A while back I did a piece on the problem of life as a creative person, "The Conflict of Interest of the Educated Gentry." Life is hard for the would-be creative person. Real creativity is almost certainly a road to failure.
So what does the Educated Gentry, my People of the Creative Self, do? It fakes it; it plays at being creative, ringing the changes on sex, fiddling with a thousand activist projects from automobile safety to trash Nazism. And the nauseating yard-sign virtue-signalling of the #WeBelieve and #BLM set.
There are, I believe, two agendas in our educated Gentry. Part One is the loot and plunder operation, buying the votes of the "oppressed peoples" with the taxes of the "white oppressors." Nothing new here; ruling classes have been playing this game since forever.
Part Two is the bossiness agenda, that we experience mostly through the Activism Culture. If you have been watching the Democratic National Convention this week you will notice that almost all the actors in the videos are "activists" that are passionately and selflessly advocating for some vital moral goal.
We are utterly inundated with the urgent projects of educated Gentry activists. There is the issue of auto safety, triggered in the 1960s by über-activist Ralph Nader. The result is that automobile manufacture is festooned with ten thousand regulations affecting safety, gas mileage, fuel composition, and now climate change. I wonder what the net effect of all that regulation is in lives saved and energy transformed. Trash collection is transformed by the agenda of a generation of environmental activists that want you to sort your garbage into at least three bins: yard waste, recyclables, and trash trash. Every coffee house has at least two bins for garbage festooned with incomprehensible instructions as to what belongs in each bin. Now we learn that it costs more energy to recycle than is saved by recycling. Especially since the Chinese are not accepting our recyclables any more.
Washers and dryers and all other home appliances are subject to energy-saving regulations. Roof-top solar cells are given astonishing subsidies, including paying the homeowner for energy generated at the retail rate. Home construction is subject to ten-thousand regulations, from earthquake strengthening to multi-pane windows to energy-saving insulation.
There is the urbanist movement that pushes regulations to encourage high-density housing, mass transit, and discourage suburban "sprawl." Whatabout bike lanes and transit-only lanes? Bike lanes are mostly used by single young men. Bus lanes take lanes away from ordinary commuters who might be lower-middle-class workers that can't afford gentry-neighborhood homes and commute an hour a day to their construction jobs in the city.
And of course all electronic gear is subject to various regulations designed to save energy.
And that is just scratching the surface.
Is all of this a Good Thing? Could be. Or not. How would we tell? For instance, it might be a good idea to mandate robust home construction with 2x6s instead of the old 2x4s. But whatabout the poor? Are the poor best served by cheap construction that gets them a home or by expensive construction good for the next century?
But we don't really get to have an opportunity to have a frank and fair discussion of the issues on any of these topics, because when it comes to political and moral dialogue the educated Gentry pretty well has the whole thing locked up, in part through their communication skills, in part through their effective moral posturing, and in part from their connections with politicians and bureaucrats in the deep state.
We libertarian types like to say that the market can make most of these decisions without the need for activist soyboys getting into the action. Let the market decide, we say, with the qualification that, of course, we should deal with "externalities" that enable market participants to push costs onto others without paying for them.
But, I like to say, we humans are not automatons going around experiencing life as a profit-and-loss statement. We search for Meaning. As Jordan B. Peterson says in a bunch of videos, you need an "Aim" for your life.
And one of the characteristics of our age is that educated Gentry are forever thinking up a thousand ways to make our lives "safer" and the planet "greener" -- and their own lives more Meaningful.
Ah yes. But what do we do about it? Good question.
I know what we need. We need the educated Gentry to get themselves a new religion, one that emphasizes the right of other people -- Commoners -- to live their lives according to their lights. We need something like the situation that arises in the novel Quo Vadis where the Roman high muck-de-muck sneaks into a Christian meeting outside the walls of Rome and is flabbergasted by the notion of forgiveness and the rejection of vengeance. And then he gets forgiven by a bunch of Christians that he has been harassing. What? It is just beyond his ken. Only of, course, he is in love with Ligia, a Christian girl princess from Lygia, so he has to try to understand.
Yeah. Imagine the flabbergastedness of an average educated Gentry grandee when first introduced to the idea that white-supremacist Commoners have right to live according to their lights, dim as those lights might be. You can't be serious, you racist-sexist-homophobe!
Actually we are seeing this flabbergastedness right now with the Trump Derangement Syndrome among the MSNBC watchers. They can't believe it. They can't believe that Americans could elect a guy like Trump. Forget a glitch in the Matrix. How about the dimming of Betelgeuse?
But really, are they dumb or something?
The Trump phenomenon is pretty simple, if you step outside of your educated Gentry bubble. Trump represents the average Commoner, a voter that is neither educated and plugged into the educated gravy-train nor an "oppressed peoples" victim looking for handouts. That is all. Not remarkable at all.
But if your reality is liberal bubble, then you are talking existential shaking of the foundations.
On the other hand, if you can't see what is right in front of your face you must be as dumb as an ox. Or at least an educated ox.
Yes. Until the day that the educated Gentry can see past their noses and understand that there are people out there that just don't see the world the way they do, we are going to get more of the same: more terminal bossiness from the folks that know that they have our best interests at heart, and know better than we do what is good for us.
See here liberals and educated Gentry and all the ships at sea. There is a word for people like you that know what is good for the rest of America: Oppressors.
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