You can only really stand up for the people by keeping them at arm's length.
*The QAnoners are convinced that happens ALL THE TIME but Epstein is the only example they can point to, which is why we're still hearing about it five years after Epstein's death and will probably keep hearing about it for decades more.
You reckon it's the qanoners ruining everything?
I had a different idea. See my thinking is that qanoners are overwhelmingly middle class and below, and a lot of them are the kind of people who couldn't go to college even if they could afford it, which they can't. Not all of them, there are some very clever people involved, but most of the qanoners I've spoken to were primarily uneducated poor people.
I think the bigger problem is that our educated and wealthy people are worthless morons. Qanoners are overwhelmingly uneducated and our Elite Human Capital are overwhelmingly cowardly, narcisstic, and just not that bright. They are so vapid and myopically self centred that they couldn't even save democracy from the proles with the most advanced propaganda machine in history. A centralised bureaucracy supported by media, education and intelligence, and how did they explain the perils of populism to the people? "uh it's right wing! Hitler was populisty! How about it's racist? Or toxic masculinity? It's very passe ok, he's eating McDonald's for fucks sake, what more do you need?!"
Populism is actually pretty simple to understand - it is the game theoretic optimal solution to a democracy for any underclass in a country where they lack (or think they lack) unifying principles or values - if you think, due to a warped media environment, that you can't rally with your neighbour over the constitution or that Jesus is lord, you can still rally around a popular figure. It's basically a coin flip between finally being heard and the stamping boot, so if you already have the stamping boot in your face it's a no brainer.
And the gamble paid off! But what the populists didn't expect was that our Elite Human Capital are so self centred they'll actually defend Epstein Island out of solidarity or something. They even mock the idea of government transparency! Like they either think government transparency is a bad thing, or are just too dim to understand that they are participating in a meme that can directly harm the concept, as that kind of negative association is part of how perverse incentives kick off in the first place.
If only there was some simple fix, like listening to the working class occasionally. Then again avoiding them as much as possible, still sneering at them at every opportunity, but pretending you do care about them has worked out great so far!
I think the thing that annoys me the most about Elite Human Capital is that they are the one class of people that pretends they don’t even belong to it. If you talk to them they’ll all try to act as though they aren’t a member of the elite, they aren’t that wealthy. An aristocracy that owns it would be somewhat more tolerable instead of them all pretending to be middle class
To be fair, the reason aristocrats/ECH don't own it is because we've just come out of a century where it was pretty dangerous to be an aristocrat and to owns that. I've said before but both of my parents were actually physically accosted at various points - one had a brick thrown at them, the other was spat on and nearly beaten. When I was growing up in the 90s, pre-woke, being white was fine but being upper-class painted a target on your back. You were expected to accept being the butt of every joke and take blame for everything wrong with the country while everything you owned was siphoned away by socialist tax policy.
One of the odd ironies of the last couple of decades for me is that while the level of identity-based abuse I'm subject to has risen, in a way it's a lot easier to deal with because there are so many more people to share it. There are a lot more white people than aristocrats! I think this is why people have started to be more open about considering themselves EHC - they have successfully diverted the inverse snobbery of the intellectual population onto ethnic and sexual identities rather than class ones.
What’s funny is that people aren’t upset about “millionaires” anymore. It’s billionaires that people continue to get angry about. I guess when everyone’s boomer parent is technically a millionaire it kinda loses its edge
Inflation comes for us all in the end.
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