Once Upon a Time humans lived in Hell. Exploited and oppressed by earls and barons and growing grain to fund the martial adventures of their lords for whom they worked the land, they were subjected to the droit de seigneur of their masters, and subsisted on slave food, nutritionally deficient wheat and maize, instead of the delicious fatty meats enjoyed by their hunter-gatherer ancestors.
And then things got even worse as absolute monarchs learned how to play the power game without the private armies of the their lords. The monarchs taxed trade and they funded their empires with credit from merchants and bankers. So the earls and barons kicked their peasant-soldiers off the land, learned how to "improve" their estates and get rich, and live it up in capital cities as courtiers in grand houses illuminated by thousands of candles.
Then along came the bourgeoisie and invented the modern market economy. These nobodies created a book industry to allow folk to read holy scripture for the first time in history; created a machine textile industry that provided cheap clothes for the masses for the first time in history; they invented steam transportation that allowed the poor to travel around needlessly for the first time in history; they invented oil for lamps that allowed cheap non-explosive domestic illumination for the first time in history. And that was just the beginning.
Oddly, the sons of the bourgeoisie were deeply alarmed by the rise of the bourgeoisie. Karl Marx, son of a lawyer, and Friedrich Engels, son of a textile baron, saw that the world of their fathers was a cruel and exploitative culture that would lead to the extinction, or at least "immiseration" of the proletarian workers, and that the capitalists would displace the feudal lords at the seat of power and would treat the workers exactly as the feudal lords had treated their peasants.
These noble souls would lead the workers in a glorious revolution against their bourgeois fathers and everyone would live happily ever after.
Only the cruel bourgeoisie woke up to the grievances of the workers and gave them the vote.
Now the workers were inside the system. So no need for revolution.
But the scions of the bourgeoisie still wanted to be relevant so they proposed to replace the mutual-aid societies of the middle class and off-load the welfare services of the workers' labor unions and have the whole thing provided by government bureaucracy, run by educated scions of the bourgeoisie like them. This brilliant plan now costs something like 35-40 percent of the income of ordinary people, and might be regarded as a kind of neo-feudalism with educated bureaucratic professionals taking the parts of the old feudal lords.
So the new feudal lords would not be the bourgeois capitalists, but the soft sons and daughters expensively educated at universities that used to educate the third sons of the aristocracy for the priesthood.
After it turned out that the workers were not going to follow their betters into revolution, and showed themselves as patriotic citizens of nation states in the last hurrah of the old monarchical order in 1914-18, the followers of Marx realized that a class-based warrant for revolution wasn't going to cut it. So they bent their revolutionary sails on new spars, leading traditionally marginalized minorities and women out into an ocean of unjust racist and sexist white male patriarchy.
Good point, said the middle class. Let's give women the vote and minorities civil rights, and let them join the Great Enrichment.
So now women and minorities were inside the system. So no need for revolution.
Oh yeah, said the well-born activists, what about gays! OK, let's give them gay marriage.
Oh yeah, said the well-born activists, what about Christian bakers that won't bake cakes for gay weddings? And what about illegal immigrants, the homeless, Islamophobia, and climate change?
You can see the point. The well-born leftist culture requires, for its oxygen, the existence of helpless victims outside the system for whom the threat of violence is the only way to get the attention of the "system." And who is to lead these helpless victims but the "woke" sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie? And yet time and again, the "system" responds to the demands of the marginalized, removing the need for the activists and their activism.
A visitor from another planet might consider that, all things considered, the human middle class is not that interested in political power and will listen to any reasonable appeal for a redress of grievances. Unlike our lefty friends that want to shut up and humiliate anyone that raises a peep against their agenda.
In The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche argues that asceticism is the natural human response to the end of the old world where noble heroes actually enjoyed visiting the most frightful cruelties on their defeated enemies. After the pacification of the world the appetite for cruelty had to find an outlet, and in the event the appetite was turned from the enemy without to the enemy within -- literally to visit cruelty on our own bodies.
Perhaps we can understand our lefty friends in a similar analysis. The essence of manliness is to go out and conquer the world. But what if you are a soft and expensively educated scion of wealth, ill-suited to the rough and tumble of the route of march and the military campaign, or even the mildly chaotic world of the business startup and the third round of financing? What do you do then? Why, you set out to conquer the inner world, the ordinary people of the nation state going about their ordinary business of wiving and thriving, putting yourself at the head of an army of the dispossessed that have been cruelly insulted by the bigotry of the ordinary people that are too busy wiving and thriving to pay attention to the Real Issues.
Cervantes deliciously satirized the end of the warrior culture with Don Quixote. Where is the modern genius to satirize our present lefty activists into incoherence?
Oh wait. His name was Tom Wolfe, and our liberal friends still don't realize what he did to them.
Anyway, one day the heir to Tom Wolfe showed up, wrote a satire of liberalism so clever and biting that liberals all curled up into a ball of embarrassment and promised never to do activism ever again.
And so the deplorables all lived happily ever after.
And then things got even worse as absolute monarchs learned how to play the power game without the private armies of the their lords. The monarchs taxed trade and they funded their empires with credit from merchants and bankers. So the earls and barons kicked their peasant-soldiers off the land, learned how to "improve" their estates and get rich, and live it up in capital cities as courtiers in grand houses illuminated by thousands of candles.
Then along came the bourgeoisie and invented the modern market economy. These nobodies created a book industry to allow folk to read holy scripture for the first time in history; created a machine textile industry that provided cheap clothes for the masses for the first time in history; they invented steam transportation that allowed the poor to travel around needlessly for the first time in history; they invented oil for lamps that allowed cheap non-explosive domestic illumination for the first time in history. And that was just the beginning.
Oddly, the sons of the bourgeoisie were deeply alarmed by the rise of the bourgeoisie. Karl Marx, son of a lawyer, and Friedrich Engels, son of a textile baron, saw that the world of their fathers was a cruel and exploitative culture that would lead to the extinction, or at least "immiseration" of the proletarian workers, and that the capitalists would displace the feudal lords at the seat of power and would treat the workers exactly as the feudal lords had treated their peasants.
These noble souls would lead the workers in a glorious revolution against their bourgeois fathers and everyone would live happily ever after.
Only the cruel bourgeoisie woke up to the grievances of the workers and gave them the vote.
Now the workers were inside the system. So no need for revolution.
But the scions of the bourgeoisie still wanted to be relevant so they proposed to replace the mutual-aid societies of the middle class and off-load the welfare services of the workers' labor unions and have the whole thing provided by government bureaucracy, run by educated scions of the bourgeoisie like them. This brilliant plan now costs something like 35-40 percent of the income of ordinary people, and might be regarded as a kind of neo-feudalism with educated bureaucratic professionals taking the parts of the old feudal lords.
So the new feudal lords would not be the bourgeois capitalists, but the soft sons and daughters expensively educated at universities that used to educate the third sons of the aristocracy for the priesthood.
After it turned out that the workers were not going to follow their betters into revolution, and showed themselves as patriotic citizens of nation states in the last hurrah of the old monarchical order in 1914-18, the followers of Marx realized that a class-based warrant for revolution wasn't going to cut it. So they bent their revolutionary sails on new spars, leading traditionally marginalized minorities and women out into an ocean of unjust racist and sexist white male patriarchy.
Good point, said the middle class. Let's give women the vote and minorities civil rights, and let them join the Great Enrichment.
So now women and minorities were inside the system. So no need for revolution.
Oh yeah, said the well-born activists, what about gays! OK, let's give them gay marriage.
Oh yeah, said the well-born activists, what about Christian bakers that won't bake cakes for gay weddings? And what about illegal immigrants, the homeless, Islamophobia, and climate change?
You can see the point. The well-born leftist culture requires, for its oxygen, the existence of helpless victims outside the system for whom the threat of violence is the only way to get the attention of the "system." And who is to lead these helpless victims but the "woke" sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie? And yet time and again, the "system" responds to the demands of the marginalized, removing the need for the activists and their activism.
A visitor from another planet might consider that, all things considered, the human middle class is not that interested in political power and will listen to any reasonable appeal for a redress of grievances. Unlike our lefty friends that want to shut up and humiliate anyone that raises a peep against their agenda.
In The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche argues that asceticism is the natural human response to the end of the old world where noble heroes actually enjoyed visiting the most frightful cruelties on their defeated enemies. After the pacification of the world the appetite for cruelty had to find an outlet, and in the event the appetite was turned from the enemy without to the enemy within -- literally to visit cruelty on our own bodies.
Perhaps we can understand our lefty friends in a similar analysis. The essence of manliness is to go out and conquer the world. But what if you are a soft and expensively educated scion of wealth, ill-suited to the rough and tumble of the route of march and the military campaign, or even the mildly chaotic world of the business startup and the third round of financing? What do you do then? Why, you set out to conquer the inner world, the ordinary people of the nation state going about their ordinary business of wiving and thriving, putting yourself at the head of an army of the dispossessed that have been cruelly insulted by the bigotry of the ordinary people that are too busy wiving and thriving to pay attention to the Real Issues.
Cervantes deliciously satirized the end of the warrior culture with Don Quixote. Where is the modern genius to satirize our present lefty activists into incoherence?
Oh wait. His name was Tom Wolfe, and our liberal friends still don't realize what he did to them.
Anyway, one day the heir to Tom Wolfe showed up, wrote a satire of liberalism so clever and biting that liberals all curled up into a ball of embarrassment and promised never to do activism ever again.
And so the deplorables all lived happily ever after.
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