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Notes -
The idea that the elites need to make the masses miserable "to spark the activist fire in their hearts" (presumably against the elites) borders on parody.
I'm not in favor of this and it's my outsider perspective trying to make sense of what their honest self-conception may be. As I understand, a lot of postmodern public-space art and architecture was designed to be ugly for this purpose. To deny normalness, to make people face the very non-normal guilty nature of western civilization. To awaken them to the crimes of the previous way of things, and to signify a discontinuity etc. And I'm likening this to a more general pattern where the elite tries to guide and educate the people.
It's one type of elite against another. The revolutionary leftist elite who have risen to the top of the prestige in academia and art and institutions etc. against the elite that embodies the patriarchy, oppression of minorities and capitalist exploitation.
My point was that what the revolutionary elite is doing is not all that different from classical elites at least in this high level analysis. Neither is about some kind of authentic majoritarian voice of the average people (they call catering to the base nature of the masses populism). Critical theorists have the concept of "false consciousness" that is a jolly joker to explain away any "wrong" opinion of the masses. "If only they were more educated, they would not wish it."
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