Author: White Whale

Not entirely sure what the theme is, so the theme may be uncertainty.  I just write stuff and sometimes I don’t know why.

But: in an infinite world, there is no finality, and efforts to create finality are themselves doomed to failure.

Life can only be lived in the flow.  It is an endless wave to be surfed on an endless ocean.

And I was thinking, for whatever reason, about training for Special Operations Operators.  As I have commented before, you can only survive if you learn to live in the present.  You have to forget BOTH past pain AND future pain, and yet deal with present pain.

And it hit me: to survive, you have to learn to love the grind, like Vince Lombardi talked about.

Because here is the thing: if you are going to live in the present, you have to LIKE the present.  You have to feel empowered in the present.  You have to feel GOOD in some way.  And it is perfectly natural to feel good in the midst of struggle.  An awful lot of those guys–and I’ve known a good number–like their work.  They volunteer for it.  Nobody forced them, and it is not all about patriotism.  I’ve had a few tell me they went to the next level because they wanted to do some good and be more directly and personally involved in it.  But that is a positive feeling too.

And I can think of no better cognitive strategy than learning to feel NOW what you expect to feel when you accomplish a long difficult goal.  If you can get that feeling every step of the way, then you will accomplish everything you start.

Few thoughts.

Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19LDgHGGRUs

Tucker Carlson on point as usual.  From my own perspective, he is one of only a small handful of journalists who matter.  Sheryll Atkisson and John Stossel would be others.

As he says “normal people would say to themselves, whatever we are doing, we need to stop.”  But that isn’t what the Democrats do.

I would really like to get drunk with one of the Rockefellers, or Klaus Schwab, or even Nancy Pelosi–anybody in a loose cabal that certainly extends to the hundreds, where most of the people have a pretty good ideas what’s going on–to where we both have enough shots of something or other in us that they begin speaking the truth.  We know nearly everything they say is bullshit, and they know it.  The open question–and it really is an open question–is what the REAL agenda is.

I would almost prefer it be open Satanism–that they have embraced cruelty and sadism as their way of life–to the alternative, that they are merely so profoundly STUPID that they think they are HELPING.  Almost, but not fully.  You can’t fix aggressive and confident sociopathy.  You can sometimes fix stupidity, over time.

The most likely explanation, of course, is that the truth is in the middle somewhere.  They don’t really think they are helping, or for that matter harming.  They really don’t care one way or another.  They only think about themselves, and what is good for them and the people whose alliance they need, and that is where it stops.

Every step, every decision, stems from a basic question: what’s best for ME, right now?  The future does not matter, and the suffering of people they don’t know doesn’t matter.

And it may well be that there is no long term plan to destroy America.  China is most likely involved, but it is not a necessary assumption to replicate the reality.  The effect would be the same, step by step, if the METHOD was destroying the capacity for integrated communities, for dialogue, and for the honest and productive use of language.

Hammering, hammering, hammering: for what, to what, and for whom I can’t pretend to say.  The assumptions governing the Fabian worldview have been falsified by history (as well as theoretically in many, many ways).  What is left, but the hammering?  One can ask and not receive an answer.

Read the Red Shield (not possibly a Rothschild reference is it?) “Pray devoutly, hammer stoutly.”

And consider a political movement which adopts a wolf in sheep’s clothing as a symbol.

All I know is that 1) I don’t know what I don’t know; and 2) you need some kind of conspiracy to explain all this.

And actually 3) that the people who DO know are most likely sharing as much as half to three quarters of the plan openly, as for example Klaus Schwab.  It is that last part, though, which makes all the difference, even though what is known is bad enough.

As I wind down (one more one more), it occurs to me to comment that refusing to participate in a system of violence is not in itself condemning that system of violence.  Camus is not making the case that violence is never necessary.  He himself participated–heroically in the eyes of most–in the French Resistance, by publishing an important underground newspaper, which was called “Combat”.  He wrote much of its content.  He did so at considerable risk and no doubt supported heartily the Allied invasion and liberation of France.

So violence per se is not the issue.  He is simply making the case that it is possible for INDIVIDUALS to reject participation.  And it would be inconsistent for him not to grant to all individuals the right to their own moral decisions.

And here is thing: simply because some people choose not to participate in, say, war, we need neither judge them–if they are sincere–nor view this as a contradiction of our own beliefs.  Moral variety is as necessary and good in the cultural realm as biological diversity is in the wild.  We don’t benefit from endless rows of almond trees, pollinated by a decaying and degenerating hoard of bees overly surfeited on a tedious and unhealthy diet. (an actual example, by the way, in my understanding.)

Again, as William James pointed out, even if we do not ourselves choose a path of saintliness and non-violence, it helps to have such people around.  They provide a needed contrast.  They help keep things from getting too out of hand.

The mind needs many models.

And it occurred to me as well that Ideology, writ large–which would  very certainly include religious ideology–is the OPPOSITE of my own assertions about proper moral judgements.

Where I say a judgement should be “local” they say the same mechanical method should be used in all cases that are even remotely similar.

Where I say they should be necessary, they say that judging is the most important and proper human action, and should be applied to all situations and people, regardless of how remote they may be from us in time or space.  To take one obvious and current example, there is no need to judge the participants of the Civil War, or slave-owners in the South, as if they were alive today, and their crimes still relevant.

And for that matter, getting lost in that sort of thing blinds people to PRESENT realities.  If slavery is wrong–and I of course believe it is, in all times and places and forms–then why does the Left spend more time and energy on tearing down Civil War memorials than ridding the world of slavery, which is still practiced in many of the same West African nations from where the original slaves came from?  There are slaves in Nigeria, certainly, and most likely nations like Chad and the Sudan.  The Chinese still keep slaves, even though there has been some small talk about that.

But attacking Robert E. Lee remains “anteater taming“.  It takes no courage, no principle, and costs almost nothing.  It also achieves nothing other than rancor and division, and obviously those seeking those can in any event only be counted on to keep breaking things if they get power.

When I say they should be “imperfect”, they say that their ideology makes all decisions necessarily perfect.  The Party is always right.  The Bible is always right.  The Church is always right.  Tradition is always right.

And so life ebbs and flows.  To pick one side is not to oppose the other side.  And to pick one side is not to not reserve the right either to change sides, to step out of the arena completely, or create on your own a viable third or fourth or fifth possibility.

In any communication there are many possibilities.  There are what you intended to say, what you actually said, what you actually meant or thought you meant, what was heard, what could have been heard, and what might be heard tomorrow or next year, all of them with no necessary connection one to the other.

Life is all movement and relation.  The world is shifting under your feet.  Peace can be found in feeling, but most likely not in thought, not if we are honest.

My brain being what it is, I cannot help categorizing the rest of the main characters.

Paneloux was fully plague stricken when he delivered his Jeremiad, but repented partially.  He was at the beginning separate from the concerns of every day life.  As Rieux noted, it is one thing to speak of death in the abstract, and another to be a Parish priest who often watches men breathe their last breath.

And to his credit, he realized it.  And I think in him Camus is presenting the only version of Christianity which makes sense to him, which is one in which EVERYTHING is God’s Will, and if He is just, and it is His will, then our job is to accept it, whatever it is.

I think Camus himself, while not holding this view, of course, was sympathetic to it.  It is logically consistent, and not contradicted by life as we live it.  I recall  William James discussing this strand within Christianity too, in a book I need to reread (everything he wrote is worth reading 2-3 times, from what I can tell) in his Varieties of the Religious Experience.

And how does Paneloux die?  Not quite of the plague.  His death certificate or note reads “Case Doubtful”.  I think the double meaning there can be assumed to be quite intentional, and the translation reasonably faithful.

Rambert represents the notion that in a plague stricken world, happiness is still possible, as both an ideal and a present reality, and is worth pursuing, sometimes at the expense of others.  And the reasoning is simple:  if no one is happy, then what is the point of anything?  The happily in love, in such a world, become our hopes and perhaps even in their own ways our saints.  Rambert, of course, lived too.  I forgot to mention him.

Love, in small ways, with small people, is one of our true comforts, and no person able to avail themselves of such comfort should go without.  We need such things.  We become more human with them, and more “abstract”–again, to use Rieux’ term– without them.

And I will add that the precise virtues of both Grand and the Spaniard (who may have had a name, but I can’t recall it) were their small ambitions.  Grand wrote and rewrote a single sentence.  It was not much, but it was very important to him, and it provided him what little satisfaction he had in his life.  He was, you will recall (or notice this if I am lucky enough to inspire someone to read the book), the first one to recover spontaneously from the plague.

And the Spaniard, likewise, said he would never get the plague because he–I think I am quoting here–“knew how to live”.  And he didn’t die of the plague.  He got through just fine.

As I would view all this, it is very Taoist.  Lao Tzu just means “Old venerable Master”, something like that. These themes and ideas were old 2,500 years ago.  A certain person may have written them, and actively rejected being named as the author, or they may be a compilation of many such individuals.  Or maybe they knew at one time who wrote it, and it was forgotten in the countless wars and conflicts and disasters–the countless plagues, some of them literal plagues–since then.

One last point (I often say in bars I am going to have “one more” but I’m not sure what the multiplier is; most people don’t get it), the plague mutates from Bubonic to Pneumonic, which is more dangerous.

Can one variety of delusion not migrate easily to another?  Do people not continually claim to be “fixing” some problem, while creating worse problems?  As I argue often, this is the primary, perhaps defining, activity of the political Left in this and most other countries.  It is not about compassion, but it invokes compassion.  In abusing language ALONE they make things worse, and most of their actual nostrums–their actual policies–make their patients worse.  The inability–which amounts of course to an unwillingness–to see this is what makes it the plague.

You know, in dealing with life, as with any specific physical challenge, it is helpful to have a variety of emotive tools.  One of these, I will suggest is at times passive resignation.

This is, perhaps, perilously close to Learned Helplessness, but what I would suggest is that such helplessness exists at a preconscious, physical level, whereas passive resignation amounts to active acceptance of things we cannot control.

Wisdom–and you know the quote I would but won’t reference–consists in knowing what is needed, when.

And in large measure, wisdom is learning over time what tools to use when, and in continually enlarging your tool box, which would include among other things state management, the skillful use of words, physical health and ability, and the ability to understand people and their motivations to either manipulate or empathize with them.

Manipulation: it has a negative connotation, but in dealing with truly stupid people is it not a vastly preferable alternative to confrontation and conflict?  This seems to me to be true.  Of course it is the rationalization our Plague Lords–read that in at least two ways–have chosen to justify what they did and are doing to us.

The ten thousand things rise and fall without ceasing.  What is right today may be wrong tomorrow.  What makes sense today may be stupid tomorrow.  And nothing is more likely to be stupid than the Long, Large Plan, when concocted by people unfamiliar with peace and who hate themselves and everyone else.

One further thought on The Plague: criminals of all sorts are safe in wartime, aren’t they?  They are also safe when criminals run the government.

We are presently plague-stricken, are we not?  One can only guess when and if the disease will pass.

The task of healers is to do what little we can, where we can, and not ask or expect too much.  That is unheroic, but a truly good heroism may not be possible.  I don’t know.  I don’t know.

Most of what I post amounts to a nervous tick.  It is fidgeting that I do in lieu of some other needed task.  I long ago decided most of my fidgeting was likely on balance more useful than harmful, so I indulge myself in posting it.  But it does not necessarily come from a healthy place, even if it may seem–and indeed be–intelligent or even at times brilliant.

This post feels a bit different.  It is a resolution of sorts, which may last in me.  It promises to.

I was watching the movie Troy last night, and despite my intellectual and emotional preference for Hector, the character of Achilles–the arrogant but highly capable man who just wants to fight, fight, fight–kept coming through in my dreams last night.

I woke up, and was wondering what it is with human beings and conflict, and it hit me: we are BORN craving conflict.  We are born that way.  We are born to seek out struggle the way that tigers are born to hunt, and cows to eat grass.

And it hit me that if this planet, at this time, with this way of living, had a name in the cosmos it would be the “World of churning oceans”, not in reference to physical events but of emotional ones.

And I do believe there are many other worlds, both in other dimensions we don’t really understand yet, as well as on other alien planets.  Many people have spoken on this, and even if they are all full of shit, nothing in the nature of things precludes it, and it would seem that in an infinite universe, the infinitely unlikely will happen often.

This inverts things, though.  The question becomes not “why is there war”, but “why is there ever peace?”  Is it that we just wear one another out?  War is the answer to depression, lack of focus, sense of loneliness, sense of meaninglessness.  It solves, particularly for men, nearly all our problems.

And I will remind you that when World War 1 broke out, there was celebration in nearly all the combatant nations.  The national dullness and ennui promised to be dissolved in feat of heroism.

And, again: Nazism appealed first and foremost to the youth of that era since it too promised war, which was the logical evolution from the mountain climbers of the Bergfilme, to the next step.  They were going to go out and do great things, commit acts of valor, and above all break up their tedium, monotony, and listlessness.

And I think most women, at heart, want to be with men who are at least capable of craving war.  And to be clear, this need not be literal war.  Most of the “wars” being fought in America right now are not (yet, at least, and in the main) physically violent.  They are wars of words.  They are wars of personal attack and rhetorical submission.  They are wars of expulsion, of banishment.  They are wars of control: of media, of academia, of the government, of the military.

Even the Femboys often are militant vegans.  This is of a cloth with the whole.  They were passionate Bernie Boys.  The men women can’t stand, over the long haul–since many for a period of time want without realizing it to mother grown ass men, until they weary of it (unless they are severely codependent)–are the ones laying around with no driving passions.

What does it mean to be “bourgeois”?  Is it not precisely the rejection of political war in favor of personal comfort? Is this not why the Communists–who have long waged wars of aggressive conquest in all sorts of ways, in as many places as they could–have long hated those they could not count on being foot soldiers, really, on EITHER side, and thus in their way?

No, I think the moment we hit Earth we are wired for conflict.  If we can’t find literal conflict, we crave and find other forms of difficulties: in work, in sports, in religious enthusiasms and the like.

We crave difficulty.  We can’t help it.  If we stop seeking it, we feel less alive.

So why have we not achieved a stable world peace in conditions of prosperity and freedom?  Well, we have not tamed human nature, have we, not least because some of us fight hard to prevent anyone from talking about such a thing, precisely because there IS such a thing.  They fight because they were born to fight, and they fight in the name of a peace they don’t really understand.

So everywhere there are people who are troubled.  Everywhere people in conflict, with themselves, and with others.  This is the BASE STATE of Humanity.  I think there are many advantages to looking at it like this, not least that we cease judging people for being born as people.

So what is the solution?  First off, we accept there may not BE a good solution, that all proposed solutions, if they themselves come from a place of violence–as they tend to do–are cures worse than the disease.

But it does seem to me that each of us can and should begin to establish beachheads of peace on the shores of War.  In your normal, average day, find twenty minutes of true peace, if you can.  It’s not easy, and will not happen quickly.  But it conditions everything before and after, your memory and your expectations, in subtle and vitally important ways.

As mentioned, I recently read Camus’ The Plague.  It was a worthy book, one worth contemplating for a moment.  With regard to this specific thought, I would offer up the evening when Rieux and Tarrou went swimming in the ocean.  In the midst of the plague of being human, they found peace for a moment, which Camus argued through Tarrou may be the best we can hope for.

And in a moment of perhaps unintentional comedy (comedy being in large measure an unexpected mismatch between our expectations and the event), Camus ranked being human over being a saint.

I have contemplated this, and here is what I will propose: aspiring to sainthood is still a battle, a battle between our mortal bodies and our spirits, but such battles are still something we crave and which come naturally to us.  What does not come naturally is being at peace, of not seeking out the Grand Conflict, and of simply seeking to offer small things out of genuine sympathy and kindness.

Indeed, as I have said, we might speak of a Battle of Kindness, in which one group of people who rally around the Kindness flag execrate and attack those they believe don’t.. And their chief “evidence” of course is that since they believe themselves the unique possessors of the Kindness flag, all who do not rally around it must oppose it.

This of course is the Plague, as Camus used it, in at least one sense.  I think he used the metaphor in several ways, but clearly one was Ideology writ large, which justified murder.  Camus declares himself a de facto pacifist and Conscientious Objector to ANYONE who might believe him or herself worthy of determining who should live and who should die.

And again Rieux rejects sainthood.  He is not trying to stamp out the Plague once and for all.  If he tried to do that, he would BECOME the plague, would he not?  No, his aim is much more modest and much more realistic: to do what little he can, where he can, knowing that it will always return, but not for a while; and in the meantime, he can do his best to be neither carrier nor recipient of it.  You will note the three main characters who came out unscathed are Rieux himself, Grand–who he asserted was the hero of the story–and the asthmatic old Spaniard who spent all day shuffling peas from one pot to the other.  Presumably Camus was saying of the last that this was indeed vastly preferable to any Grand Passion which induced someone to the Plague.

So, in the course of our lives moments of peace may happen.  We may fall in love and have truly happy, peaceful moments.  We may go on a walk or bike ride or horse ride on a moon-lit night, and find ourselves feeling GOOD, for reasons we don’t understand.  I have had moments like that.  Small ones.  Not long ones.  But such things make us better humans.

But such things can be cultivated, too.  This is the point of the habits of yoga and meditation, and perhaps slow walks in parks and the forests.  And it is funny: so often with people we find ourselves attuned only on superficial levels.  But even there, moments can be created in which some genuine fellow feeling and kindness and flow back and forth.  I have experienced this doing breathwork.  As I have said, in my view the actually most useful part is how much that work opens people up to one another, for small moments, before they remember their homes, their misery, the pain of the world, and close up like flowers that blossomed briefly in the morning.

Love, I think, is best thought of as a small, occasional flower.  Don’t seek the Grand Passion, not even in a lover.  What the best lovers do is have, for some period of time, small moments that are better than most.  For some period of time they look in each others eyes, for a moment, and see recognition, and in this recognition they find peace, and this peace is the meaning of it all.

And in relationships that last happily–many relationships last unhappily, or mostly, or often unhappily, since time changes everything continually–couples find ways to recreate moments of recognition.  They don’t close up.

And the enemy of this–remember we live for conflict, so there is always a bear waiting outside the cave–is our pain.  When we open and are seen, we heal and we feel good.  But as long as there is unresolved pain, we will sooner or later close up and protect it.  And so we go, back and forth, in cycles.

And what kills love, I think, is mismatched cycles.  All it takes is for one lover to look in the others eyes when their pain predominates, and see nothing, and they will be hurt, and lose trust.  And trust betrayed is of course worse than never trusting at all.  And so lovers quarrel.

So I think, in any event.  I have not had a lover like that.  No one ever sees me.  I am a deep, deep mist on a cool Autumnal day.  I cannot blame anyone for not seeing me.  It is not easy. I am faint, and far in the distance.

But returning to Camus, a point my eldest made–we have formed a sort of book club, which is fun–was that the author himself was Rieux, and he himself noted that he was just “reporting the facts”.   He was as objective as possible, and as “abstract”.

But Camus may well have quoted Lao Tze, who said “renounce sainthood; it will be a thousand times better for everyone”.  Rieux himself made Grand the “hero”, but of course Camus intended Rieux to be the hero, in a nice irony I nearly missed.  And he intended Rieux to be the ACTUAL saint, the one who neither sought nor would have accepted the term “saint”.  He was just a man doing his job.

And here is the thing: Camus more or less says that most morality comes from a very simple instinct, to do your job, even in difficult circumstances.  No one is praised for seeking food when they are hungry.

And as he says, most people are basically decent, most of the time.  Most are willing to roll up their sleeves and help, if the situation calls for it.  Indeed, as I have said, most are primed from birth for difficulty, hardship, and conflict–in this case with death itself, more or less.

I had a specific personal reason for watching Troy I won’t go into, but I would suggest that everything is medicine, if you pay attention.

But if we equate deep, true relaxation with peace, and peace, along with sympathy, as the highest you can aspire to in this conflicted world, I would suggest you learn to seek both, in your own way.

And actually, I would say this too: Tarrou–who by the way may have been EITHER a Communist or a Nazi or something else (although Communist is most likely, since he opposed the French regime)–claimed that the world was divided into the plague stricken and the victims, by and large (other than the healers, who were his saints).

What is missing in this commentary, that no doubt was latent, was that while the relative roles may vary from time to time and place to place, that most people can be BOTH plague stricken AND victim.  The victim is simply someone who had the plague and died from it.

We all have the plague sleeping in us.  It is a task of continual awareness not to allow it to awaken and infect others, or to kill our own sense of decency.

You have to stay awake.  There is no other remedy.  How you do this is up to you, but I would suggest we all need periods of silence and solitude.  We need beauty of all sorts.  We need the company of profound minds and spirits, which are best found in works of great philosophy and literature.  I read a couple pages of Marcus Aurelius most mornings, and when I finish Meditations will read Epictetus.  We need nature.  And yes, we all need love, but no one can, in the end, give you what you lack.  You are no longer a child and you cannot ask the world to be a mother to you.

No: allowing your shame to abate–from time to time, and perhaps for not very long–is a skill we all need to learn, and like all skills, it must be practiced, perhaps for a very long time.  After shame comes self acceptance, and with self acceptance comes the peace that I think is indistinguishable from self love.  That is how it works, or so I hypothesize.

I am just speaking as objectively as I can.

And yes, of course, I aspire to being a healer.  It is just a word, but it’s a good word.  We all need a point and direction to our struggle, and this one seems the best to me.

I honestly think I have been a soldier in many lives, and probably at times a very good one.  And think for a moment about how easily we value and admire the talent for killing.  That stink is in all of us, or at least most of us.  I have no memories at all, but it has long seemed interesting to me that my favorite book when I was three years old was an encyclopedia of weapons used in World War 2.  Maybe I fought in that war somewhere.  Maybe some part of me just wanted to get up to date.

But I have bad eyes.  Even though I tried several times to become a soldier, the path was barred for me, which I think was the plan.  My energy had to go elsewhere, as indeed it has.  I fight my own wars, in my own way.  My war is the war of peace.  “Conquest” is calmness.  “Aggression” is sympathy and empathy.  Territory held is what is stable and good within me, which becomes daily reliable over time.

https://theplandemic2.com/

It’s maybe six months old. I watched it when it first came out, but I was drunk and don’t remember most of it.  Practically, it fills in the details I had in any event already intuited.

And it can be added to.  As I say, China, among others, could be a coconspirator.  I think this represents a good start, though, at assigning blame.

And it does seem a reasonable claim to make that virtually all large scale evil in the last hundred years was connected to the Rockefellers.  Certainly the emergence of Big Oil and Big Pharma, the suppression of natural cures and lifestyle counseling by doctors, the support of both Communism AND Fascism, the Great Depression, hyperinflation (the devaluation of the dollar) and yes probably the past year of the semi-plague and full tyranny.

My brain tells me there is no hope.  So I don’t listen to my brain.  Miracles happen.  They don’t happen on command, and they cannot be relied on.  But we can always plan on doing our best to die on our feet, and awake.  You don’t need hope for that.

I remember Edward de Bono once proposing that maybe the Middle East just needed more B vitamins.

In that vein, I would like to propose that rates of violent crime are higher in black communities–and they ARE higher, by the way–than most other ethnic groups–is that Vitamin D deficiency makes depression more likely, and depression often leads to irrational violence.

Here is a link on D and depression: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/vitamin-d-deficiency-and-depression-in-adults-systematic-review-and-metaanalysis/F4E7DFBE5A7B99C9E6430AF472286860

Now, one of my recurring themes is that you should NEVER look for The problem, or THE issue.  This may play a role.  It may not.  But what do we have to lose by trying it?

I honestly think my proposal of government (taxpayer) funded nutritional supplementation among the black community is more likely to help on balance than any other proposal put on the table by the Left of which I am aware, certainly including “reparations”, which are money paid by the innocent, to those who have not been harmed, all in effect so that a power elite of Uncle and Aunt Tom’s and their white backers can create the illusion that they are doing something other than using their positions to get rich, and have the power to fuck with whomever they want, with impunity.

To my mind, if a deficiency of any sort is obviously present, and it is easily corrected, it SHOULD be corrected.  No rocket science happening there.

In any social grouping, someone is going to wind up in charge.  It may be the result of a vote, but the vote will go to the person most people think should be in charge.

In any human group, some people will be either actually more able, or perceived to be more able–which amounts to better ability at what we might call Projection or Image Management, so the point remains, even if bullshitting is the skill in question–and they will always tend to do better.

By accidents of genetics and birth, some people are more intelligent, more persistent, more resourceful, more social adept, more creative, or better at whatever it is we care about at that point.  This point is indisputable.

And obviously if we punish elites we in effect reward average-ness, or what might reasonably be called relative mediocrity.  No nation which does not empower its best to do their best is going to survive long, at least when other nations are not operating under the same constraint.

We can acknowledge openly that life is not fair and some people are just more apt to succeed in anything they do than others, or we can pretend that because we deem this unfair, that such people should be torn down, as in Harrison Bergeron.

Here is the irony or deal breaker: attacks on elites amount to efforts to mobilize resentment and hate to usher in a DIFFERENT elite, that lacks the capability and talent that the actual elite does.  How does an utter mediocrity like Maxine Waters keep getting elected?  She tells everyone how awful white Republicans are, and how she has to oppose them.  She herself is dumb as a box of rocks.  She herself does not live with the poor of her district: she lives, OBVIOUSLY, in a large mansion, presumably with a security detail and chauffeur.

So what has she done?  Without possessing ability or intelligence, she has created a very successful career promising to do everything and actually accomplishing next to nothing.  Her district is a mess.  If she is bringing home the bacon, then only a few are benefitting.  Year in, year out, she does not propose major initiatives that would ACTUALLY make a difference.  No: she simply uses class and race hatred to deflect attention from the fact that she ACCOMPLISHES NOTHING.  And why would she?  She is a mediocrity.

There is always going to be an elite.  This is a fact of human nature.  The only question is whether the elite is those actually possessing ability or those whose main “talent”–whose main means to elite status and power–is moral vacuity and deceit.