Help those in need, not those who are emotionally needy

From Why the rich are revolting by Ed West. A contemporary elaboration of an age old observation. It is rarely the desperate who drive the revolutions but the Upper Middle Class. Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, Che Guevara, the examples are legion.

These are the individuals with the social capital to be aspirational but unable to move ahead in whatever the existing system might be. If they are to be at the top, they have to be in the vanguard. It never ends well.

Our prosperity, in this regard, has not helped us. The increasing prosperity of the US, the heavy overproduction of university credentials (and corresponding quality debasement of same) has made it harder and harder for the offspring of the privileged to distinguish themselves in terms of class caste. They wish to be acknowledged as superior without having to earn that superiority from demonstrated competence.

Combine overproduction of credentials, with an increasingly selective meritocracy, and then combine that with an increasingly winner-take-all economic structure and you have a recipe for social unsettlement. Privileged offspring not able to compete or able to distinguish themselves from the abhorred masses and not respected or even having the means to gain the respect that they think they deserve.

Disruption and overturning of norms is the age-old and preferred mechanism for such privileged drones to mark themselves out. One of its manifestations is in Luxury Beliefs.

I was bewildered when I encountered a new social class at Yale four years ago: the luxury belief class. My confusion wasn’t surprising given my unusual background. When I was two years old, my mother was addicted to drugs and my father abandoned us. I grew up in multiple foster homes, was then adopted into a series of broken homes, and then experienced a series of family tragedies. Later, after a few years in the military, I went to Yale on the GI Bill. On campus, I realized that luxury beliefs have become fashionable status symbols. Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class.

In the past, people displayed their membership of the upper class with their material accoutrements. But today, luxury goods are more affordable than before. And people are less likely to receive validation for the material items they display. This is a problem for the affluent, who still want to broadcast their high social position. But they have come up with a clever solution. The affluent have decoupled social status from goods, and re-attached it to beliefs.

It is what is fueling the Social Justice/Antifa fusion.

The beta children of the privileged class seeking affirmation by white knighting for totem groups and by their very activism destroying the aspirations of the preferred groups. The past week has been filled with Antifa trust fund babies pictured instigating riots which then destroy the accumulated savings and achievements of the aspirational black middle class. All in order to advance the social standing of those beta children of privilege.

It is a crying shame we ideally should be addressing. Help those in need, not those who are emotionally needy.