The thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.

From The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy by Christopher Lasch.

Mickey Kaus, A New Republic editor, has advanced an interpretation of the democratic malaise, under the provocative and slightly misleading title The End of Equality, that has a great deal in common with the interpretation advanced in these pages.* According to Kaus, the most serious threat to democracy, in our time, comes not so much from the maldistribution of wealth as from the decay or abandonment of public institutions in which citizens meet as equals. Equality of income, he argues, is less important than the “more attainable” goal of social or civic equality. He reminds us that foreign observers used to marvel at the lack of snobbery, deference, and class feeling in America. There was “nothing oppressed or submissive” about the American worker, Werner Sombart wrote in 1906. “He carries his head high, walks with a lissom stride, and is as open and cheerful in his expression as any member of the middle class.” A few years later R. H. Tawney noted that America was “marked indeed by much economic inequality, but it is also marked by much social equality.” It is this culture of self-respect, according to Kaus, that we are in danger of losing.

The trouble “with our society, from this point of view, is not just that the rich have too much money but that their money insulates them, much more than it used to, from the common life. The “routine acceptance of professionals as a class apart” strikes Kaus as an ominous development. So does their own “smug contempt for the demographically inferior.” Part of the trouble, I would add, is that we have lost our respect for honest manual labor. We think of “creative” work as a series of abstract mental operations performed in an office, preferably with the aid of computers, not as the production of food, shelter, and other necessities. The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life—hence their feeble attempt to compensate by embracing a strenuous regimen of gratuitous exercise. Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality—“hyperreality,” as it has been called—as distinguished from the palpable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in the “social construction of reality”—the central dogma of postmodernist thought—reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency—against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life—the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.