Mostly I agree with this but a couple of points you don’t make explicit but need to make explicit:
1) High IQ as NOT correlated with being a better person in any moral sense: you point out that the elites are the ones who engage in all kinds of horribly dishonest behavior in order to win status games and have no self-awareness about how justified the resentment against them is.
2) Eventually this elite foolishness becomes very seriously damaging—that point has now been reached in a way that the proles can’t possibly ignore with the drag queen and transgender ideologies being VERY FORCEFULLY PUSHED ON THEM AND HARMING THEIR CHILDREN.
This is a five-alarm fire, culturally. It is fine that you understand the elites, but you don’t condemn them enough where they need to be condemned.
Mostly agree, my biggest difference is in step two as follows:
1. Politicians and bureaucrats are punished much more for errors than they are rewarded for good deeds (negativity bias and/or slave morality).
2. While egalitarian ideologies diminish the reaction to both errors and good deeds, this is beneficial to politicians and bureaucrats due to 1. Counterintuitively this is more beneficial the further up the hierarchy you go since the effect of 1. becomes stronger.
3. Even if people do not consciously realize 2., the more egalitarian ones survive in their roles or climb up with higher probability than non-egalitarians.
Excellent analysis. The skeleton in the cupboard is race. The large majority of whites vote and act in a colorblind fashion. Upper-, middle- and lower class blacks are 100% ethnonepotist - on a jury, they will vote to exonerate the criminal solely based on the skin color. Ditto resource distribution. This cannot continue forever.
"The idea that poor people are always the victims of forces beyond their control has become the standard way to discuss inequality and poverty."
Poor whites are held accountable. The kid who drove into a violent mob and caused a woman's death at the Charlottesville riot in 2017 was sentenced to I think 300+ years. Blacks, on the other hand, murder people in cold blood all the time and receive much lighter sentences.
After Kneeling Nancy and the 2020 Saint Floyd riots (apparently covid doesn't bother BLM/antifa rioters) hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into NGOs like the NAACP. Nothing comparable to any police involved death of whites, as white oriented groups are reviled as racist and pure evil. Jared Taylor, for instance, at American Renaissance, is an academic who isn't irrational at all but merely states the obvious. It's actually kind of funny that whites, and only whites, are supposed care about what other groups think about them and are terrified of being called racist. This great fear has no precedence to my knowledge and exists no where else.
White artists, composers and even fashion designers are now being accused of "cultural appropriation" and non-whites are demanding recognition in the work or censorship. Meanwhile, their accusers appropriate whites' various inventions, medical treatments, language, clothes, music, etc.
People nowadays who brush off race or pretend there is some sort of equivalent derangement when discussing social/cultural issues seem, to me, to be in deep denial. From my point of view race (and sex) are at the very heart of any analysis. Ignoring them just seems bizarre. And no, I'm not in fear of lower class competition. I simply believe white people are a unique group who are in a spiritual death spiral and are unable to maintain their sacred spaces. Sad.
That said, I appreciate your attempt to wade into this miasma.
How funny, I posted this (below) in January 2021. Yours is obviously much better.
"A theory: social classes don't like their immediate neighbors. At least for the classes in the middle.
The upper-middle class doesn't like the rich, whom they perceive as plutocrats who rig the system. They also don't like the lower-middle class, whom they see as ignorant and bigoted. But they speak fondly of the poor, whom they regard as having been cheated by an unfair system.
The lower-middle class, meanwhile, disdains the upper-middle class for their perceived elitism and entitlement. And in turn they don't like the poor, whom they consider lazy freeloaders who don't want to work. However, they have no problem with the very rich, whom they feel have earned their wealth.
I don't know what the very rich or the very poor think."
Step 4 seems to be your strongest section. But maybe that is just my own bias showing.
Buzzfeed should have a quiz that tells you what class you belong to based on education, income, taste, identity, etc. Where would it put me? White, cis, straight, millenial, male, married, Father, $130k income, graduate level education (non-elite or Ivy), christian who works out, likes hunting, votes knowing his vote doesn't matter but feels cathartic, reads Hanania.
I would guess high-prole or upper middle striver. But I know a lot upper-middle strivers and I'm not that smug and insecure. Ok maybe a little smug but not in the same way. Like, I don't need to see myself in the free city lifestyle magazine attending a banquet sniffing my own farts...yeah, definitely high prole.
This essay oozes disdain for the "lower classes" from which the author firmly distances himself. Predictably he shoots a few arrows at the "proles" who supposedly reject COVID jabs only because jab pushers are Woke. The author is too protective of his social status (and too proud of his long-winded theory) to risk acknowledging Big Pharma's takeover of the CDC and NIH.
These factors come into play, particularly the idea of women having an increased voice/role in societies. However, too many, particularly on the left, fail to recognize that actual differences in thought process, values, etc exist between men and women how those differences affect each of those areas.
However, you are missing the forest for the trees. It boils down to a 1 main idea and most everything else in an outgrowth of it:
The rich and powerful have zero real accountability. They are corrupt and manipulate the system for their benefit while screwing everyone else over. They buy or are the politicians and can manipulate the law through the system they built to protect themselves. Need a simple example? Who are/were Epstein's clients? Why arent they being prosecuted? Why does the mainstream media have no interest in finding out who they are?
Because the people mentioned above have no accountability, none of the issues, problems, complaints of the majority are addressed. Sometimes, at best, they are thrown crumbs and told be happy about it. The 'elite' do whats in their best interest which makes the situation worse for the rest.
And it might not be quite so bad if those elites were actually elite, but they arent. They are terrible at their job. Nearly all of our major problems, both domestically and internationally are their fault.
Nearly every major foreign issue weve dealt with since WWII was a direct result of their previous action. Iraq, Iran, Bin Laden, Saddam, Russia, China, all direct results of actions we have taken in an attempt to solve a previous 'problem'.
Our domestic issues like budget problems, social security, expensive medicine, failing education, rising poverty, again direct results of the decisions and actions (or lack thereof) of those same set of 'elites'.
Always playing games instead of legitimately attempting to solve a problem. Worrying about who got credit and if it would help the other side too much. Inserting poison pills into something that might be good. Only supporting ideas where they can benefit beyond just doing their job. Writing loopholes that you can drive a convoy through so it appears they are doing something. Crafting legislation with no benchmarks or tracking to see if what they are forcing on is effective or efficient.
And a media that only challenges opposition politicians just enough and at certain times to stoke some angry, but never really to force the issue or truly hold some accountable.
This corruption has reached a level that is approaching too much for people to tolerate anymore. The problems, debt, etc is has created and allowed to build is reaching a breaking point.
TLDR Double standards, hypocrisy, and corruption of the rich, media and politicians (the so called 'elites') has reached a point where its so blatant and frankly incompetent that people are reaching a breaking point.
Intriguing to be sure, but maybe I missed something, but I found myself thinking that the whole analysis is too divorced from outcomes. Maybe it is me just reverting back to the materialist/economic view of things, but there are trillions of dollars at stake in the outcomes of elections. 2022-era Left/Elites parties disproportionately direct those resources towards cities, blue states, universities (and their graduates via loan forgiveness), nonprofits, Federal and international bureaucracies, and foreign aid/adventurism, whereas 2022-era Right/Populists basically starve all of that in favor of general business and personal tax cuts, protectionism/tariffs, family supports, rural areas, and military buildups. These aren't small matters, it's not uncommon that people pay 30-40%-50+% of their income in taxes, and whole segments of the economy are based either directly or indirectly in some kind of government support. The economic stakes in the regulatory state might be even bigger still.
So yeah sure a lot of the culture war is essentially tribalism, with the tribes being motivated in large part by psychological animosities held by the extremes, but not sure you can divorce that from the huge actual stakes that are involved in these conflicts.
Embarrassingly bad analysis. If you want to understand the rural/urban divide dynamic look to Henry George, he understood and explained it perfectly. It is indeed economic (despite your shoddy article) and is due to land rentierism gradually consolidating all wealth into the hands of the urban at an exponentially faster rate than rural and exurban (in an entirely parasitical way I might add, although the urban are not actually aware of this mechanism). This is due to the inelastic supply of land (land in the economic sense, not merely the colloquial sense) resulting in urban monopolization being the fastest guarantor of (rentier) wealth increase despite being its least taxed. It would take a small booklet to properly explain the dynamic but you can search YouTube for "for the land is mine dvd restored" and the first result will be a decent primer. Professor Henry Dodson has two YouTube channels further expounding on all aspects of Henry George's theory, and then of course there's "Progress and Poverty," George's magnum opus. As an aside, culture is largely an export of capital accumulation via advertising and other corporate commercial interests. If politics is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from capital accumulation. Our culture is not something that arises organically, it is something developed and foisted with intentionality.
I am sympathetic to the idea that people like shitty, "sophisticated" stuff for the sake of the class marker, but I worry you might take it too far. You don't even consider the possibility that simply being well versed in art and literature and architecture means that the tricks that make for a conventionally attractive building or typically moving novel start looking trite and predictable. I bring this up because I've noticed I've become more friendly to certain sorts of avant-garde stuff the more I look into art.
Another problem with this hypothesis is classical music. Elites by and large listen to the classical music proles associate with capital-c Classical Music (Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, etc), not the garbage produced after WWII. It might be that proles just don't like classical music in general so the pressure to look for something more complex is quite low, but its not like there is a lot of prole interest in art or books either. I think this suggests "upper class" taste is much less feigned than you propose, since nobody in the upper class has trouble admitting that they prefer Bach to Joan Tower or whatever.
Another problem with this hypothesis is that elites have completely lost their shame about liking music for proles. When I was growing up, listening to latino dance music was heavily frowned upon and upper-class nightclubs would just play pop or harmless rock or whatever, while nowadays nobody has any shame about liking stuff like Bad Bunny. The problem here is that such music is just popular at every social class, so at least there are some domains where what people truly like will just win in the end, no matter the signalling value (or lack thereof).
If your analysis is correct, then liberals are making a huge mistake by absorbing ideologies like Ibrahim Kendi’s that are simplistic enough to be accessible to low class whites. In doing so, they enable the lower class to engage the ideas themselves, which in this case are straightforwardly rubbish.
Additionally, as people with lower cognitive abilities proliferate in the elite (due to non merit based admission) and bring their simplistic ideologies to bear on their institutions, then the genuinely high IQ will be faced with a quandary: (1) fool themselves into believing that the high class ideology is coherent, (2) form their own group, (3) shamelessly take on absurd intellectual positions for status, or (4) publicly adopt the intellectual positions while subtly signaling their disagreement. (1) can only be done in a quasi-religious manner. (2) is basically what happened with the intellectual dark web. Despite what conservatives claim, I think (3) is quite uncommon except among politicians. (4) is what most people will do.
My entire immediate and outside family seems to be an outlier in your theory, which I understand can't cover every situation, but seems strange to me. First, if higher IQ is associated with the elite and those elite look down on lesser IQ population, why aren't black people also looked down upon if they are poor or for what reason are they being used? Second, as an upper middle class family that "clings to" traditional values, has Master's Degrees (IQ) and votes for Trump because the left is too far gone while our poorer, less educated family members always vote D into office because they are afraid of losing benefits, I wonder how many other Republicans are out there in my situation that aren't taken seriously because it is assumed we are too stupid to understand politics? Not in a personal sort of way, just wondering as a matter of facts. Sorry for the run-on sentences (as my mind races) 😄
Good God, it is much more simple - the elites have enough power to impose that power and spread their increasing mental illnesses . . . the stupid succumb, while the opposition comes from those that recognize the utter bullshit that the upper classes embrace. And it is bullshit.
I agree with most of this. I think it mostly explains the professional-managerial class and the white fraction of the working class, though.
I would add that billionaires, because they can donate millions of dollars, can actually become rational actors in swaying politics by donating enough money to a candidate to make them do what they want.
The motive: Resentment against the possibility of losing your social status against social climbers. When Napoleon stripped German guildsmen of their privileges of closed markets, their outcompeted sons became the nucleus of German Romanticism, painting Republicanism as Anti-German, treacherous, and, ultimately, Jewish. More often than not, today's culture warriors are descendants of the culture-defining class. E.g. When a white person is chastising himself for his "white-privilege" such awkward looking performances of self-degradation aren't aimed at himself, but at those lesser whites as he is effectively cordoning off the upper social stratosphere: You can not join unless you bow down first.
Mostly I agree with this but a couple of points you don’t make explicit but need to make explicit:
1) High IQ as NOT correlated with being a better person in any moral sense: you point out that the elites are the ones who engage in all kinds of horribly dishonest behavior in order to win status games and have no self-awareness about how justified the resentment against them is.
2) Eventually this elite foolishness becomes very seriously damaging—that point has now been reached in a way that the proles can’t possibly ignore with the drag queen and transgender ideologies being VERY FORCEFULLY PUSHED ON THEM AND HARMING THEIR CHILDREN.
This is a five-alarm fire, culturally. It is fine that you understand the elites, but you don’t condemn them enough where they need to be condemned.
Mostly agree, my biggest difference is in step two as follows:
1. Politicians and bureaucrats are punished much more for errors than they are rewarded for good deeds (negativity bias and/or slave morality).
2. While egalitarian ideologies diminish the reaction to both errors and good deeds, this is beneficial to politicians and bureaucrats due to 1. Counterintuitively this is more beneficial the further up the hierarchy you go since the effect of 1. becomes stronger.
3. Even if people do not consciously realize 2., the more egalitarian ones survive in their roles or climb up with higher probability than non-egalitarians.
Excellent analysis. The skeleton in the cupboard is race. The large majority of whites vote and act in a colorblind fashion. Upper-, middle- and lower class blacks are 100% ethnonepotist - on a jury, they will vote to exonerate the criminal solely based on the skin color. Ditto resource distribution. This cannot continue forever.
"The idea that poor people are always the victims of forces beyond their control has become the standard way to discuss inequality and poverty."
Poor whites are held accountable. The kid who drove into a violent mob and caused a woman's death at the Charlottesville riot in 2017 was sentenced to I think 300+ years. Blacks, on the other hand, murder people in cold blood all the time and receive much lighter sentences.
After Kneeling Nancy and the 2020 Saint Floyd riots (apparently covid doesn't bother BLM/antifa rioters) hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into NGOs like the NAACP. Nothing comparable to any police involved death of whites, as white oriented groups are reviled as racist and pure evil. Jared Taylor, for instance, at American Renaissance, is an academic who isn't irrational at all but merely states the obvious. It's actually kind of funny that whites, and only whites, are supposed care about what other groups think about them and are terrified of being called racist. This great fear has no precedence to my knowledge and exists no where else.
White artists, composers and even fashion designers are now being accused of "cultural appropriation" and non-whites are demanding recognition in the work or censorship. Meanwhile, their accusers appropriate whites' various inventions, medical treatments, language, clothes, music, etc.
People nowadays who brush off race or pretend there is some sort of equivalent derangement when discussing social/cultural issues seem, to me, to be in deep denial. From my point of view race (and sex) are at the very heart of any analysis. Ignoring them just seems bizarre. And no, I'm not in fear of lower class competition. I simply believe white people are a unique group who are in a spiritual death spiral and are unable to maintain their sacred spaces. Sad.
That said, I appreciate your attempt to wade into this miasma.
How funny, I posted this (below) in January 2021. Yours is obviously much better.
"A theory: social classes don't like their immediate neighbors. At least for the classes in the middle.
The upper-middle class doesn't like the rich, whom they perceive as plutocrats who rig the system. They also don't like the lower-middle class, whom they see as ignorant and bigoted. But they speak fondly of the poor, whom they regard as having been cheated by an unfair system.
The lower-middle class, meanwhile, disdains the upper-middle class for their perceived elitism and entitlement. And in turn they don't like the poor, whom they consider lazy freeloaders who don't want to work. However, they have no problem with the very rich, whom they feel have earned their wealth.
I don't know what the very rich or the very poor think."
Step 4 seems to be your strongest section. But maybe that is just my own bias showing.
Buzzfeed should have a quiz that tells you what class you belong to based on education, income, taste, identity, etc. Where would it put me? White, cis, straight, millenial, male, married, Father, $130k income, graduate level education (non-elite or Ivy), christian who works out, likes hunting, votes knowing his vote doesn't matter but feels cathartic, reads Hanania.
I would guess high-prole or upper middle striver. But I know a lot upper-middle strivers and I'm not that smug and insecure. Ok maybe a little smug but not in the same way. Like, I don't need to see myself in the free city lifestyle magazine attending a banquet sniffing my own farts...yeah, definitely high prole.
This essay oozes disdain for the "lower classes" from which the author firmly distances himself. Predictably he shoots a few arrows at the "proles" who supposedly reject COVID jabs only because jab pushers are Woke. The author is too protective of his social status (and too proud of his long-winded theory) to risk acknowledging Big Pharma's takeover of the CDC and NIH.
These factors come into play, particularly the idea of women having an increased voice/role in societies. However, too many, particularly on the left, fail to recognize that actual differences in thought process, values, etc exist between men and women how those differences affect each of those areas.
However, you are missing the forest for the trees. It boils down to a 1 main idea and most everything else in an outgrowth of it:
The rich and powerful have zero real accountability. They are corrupt and manipulate the system for their benefit while screwing everyone else over. They buy or are the politicians and can manipulate the law through the system they built to protect themselves. Need a simple example? Who are/were Epstein's clients? Why arent they being prosecuted? Why does the mainstream media have no interest in finding out who they are?
Because the people mentioned above have no accountability, none of the issues, problems, complaints of the majority are addressed. Sometimes, at best, they are thrown crumbs and told be happy about it. The 'elite' do whats in their best interest which makes the situation worse for the rest.
And it might not be quite so bad if those elites were actually elite, but they arent. They are terrible at their job. Nearly all of our major problems, both domestically and internationally are their fault.
Nearly every major foreign issue weve dealt with since WWII was a direct result of their previous action. Iraq, Iran, Bin Laden, Saddam, Russia, China, all direct results of actions we have taken in an attempt to solve a previous 'problem'.
Our domestic issues like budget problems, social security, expensive medicine, failing education, rising poverty, again direct results of the decisions and actions (or lack thereof) of those same set of 'elites'.
Always playing games instead of legitimately attempting to solve a problem. Worrying about who got credit and if it would help the other side too much. Inserting poison pills into something that might be good. Only supporting ideas where they can benefit beyond just doing their job. Writing loopholes that you can drive a convoy through so it appears they are doing something. Crafting legislation with no benchmarks or tracking to see if what they are forcing on is effective or efficient.
And a media that only challenges opposition politicians just enough and at certain times to stoke some angry, but never really to force the issue or truly hold some accountable.
This corruption has reached a level that is approaching too much for people to tolerate anymore. The problems, debt, etc is has created and allowed to build is reaching a breaking point.
TLDR Double standards, hypocrisy, and corruption of the rich, media and politicians (the so called 'elites') has reached a point where its so blatant and frankly incompetent that people are reaching a breaking point.
Intriguing to be sure, but maybe I missed something, but I found myself thinking that the whole analysis is too divorced from outcomes. Maybe it is me just reverting back to the materialist/economic view of things, but there are trillions of dollars at stake in the outcomes of elections. 2022-era Left/Elites parties disproportionately direct those resources towards cities, blue states, universities (and their graduates via loan forgiveness), nonprofits, Federal and international bureaucracies, and foreign aid/adventurism, whereas 2022-era Right/Populists basically starve all of that in favor of general business and personal tax cuts, protectionism/tariffs, family supports, rural areas, and military buildups. These aren't small matters, it's not uncommon that people pay 30-40%-50+% of their income in taxes, and whole segments of the economy are based either directly or indirectly in some kind of government support. The economic stakes in the regulatory state might be even bigger still.
So yeah sure a lot of the culture war is essentially tribalism, with the tribes being motivated in large part by psychological animosities held by the extremes, but not sure you can divorce that from the huge actual stakes that are involved in these conflicts.
Embarrassingly bad analysis. If you want to understand the rural/urban divide dynamic look to Henry George, he understood and explained it perfectly. It is indeed economic (despite your shoddy article) and is due to land rentierism gradually consolidating all wealth into the hands of the urban at an exponentially faster rate than rural and exurban (in an entirely parasitical way I might add, although the urban are not actually aware of this mechanism). This is due to the inelastic supply of land (land in the economic sense, not merely the colloquial sense) resulting in urban monopolization being the fastest guarantor of (rentier) wealth increase despite being its least taxed. It would take a small booklet to properly explain the dynamic but you can search YouTube for "for the land is mine dvd restored" and the first result will be a decent primer. Professor Henry Dodson has two YouTube channels further expounding on all aspects of Henry George's theory, and then of course there's "Progress and Poverty," George's magnum opus. As an aside, culture is largely an export of capital accumulation via advertising and other corporate commercial interests. If politics is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from capital accumulation. Our culture is not something that arises organically, it is something developed and foisted with intentionality.
I am sympathetic to the idea that people like shitty, "sophisticated" stuff for the sake of the class marker, but I worry you might take it too far. You don't even consider the possibility that simply being well versed in art and literature and architecture means that the tricks that make for a conventionally attractive building or typically moving novel start looking trite and predictable. I bring this up because I've noticed I've become more friendly to certain sorts of avant-garde stuff the more I look into art.
Another problem with this hypothesis is classical music. Elites by and large listen to the classical music proles associate with capital-c Classical Music (Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, etc), not the garbage produced after WWII. It might be that proles just don't like classical music in general so the pressure to look for something more complex is quite low, but its not like there is a lot of prole interest in art or books either. I think this suggests "upper class" taste is much less feigned than you propose, since nobody in the upper class has trouble admitting that they prefer Bach to Joan Tower or whatever.
Another problem with this hypothesis is that elites have completely lost their shame about liking music for proles. When I was growing up, listening to latino dance music was heavily frowned upon and upper-class nightclubs would just play pop or harmless rock or whatever, while nowadays nobody has any shame about liking stuff like Bad Bunny. The problem here is that such music is just popular at every social class, so at least there are some domains where what people truly like will just win in the end, no matter the signalling value (or lack thereof).
If your analysis is correct, then liberals are making a huge mistake by absorbing ideologies like Ibrahim Kendi’s that are simplistic enough to be accessible to low class whites. In doing so, they enable the lower class to engage the ideas themselves, which in this case are straightforwardly rubbish.
Additionally, as people with lower cognitive abilities proliferate in the elite (due to non merit based admission) and bring their simplistic ideologies to bear on their institutions, then the genuinely high IQ will be faced with a quandary: (1) fool themselves into believing that the high class ideology is coherent, (2) form their own group, (3) shamelessly take on absurd intellectual positions for status, or (4) publicly adopt the intellectual positions while subtly signaling their disagreement. (1) can only be done in a quasi-religious manner. (2) is basically what happened with the intellectual dark web. Despite what conservatives claim, I think (3) is quite uncommon except among politicians. (4) is what most people will do.
My entire immediate and outside family seems to be an outlier in your theory, which I understand can't cover every situation, but seems strange to me. First, if higher IQ is associated with the elite and those elite look down on lesser IQ population, why aren't black people also looked down upon if they are poor or for what reason are they being used? Second, as an upper middle class family that "clings to" traditional values, has Master's Degrees (IQ) and votes for Trump because the left is too far gone while our poorer, less educated family members always vote D into office because they are afraid of losing benefits, I wonder how many other Republicans are out there in my situation that aren't taken seriously because it is assumed we are too stupid to understand politics? Not in a personal sort of way, just wondering as a matter of facts. Sorry for the run-on sentences (as my mind races) 😄
Good God, it is much more simple - the elites have enough power to impose that power and spread their increasing mental illnesses . . . the stupid succumb, while the opposition comes from those that recognize the utter bullshit that the upper classes embrace. And it is bullshit.
I agree with most of this. I think it mostly explains the professional-managerial class and the white fraction of the working class, though.
I would add that billionaires, because they can donate millions of dollars, can actually become rational actors in swaying politics by donating enough money to a candidate to make them do what they want.
The motive: Resentment against the possibility of losing your social status against social climbers. When Napoleon stripped German guildsmen of their privileges of closed markets, their outcompeted sons became the nucleus of German Romanticism, painting Republicanism as Anti-German, treacherous, and, ultimately, Jewish. More often than not, today's culture warriors are descendants of the culture-defining class. E.g. When a white person is chastising himself for his "white-privilege" such awkward looking performances of self-degradation aren't aimed at himself, but at those lesser whites as he is effectively cordoning off the upper social stratosphere: You can not join unless you bow down first.