Elitistics

Introduction:

There is not yet an “Elitistics”, but there exists an inchoate bundle of assumptions held by many, if not most, in the still inchoate Anti-Islam Movement that implies one. In a nutshell, an Elitistics is the doctrine that asserts that the primary reason why the West persists in its failure to address the problem of Islam is because of influential Elites in the West.

Analysis:

Some of the more important assumptions of Elitistics, whether explicit or implicit, conscious or semi-conscious:

1. Elites are monolithic.

2. Elites are a tiny minority.

3. Elites represent a dastardly Gramscian Leftist cabal.

4. Elites are amazingly powerful.

5. Elites are the ones really in control, democracy is a sham, the only way to restore the West is through violent revolution and/or neo-Napoleonic civil wars throughout the West.

6. Thus, the vast majority of ordinary people throughout the West—with the two exceptions of a tiny minority of ordinary Leftists on the one hand and an amorphously indeterminable minority of ordinary good guys—are either witless cowardly sheep or amoral cowardly sheep.

Discussion: 

When the assumptions of Elitistics are laid bare, their preposterously incoherent nature becomes more evident, not to mention a strangely quasi-Gnostic alienation from the structures of the West. A small minority among the Anti-Islamic Movement hold to the paradigm of Elitistics boldly (if no less incoherently); while the rest continue to ejaculate statements that imply a support for it, but tend to retreat to further incoherence when called on it and when challenged to defend the implications of their statements.

A more sophisticated, subtle, mature, pro-Western and realistic paradigm must, on the contrary, follow counterpoints to the list above:

1. Elites in the West are not monolithic.

In fact, sociologically, the West has developed the least monolithic structure by which various economic, political and professional classes are stratified allowing for the widest diversity, opportunity, anti-classist insouciance, and ladder-climbing porousness ever realized in the history of Mankind. This reflects, of course, an imperfect work in progress, which nevertheless ought not diminish the astounding achievement involved.

2. Indeed, Elites are a tiny minority in the West—

if we take care to notice how many so-called Elites are really ordinary people who occupy various levels of influence and reputation: Is, for example, the editor-in-chief of a newspaper in Duluth, Minnesota, who supports Obama and thinks Muslims are wonderful people, a dastardly card-carrying member of a sinister Gramscian Cabal of “Elites”? Or is he rather an ordinary person, a bit below the upper-middle-class perhaps, with three family cars, a nice fairly sized boat to take out on the lakes, the ability to send both his daughters to college, enough money to have a summer time-share in Florida and take one or two trips to Europe with his family, etc.? Individuals like this, and millions of others of various more or less similar flavors, exist out there who hold views that we in the still inchoate Anti-Islam Movement would consider solidly inimical to ours, and yet these are obviously not “Elites” in the sense implied by the paradigm of Elitistics. They are ordinary people who altogether, through a complex and multifaceted sociocultural process, adopt, digest and do their part to perpetuate, a broadly held, dominant and mainstream worldview, which for want of a better term I call PC MC. The bonafide Elites of the West (think a George Soros, a Bill Gates, a George Clooney, a Bill & Hillary Clinton, a Justin Trudeau, etc.) are an extremely tiny minority. 

3. Only a very small minority among Western Elites represent a dastardly Gramscian Leftist cabal.

They are indeed a problem, and have been a problem for the West at least as far back as the French Revolution, escalating to grotesquely massive dimensions with the Communist Revolutions in Russia and China and their subsequent attempts to destabilize the world order—both bouts of brazenly effective sociopathology, it should be noted, remaining on the periphery of the West. Now with an unprecedentedly radical Leftist American President, President Obama, there seems to have been opened up a greater opportunity for the truly dastardly type of Leftist (one has only to look at many of Obama’s political and personal friends and associations over the years to gain a glimpse of them) to gain more influence in high places in America. But nevertheless, for all that, the overall sociopolitical structures remain non-radical, even where Leftists exert their modicum of influence; and Leftists qua Leftists remain a minority throughout the West. They only enjoy the degree of influence they have today because the much broader swathe representing conservative, centrist and apolitical people—of all strata of sociocultural classes—have succumbed to the shift in worldview called PC MC, which itself represents, and implements, a kind of diluted, decaffeinated, soft and lite version of the Leftist paradigm.

4. Western Elites are only powerful to the degree that democratic structures in the West allow them to be.

This does not mean there do not exist unfair advantages to the extremely wealthy, nor that they are not able here and there to exert varying degrees of influence over policy. Such influence, however, is restrained in the modern West to a degree that has surpassed every other polity throughout world history. And again, it is a work in progress, and has flaws; which, again, nevertheless do not militate against its amazing achievement.

5. So: Elites are not the ones really in control, democracy is not a sham, and the only way to restore the West is not through violent revolution and/or neo-Napoleonic civil wars throughout the West. Indeed, such a profoundly irritated view is, given the chance, more than likely to lead to violent cataclysms that would have been unnecessary and would cause tragic amounts of suffering, death and destruction to infrastructure.

6. Therefore, the vast majority of ordinary people throughout the West are not either witless cowardly sheep or amoral cowardly sheep, controlled by an anti-democratic cabal of crypto-Royalty: they are mostly good, decent people who are probably the most intelligent and literate mass of people belonging to a society ever assembled in the history of Mankind (with, again, normal imperfections & flaws, etc.). A small minority of ordinary Leftists do exist among them, and there is definitely a problem of a kind of disaffected alienation from the West that they represent, and have always represented, going back to the French Enlightenment. Alongside these quasi-Gnostic Leftists, however, also exist another group of people with a kind of mirror-image alienation from their own West: the Elisticians.

Conclusion:

While some bonafide Elites do have a modicum of influence in the West with regard to the problem of Islam, the primary reason why the West persists in its failure to address the problem of Islam is not because of them, but because of the vast majority of ordinary people (many of whom are casually and rather ignorantly lumped, by Elisticians, into the category of Elites) whose hearts and minds have become believers in the worldview of PC MC, a worldview that reflects a profound and massive sea change in thought, a paradigm shift, which the West has undergone over the past half century or so. While there were many historical roots leading up to this paradigm shift, roots going back at least to the 16th century, what marks this shift as a new era is the mainstream dominance of its values. Contrary to the quasi-Gnostic conceit of the Elisticians, the modern West is not an Elitocracy. Rather, the modern West has developed the least elitist civilization in world history, comprised of a diverse tapestry of democratic polities which continues to thrive, though obviously not without faults and flaws.

Elitistics, Continued