Elites Abandoned the Masses(eriktorenberg.substack.com)
eriktorenberg.substack.com
Elites Abandoned the Masses
https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/how-elites-abandoned-the-masses
6 comments
[deleted]
The examples in the article are radical leftists caricatures. They are essentially straw men presented to illicit a response of disgust. I don’t know any single mothers saying that monogamous marriage is oppressive or people saying they don’t want kids because it is immoral. Yes these people exist, but they are not the norm.
> In not wanting to champion, say, fitness, marriage, and hard work, elites end up encouraging fat pride, divorce, and anti-work—all while being fit, married, and hard-working themselves.
That’s basically the entire argument, or perhaps observation, if you don’t want to read the whole essay.
That’s basically the entire argument, or perhaps observation, if you don’t want to read the whole essay.
[deleted]
i often wonder how many of these articles are cia funded to normalize "elites" or "leaders" being a separate cast of society above the rest of us. left vs right doesn't work anymore, so they want to glorify being superior through wealth, and at the same time, normalize being a hypocrite because they actively encourage corruption.
How does this garbage get to the front page?
> In [the] 1960s, everyone worked.
Yeah, the hippies were workin real hard.
> In [the] 1960s, everyone worked.
Yeah, the hippies were workin real hard.
The "lazy hippy" thing is a bit revisionist. There was a huge back to the land component to 60s idealism that involved glorifying farm work amongst other forms of manual labor.
Chris hedges has written about this kind of thing more eloquently than I ever could:
“I, unfortunately, had the experience of being shipped off to a private boarding school at the age of ten as a scholarship student and live–I was one of 16 kids on scholarship, and I lived among the super-rich and I watched them. And I think much of my hatred of authority and my repugnance for the ruling elite comes from having been among them for so long.”
“I came–certainly my mother’s side of the family–from, you know, lower working class. I mean, people–one of my uncles lived in a trailer in Maine, and certainly people with no means. And I would juxtapose the world I was in with that world. And it was very clear that it wasn’t about intelligence or aptitude.”
“It’s very distasteful to see, because, you know, I would go to the homes of friends of mine and watch–and let’s remember they’re children, 11, 12 years old, ordering around adults–their servants, their nannies.”
“The rich are different, because when you have that much money, then human beings become disposable. Even friends and family become disposable and are replaced. And when the rich take absolute power, then the citizens become disposable, which is in essence what’s happened. There is a very callous indifference.
“I mean, these people — and C. Wright Mills wrote about this in ‘The Power Elite’ — they’re utterly cut off. I mean, the only people they ever meet who are members of the working class are people who work for them–their gardeners or their chauffeurs. They live in self-encased bubbles. They have no real contact with reality. I mean, they don’t even fly on commercial airlines. And yet they have absolute power.
“Now, that becomes very dangerous politically because they’re so out of touch and they are able to retreat into their enclaves in the same way that you saw in France under Louis XVI, people retreating to Versailles, or the end of the Chinese dynasty when everybody went to the Forbidden City.”