Amerika

As liberal democracy winds down to a crash, people are looking for excuses to blame anything but the obvious, which is our bad choices based on the illusions inherent to our intent. Dr. Peter Turchin, for example, writes about an illusory collapse which is external and thus can be scapegoated, instead of facing our own culpability:

“Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition that gradually undermines the spirit of co-operation, which is followed by ideological polarisation and fragmentation of the political class,” he wrote.

“This happens because the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions.”

And once we parse it, we see the truth: he is repeating the same ideas that were popular from the Peasant Revolts onward, that our problem is the differences between people, and not the obvious truth, which is the incompetence of most people and all people in committee-style groups.

The spirit of co-operation died with class warfare, and then was resurrected and killed again with the rise of diversity.

Guilty parties can be found not among the natural elites, but among the proles. We The People is the problem. They pursued an illusion and it destroyed society, so now they are blaming the elites.

As always, there is partial truth here. Thanks to the Leftist war on competence, we have chosen new elites, and they are incompetent because they were selected for political reasons, not actual competence.

From this we get a new form of “inequality.” Those who join the Party become wealthy but have to spend their days on unimaginable tedium; those who resists are condemned to poverty, but often have more time to discover life itself.

In the meantime, society collapses, because neither voters nor elites really care at all about the outcomes of their actions.

Tags: elites, inequality, populism