Proud Class Traitor (Part 1)

The beginning of an elitist argument against our elite

As much as I despise Rousseau (and really, less the man than his influence), he was quite right about one thing in particular - the spectacular corruption of the French elite of his day. I’ve frequently remarked that our elite has yet to reach that level of that corruption, but god only knows how they are trying. What is amazing about humans is their capacity for self-deception, and I can offer you no more bitter experience than to contemplate your own. We all desire to live our nice, tidy little lives with a degree of orderliness in defiance of the chaos that is the universe. That’s the first big self-deception - that we aren’t engaged in a struggle against the nature of Nature. Rousseau idealized the natural man, completely harmonious with his surroundings; ripped from that idyllic existence by the corruption of socialization. The prevalence of this deception isn’t just something other people think - I feel it when I have quiet moments in some beautiful natural setting; it could be on a beach, gazing upon mountains, or deep in the cool of the woods. We are refreshed, re-centered at such times - save for those who have lost all sense of connection to nature (who may experience near panic at the unfamiliarity). Of course then we return to our mundane lives, and we get to ignore the difficulty that living a more-natural life would actually entail. I won’t say it is Hobbesian, but any attempt to regress to a life more familiar to a human of 2 or 3 centuries (let alone farther) back entails sacrifice of comfort, convenience and likelihood of long life. That’s not an attractive trade-off.

It is the reality of trade-offs that is another place humans are prone to deceive themselves. Thomas Sowell has said the first rule of economics is that scarcity exists (i.e. there is never enough to satisfy all human wants) and that the first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics. You want to find out if your friend is a progressive - run that quote past him (or her). There is a great human deception, most brilliantly exploited by Marx (and his disciples) that scarcity is a myth, and that there is a natural abundance which is hoarded (un-naturally) by a few. A corollary deception here is usually seen amongst the most dedicated climate worshippers - that there is plenty of good, natural energy (not fossil or nuclear) available, and it is only the work of the devil that keeps us from enjoying it. Oh, they don’t say devil of course, but it is in their mind demonic presences that animates anyone arguing in favor of fossil or nuclear energy. Take away their phone charger and see how long that energy lasts and what they do when denied access to it. They may not regress to a pre-electrical era human, but I’m pretty sure you will see regression to a toddler’s temper tantrum.

I long lived with the belief in the deception of the essentially classless society. This is a rather common American self-deception. Most other humans have been reared and educated in societies that are quite clear and comfortable with their class distinctions. I read Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man and here I was, reading a book written in my native tongue and less than a century removed from my lifetime that was as foreign to me as if it had been written in some other language about an era or land long bygone. The rigidity of the class consciousness, shared not just within the upper-middle class of Sassoon’s social milieu but across all of the social spectrum of late 19th to early 20th century England, was (and still is) as exotic to me as anything that might be written about India or the Inca Empire. I, born and raised on classic American social values, can no more imagine myself served (as though I truly deserved to be) than serving (as though that was as natural a condition as breathing). Yet that permeates Sassoon’s writing - and not as an affectation, but as natural as if ordained so by God. I had a similar feeling in reading Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain - his apologia for his Catholic conversion and monastic life. It wasn’t until I started reading Nietzsche that I had some real understanding of just how un-natural my native beliefs actually are. There is no comfort in confronting and abandoning beliefs you have long held, as liberating as the experience is supposed to be. The most natural reaction is to search for another mooring point and this usually entails the wholesale adoption of another set of self-deceptions; ecologically speaking, you seek out a substitute niche - one that requires as minimal adaptation as possible. It is extremely hard to remain open, unmoored and sane¹.

So the reality that I long denied is rather simple, even in America; we have, and always have had, and will always have, a social hierarchy - perhaps most coarsely defined as the elite and the masses². If you are reading this and aren’t rebelling a little bit, you might not be a “real American”. If so, congratulations, you’re better grounded than I was for the majority of my life. So, now that we have granted reality its due, what does this mean? Well, for starters, where do you or I fit in? I can’t speak to you, but I will speak to myself. I am educated up to the graduate degree level, which when I earned that degree put me in some fairly rare company; today much less so. Income-wise, prior to retirement, I was near the top decile of earners. I learned (and have mostly forgotten) two foreign languages. I have traveled outside the U.S. (and though technically foreign countries, Mexico and Canada don’t really count) and not as part of the U.S. military. I am more interested in history and philosophy than I am in sports or politics. If I sum all of this up, it doesn’t exactly add up to one of the masses; yet I’m not really the elite, am I?

By all appearances, I am part of the elite. Yet I despise the American elite. In this I am rather well cast as the disaffected intellectual (a subclass thoroughly documented in European history). Schumpeter, in the third edition of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, has some notes about the nature of intellectuals - it isn’t flattering in the least. He notes that up to his point in time (post WWII) that America, unlike Europe, hadn’t produced many “underemployed and frustrated” intellectuals. I fear that after his death, we have not only caught up, but far exceeded the European tradition. This is not a good state of affairs.

Thus I have come to consider myself a class traitor³. I don’t slink into that designation with shame, but I stand up and proudly declare myself such. I look at what is supposedly my peer group and think what a colossal collection of fools. You, as a substack reader, are also not likely one of the masses, nor if you are reading me are you likely one of the elite I am about to disparage in detail. Welcome to the ship of fools, at least we are in the same boat.

1. It may only work for me because of my age, I know that I don’t have to live that long with the consequences.

2. It could be defined in any number of ways with unlimited permutations, but in my other thinking and writing on organization, it always is clearest as leaders and followers. I don’t like this, but I can’t allow mere distaste to untrack my thinking. Whomever it was that first posited the notion of the bitter truth, he wasn’t lying.

3. Certainly this risks putting me (and you) in the same group as Marx and Engels, who were raised bourgeois and shed that; or at least they pretended to - in fact they carried with them the deepest core of Western values. Nietzsche noted that the revolutionary (and though he doesn’t name Marx, you can’t miss the allusion) is as committed to Judeo-Christian values as any priest or preacher in Christendom. All of Marxism is a substitute religion for Christianity - ironically the least dogmatic are those that switched to cultural Marxism (i.e. the Frankfurt School) over those still devoted to “vulgar” dialectic materialism. You can almost consider that the parallel to the Reformation. Also recall that it was Christianity that displaced the classic Roman religion after the Republic had become the Imperium.