Status and Power Seeking on the Backs of the Unfortunate

The elites portray themselves as good-doers. The could be some of that, of course, but there is a Machiavellian side to such displays too. Rob Henderson explains:

Elite overproduction happens when a society produces too many people who believe they deserve high status. To get there, they often try to align themselves with genuinely marginalized groups in order to unseat the current elites and replace them. A lot of the time, when you hear someone loudly criticizing elites, what you’re really hearing is an audition to join them—an attempt to co-opt the suffering of people who are actually mistreated.

Even if someone has never personally experienced hardship, they can point to history or to the struggles of people who share their traits and say: they suffered, I’m like them, therefore you should give me power. That might mean a spot at a university, a job at a prestigious firm, or some other coveted position.

What’s interesting is how this shift away from individualism and toward group identity makes it possible for someone who’s only ever known affluence and comfort to be rewarded, so long as they share something in common with a historically marginalized group. Meanwhile, the people who really have been mistreated may get nothing. And yet people seem surprisingly willing to go along with it.

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The Culture Wars Are Not Organic

The culture wars are not organic. They were inflicted on us in a systematic way by powerful monied elites who simultaneously and systematically censored dissent to the official narratives. They did this to distract us and pit us against each other, as Dave Smith explains:

Dave Smith:

Go track how many times the word racism was mentioned. Around 2012 it shoots up. "Social justice" shoots up. Transgenderism shoots up, white privilege shoots up. This was forced on the American people. Why are we having these conversations now? The people did not wake up one day and decide we want to have a national conversation about chicks with dicks. That didn't happen. This wasn't an organic movement.

It was all of the most powerful people decided this is what we're going to talk about. And why was that? Look, when you're failing on policy, you pivot to a culture war. You pit people against each other, so they're fighting each other. We had in this country, we had an Occupy Wall Street movement where leftists were standing outside of big banks, screaming, we are the 99% right wingers had a populist movement called the Tea Party, where they were outraged about the bailouts of big banks, unsustainable debt, government spending. They all like that. That's not what the powers that be like. Look, they like you fighting about issues like abortion. Now, I'm not saying abortion isn't a very important issue. It's a very important issue. But us fighting about that issue doesn't scare anyone at the Federal Reserve. It doesn't scare anyone in the CIA. They don't care if you fight about that issue. They love you fighting over transgender bathrooms.

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