Saturday, January 09, 2010

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 Westwith the two exceptions of a tiny minority of ordinary Leftists on the one hand and an amorphously indeterminable minority of ordinary good guysare 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 orderboth 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 Obamas 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 peopleof all strata of sociocultural classeshave 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

3 comments:

Geoarrge said...

While it would be an incorrect assessment to say elites are monolithic, there are certain general attitudes which can summarize the typical elitist mindset:

1. Because of random disasters, and stupid or malicious people, the world is a dangerous and scary place.

2. Because the world is a dangerous and scary place, it needs to be controlled to the greatest extent possible.

3. In order for the world to be brought under control, smart people must be in charge.

4. I am smart enough to be in charge of something.

Even though there is no coordinated conspiracy there is, nonetheless, an effective synergy resulting from the assumptions common to many of those who are attracted to power.

In general, the danger is that of assuming that the 'experts' know everything and ought to be immune from scrutiny by laypeople.

That assumption cultivates policies that tend to put THE EXPERTS!! into unelected bureaucratic positions outside the direct reach of democracy.

B322 said...

I have to say this is the most subtly optimistic article on the subject of political theory, Islamifiction, dhimmitude, what-have-you, in a long time.

Your article's prescriptions are subtler than its descriptions, but if I may connect the dots a little, the obvious course of action for the anti-Islam individual is:

Don't blame the elites.
Decolonize your own mindset - eschew dhimmitude.
And then help the people around you to do the same.

The establishment must follow; it will have no choice.
Yet much work remains to be done.

It is refreshing when a dose of cold, hard reality is actually more optimistic than wooly thinking. Paranoia and doomsaying are far too mainstream, and in megadoses, they support the same sort of donut-eating, TV-watching carelessness that the callow hippy/surfer mentality promotes.

With you and Spencer and Pipes in my head, I've discussed Islamification a little with my friends and family, and I found them much more willing to listen than I would have expected.

Hesperado said...

Thanks Blode,

I'm glad you picked up on the optimistic underpinning. It's been one thematic strand in many of my writings here on this blog, and it stems from what I consider the greatness of the West. The West, of all sociopolitical entities throughout history -- and with American, as usual, at the vanguard -- has evolved toward a greater respect for and power of the individual, and of the common person. If we don't believe that 1) common people have a remarkable degree of power and representation in our modern West, and that 2) most Western elites are on average more or less good decent people; then in my opinion we might as well give up, and/or hunker down to wait for some Mad Max and/or Christian apocalypse to save us.

Had Muslims not come along, we probably could have kept coasting along in our PC MC bubble indefinitely, since the only other major problem that PC MC is ill-suited to admit (let alone manage) is the problem of regressive cultures increasing within the West through immigration as well as through the growing presence of non-whites in the West. But while this problem is formidable and complex, the agents of the problem -- non-Muslim non-whites -- are simply not on the same level of being problematic or dangerous, compared with Muslims; and therefore the former do not call for the extraordinary re-orientation and priorities which the latter call for (that's where I tend to disagree with Lawrence Auster on the problem of blacks in Western society: while I agree with him that it poses a problem -- of relative violence and unilateral resistance to full integration into our law-abiding culture -- it should not be put on a par with the problem of Muslims, which Auster tends to do with language like "the Black Intifada", etc.)