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Sevender's avatar

This is one of those observations that is both gratifying and wearying to hear coming from the mouth of someone else, finally—a sensation I bet many of your readers will share. We are ruled by KoolAid drinkers. Approval-seeking has beclowned the entire professional and managerial class to the exclusion of all critical thinking. From Russiagate to vaccinations to Medicare for All to BLM, the right opinion is the one that gets you invited to the offsite senior leadership retreat.

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Fredo's avatar

What that cat wrote in his email rings true to me as well. I too work a bit of a cross section of “hands dirty” and white collar/c-suite. My spouse is from a highly pedigreed university background while I’m what they call, self made. Everything he mentioned about elites and not thinking for themselves after some time is very accurate. They’re all caught in a box. None of them attained their positions by being controversial in the slightest bit. This is also an incredible problem in the military, but that’s another story, but still roughly the same - zero risk mindset and very politically intelligent. They have no idea what’s going on in the real world. Like, blind to it completely because they’ve homogenized their social and professional circles within the same upper crusts. Everything right now is very “royal” in flavor - benign talk about a topic related to social justice, and somehow that counts for anything about Britany Spears too, weirdly. But only politically correct convo, that’s actually incredibly shallow because it’s just a paraphrased version of BBC/CNN/MSNBC headlines of the day. This is the same community that is still unaware that Russia Gate was phony (I’m speaking from first hand experience talking with this circle), or that kids are at zero risk from COVID, or that you can’t actually dream your way out of being biologically male. It’s surreal. There seems no common sense. Not even a bit of intellectual curiosity. Perhaps they have grown up not needing that skill. Whereas there are the “lower classes” that move up and across the economic spectrum based in large part by applying common sense thinking, questioning a status quo out of necessity.

So the comparison between classes seems very accurate. The 19th century turned and the British Royal system began to fracture because of the rampant incompetence of a ruling class that mirrored, closely, our own elites now. The biggest difference that I see between old British royalty and our elites are how they attained elite status. In Britain it was a birthright. They were born better, supposedly. Here, it seems as though they are created in university. But the end result is the same.

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