I had mentioned a few ideas I had last week. Week before last, now, by my reckoning. Here is one. It is in many respects a repetition of an idea I have shared many times, but in others, not.
I was listening to a BBC podcast on Alexis de Tocqueville, and they commented on how little he cared for the homogeneity of our culture, of how “democracy” precisely meant that there were no great men, as Europeans of his time would have understood it, and how most Americans were mainly interested in making money and joining clubs, and that was about all we cared about in life, beyond our religion. We did not produce “artists” worthy of the name, he felt (they critiqued this claim by pointing out that Poe, among others, was active at this time).
And it clicked with me that while he admired much of our democracy, much of our system, he still felt the need for a nobility, for a class of superior people, however defined, in order for our CULTURE to flourish. You have on the one hand “mere” money making, and on the other, generative, creative, better people who teach the commoners how to live, or at least demonstrate an alternative. A purely “bourgeois” culture he could not accept or embrace . There had to be great art, great music, great literature.
Then it hit me that intellectuals–particularly Continental intellectuals, and those influenced by them–never rejected the notion of nobility, of class, of social structure: they merely posited that post-religious thinkers and artists should occupy the position of nobility.
When you run the past 200 years of intellectual and political history through this Rosetta Stone–what I call a Tubaform–then EVERYTHING makes perfect sense. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is merely the “ancien regime” reinstalled per the specifications of the aspiring elite. They don’t reject the idea of rulership, merely the idea that people they consider their inferiors–hereditary nobility and clergy–should occupy any of those positions.
It makes sense why someone like Jean-Paul Sartre would hate engineers. I read this was a favorite insult of his. On the surface, this makes no sense, since social engineering is at the heart of the Communist project. It consists in little else. (and for my part, I am quite happy to think of myself as an engineer of ideas, which is why I invoke it in the first paragraph of my essay on Goodness).
But for Sartre, it meant “this person is not one of us. He exists purely in the practical domain, which means he is spiritually inferior.” Sartre literally thought of himself as an aristocrat of spirit. And he gave himself to the public as something like a prophet. Although I have not read much of the explanation he himself gave, it seems likely he refused the Nobel Prize not because he felt inferior to it, but SUPERIOR to it. It was a bourgeois–which is a synonym for “intellectual commoner”–prize, given by people he was better than.
And the logical conclusion is that the creed of egalitarianism is one proposed and pushed by elitists, by people who simply want to remove classes “out there”, but who never for a moment consider that they themselves are anything but morally nobler, and fit for nothing BUT rule.
So over the past 100 years, particularly, you have two sets of people competing for the affections of the poor: the intellectuals, and the actual middle class. The intellectuals don’t care about the relative poverty or wealth of the poor (this is obvious), but rather about the installation of an intellectual state which is satisfactory to their “spiritual” ambitions of being a ruling intelligentsia.
Against this, you have small business owners, and large factories, hiring the poor, paying them good wages, enabling them to move into increasingly large homes, and free to be as intellectually mediocre as they like. Catastrophe, from an elitist intellectuals perspective.
This explains the hatred of the bourgeosie: they are competitors, those who are feeding the hungering masses, when they should know that they don’t live by bread alone.
Paradoxically, the intellectuals here, then, become martyrs to the middle class, and hateful and resentful. In their own minds, they are the Christ figures, misunderstood, mistreated, maligned, but still worthy of worship.
Obama was their apotheosis. He was perfectly worthless. He knew nothing useful about anything. No one could accuse HIM of being an engineer. I doubt he ever even took any math classes. Reading scripted lines–and repeating cant and propaganda before that–was his main forte. But he BOUGHT INTO the notion of the inherent social superiority of intellectuals. That was quite sufficient.
And my God, could anyone be more opposite than Donald Trump? Bad hair, bad grammar, money obsessed, intellectually incurious: this stupid, destructive motherfucker just wants people to make money, to be prosperous, and to buy more TV’s and automobiles.
Gotterdammerung. Small wonder their small minds and smaller spirits are so obsessed with him, and with reversing history and the will of the people they actually hate.
Ponder this. It is a slightly new angle on an old theme, but sometimes getting just the right angle allows you to look far down the tunnel, or in this case, the hole where the wild and sick things go and grow.