Yes, I know I said I was going to return to the theme of climate change as soon as I got back from my working trip to England. Regular readers will know that my muse is an unpredictable lady, however, and what she decides to talk about is not always what I had in mind. Add to that long hours sitting on planes and trains and Underground cars, brooding over certain recent events, and unexpected insights are hard to avoid.
The recent events just mentioned, and thus the insights, centered on a conversation I’d had recently with a friend and fellow blogger. The friend in question is one of the most intelligent people I know, with a broad knowledge of politics and international affairs, and a habit of incisive analysis that often impresses the stuffing out of me. Our conversations usually range over a dizzyingly broad landscape of ideas and current events, and I expected more of the same. What I got instead was a series of repetitive diatribes about Donald Trump.
Mind you, I have no objection if people want to criticize Trump—no politician should ever be immune to criticism, and I’ve got my own objections to some of the things the current US administration has done—but there’s a difference between thoughtful criticism and the endless rehashing of partisan talking points. My friend did the latter, circling back over and over again to the claim that Trump’s tariffs would result in economic catastrophe and empty store shelves within weeks. Of course he was wrong, and there was never any real danger that he would be right. Anyone who’s paid attention to Trump’s style recognized the initial round of tariffs as the negotiating ploy it obviously was. Governments overseas certainly got the memo and started negotiations in earnest immediately, and the store shelves stayed well stocked.
Yet my friend, usually so acute in his analyses, missed this completely. Instead, he insisted that this time Trump really had gone too far, and would be abandoned by his supporters and driven from office in short order. That gave away the game, of course. People in what we may as well call the laptop class—the people in and around the corporate, government, and nonprofit bureaucracies that dominate our society—have been saying that since Trump began his first presidential campaign back in 2015. They’ve been wrong every time, but that repeated failure somehow never keeps the same prediction from being trotted out every few weeks or so.
My friend isn’t quite a member of the laptop class, but he shares most of its values and interacts with that class frequently. Brooding over the sheer weirdness of our conversation got me thinking about the many comparable examples I’ve witnessed in recent years. Some of those had Trump’s antics as their common theme, but there are also plenty of examples that have nothing to do with the current US administration. It was while I was pondering this, and watching stations on the London Underground go rattling by, that it occurred to me that all these examples came from people from the same social sector: that is, the laptop class and its associated intelligentsia.
That, and another set of repetitive phenomena which I’ll discuss a little later, sent me on a deep dive into the underpinnings of social hierarchy among human beings. In order to forestall the inevitable misunderstanding, let me be explicit here: the positions occupied by individuals in a social hierarchy are assigned by by society, not by biology. It’s the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional reactions that individuals have to the places assigned them by society that are hardwired into their nervous systems.
There’s nothing uniquely human about any of this. Every species of social vertebrate—guppies, chickens, baboons, you name it—follows one of a few standard variations on a common pattern of social hierarchy. In all probability those evolved back in the middle Paleozoic, hundreds of millions of years ago, around the time that the first primitive fish started swimming in schools for mutual protection rather than each going their own way. The neurological patterns that make these hierarchies work aren’t a product of the cerebral cortex, the most recently evolved and bug-ridden part of our nervous equipment; they’re down there in the brainstem. This goes deep.
One of the profound challenges that certain branches of psychology and anatomy level against the arrogant confidence of our species is precisely the recognition that we’re nothing like as rational as we like to think we are. Our rational minds, remarkable as their activities can be, are thin veneers over the top of standard-issue social primate nervous systems. Sometimes our rational minds can guide the rest of our mental equipment, but that’s generally the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time, the primate level takes the lead, and the rational mind simply rationalizes the results, coming up with plausible excuses for what we’re going to do anyway and presenting those as spurious reasons for instinct-driven behavior.
I think most people are aware of this to one degree or another. It’s a common adage among us men, for example, that we can only think with one head at a time, and when the one down between the legs does the talking, it can require an enormous effort to wrest control from it and start thinking with the brain instead. My readers will doubtless have no trouble coming up with many other examples. Yet I haven’t seen much discussion so far of the way that this interfaces with status and hierarchy to create certain familiar patterns of human behavior.
Bring those deep roots into the picture and a great many otherwise odd phenomena make instant sense. Consider the very common social habit among the poor to which the Irish, with their gift for language, have given the name “begrudging.” Begrudging is the systematic and often nasty way that the poor turn on those of their own social class who try to better their individual status. Rationally speaking, it makes little sense, but if you factor in the unconscious nature of status, it’s instantly understandable. Hierarchies only work if most of the people in them accept their status, and cooperate with the system to keep others in their place:
“God bless the squire and his relations
And keep all of us in our stations,”
as rural English people used to pray.
One of the things that’s made the last few centuries so unsettling for so many people is that cascading waves of change have upended traditional hierarchies across most of the world. In the United States, in particular, we haven’t yet had a settled social hierarchy last for more than a century, so it’s been a very unstable place to live. (Note here again that the positions occupied by individuals in a social hierarchy are assigned by society, not by biology; otherwise social mobility wouldn’t happen at all, much less become as common as it has. Once again, it’s the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional reactions to hierarchy that I’m discussing.)
All this instability made upward mobility one of the basic elements of the American credo, as whole generations conveniently forgot that where there is upward mobility there must be downward mobility to balance it. Since the instincts that govern hierarchy change only over evolutionary timescales, however, the reactions that governed the social interactions of Devonian lungfish and African baboons are still fully functioning in all of us, and have predictable results on those whose status changes, as well as on those who end where they began.
This is where I want to bring in the second set of examples I mentioned earlier. It will require some care to avoid giving unnecessary offense here, so I’ll remind my readers that we are talking about instinctive behaviors shared with all social vertebrates and hardwired into all of us at brainstem level. None of what follows should be taken as criticism of the persons in question—not least because any of us in the same situation, would likely behave the same way. With that in mind, let’s talk about the distinctive behavior pattern that’s given rise to the slang term “Karen.”
That term got instant currency a few years ago because we’ve all witnessed the behavior it represents, and those who have worked in retail (as I have) have been on the receiving end of it far too often. A middle- or upper middle-class woman goes into a business and tries to bully the staff into giving her special treatment; if this is refused, she inevitably demands to speak to the manager and deploys the same belligerent tactics. What’s fascinating about this is that the women in question never see their behavior as bullying. From their perspective, they’re simply speaking up for themselves and asking for reasonable accommodation.
I’ve had the chance to watch this in action repeatedly for an interesting reason. Inevitably, if anybody uses the label “Karen” with this behavior in mind in the comments on this blog or my Dreamwidth journal, one of my middle- or upper middle-class female readers sends me a private message demanding that I not permit the term to be used. Yes, exactly: they want to speak to the manager, and tolerably often they do it in the same belligerent way that the stereotype suggests. I don’t recommend trying to tell them this, however. The only thing that works reliably to quell the behavior pattern is a quick verbal equivalent of the alpha baboon baring his fangs.
What makes this fascinating to me is that the women who behave this way aren’t normally belligerent. Quite the contrary, the ones I’ve met personally have one and all turned out to be pleasant, intelligent, sweet-tempered people. I’d have been at a complete loss to make sense of all this, except for my late wife’s passionate fondness for 18th- and 19th-century English novels, in which this same behavior pattern is anatomized in mordant detail. No, it’s not women who display it in Georgian and Victorian literature; it’s nouveaux-riches, men who rose out of the working class into positions of wealth and influence. The contrast between the scion of old wealth, whose manners command instant respect from the lower orders, and the nouveau-riche “mushroom” who doesn’t have those ingrained manners and habits, and has to use bullying and bluster to get what he thinks he deserves, is a constant theme in these tales.
Consider, in this light, the change in status of middle-class women over the last 75 years. As a group, they’ve experienced a vertiginous rise in society, to the extent that I don’t think anyone will be surprised if we get a female president one of these years. In 1950, that was practically unthinkable. It’s a standard trope in the novels Sara loved, though, that it takes three generations or so for a family that’s risen into the privileged classes to learn how to play the role properly. The daughters of today’s middle- and upper middle-class women won’t have this problem; they’ve been raised in social environments that accept their privilege, by parents who have more or less gotten used to their new status. It’s those who are still in the transitional state who are vulnerable to these hardwired reactions.
(Here again, the existence of this transitional state may help remind readers that the positions occupied by individuals in a social hierarchy are assigned by society, not by biology. It’s the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional reactions individuals have to the positions their societies assign them that are hardwired into their nervous systems. I’ve repeated this thrice, following the Bellman’s Law, because I expect some readers to go out of their way to misunderstand what I’m saying in this post, and I plan on merrily mocking those who do so. You have been warned.)
The point to keep in mind is that this same pattern can be expected any time any person or group of people undergo a significant rise in status over the short term. Beneath the veneer of rational thinking and the flurry of rationalizations it produces, their behavior is shaped by patterns of instinct that were age-old before the first dinosaurs, and it requires a massive effort of self-knowledge and self-mastery to overcome those patterns. The same is just as true on the other end of the scale. It’s when we turn to this of the picture, and consider the behavioral impacts of downward mobility, that we can circle back to my friend and his tirades about Donald Trump.
Status is not an abstraction. For most people, it’s an essential ingredient of their identity. Gaining status is disorienting and disruptive, but it has obvious benefits, and most people get used to it in due time. Losing status? Not so much. Rather, it’s felt as a catastrophe, both in practical terms and in the impact on identity. If you’re used to thinking of yourself as one of the important people, the ones whose opinions matter and whose needs and wants ought to be taken into account by everyone else, finding out that this isn’t the case any more is a shattering blow. We can describe the result as status panic. It’s a profoundly traumatic experience.
What makes this especially agonizing is that the members of every privileged class end up thinking of themselves as the natural rulers of society, who deserve the unquestioning obedience and respect of the lower orders. They forget the mordant lesson Arnold Toynbee tried to teach them, which is that the rest of society tolerates privileged classes only so long as they provide effective solutions to collective problems. This is precisely what the laptop class has failed to do in recent decades. No matter what the problem is, the response is to hire more bureaucrats and commission more studies—a move that benefits the laptop class considerably, of course, but doesn’t do a blessed thing to remedy problems that are pressing down with ever more force on the rest of us.
That’s why every scenario spun these days by the laptop class and its penumbra of writers and bloggers ends with Trump being driven from the presidency so that the laptop class can return to power. No other outcome is imaginable to them. When news of the Russian Revolution was brought to Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, at his comfortably secluded palace at Tsarskoe Selo, he is said to have responded in baffled and plaintive tones: “But the Russian people love me!” In much the same way, as the less violent revolution now under way comes to the attention of the current elite in its equally secluded virtual palace—call it Bourgeoiskoe Selo—they’re incapable of grasping that the vast majority of people are sick of their mismanagement of society, and are cheering Trump on as he fires bureaucrats by the job lot.
Nor, to be frank, is any other option available at this point. The United States is effectively bankrupt, having run itself trillions of dollars in debt to pay for all those bureaucrats and studies that the laptop class cheered on. The debt was temporarily possible because of the US dollar’s role as global reserve currency, but that role is crumbling now as nation after nation cuts bilateral deals with its trading partners and shuts the dollar out of the equation. That being the case, the only remaining option is to slash federal expenditures to the point that they can be covered by current tax and tariff revenue, and then force a technical default on America’s overseas debt.
A case could be made, in fact, that this is why Donald Trump is president just now. Everything he’s done in his first months in office follows the standard script of a CEO brought in to prepare a badly indebted company for bankruptcy and reorganization: he’s cutting wasteful expenditures, laying off excess staff, terminating whole departments, forcing renegotiations of contracts with vendors and partners, and pulling back from commitments that can’t be sustained. It’s occurred to me more than once that business interests, recognizing the inevitability of a default, decided that it was time to back a presidential candidate who has plenty of practical experience with strategic bankruptcies and knows how to handle them.
The difficulty for the laptop class, of course, is that this means that they’re on the chopping block, just as definitively (though not quite so literally) as the French aristocracy in the years following 1789. It’s not just that the sprawling financial ecosystem that funneled trillions of dollars out of the federal coffers and into a cascade of bureaucracies—public, private, official, off-the-books, you name it—is being dismantled, though of course that’s a massive issue: many thousands of members of the laptop class are already having to find other jobs in a market that has very little use for their existing skill set. It’s even more devastating to them that, as their class falls from power, nobody has to defer to their opinions or care what they think.
This, I think, is the subtext behind much of the high strangeness of the last decade or two. Once the supremacy of the laptop class started to face sustained challenges, members of that class rallied reflexively around whatever banner of expert supremacy got trotted out for adulation. That’s why thousands of people, who’d long insisted that Big Pharma couldn’t be trusted and natural remedies were best, pivoted on a dime and began insisting that the inadequately tested experimental drugs churned out by Big Pharma and mislabeled “Covid vaccines” were the only option—and why many of them nodded in bland acquiescence when the media proclaimed that anybody who refused to take those drugs should be rounded up and thrown into camps.
I watched that process in something like a state of shock, as many of us did. I also watched people who were alive and aware of the media during the great global cooling scare of the 1970s and 1980s angrily insist that nothing of the sort ever happened, only to turn red-faced and change the subject when I brought out the evidence. We’ve all seen plenty of other examples. What they all have in common is that they involved reflexive rejections of challenges to officially approved opinions, and thus to the supremacy of the laptop class, which prides itself on its power to define reality for everyone else.
We’re likely to see much more of that in the decade or so immediately ahead. The United States right now is in the middle of a full-blown elite replacement cycle, as significant as the ones that followed the events of 1865 and 1932. The crisis of the 1860s led to the replacement of the plantation aristocracy by a new class of industrial magnates; the crisis of the 1930s saw the ineffectual successors of the “robber barons” shoved aside by a new class of government and corporate bureaucrats whose successors make up the laptop class of our time. Now it’s the bureaucrats’ turn to be elbowed aside by a new entrepreneurial class, which will inevitably go through the same replacement process, perhaps around 2100.
In the meantime, of course, the rest of us have to deal with a laptop class in the midst of full-blown status panic, flailing around frantically in an attempt to convince themselves that some sequence of events or other will restore them to their supposedly rightful place as masters of the world. I’d encourage my readers not to take any of those flailings personally. The people in question are going through a traumatic shift in self-image, battered by reactions that date from before our ancestors first crawled up onto dry land. While they’re incapacitated, it’ll be up to the rest of us to think about what realistically can be done to deal with the turbulent future bearing down upon us—a future that hasn’t been improved, and in some ways has been seriously worsened, by the gyrations of a decadent elite on its way out history’s exit doors.
Excellent post, JMG. I was under the impression as The Long Descent kicked into gear, that most people would deal with the reality of what was possible, and what was not. But I was looking at through the lens of science and economics, and not the much more slippery process of psychology and “status”.
Your post today certainly explains how much of the chaos today is self-inflicted to some degree, crazy reactions a result of deep-rooted instincts, and suffered by those who cannot comprehend the processes happening in the Big Picture of things outside of their hard-wired perceptions.
While I won’t argue that a decline in status is a big driver of modern behaviors by many, I also am of the opinion that brain-washing propaganda and reactions based on trigger words/phrases/views is also a big part of what’s going on.
Intentional chaos for the elites and their minions, the bureaucrats, to maintain control and wealth.
I am grateful for your profound insights into our current status as a society in evolution. You certainly have a way of making sense of what is currently at the root of why certain members of society think and act (seemingly unconsciously) as they do.
Mr. JMG,
The moment that best embodies the collapse of the laptop elite was during COVID. Watching the Professional Managerial class shutter the nation to protect themselves while forcing lower class “essential workers” into their jobs is the perfect example of the failures of these “laptop warriors.” I think that was the moment I knew that the trained leaders of the world are quite fallible!
Would love to hear other examples of Laptop Class failures, for the lols I guess. Glad you are back from your travels!
Well, actually, there are in theory other options. One could, for example, tax the rich since deficits are a matter of revenue and expense. In fact, on a per capita basis, federal civil servants have been in decline for generations and are not a driver of expenses. Contractors to the federal service, used to replace civil servants, cost far more than doing in the public sector way and it’s not even close.
Trump’s actual budget massively increases the deficit, and it’s not minor, in order to give more tax cuts and other preferments to the actual ruling class, which isn’t the laptop class. The laptop class are the courtiers of the current/previous systems, parasites to be sure, but they aren’t the driving force and haven’t been for some time.
Trump’s actions are not those of someone who is fixing the deficit, though they are those of one trying to change the courtier class, which is necessary for the full rule of the oligarchs. A good hard look at who controls Vance would be advisable.
You will not like the new regime even as much as you liked the old one.
The problem with being almost always right, as you have been for decades, is recognizing those few times where you aren’t.
Have you heard about the 4am Club? Neither had I until a few days ago… The 4am Club is comprised of people (solely women as far as I can tell) who woke up at 4am on November 6 in a state of panic because they had gone to bed thinking they would wake up to Kamala Harris being President. The 4am Club women are convinced they are on the wrong timeline and that if they unite their consciousness — they are largely atheist and don’t believe in God, gods, or prayer — they can shift the timeline to one where Harris is President and Trump was the loser on November 6. The most recent date we were supposed to shift was the 14th. I have not checked TikTok to see if there is a new date set since the 14th clearly failed.
Brilliant piece, excellently argued. Thank you for shifting gears to follow your muse. Many of us out here have had similar experiences to the one you describe with your friend.
I wondered while reading this post if you’d agree that perhaps gay men are now part of the Karen contingent. I’ve had some recent experiences that suggest they are, in one strong example an over-involved parent with a gay son in tow, both demanding the earth and sky in a world with not much to spare.
“Leveling Down” is not ideal but it is the most common way historically that inequalities and hierarchies get reduced in practice.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691271842/the-great-leveler?srsltid=AfmBOorB6-WTSdZKy5-1RZd7hrLLAyMA6xMdVPMAoiazimzLvN5ufANC
I have read some speculation that the end of the American Empire may be less like the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire (the common cliche) and more like the far more extreme distintegration of the Frankish Empire in the 9th Century with hundreds of city states and small fiefdoms in the aftermath. A comparison to the Holy Roman Empire was actually made by Founding Father James Madison himself!
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed19.asp
@drhooves #1 – Perhaps part of the structure maintaining the status hierarchy is a story, or set of stories, that encode a value system. The elite are seen as the champions of the value system. It’s not just the elites that get replaced, it’s also the stories and the value system.
The space program looks to me like a good proxy for the system with the laptop class at the top. Buck Rogers was already a hero in the 1930s. The lunar landings were the pinnacle of the cycle. By now the space program is turning into a farce.
I remember reading in a biography of Alan Turing that science was not important in the education of the elite in the 1920s. Science and technology, those are the horse and shining armor of the laptop class.
Maybe the antipathy to diversity is a clue to the coming value system. Free markets and free exchange of ideas, those were the ideals of the laptop class. The coming entrepreneurial class is looking to be about rallying large groups to march in step, about organizational power.
You mentioned the French Revolution. Looking at it, the Ancien Regime started collapsing when the interest on their debt reached 50% or so of the total royal budget. Interest on Murican debt is roughly at 15% right now. I think it might surprise people just how quick it can go from where it is right now, to that 50% mark. But we’re not quite there – yet.
Can’t say I can find much sympathy in my heart for any of that “laptop class”. All I know is the current arrangement of things – does not work, deeply dysfunctional. I’m for things that work, whatever that pencils out to in detail.
>Have you heard about the 4am Club?
Is that where your purring cat is cold-nosing you awake at 4am so you can go work out at the gym? Cats love mornings. And you should too.
Drhooves, I’ve assumed all along that the further we get into the Long Descent, the fewer people will be willing to grasp what’s happening, because the widening gap between the image of the future that undergirds their identities and the actual future that’s happening will be too painful to deal with. Yes, there’ll be some intentional chaos, but much more of the unintended kind!
Patricia L, thank you. It’s been something I’ve been brooding over for a long time, for obvious reasons.
Mrdobner, yeah, that’s a fine example of the species. There are of course plenty of others.
Ian, fair enough; you’ve made your prediction, I’ve made mine, and now we’ll see who turns out to be right. One point, though — while the number of federal civil servants per capita has been contracting, the torrent of federal money to NGOs and the whole ecosystem of satellite bureaucracies has soared, and they’re as much a part of the laptop class as civil servants. That satellite ecosystem is also on the chopping block, as I noted.
Kimberly, good gods. I’ve just been looking into several other examples of that sort of flagrant disregard of mere reality. Is there a website or the like for the 4 am club? I’d like to get more details so I can discuss all this in an upcoming post.
Brunette, I haven’t encountered that behavior pattern myself from gay men, but they’ve also seen a vertiginous rise in social status in recent decades, so it’s by no means out of character.
David, you might be amused to know that fantasy author John Crowley, in his brilliant novel Little, Big, equated the US with the Holy Roman Empire, to the extent of having a revived Frederick Barbarossa ruling over it!
Other Owen, I know. My guess is that business interests saw which way things were going, and took action before the 50% mark came too close.
Can so relate to these accurate observations in your essay… I too worked in retail (thirty years!) and have a Trump Derangement Syndrome (otherwise lovely) family member who had attained laptop status after our modest middle class upbringing.
Ironically, both she and I are now experiencing the “status plunging” of getting old, lol!
Thank you for your insights JMG
I am sorry JMG please don’t ban me, just it is a rollercoaster here and recently I have heatlh problems so if something happens it will be a problem for me and I aprecieate your blog I would stay in conversation here
Wer
This is one of your best posts ever, I think, right up there with your classic essay on catabolic collapse!
Indeed, one can’t say too often that “the positions occupied by individuals in a social hierarchy are assigned by by society, not by biology. It’s the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional reactions that individuals have to the places assigned them by society that are hardwired into their nervous systems.”
And I particularly appreciated your emphasis on the role that rationalization plays here. Aristotle once attempted to define the human being as the “rational animal.” No, we humans are not that; if anything, we are the rationalizing animal. Our capacity for rationalization and self-deception may well be our true defining quality as a species.
You have often talked about the four major classes of our society: the investment class, the salary class, the wage class, and the welfare class. But there is at least one other major class in our society that you might have included: the criminal class. By this I do not mean all people who commit crimes (even regularly), but those whose major skilled professions are crimes. As with any class, there are levels of skill and competence here. The most competent members of the criminal class are quite successful at escaping the notice of law enforcement, or alternatively, at corrupting law enforcement to overlook their professional activities.
I have family background in this class: my father’s mother and step-father, whom I knew well as a boy, were successful professional criminals for a number of decades in their prime. They never had any trouble from the law, and also they were smart enough to “go straight” as they aged and had less tolerance for the stresses of criminal activity. Grandpa left home in Copenhagen when he was 13, and went to sea. He had a knack for machines, and so he worked in ships’ engine rooms for a number of years. He left sea in Canada and came to the US, where he became a machinist, and eventually a midway “sharper” (a con artist) with a traveling carnival. In his later years he worked for a major fence (a professional dealer in stolen goods) in Oakland, whose “cover” business was an auction house. Grandma, a young widow at the time, was that same fence’s bookkeeper, keeping both his “false books” (which could be inspected at any time) and his “true books” (which no one ever got to see).
One of the characteristics of the most successful members of this class, to judge by my grandparents’ stories, is their extreme clear-eyed realism. Rationalization is a major weakness in that line of work, and sometimes proves fatal. So I became aware of its dangers at a young age. That was one of the greatest gifts I ever got from my grandparents and their son, my father.
[For those of a scholarly bent, there is now a truly excellent anthropological study of one segment of the international criminal class, Global Outlaws: Crime, Money and Power in the Contemporary World (2007) by Carolyn Nordstrom. I recommend it highly.]
Wow! Thanks for this! The media – my local paper is owned by USA Today – is full of sob stories about children going hungry as this or that program is axed; children whose Sesame Street role models have been of great comfort to them crying out, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, as the King of Siam told Anna. My phone’s News app keeps giving me mainstream (laptop class) sources, and everyone is focusing on Israel trouncing Iran. (P.S. other news sources to browse for except Fox and Al-Jazeera? suggestions welcome.
Meanwhile, college presidents and athletic directors are pulling down big bucks – the raw economic inequality, now of Gilded Age proportions is so bad that even my fellow residents in this enclave of the now-privileged (most of whom were NOT members of the laptop class, being old enough to have come up by older methods,) point to it as a Bad Thing.
Meanwhile, if Trump et. al would lay off the Culture Wars and stick to the economics, I’d be happy. Likewise if my children, and the causes that used to stand for something else, would do the same, we’d be spared a lot of needless hot air.
But, yes, status panic explains a lot of the raw rage and boilerplate !0-minute-hate rantings I’m getting so sick of. Once again, thanks for this.
And welcome back from Glastonbury.
The Grey Badger
A fine insight. I think that it also applies to the hierarchy of nations. The USA and the collect west appears to be terrified, and consequentially irrational, about their relative drop in the hierarchy.
On a related note, I’ve heard a Rumor that they are filming a direct to TV adaptation of Twilight’s Last Gleaming on location in west Asia. It’s currently unclear how closely the script is going to follow the book. But, it’s rumored that they have cast the USS Karen in a leading role. She’s supposed to get into some heated arguments with a Muslim manger over his policies.
“The difficulty for the laptop class, of course, is that this means that they’re on the chopping block, just as definitively (though not quite so literally) as the French aristocracy in the years following 1789. ”
I have often thought about what might have happened had the French and their allies won at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 rather than the British.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Plassey#:~:text=500%20killed%20and%20wounded,then%20capital%20of%20Bengal%20Subah.
Might the added wealth and prestige of a French-dominated India have prevented the revolution and possibly even led to France being a more powerful country than England in the 19th Century.
One of the alternate realities on Tony Jones Alternate Histories (one of my favourite pages) is one where Robert Clive commits suicide early resulting in this outcome.
https://www.clockworksky.net/cliveless_world/ah_cliveless_top.html
https://www.clockworksky.net/alternate_history_top.html
To the gentleman who suggested the answer was to raise taxes on the rich: if you run the numbers you will find that even if 100% of the wealth in the country was confiscated by the federal government, it would only be enough to fund the federal budget (let alone the whole economy) for about 6 months. Then, with all that money back in circulation (after being spent), it would still find its way back into the hands of those who knew how to make money. Redistribution is a myth, my friend. Anyone who thinks that wealth is a zero sum game, neither knows what money is or how it works.
I hit the relatively high status of a senior engineer, looked at my bleak prospects from that vantage point, and decided that my upbringing as a hillbilly surrounded by Appalachian “poverty” was a better life. I could care less about my “status” which is something that my elders (baby-boom family members) find absolutely unfathomable. In the scramble for status, a lot of us forget to be happy along the way, thinking that happiness will follow “accomplishment” and material wealth.
In this vein, I would encourage our host and readers to examine the history of the samurai in Japan during the Tokogawa period. It’s very interesting to note that the society and laws didn’t allow a samurai (noble) to move down in station to something like a peasant or merchant, even when there were no more wars to fight and the samurai often became bureaucrats, criminals or just drunks in debt to the rising merchant class. There was also a law that a merchant could not refuse a loan to a samurai, which might parallel the notion that think tanks or NGOs are “owed” support on the public dime. Perhaps the “laptop class” or the PMC, or the chattering class, or whatever we are calling them today need an escape route out of the status trap and at least into a productive role where they can feed themselves with dignity.
Was just talking about the elite replacement cycle yesterday – it does seem like the root of a lot of the hysteria so common these days.
I’ve also been thinking about the concept of “varnada” (basically, job) and how what you do for a living shapes your character. It’s not always the same as “caste” – you can be born into a Brahmin family and become a businessman (a Vaishya job), for instance, but when they align – like if you are natural astrologer and born into a family of astrologers as my Jyotish guru’s guru was, and you memorize the whole Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra in Sanskrit by the time you’re 8 and then spend the rest of your life applying it, what a difference that makes! And as I get deeper into Vedic studies and practices, I realize how stratified the jobs are – if you are a Jupiterian priest or astrologer, you shouldn’t be doing much Saturnine things like cleaning, farm work, or menial labor, and vice versa. So a Jyotishi spends all his time studying and practicing Jyotish, his consciousness gets shaped by that activity, and can then attain great heights (and the vastness of Jyotish shastra is truly staggering) This makes sense as a result of thousands of years of relatively stable social hierarchies, but…
I also remember the advice of my first spiritual teacher’s spiritual teacher, Richard Rose, who grew up during the depression in West Virginia. He suggested that spiritual aspirants get menial jobs so they could spend their mental energy on spiritual things, rather than somebody who has to think all the time for a living and then has no mental energy left for spiritual pursuits when they got home. This also makes a lot of sense for an American, living in a time when social hierarchies are very unstable.
I then think about the laptop class whose consciousness gets shaped to waste time, find excuses to waste energy, and obey propaganda, and I feel really sorry for them. They don’t even have any useful skills, have basically wasted all their mental energy on busywork, and when the time comes for the class to be liquidated, of course they’re going to become hysterical.
Oh well, off to work in the garden while I listen to Jyotish lectures.
Great post! You nailed it with the idea of elite are tolerated only as long as they provide effective solutions. I think that explains a lot of what we are seeing.
I’m having some trouble understanding this part: “the positions occupied by individuals in a social hierarchy are assigned by society, not by biology.”
You talk about how social hierarchies are biological, going deep millions of years in our evolutionary history, and hold true for all social animals in one way or another. If that’s true (and I think it is), how are social positions not also biologically determined? The baboon knows that the bigger and stronger male has higher social position in the hierarchy. He doesn’t need to be taught that, he knows it instinctively. It’s often the same in human males. So it seems to me that social position must also be biologically determined, if not completely than at least mostly. Because if animals are instinctively attuned to hierarchy, they must also be instinctively attuned to what makes an individual a higher or lower status, mustn’t they? Or am I missing something?
One would hope that cutting off wasteful expenditures would include cutting off military aid and funding to countries like Ukraine and Israel, but Trump doesn’t seem anywhere near interested in that, instead preferring to get the United States involved in yet another costly war in the Middle East.
Cheers for the Bellman. I trust you were equipped with a suitable map for your travels and weren’t waylaid by conventional signs. And that you had been sure to pack a railway share…
@jmg “a future that hasn’t been improved, and in some ways has been seriously worsened, by the gyrations of a decadent elite on its way out history’s exit doors.’ EXCELLENT QUOTE!!
I am in the laptop class (but have 4 healthy chickens, ha ha ha)
I have seen the degradation first hand over the last 30 years — as junior software developer projects back “then” actually made things more efficient.
Around 2015 a lot of the things I have worked on seem to add steps, and complexity, and bureaucracy and delay.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the laptop class is silently adding these cumbersome steps to “protect” their status (or slow down the inevitable).
People who can cut the Gordian knot will rule the future 🙂
Jerry
JMG: “It’s a common adage among us men…”
Q: How do we know that God is a woman with a sense of humour?
A: She gave men a brain and a penis but only enough blood to run one of them at a time.
Funnily, I’ve spent the last week or so thinking about thinking in relation to consciousness and the idea that we are effectively consciousness experiencing this existence using the vehicle of an animal body and its associated patterns and hardwired [instinctual] responses to ‘inputs’.
The personality of incarnation could be a case of ‘intoxication of senses’ where the tools of consciousness (emotions/thoughts) are mistaken for consciousness itself.
Where it gets particularly sticky is that ‘mind’ is also a vehicle for consciousness as well, so where you say:
JMG: “Most of the time, the primate level takes the lead, and the rational mind simply rationalizes the results, coming up with plausible excuses for what we’re going to do anyway and presenting those as spurious reasons for instinct-driven behavior.”
Fear short-circuiting rational thinking disables one of consciousnesses vehicles and takes us another step away from intuition as ‘rational’ goes out the window and action gets driven by deep [animal] patterns.
…if we only think that we are thinking, the issue could be more fundamental than what you are terming ‘status panic’ and it seems unlikely that tinkering with the monkeymind will, on its own, change the direction of spiral – Yes it can be a behavioural issue but ultimately I think it’s a consciousness issue and that’ll need some chewing on.
If the intoxication of the animal self continues to drown out rational thinking and intuition as it seems to be doing in the collective west, we might be about to experience quite the reality dysfunction as minds melt and eyes bulge… to badly mangle Bob Dylan: “Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone… Status, it’s a-changin’
I’ve been brooding for decades, probably the same for most of us here, and now things are so much worse.
One thought that keeps me grounded is something a wise druidry type dude once said: “humans are going to human”. That and “This age is the worst that it will get. Deal”.
My one quibble with this wisdom is that “The Worst That It Will Get” will be unevenly applied across space and time. Experiencing humans getting their primate on is one thing when looking across the counter at a MK1 Mod 0 Karen and quite another in a devastated war zone. I guess that’s where the Fates come in.
One of the many benefits of working through the “collapse now and avoid the rush” strategy over time is that when you begin to learn the skills of LESS (Less Energy Stuff &… em… STATUS?) before you HAVE to, is that you are also, coincidentally, learning the skills of having a lower status (at least in the hierarchy of stuff) before you HAVE to, and both sets of skills are worth having – not least because they undercut the sense of panic.
For which, many thanks. 🙂
It is interesting that people from other cultures ,who now live here in the US ,are much more acutely aware of class structure than Americans are.
I have neighbor from India who I have been helping and advising on home improvement and maintenance projects with his new house. As we were staining his fence we discussed our backgrounds. He was from a tier 3 ( his description)city in India, from a family that ran some sort of cigar factory. When I mentioned that my father had been a surgeon he was very taken aback. In India a surgeon would be a member of one of the highest classes with servants and no expectation that he or his offspring would do or know anything about manual work.
I explained that my father was from a small town in Montana and had worked as a carpenter to put himself through med school. But as good as he was at medicine he really saw himself as a farmer, and raised his kids on a sheep farm taking care of 500 sheep.So I am also ,at heart, a farmer and machinest having spent my career in the down to earth trade of running a machine shop. This was very incongruous to him as I did not exhibit the behavior of social class that he would expect.
But Americans never express such observations as they delude themselves that social class and hierarchy does not exist.
Welcome back. Was a tad worried for your safety based on all the stories of the Orwellian police state Old Blighty.
5 years of quiet anger over the laptop class treatment of we the Unclean 2nd class unfoxed. And now they’ve brought in Carnage to keep the Laurentian elite happy. While your assessment of the unraveling of the PMC/laptop class warms the cockles of my heart I have 4 Trolls who are navigating the Long Descent fairly well so far. And I do not wish for them to suffer greatly for the gross incompetence of Little potato’s band of fools still in Ottawa.
Dear Archdruid: Let me to say one time more that I think that you are a genius.
It looks currently like Trump’s desire to cut some of the vast waste and fraud in the American budget is rapidly diminishing…He wants more money for the Pentagon, which has already failed numerous audits with 20 trillion or so missing, and he’s threatening a war with Iran, which the Pentagon has war gamed before and always ends in disaster…
I’ only ran into two real Karens during the scamdemic, and it was a lot of fun to wrong foot and mock them over their silly behavior…More please!
Excellent post, and thank you!
I experienced a good dose of status contraction myself about 20 years ago, long story, but it was painful indeed. I didn’t understand just how much my sense of personal happiness and confidence was linked to my professional status. On a physical level what was falling away was objectively good for me – less stress, more time for other things and having space to open up to new perspectives (including the ADR!). But I felt the stinging sense of loss on an emotional for several years after the material loss of status. Anyway, it all turned out well and I became quite happy in my reduced circumstances and have walked a few different
paths since, gratefully so.
The way out was to examine myself – mostly through spiritual inquiry and reading a lot about the self and ego, and building up enough consciousness to see clearly what I was hanging on to and why. I was lucky in that I had time to do that, and wasn’t surrounded by lots of other people lamenting the same fate. But it still took time and work. If one has an obviously “Hollywood bad” ego, it’s probably easier to see it and be repelled by it and work to drop it. But if you perceive yourself as one of the good people (smart, in control, successful, etc.) it’s quite difficult to see that clearly, let alone get comfortable with taking yourself down a peg or two.
So, yes, it’s going to be very hard for the concept jockeys of the now passing era – those who manage institutions, or shape elite opinion or explain reality to the masses. Mental health crisis beckons for many, or has already done so. But many will make it happily to the other side – although I imagine a good few, while gravitating to reduced circumstances of various sorts, will never quite get over the habit of imposing their opinions and sense of superiority on the rest of us.
Regarding Ian’s comment at #4, one of the problems in recent decades is “intermediation” – the government bureaucrats who worked in the various programs were indeed replaced by contractors (for “efficiency”), but, curiously, most of them retained their jobs. The contractors, you see, need to be hired and closely supervised, and who better to do it than the people who used to do their jobs?
Losing status? Not so much. Rather, it’s felt as a catastrophe, both in practical terms and in the impact on identity.
I can personally attest to this. I was born in raised in the Professional Managerial Class with the expectation that someone as inherently intelligent as I am would undoubtedly secure a place for myself within this class upon reaching adulthood. Unfortunately, childhood vaccination, I am inclined to think, made me just autistic enough to have significant social adjustment and basic “living life” problems that contributed to this expectation not being met. Part of the problem, of course, was the well-known “overproduction of elites” phenomenon that meant dilettantes such as myself were unlikely to have a place at the PMC table. But once I fully realized what my situation was going around 2001 or so, I started beating myself up about it all day every day and have been doing so unrelentingly ever since then.
It wasn’t until just last week, believe it or not, that I realized that this behavior has likely been a contributor to the persistent middle insomnia problem I have been experiencing for the past nine years (it has been really bad for the past four and a half), and that I realized, in turn, that this behavior and its consequences are inhibiting the accomplishment of whatever purpose for which I have incarnated and requires serious and consistent course-correction. Besides, if I don’t deserve to be treated by anybody else that way regardless of how foolish I was as a young man, then I shouldn’t be treating myself that way because that’s just useless self-cruelty. (As we said in the old hometown neighborhood, “Well, du-uh!“)
It’s good to know that my misguided attitude was something biologically programmed into me so that I don’t undermine my new path of recovery from self-abuse by having yet another reason to castigate myself!
Thoughtful considerations indeed. As always.
And indeed Trump’s role or motivation might be to prepare the US to a bankruptcy. And I do believe this is the idea. But, as events unfold, I really wonder if he will be able to fulfil it.
For all kind of reasons, it seems much more difficult to withdraw from the Ukrainian conflict than he was thinking (or pretending to) while staying out of the endless Middle East wars seems more an more difficult too.
In the meantime, I remember this interview he gave on Bloomberg a few weeks before is re-election. He was saying that raising tariffs by 10 or 20% make no sense as it will indeed only cause inflation. He argued that his plan was much bolder: it called for much higher rates, high enough to put an end to imports and allow American production to take over. And still, in the end, it seems he had to settle for the first option. What is the plan all along ? I’m not so sure…
“I’ve repeated this thrice.” Getting the popcorn ready…
I’m interested in your opinion on Mr. Trump’s recent behavior. His “big beautiful bill” doesn’t look all that different from the previous administration’s budgets (with some token differences such as the border wall). And he seems to have turned on a dime from “we need to get out of foreign wars” to “we stand with Israel and may even get into the Iran war on Israel’s side.” In the latter case he’s going as far as ignoring the evaluation of his own Director of National Intelligence. Has he been “taken behind the woodshed” and told in no uncertain terms that if he values his position and his life he’d better toe the line? (FWIW, I suspect Mr. Obama originally believed in “hope and change” until he had a similar encounter.)
Pulling back from commitments that can’t be sustained…like promoting a massively massive budget bill, or getting the U.S. involved in yet another Middle East war?
I admit, the Orange One certainly convinced a set of people that he was going to downsize that awful, terrible bureaucracy and eliminate Neocon interventionism. Turns out it was all just…a con.
Now that’s some magic, indeed.
By evolutionary necessity, women are socially much more clever than men. Their rise in your laptop class begets imbalances which will take some time to assimilate (or more likely, reverse, in the background of catabolic collapse). Other societal rifts — old/young, rich/poor, educated/uneducated, east/west, rep/dem — ironically serve to moderate the effects of the current M-F uber-rift.
Hi JMG: Again, you have really gotten me thinking about things that are happening around me in a broader sense. What I see now is the movement downward that Spengler talks about. But this has been going on for centuries, if you accept his analysis. But the Caesar phenomenon (I can’t help equating Trump to that) is real I think.
Last summer I bought the cheapo paperback version of his two volume book and proceeded to read it slowly, even underlying the parts that really captured things for me. I feel like what we are looking at right now is part of that inevitable decline in, not only the economic part of our lives, but the cultural and spiritual parts also. Whenever I talk to anyone about current times, I keep bringing up his ideas, which put these things in a different perspective. This current privileged class will experience decline,no doubt, but Western, industrial society is still going to decline, no matter which of our classes reigns supreme. Just my two cents.
@Kimberly
I see you read Bad cattitude. I would advise taking the gentleman with a grain of salt. Ask him about the 2008 financial crisis and how it plays into our current slow decent into insanity. I’m willing to bet he’ll say it plays no part at all, but in my long study of it and the .com bubble, i’d say they were the event horizon. The last chance to turn off the crazy, and be humbled. As you know we didn’t do that, and his refusal to even acknowledge it leads me to question his motives.
Does anyone know how ‘Karen’ came into common usage and if there is an equivalent pejorative for men?
And while I am demonstrating my ignorance of things social – has ‘Karen’ taken the place of calling a woman ‘a bitch’ where men are just referred to as an ‘@hole’ or something more fruity?
Last summer I and some of my family were able to tour the Nemours Estate for the first time ever. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a magnificent French château, complete with massive formal gardens located outside Wilmington, DE. The house and gardens are very specifically designed to say “Know your place, peasant.” Check them out online: https://www.nemoursestate.org/
It was, you guessed it!, built by a member of the DuPont family.
Dear son commented that he’d never get used to living in this kind of splendor. The docent said it takes about two years of luxury and having your every whim taken care of to get used to it and then, to expect it.
I can see her point, looking at how celebrities, tech billionaires, and super athletes behave.
Fra’ Lupo
Don’t forget, Trump granting amnesty to illegals working in farms, restaurants, and hotels after promising American workers that he will deport the illegals and give Americans good jobs.
Amusingly, I recently demanded to speak to the manager at our local Staples!
Bill and I were walking, as is our wont. It was raining and had been raining.
Why did I need to speak to the manager? Because the parking lot drain wasn’t draining. At all. It had never been cleaned so water could only slowly filter through the buildup of mud, leaves, and debris. It sat under several inches of water in a low spot in the parking lot. Shopping centers are not public property so the property owner is responsible for maintenance.
Hershey is prone to sinkholes and poorly maintained drains make them more likely to pop up.
Hershey ALSO got 11 inches of rain in 2011 from Tropical Storm Lee leading to widespread flooding in the township, including one woman drowning in her car mere feet away from that storm drain.
The Staples manager took plenty of pictures and maybe, eventually, that drain will be cleaned.
I think I was fully justified in speaking to the manager!
JMG,
You hit the mark with your assessment of the “Karen” phenomena. There is only one thing I would add that I think has to be admitted by every Karen: Anger. Women who were in the workforce in the 70s, 80s, and 90s were subjected to some pretty nasty disrespect and putdowns. I can tell you from personal experience that it resulted in massive chips on shoulders . What was that term they kept using for me in the office back in the day? Oh, right, “sharp elbows.” Are Karens getting it thrown back in their faces now? Sure, and rightly so. That said, there were things I did and said because I was not respected or given my due and I regret a few, but only a few. And I have worked retail. I understand the anger on both sides.
On the laptop class, you also hit the mark. I am/was part of that class. I got DOGE’d. I took one of the “fork in the road” offers and am very happy I did. I worked hard for the government and some of the work I did was even innovative and high quality, but none of it was necessary. I have lived and worked in the Washington DC area for more than 40 years and take it from me, if they cut 90% of the government employees and all of the contractors, the country would run much much better. Example: the first thing I learned when I went to work for the government is there is a form to fill out for everything. Often multiple forms, all with the same information on them. You know why there are all those forms? So the government can pay someone to process all those forms…
I voted for Trump for the last three Presidential races because 1) Anyone but Hillary; 2) Biden was senile; 3) Covid plus Biden was senile. I don’t like Trump though. I think he is a terrible choice, but we had no choice. I am afraid they are snookering him again with the Iran war thing the same way they snookered him with the Covid nonsense in his first term. This is a personal failing of Trump’s — he gets snookered because they play to his ego. But what do I know, I am just looking at it from the outside.
Anyway, great post!
Eric Hoffer, longshoreman, writer, and social observer said much the same thing:
Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status.
Thanks JMG. The 4am Club is definitely a TikTok phenomenon. I know of no other websites that feature it, though I suspect it could be a thing on Instagram or YouTube. I believe the term was coined by Gia Prism, a self-styled internet healer and psychic medium on TikTok. She’s white and appears to be in her 30s or early 40s. She calls Trump Felon47. He seems to be her Satan. As of a day ago, she has framed this latest failure to ascend timelines as part of clearing the karma of war, which she does not see as imminent, and part of what she is dubbing a “mastery challenge”. In any given Gia Prism video, there is a lot of corporate retreat Bullsh*tese, false transcendence, and a lot of New Age posturing. To Gia Prism’s credit, she does suggest that falling into a pattern of “staying in fear” is not helpful, but the double edged sword she seems prepared to unsheath is blaming her followers for not rising to the mastery challenge because they did not overcome their old, fear-based patterns enough. “We as a collective are struggling with the mastery lesson”, she quips. Uh huh. How did William Miller explain himself once April 1844 rolled in without apocalyptic consequence? Did anybody call him out on his error or did he just keep going?
When I was middle school age, I read an old book called The Primates, part of the Life Nature Library series.I learned that macaque and langur monkey behavior was similar to human behavior in some ways– territories that monkeys are scared to leave or even venture to the edges thereof, dominance hierarchies, baby monkeys needing to be socialized to be functional in adolescence and adulthood, males being less nurturing to infants while still caring for them, and so on.
I didn’t know dominance hierarchies went back to the Paleozoic but I knew from the book that they went back to before our lineage separated from that of the Old World Monkeys.
Most NATO allies are going crazy about Trump, for a simple reason. The world is suddenly more dangerous, with Putin and Xi starting and threatening invasions, and the NATO allies have depended on the US to protect them. Now Trump is effectively telling them he’s leaving NATO, and that they have to pay for their own defense. Defending one’s country these days is incredibly expensive, and it means that the NATO allies may have to give up some goodies they value a lot, such as universal health care. They are desperately trying to persuade the Americans they know to go back to the old ways. Peter Zeihan wrote a series of books that are proving prophetic.
I agree that Trump is acting like a CEO brought to revive an indebted company. I’ve been through corporate shakeouts like that, and they are bloody.
Trump is also following the script for an authoritarian takeover of government, with the full consent of the Congress. That’s the part that concerns me much much more, and sends me out into the street.
I loved every word of this post. I now have a much better framework to make sense of what is happening and why people are acting the way they are. Thank you.
“equivalent of the alpha baboon baring his fangs” Ouch! That must have been gruesome! Having recently been on the receiving end of several of your “grizzled lion stares” I can sympathize. Those pack a punch.
So thinking out loud, the US will go trough its revolutionary stage and the new order is something like big entrepreneurs with a slashed civil servant caste, mostly state level, and a lot more subsidiarity in political organization. But the entrepreneurs can still swim in their ponds and the people get to live under less regulation.
That sounds better then Europe. For now we do not have any other overt option as just go with the system. I literally spoke with a 20ish young woman today who admitted the system was unfair to her, but that’s it. You just have to take it. Later I heard on he radio that our state is going to go 33% over its deficit allowance. Yeah, our laptop class is going to drive this straight over the cliff.
Best regards,
V
On the topic of status for gay men, one thing I’d note is that since the middle of the 2010s, a lot of aspects of gay culture has come under attack by the government and other large organizations in the name of “trans-rights”; I’m far from sure what effect that will have on their perception of their status, but it could explain the seeming lack of gay Karens.
One thing I think a lot of people miss unless they are downwardly mobile by choice is just how dramatic the changes in how people relate to you can be. My family has essentially disowned me, for instance, because I chose to slide downward hard in order to make room for pursuits I care about more than social status. I’m not sure that very many people who have not had this experience understand just how dramatic a freakout people have when someone stops caring about social status….
“Now it’s the bureaucrats’ turn to be elbowed aside by a new entrepreneurial class,…”
I think we’re able to watch that live right now, with MAGA wondering aloud whether Trump’s become afraid of his own courage.
Triggering, incidentally, furious reactions from the other side, who simply can’t believe that in this archetypal moment of the nation rallying behind “a president soon to be at war”, MAGA insists on a NO.
Wer here
If Ican be truthfull I ve never run into a “Karen” in my hometown (thankgod I ve seen them on the internet)
maybe because here in rural areas of Poland people are more level headed than in others. But I’ve seen what other “right thinking people” are doing and behaving like. I will always remember that one character who was riding on a train loudly complaining about everything (because his pal’s Mustang was broken and he was forced to ride with the peasants) and his idiotic coment when we arrives at a station near Trzcianka and he proclaimed after seeing the church nearby ringing for a mass “Look medieval period ahead” I almost come up to him but starting a fight with some rich spoiled brat with a rich connected father probably would have ended in disaster for my familly so I clenched my teeth and left at the Piła stop.
Isaac Salamander Hill The hierarchies where not as strict as you are mentioning there was a fluidity to it that people of European origin just can’t fathom because of abrahamic religion insistence of master and slave. And a brahmin life was the hardest life out there he couldn’t do business, do farming or anything else except to study the Vedas as Bhartiya Civilisation is an oral civilisation so all the information, knowledge and wisdom was passed on via stories. Brahmin priest got the highest respect in society because of his knowledge but lived life in poor material conditions all through out. People from other jaatis and varnas could be priests but they had to live the life of a priest if they were deemed capable. Pre-Industrial Society had varna system which gave people community, purpose and because as a polythestic religion we had different kulas and devi devatas to worship so everyone had a complete life handed to them in which according to your strengths there was fluidity but unlike present times where we are sold that anyone can become anything that was just not true back then you had show something extraordinary out there to do different occupations and the same applied to brahmins if the brahmin was not capable of the living the life then he was not allowed to continue being a priest and was forced to pick different occuption.
This is a (sadly!) timely post for me.
Like many others here, I have a family member who has “chimped out” over Trump. When we were growing up, I (as an Aspie) was always the one having emotional meltdowns, with no friends and generally incapable of dealing with life, whereas he was always good with people, easygoing, and popular. He married well (40+ years together and still going strong) with 2 children, whereas I am an old bachelor.
We both worked full careers in the IT industry. He zoomed to executive level rapidly (thus becoming a member of the “laptop class”) whereas I was always more of the technician, rising only to project management level (“lower” management rather than middle-management).
Now, it seems things have reversed, and I am not happy to see that. We are both now retired. He has his children close by, and his house, car, etc. are all 100% paid for. Materially, he is in excellent shape.
However, I emailed him a week ago, and made the big mistake of casually mentioning that we are in the middle of a ruling-class replacement cycle. I used the phrase “discredited ruling class” at which he erupted like Mt. St. Helens. He accused me of being a stupid ignoramus who knew nothing about American history, asserting that the current ruling class is the best thing that ever happened to America. He closed the letter by saying “Don’t you ever speak to me about a ‘discredited ruling class’ ever again!”
I will mention in passing that he is a Richard-Dawkins-style atheist. I think that is important. In my experience, only people who seriously practice some sort of spiritual discipline in their lives seem able to transcend the “neurological hard-wiring” you mention in your post. To the extent that I have been able to transcend my own “Aspie-ness”, I give credit to God. My own Orthodox spiritual life has given God the “space,” so to speak, to do His work.
All my life, I have heard upper class atheists ridicule religious people, by pointing out that atheists are often more “moral” than religious people are. Well, it is dead easy to be “moral” and “respectable” when you are sitting on the top of the social pyramid. However, if your character is dependent upon having plenty of money and high social status, then you don’t have a leg to stand on when times get hard. I think we are seeing that now. “A crisis does not change people – it reveals them!”
JMG,
I am a little puzzled by your analysis of some of Trump’s actions: namely, if he’s trying so hard to cut costs, why the giant spending bill that costs more than the cuts save? It doesn’t sound like its all essential infrastructure or anything either – a lot of it is military and I really wonder how much of it is useful military spending rather than pork barrelling.
I’m part of the so-called “laptop class”, also a very long-time reader and currently working in the startup and VC world.
It feels like we’re living in a world that’s more feudal than free-market. The main goal of many startups today isn’t to build a product people need, but to craft a compelling demo for investors. Given the extreme levels of income inequality, there’s an overwhelming amount of capital chasing these demos. I don’t see this going away in the short term (emphasis on “short”)
I work at one of the worst offenders—our company has no real product, just endless demos designed to secure more funding. But because there’s so much money in this space, even switching to a “laptop job” at a company doing genuinely useful work would mean taking a 50% pay cut. And if I wanted to do something truly meaningful, the cut would be closer to 80%.
I’ve relocated to a place where I can “collapse first and avoid the rush,” but the system remains rigged against those engaged in any sort of productive work. Choosing when to exit isn’t simple, especially when others depend on me and the impact on their lives would be significant.
As to the status thing – My colleagues are shocked that I do not try to get promoted, do not try to take the lead, that I am “just a nice person to work with without any strong ambition”. I think they have difficulty in even conceiving that one might not place much value on such stuff.
I’m baffled and rather disgusted by Trump’s recent behavior with respect to Iran and Israel, but I’ve learned that reacting emotionally to the man is the best way to get caught in his crazyweb, from which there seems to be no escape. So we’ll see what happens.
But regarding your actual point, I think this makes sense of a lot of the insanity of the last few years. That very much includes phenomena like Cancel Culture, #metoo, and the lunatic obsession with “cultural appropriation.” Each of these turns out to be little more than an easy way to take out rivals for status or delegitimize business competitors– nasty, but highly useful in a contracting environment.
A good article, which means I agree with about 60% of it and find the other 40% fun to play with.
I think as a younger member of the laptop class approaching middle age here, me and most of my contemporaries have kinda… already dealt with the status panic. We know that none of us will ever again know the kind of middle class luxury we experienced as children. For example, a year ago my partner and I rented an apartment with… get this… a *DISH WASHER*. I’ve been washing dishes by hand for 20 years (all of course while working a job that requires a massive education and that technically had a higher salary than my parents), and this thing made me happier than a housewife in a 1950’s general electric commercial.
I don’t think the entrepreneurial class will save us. I don’t even think there is one. Trump and Musk took a chainsaw (it was on stage!) to a broken machine instead of a set of tools. To me, it looked like vandalism. Maybe that’s just the laptop class training talking, a workman’s disgust at a shoddy job. Maybe even having that attitude shows that I missed the joke and took all this governance and policy stuff seriously when I was just supposed to use it for social status and for being smug. I see the techbros and the Thielites as part of the same class as the laptop havers and lanyard wearers: doomed, deluded, and fighting to be kings of a castle that is currently on fire.
I’m pagan, and trans, and I guess a political radical (though I don’t feel like one). And maybe I’m just too autistic and numbed out to properly associate with my own class. I read you, after all, and I’ve always found more solidarity with my fellow outcasts than with my coworkers. I once had to endure an extended lecture on the benefits of a heated bathroom floor and wanted to throw myself out a window to escape. I guess I exited the class slowly, without thinking about it, and have no place in contemporary power structures. Between the hatred by some on the right (please note the some, I grew up in a small town and don’t think everyone to my right is a monster) and the callous disregard and finger waving from the moderate centre (I don’t worship Ezra Klein, and I refuse to be the scapegoat for the Dem’s failures), I don’t have a dog in this fight anymore.
I don’t know why I’m writing this except to say… I’m not that sad about it? The people I know may be laptop trained, but we’re all pretty quick on the uptake. I’ll partner with anyone unless they actually hate me, and most people are pretty cool. Maybe this is that class solidarity the old hippies talked about. I’ve written laws (yay policy) and I’ve washed floors so I’m pretty confident I can make myself useful. I’m learning to play music again. I have my people, and we’ll survive all the scapegoating and bad-faith arguments in the world and when the madness pauses we’ll regroup and prep and do it all again.
I’m taking a pass through this thought, which you considered important enough to mention three times 🙂 “…the positions occupied by individuals in a social hierarchy are assigned by society, not by biology.”
And the specific word that stuck out to me is the word “assigned”…
So, I’m thinking about the ways in which we (as members of society) participate in the matter of assigning status to one another.
And I’m thinking that the roots of the word “status” are related to the word “standing” and one always stands in a place. In terms of society, one stands in a place defined by the totality of one’s social relationships, both with actual others and with potential others. Such a place may be within a hierarchy, but need not be. Some environmental conditions favour deeper and more complex hierarchical social groupings, and some favour much flatter, more acephalous social groupings, but there are few human beings, under any set of conditions, who can long tolerate having no “place” within some set of social relations, however deeply or shallowly layered.
So, if we set this sense of panic into a broader context than the strictly hierarchical one, it raises the happy prospect that we (as social beings) may actually have a certain capacity to shore one another up against the panic of being/becoming socially placeless, at least on small scales and face-to-face. We actually know how to grant “place” to one another and often practice “place-giving” strategies, like offering respect, granting acknowledgement, deeply “seeing” one another, spending time together, telling stories about one another’s doings and sayings, laughing, dancing, eating and drinking together, sharing sorrows together, and so on, at least with friends and family members. It is not necessary that the “places” we set be either above ours or below ours, it may be that being offered a place “beside” someone we care about, at any table of good cheer, might of itself stave off at least the worst of the kind of panic you discuss.
Anyway, I’ll go off and think some more. Be well, stay free.
@Katherine Halton 40
That decline has been ongoing for many decades at this point. Not only has the vigor of Faustian culture faded, American elites gave up emphasis on the canon of great Classical, biblical, & European cultural achievements* for studying science and technology, then lowered the standards to a commom core. From what public school teachers on the Internet are saying, education quality, or students’ willingness to learn, further deteriorated in the wake of the CoronaPanic.
*Disclaimer: I don’t know most of them either.
@Roldy (#37):
My take on Trump’s recent behavior is
(1) that Presidents actually don’t have all that much real power to make binding policy decisions, but are kept isolated from real life by their security apparatus, and thus easily manipulated by their “subordinate” staff (from Cabinet members on downward) and experts;
(2) that his early upbringing under the influence of New Thought (in the person of his childhood pastor, the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale) gave him a highly inflated notion of human (and his own) ability to bend the real world to his desires;
(3) that like many a naturally gifted con-artist, he never had to become skilled at his con-artistry to recognize when he is being conned by another con-artist with superior skills; and
(4) that Trump is experiencing the cognitive decline that often comes with advancing age.
I wish Trump had the intestinal fortitude to behave as you describe him behaving. Instead, while he is making some cuts, its hard to discern if he has any consistent plan in mind, or really understands the long term dynamic of decline in any serious way. As usual,I find your analysis of the ongoing dynamic useful and on point.
It seems to me that the MICCC still rules – Military Industrial Congress Critter Complex. A large defense budget increase and possible Middle East war. So much for financial austerity. In any case a big piece of the budget can’t be cut easily and rises automatically. interest payments and Social Security/Medicare/Disability now around 53% of the spending. Leaving budget cuts to be taken out of the remaining 47%. The current deficit is around 26%. Taking that out of the 47% – not going to happen. We are fracked.
Thank you for your perspective on a hot topic within my own family. My sister is amid her fall from grace as a servitor of the laptop-cracy. She’s risen from being a lowly psychologist and academic to leading feel-good tours for rich karens. Unfortunately, the middle class is fleeing the state where she lives while the laptop class thrashes. So much for her client base. As a Douglas Adams fan, she is quite annoyed that I pointed out the similarity of her position and defenses of it to the character in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series who makes good money telling rich people it’s okay to be rich. Suggesting she move back to the Rust Belt and help clean up the mess her votes made by working with victims of the opiate epidemic, veterans, &c. was less than warmly received. What about the wellness model? She fears the social media backlash for such deviance from the party line.
Sigh.
Suggestions for how to deal with her are very welcome.
R
First: “let me be explicit here: the positions occupied by individuals in a social hierarchy are assigned by by society, not by biology.” Do I hear echoes of Stephen Jay Gould here? Not everyone agrees with Mr. Gould though everyone admits that he was great with words.
I was in the USAF in the Fall of 1969 during a worldwide alert that wasn’t publicized, then or now. But you’d surely have known about it if you were in the US military then. My unit dispersed our interceptors, flight crews and maintenance crews out to remote sites for about two weeks. We understood that this was a world-wide alert. This all remained secret until about 2000 when it was declassified. There’s now a book about it: “Nixon’s Nuclear Specter: The Secret Alert of 1969, Madman Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War” by Wm. Burr & Jeffry P. Kimball, published in 2015. The key phrase here is “Madman Diplomacy.” Nixon had to work at it to make the Russians think he was just crazy enough to do something very rash. Our current guy doesn’t even have to work at it to lead folks to the same conclusion. Let’s hope he’s not really that crazy. What do I really think about Israel and Iran? You don’t want to know.
On Rome compared to the US, and “Little, Big”: We have been welcoming the barbarians with open arms and free cell phones; not that we don’t already have plenty of low skilled idle “workers” who could do farm labor, etc. without having to invite more in. I’ve now completed three readings of “Little, Big.” It’s a charming book but with an unconvincing conclusion. Eigenblick vs Trump and the general decline does make a lot of sense. But there’s a lot else that doesn’t.
I am especially curious about the fate of the medicine class. Our society seems unique in the reverence that we have for medical doctors, both in social status and financial reward. Medical doctors are undoubtedly among the highest in status, and although it has taken a hit during the Covid area, the aura is still there. I applaud Robbert Kennedy’s attempts at reforming the health care system, but I am not sure even he will be able to break that pattern.
One possibility that could break the status of physicians may be AI/LLM’s taking on a part of medicine in America, and as I believe that AI’s are already able to outperform a lot of doctors, that may be a real improvement for most of us, at the expense of the human physicians. Mind you, that I think the role of practitioners of natural medicine may increase alongside of this, I don’t think they will ever rise to the level that MD’s currently hold, although that may be a good thing.
Mr. House @ 41, I found your comment most intriguing. Could you please explain what is an “event horizon”? Sure, showing my ignorance, I know, but that sounds like a phenomenon I need to understand.
JMG, I would like gently to add to your excellent analysis that there is also the merchant class, the folks who make their livings buying and selling on brightly colored pieces of plastic. They also, considered as a social class, are showing increasing incompetence and panic. There was once a series of home invasion robberies in a town where I lived–no one was physically hurt–which targeted business persons who had the insane idea of taking their weeks’ earnings home. Come to find out, it was domestic staff, housekeepers and such, who were tipping off their relatives, the robbers. The phrase how dumb can a person be comes to mind.
Something fascinating just clicked into place:
a) Part of the claim to power the current elites have is that advertisers and PR have the ability to mold the human mind like putty.
b) Part of the Trumpian phenomena is that a large number of people are not playing along with this script. Trump won in 2016 despite a concerted effort on the part of nearly the entire PR system to destroy him; in large part he won because he figured out how to use the PR system against itself.
c) The comfortable classes are responding to this by doubling down on the claims to PR’s power. This is both attempting to use it to advance more insane positions (such as biology does not matter when discussing gender), but also in their utter refusal to think critically about anything that the PR system says.
There are tons of people I know who seem to have lost the ability to think critically about anything the mass media says, and this provides a perfect explanation: it is part of the process by which the laptop classes are trying to convince themselves their power is permanent.
Jill, thanks for this. I hope some recognition of the role played by status panic will make dealing with TDS sufferers easier.
Wer, nah, don’t worry about it. This promises to be a very busy post and so I need to keep the conversation on topic.
Robert, thanks for this! You’re right about the criminal class, too. I recently had the chance to pick up a copy of Francis Grose’s A Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue from 1788, which includes a vast amount of criminal slang from Regency England — enough to make it clear that there was a full-sized class of criminals at that time, as of course in ours as well. The number of criminal specialties in 1788 was impressive…
Patricia M, and thanks for this. Yeah, that’s about what I expected the media to be doing.
Team10tim, er, you’ll excuse my autism, but I trust that’s a joke.
David, if the French rather than the English had taken over India, we’d probably all be speaking French now. Looting India of all its wealth was what gave Britain the basis for its global empire; I could see the same thing centered in Paris, with Britain probably reduced to the status of conquered province ruled by an Irish viceroy.
WatchFlinger, interesting. Despite the legal prohibition, there were various modes of downward mobility in Tokugawa Japan — of course the most accessible of them was to get killed in a duel, which plenty did!
Isaac, there’s also the huge difference between the cultural contexts! Indian society makes ample room for minute specializations — it’s evolved that capacity over millennia. Ours, by contrast, still privileges the jack of many trades.
Jason, if that were the case, then social mobility wouldn’t happen, and women wouldn’t have improved their status so drastically in recent decades. Even in baboon troops, it’s not always the biggest and strongest male who runs things — quite often two smaller but more clever males will double-team the alpha and defeat him, for example. All through the pyramid, status is always changing, because your status doesn’t depend on this or that abstract factor — it depends on who wins which conflict, by hook or by crook.
RogerCO, of course! Also a book of conundrums in case of fainting.
Jerry, those chickens are the wave of the future. (Now I’m imagining a chicken in Greek warrior gear cutting the Gordian knot…)
Earthworm, I ain’t arguing. My experience is that it’s sometimes possible to take control from the baboon mind, but it ain’t easy, and most people won’t make the effort. That being the case, yeah, a lot of sinking can be expected.
Scotty, oh, granted! “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet” — nor will it ever be.
Scotlyn, hmm! Yes, that also works.
Clay, India in particular has had very precise social classes welded into place for millennia, and hyperspecialization is the norm there. It doesn’t surprise me that people from there would find our more flexible patterns baffling. At the same time, yeah, the pretense that America has no social classes is an absurd one.
Longsword, I simply let it be known, while I was in England, that we wouldn’t be talking about politics because Britain doesn’t have a Bill of Rights. Nobody quibbled.
Anselmo, thank you, but I disagree. I’m just far enough out on the fringes that I have some perspective.
Mark, thanks for this. I’m glad to hear that you found a constructive way through it all.
Roldy, yep. Now all of it faces pruning.
Mister N, that habit of beating up on oneself is part of the mechanism by which the system enforces obedience. You were taught to do it, and you can unlearn that — as I gather you are now doing.
Tris, we’ll have to see. Elite replacement cycles always involve a lot of squawking and flailing.
Gerry, me too.
Roldy, we can discuss that some other time, as it’s off topic for this post.
Absolutely, depends on your definition of “clever.” It’s certainly true that men and women tend to different modes of mental development.
Katherine, excellent. Yes, exactly — the current elite replacement cycle is only an incident in the broader arc of Faustian civilization’s decline and fall.
Earthworm, a male Karen is a Kenneth. I’m not sure as to the exact origins, but iirc it’s the latest in a long series of African-American pejoratives for privileged white women — “Miss Ann” was the one used before 1865, for example. As for usage, no, “b***h” has a much broader range of connotations and applications, as do terms for men such as “jerk” and “***hole.” “Karen” is much more specific. You don’t have to be privileged and blustering to be a puppy’s momma!
Teresa, no, I haven’t been there — I’ll keep it in mind. As for speaking to the manager, I’d be willing to bet that you were polite and friendly, rather than charging in there to demand special treatment!
Jean, so noted! It interests me that so many former DC-area bureaucrats I know say the same things you do.
Teresa, trust Hoffer to catch that.
Kimberly, thanks for this. As for Miller’s failed prediction, no, he had the grace to be bewildered, baffled, and disappointed.
Patrick, I know that book well — we had a complete set of the series in my childhood home. It wasn’t until later that I found that similar patterns are found all through social vertebrates.
Tom, and if going into the street is what you feel you have to do, by all means. Just be aware of how much, or little, an effect that’s had in recent decades.
Frank, you’re welcome.
Vitranc, fortunately not — a few sharp words online are usually quite adequate. As for Europe, it’s going to have to make similar changes in due time; with the US no longer paying for NATO’s defense, a lot of changes are going to follow.
Anonymous, fair enough! As for downward mobility, yes, I know that one well. Sara and I were both raised at the lower end of the middle class, and our decision to embrace downward mobility got quite a bit of pushback from our families.
Michaelz, bingo. I notice that Trump has also backed off on his attempt to allow farms and some other industries to escape immigration raids.
Wer, oof! That must have been an unpleasant experience.
Michael, I avoid bringing up such subjects when I can, precisely because so many well-off white people do in fact go full chimpanzee when they come up. Clearly you got his goat good and proper!
Pygmycory, US law doesn’t permit continuing programs to be cut in a reconciliation bill like the one in question. That requires a second, independent bill to shut down programs — and one of those is working its way through the House right now.
Ahriman, of course! The laptop class, like every aristocracy, moves toward a condition in which an endless proliferation of self-perpetuating grifts funnel an ever larger share of wealth toward the privileged. That continues until the bottom falls out.
Steve, exactly. All the various political hot-button issues of recent decades are ways to target and remove potential competitors among the laptop class. That’s all they are, and all they ever were.
Allie001, I’m delighted to hear this. One of the other crucial factors at work in the present transition is that the Boomers are finally being shoved out of the seats of power to which they’ve clung for far too long. (Yes, we’re talking about my g-g-g-g-generation.) A lot of younger people, who’ve been shut out of access to wealth and influence by our current senile kleptocracy, have developed skills and flexibilities that most Boomers lack utterly.
Scotlyn, good. I chose the term “assigned” very deliberately, of course.
Jerry, Trump has no clue; he’s simply moving in response to a situation that neither he nor anyone else in power really undestands. As Spengler pointed out a long time ago, successful politicians aren’t people with an abstract conceptual grasp of the world, but rather people who have an intuitive sense of what to do at any given moment.
BeardTree, ah, but factor in the significant fraction of social security et al. that’s pure fraud…
Rhydlyd, I have no idea. I’d probably just chuckle at her.
Phutatorius, I found Gould well worth reading and reflecting on. As for Little, Big, oh, literally it doesn’t work, but it’s not meant to be read literally.
Peter, my take is that the medical profession is in for a dramatic plunge in income and status. Between the absurd profiteering and the increasingly obvious failure of the system to provide good health, the profession has forfeited the trust of health care consumers; I see Kennedy as pursuing a last ditch attempt to save the system, which will fail.
Mary, good gods. Can you point me to news stories about that? I’d love to be able to cite them in an upcoming post.
Anonymous, exactly! And in the process, they’re setting themselves up for failure and humiliation.
That explains why so many got a kick out of this:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-dont-really-care-margaret
From the reaction, it’s like Vance said “I don’t really care, Karen.”
I was hugely impressed with Nemours. They give outstanding access to the house too, far more so than is usual with grand estates.
There is no café, so bring a picnic lunch (areas are provided) rather than venture into the wilds of Wilmington, wasting precious time that could be spent gawking at the spectacular landscaping.
At the very far end of the property, there’s a temple to Diana (I think). You stand there and gaze up a mile or so of sloped landscaped allées, a sunken garden, water features, a maze garden, huge gilded statues, a Roman wall (they’re not in this order), ultra-formal flower gardens, and, finally, the château.
Much of the estate, what’s left of it, is surrounded by a high masonry wall with broken glass embedded in the top. On the other side of the landscaping is Nemours hospital and Wilmington’s shooting galleries.
It is astonishing and utterly unlike the other four DuPont gardens in the area.
Welcome back to this odd place, JMG, just in time to enjoy its herky-jerky in full. I hope you were refreshed and inspired by your journey. And a belated happy birthday!
Enjoyable essay, food for thought. Assigned class, biological responses thereto. I look forward to discerning more fully how I can achieve a more conscious approach to my specific situation in that picture.
Class is a complicated and very nuanced phenomenon, as evidenced by some comments here and in my own life. I’ve been surfing waves of downward mobility mostly all my life, frustrating my family’s expectations, coming through the complex social arrangements I’ve encountered beginning with those of my quasi-aristocratic Southern family nest. Connections to the Burr family (Aaron’s sisters’ kin), and DAR on all sides, etc., political connections, comfort, if not the mad pinnacles suffered by the nouveau riche and movie stars. Long left behind. So far falling more like a leaf than a rock. Good karma, that.
I have lately been spending time with a truly nice bunch of folks of a certain age who are just now encountering the real joy one can experience by leaving monkey-mind behind briefly using the myriad tools that can give one a taste of that. Led by a woman who has spent some good length of time herself in acquiring and using them and now teaching them. Kudos to her, for that.
However, I suspect that boomer entitlement may play a part in the unbridled optimism expressed in these meetings, that if you can dwell in that mind, you can (with genuine intuition) successfully navigate the shoals and difficulties of life. Given that biology does play a large part in consciousness and that with triggering or other (such as actual kinetic warfare) conditions, mostly that awareness vanishes like dandelion puffs in a strong breeze. While it’s true that genuine enlightened minds seem to be able to experience even the most difficult situations as pain and not suffering (I have observed this in a few, I think), the path from occasionally experiencing the Great Connectedness to dwelling in it consistently is much more complicated than is being advertised.
It’s a good thing to do, of course, touching the Great Connectedness, but even when attempting to free oneself from expectations, circumstances supervene and they crash in on us like tidal waves. Rather like the effort to free oneself from the myth of progress. The breakdown of a long cycle is more of a challenge than many imagine, or can imagine.
I guess what I’m alluding to is that we have to gird our loins as it were, and prepare seriously as adult grown-up people to encounter the rapids ahead. Some of us were better set up for that effort than others, but sooner or later (I’m talking to you, darling PMC puppies) everyone will have to. Or be used as computer-slaves in brain-capsules in spaceships run by insectile beings (see WOH).
JMG, you wrote, “All this instability made upward mobility one of the basic elements of the American credo, as whole generations conveniently forgot that where there is upward mobility there must be downward mobility to balance it.”
Fortune’s Wheel indeed. (I’m not talking about that insipid game show.) These days I think that both the surface and axle of the Wheel have been liberally greased.
Also, “When news of the Russian Revolution was brought to Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, at his comfortably secluded palace at Tsarskoe Selo, he is said to have responded in baffled and plaintive tones: ‘But the Russian people love me!’ ”
When told that his father was abdicating for himself and his son, the Tsarevich is reputed to have said, “But if there is no Tsar, who will rule Russia?”
JMG, thanks so much. Thanks for explaining this. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. I’m wondering if RFKjr gets his way and bans most pharma ads, is the propaganda structure that keeps the illusion? From what you are saying the TDS is only likely to get worse. Also, a big chunk of the right is following the flow of money that seems to be financing the unrest. https://datarepublican.com/ Your model suggests that facts are irrelevant, and even public records with EIN banking numbers attached will be memory holed. Yikes. It’s going to be maximum drama at some point.
Speaking for the medical personnel knowingly or unknowingly enjoying the concerto on the Titanic; what would be your advice for a youngish medical doctor working on her residency in a local hospital?
I imagine setting oneself up for a private practice and getting some books on herbal medicine. (Already ordered two Matthew Wood books)
@scotlyn: I got my own now. No duel necessary 😉
Continuing from where I left off, I think the best way to cope with “status panic” is the old Medieval adage “Memento Mori” (“Remember your Death”).
The Orthodox funeral service has some moving hymnography around this:
“All worldly things are vanity, and do not survive after death; riches do not remain, nor does glory travel with us on the way; for when death comes, all these vanish away. Wherefore let us cry out to Christ the immortal King: Give rest to the one departed from us, in the dwelling place where all rejoice.”
“Where is the attraction of the world? Where the illusion of transient things? Where is gold and where is silver? Where the throng and bustle of servants? All is dust, all is ashes, all a
shadow. But come let us cry out to the immortal King: Lord, make the one departed from us worthy of your eternal blessings, in blessedness that has no end.
“I remembered the Prophet crying out: I am earth and dust; and again I looked in the tombs and saw the naked bones, and I said: Who is this? King or soldier, rich or poor, righteous or sinner? But give rest among the righteous to your servant, O Lord, as a loving God. ”
That sure puts loss of status in perspective!
This is a synchronistic post. I’m just finishing up a book called The Trickster and the Paranormal, by George P. Hansen, which despite the title is very pertinent to a post on status loss. There’s a good chance you’re aware of it so I’ll try not to be too pedantic in my summary, but the throughline of the book, which covers a dizzying array of topics from anthropology to literary theory to UFOs, is that societies are structural. They thrive on explicit and tacit social roles and relationships, order, stability, and status.
Hansen argues that the archetype of the trickster manifests through situations and people that are marginal, liminal, taboo-breaking, and low status. He doesn’t mean this metaphorically, he’s quite magically literate.
One of the things the trickster does is break down decadent structures so that new ones can be built in their places. He is irrational, disrespectful of rule and order, often engages in sexual deviance (which can range from celibacy to promiscuity and perversion), and he is associated with low status individuals, either being low status himself or sacrificing his status. It’s in these situations that Hansen argues paranormal phenomena, magic, and the Trickster manifest, and any attempt to tighten the grip on them inevitably backfires since they can’t be dealt with in terms of the dominant rationality.
You’ve made the argument yourself that Trump is a manifestation of the Changer, so of course he is demolishing old status roles and initiating a reversal of position (another classic trickster event, as when a king and pauper trade places, or a husband and wife, etc.). Thus it will be the people on the margins who acknowledge the Trickster and accept certain upheavals without losing their sanity who come out best. He seems to undo those who fall deeply into his grip just as well as those who oppose him.
Those nouveaux-riches and Karens? Like you argued, they are trying to cement new status. Sadly for the Karens, they have chosen a time in which all statuses are flailing in the wind, and trying to seat themselves on a crumbling throne won’t work.
Trump has been on a meteoric rise, breaking taboos to get ahead. There’s a lot of power to be wielded in taboo-breaking, but its inherently unstable. I think he runs a few risks: 1) becoming an entrenched elite himself, trying to stop the events he started while he is still on top and then suffering as they run right over him, and 2) delusional madness. So far he’s remained in the middle ground. I don’t see him being driven from office unless he betrays the archetype that got him there, or drinks his own Kool-Aid.
If he does, someone will replace him before his corpse is cold, and on it goes.
The marginal readers of this marginal blog should be in good position to ride out the storm, sine we’re willing to acknowledge a trickster episode when we see one and don’t have much status to cling to.
This is a profound insight, and it seems to match the reality in most first world nations. Of course, the elite replacement cycle is at different stages depending on the country. I’d say it’s largely a function of how over-extended the country is. I’ve developed, partially out of self-protection, partially out of amusement, a two fold approach that works to identify the Karens and Colins (does anyone have a name for a male Karen).
Firstly, don’t talk how you write. Having spent long enough around rural people, I’ve noticed that their verbal skills belie their intelligence, it’s a factor of a long time alone and in your own head. A lack of verbal polish, or a deliberate attempt not to use fancy words almost automatically identifies those of certain laptop classes that want to pour scorn on you. It’s a great early warning device.
Secondly, talk about energy reality. That’s a sure fire way of having not just the laptop classes, but nearly everyone else, trying to cancel you 😉
Nemo, exactly. Vance was baring his teeth in proper baboon style.
Teresa, so noted!
Clarke, that’s a crucial point. Higher states of awareness can be extremely useful for navigating crises — ask any samurai whose Zen practice helped him chop his way through a battle in one piece — but it requires a certain tough-mindedness that a lot of current schools know nothing of. Plenty of winnowing and testing ahead!
Bird, ha! The Tsarevich’s current equivalents are saying, “But if there are no bureaucrats, who will file form 2234-E-36 annually?”
Bradley, if RFK gets his way on pharma advertising, what’s left of corporate media will go into financial freefall very quickly, and I’ll be cheering. As for the financial backers of the latest astroturfed protests, that won’t affect the beliefs of TDS sufferers, but it may have consequences involving judges, prisons, and the like. No doubt a century from now the Resistance, probably living in exile by then, will commemorate the imprisonment of those backers as yet another set of martyrs for their cause, but that’ll be cold consolation.
Vitranc, it really depends on local conditions and legal arrangements. Here in the US, the smart doctors are dropping out of the big health care corporations, refusing to take insurance, and offering health care to individuals for relatively modest cash fees, the way it was done a century ago. “Concierge medicine” is the buzzword here.
Michael, that’ll do it! Good old-fashioned Stoicism teaches similar lessons, and offers a lovely bucket of ice cold water in the face to shock people out of the status trance.
Kyle, I’ve seen it but haven’t read it — and just ordered a used copy. That sounds well worth a close read.
Peter, so noted! I’m pretty much stuck talking the way I write, because both of them are exact reflections of the way I think — my thoughts are all in spoken language — but the other one, yeah, I bet I can do that. 😉
Oh, and at least in the US, a male Karen is a Kenneth.