Elites Abandoned the Masses
eriktorenberg.substack.com
eriktorenberg.substack.com
That’s basically the entire argument, or perhaps observation, if you don’t want to read the whole essay.
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.”
> In [the] 1960s, everyone worked.
Yeah, the hippies were workin real hard.