The coming rise of an American royal class, as incompetent and as privileged as all past royalists
A modern Ivy League education: “But Brawndo’s got what plants crave.
It’s got electrolytes!”
The move by the general public away from public schools and universities has become well documented. I have noted this movement in a number of essays, the most recent of which in February showed with ample evidence that these government schools have done such an excellent job of smearing their own reputations so thoroughly that parents and students are fleeing from them in record-breaking and unprecedented numbers.
Similarly, Glenn Reynolds in an essay last week about the recent Supreme Court decision outlawing the use of racial quotas in universities noted this trend as well, and how the Court’s ruling only reinforced the decision by many to avoid these institutions and their routine bigotry.
[W]ho trusts higher education anymore? At the turn of the millennium, when Grutter [a 2003 Supreme Court decision that narrowly allowed university racial quotas] was decided, American higher ed was at its zenith. Since then a series of scandals – just today a famous “ethicist” at Harvard was charged with fraudulent ethics research – has undermined its reputation for probity (and the Hollywood admissions scandal of a few years back certainly undermined the perceived integrity of its admissions process), even as everything else about universities came to seem less serious. With 57 genders, coloring books and crying rooms for election results, endless crusades against “whiteness” and “heterosexism,” and the like, the notion of deferring to the educational seriousness and expertise of those in charge of the asylums of higher ed seemed much less appealing. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make ridiculous. But higher education has supplied the ridiculousness itself.
Both Reynolds and I missed however a much more fundamental point that was then made by one of the commenters to his essay. It isn’t so much that ordinary people are fleeing established universities for other colleges, it is that ordinary people are deciding in increasing numbers to forego a college education entirely, concluding that it is a waste of time. As this commenter noted:
It used to be that adults that were high school graduates wanted their children to go to college, get an education, and better themselves. Based on my circle of friends, that is no longer true. It appears that the only parents I know pushing college to their kids, now, are the college graduate parents. And not all of them.
This is a huge change from 20 years ago and a significant indicator of just how much colleges and universities have turned themselves into clowns and can’t even see it. [emphasis mine]
What this commenter describes without realizing it is a growing two-tier caste system. The Ivy League colleges that provide safe spaces and coloring books and encourage race-based anti-white bigotry are not going away. Their endowments are gigantic. Moreover, there is no indication that they plan to reform themselves. If anything, it appears these universities are circling the wagons in order to defend critical race theory and the queer agenda by any means necessary. The American ruling class in turn now uses the diploma from these schools as a stamp of approval. To enter the halls of power you need that diploma. To get it, however, it is clear that you will have to bow to the insane critical race theories and diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates advocated by these schools.
The general population meanwhile in steadily increasing numbers wants nothing to do with this racist madness. By abandoning these schools, however, the general public is allowing these schools to become a method for the ruling class to differentiate between those who endorse its policies, and those who oppose them.
As noted by the Spirit of Christmas Present in Dickens’ The Christmas
Carol, ‘This boy is ignorance, this girl is want. Beware them both,
but most of all beware this boy.’
Soon we will have a two-tier society. On one side will be ordinary people, doing ordinary but necessary work, sometimes college educated but mostly not. On the other side will be a ruling class approved by these failed colleges, trained for nothing but seeding discord and hate with an education that is flawed at best, and likely very wrong.
Just like the European nobility who was generally incompetent but guaranteed power, America will have its own incompetent royalty. While entrance to this ruling class will not be exclusively determined by bloodline (though it will certainly help), it will be very much controlled by a diploma proving you have been fully indoctrinated into the leftist agenda, gladly provided by these Ivy League colleges.
Will this system last? Who knows? Many powerful nations in the past lasted centuries with an incompetent ruling class, with Rome and China as prime examples. In all cases however these circumstances resulted in more ignorance and close-mindedness. For Rome it eventually led to the medieval dark ages, when knowledge was lost and society crumbled.
The result in the U.S. will be the same, an overall decline in the education of the American population, likely leading to the crumbling of society as well. We can see this already in our major cities, run by this incompetent ruling class of Democrats, many of whom already have that Ivy League stamp of approval.
A dark age is coming, and this one trend in education illustrates its advent.
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Lorde
“Royals” (June, 2013)
https://youtu.be/nlcIKh6sBtc
(3:20)
We’re a little different.
Our royals seek power over the rest of us.
The rest of us have guns.
They have to rule from cities afar. Just like Britain.
How’d that work out for them?
Our whole US education system needs an overhaul.
No longer should school boards be made up of anyone without a child in that system. No educators or prior educators should be on the board.
We used to have kindergarten to get children ready for school. Now we have pre schools to get them ready for kindergarten. One more layer of education for teachers to take over.
Now I have heard that they want to start an after high school pre collage course to get kids ready for collage. One more layer for the teachers to take over.
Once in collage they now have to take make up courses for what they missed in high school. More courses to keep professors working.
My son went to trade school, more or less. It was offered by our local union. After working and going to their classes for two years he is now fully paid off and making over 30 dollars and hour. Commercial roofer. He likes it.
“Every child should be educated to obey authority.”
Josiah Quincy III, president of Harvard 1829-1845
“Compulsory Education in the United States, A History” Part 3
Excerpted from “Murray N. Rothbard; Education Free & Compulsory” (1999)
https://youtu.be/jxdl-rw-Y2o
53:06
“Compulsory schooling originated as a tool of state indoctrination, inculcating children into Protestantism, then nationalism, and later progressivism and egalitarianism.
“Schooling in the United States began by copying the English model of voluntary private schools. But gradually through the 19th century, public schools were established and eventually attendance at them was made compulsory. They have served, and continue to serve, as a useful tool for state indoctrination into socialism, progressivism and egalitarianism.”
And people wonder why some have come to not trust the institution religion? And that is not to say that human beings do not need spirituality and the formalized entity religion, they do.
““Compulsory schooling originated as a tool of state indoctrination, inculcating children into Protestantism, then nationalism, and later progressivism and egalitarianism.”
Whether religion is used for indoctrination in order that people “think” properly, or it is used as a tool of societal control it is all the same.
Every government, corporation and religion entity bar none can be used to abuse power.
https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/god-spirituality-v-politics-law-and-justice-religion
And this truth is being used as an effective political weapon of control and usurpation of our system in particular at this time in history. It is an old story and what’s old is now new.
More to come on this particular subject soon.
It is all a psyops focused on authoritarian power:
Interview: Dr. Robert Malone: https://youtu.be/vPCr6UJM-Js
They always tell you what they are about and especially exactly who they fear.
“Its non binding”………………………..for now.
And once it is agreed to THEN it will in short order become BINDING!
Murray Rothbard
The American Economy & the End of Laissez Faire 1870 – World War Two
Lecture 9; The Progressive Era
https://youtu.be/t-0X81v-NvI?t=159
“The progressive movement came in 1900 to eliminate political parties. Technocrats and bureaucrats take over political power. Rural versus urban. Eliminate mayors, eliminate voting altogether, have appointed bureaucrats only. Nationalize public school system so costs could be socialized, like getting the public schools to teach Spanish. Children can all be part of a collective, without parental influence. Control shifted from ethnic working-class small communities to upper class WASPS…”
Sounds just like the wonderful E.U.
That could never happen here in America.
Hey, wait a minute!
Bob, while I agree with this thread I think you are missing an important factor, and that is the role of modern technology in the advent of this schism. Neil Postman wrote an incredibly insightful book in the 1980s called “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” In it I think he traces the original emergence of this new Royal Class to the transition society made from Language Based communications to the era of Media Based communications over the course of the 20th century.
In the prior era writing was the tool for communicating which imposes strict discipline on stating a thesis, presenting a case to support it, and then basing your conclusion on evidence presented. And if you were not rigorous in presenting DATA to affirm your assertions you were not taken seriously.
The advent of Media Communications has perverted this by substituting Logic and Data for the Soundbite affirmed by the Perceived Stature of the presenter. This worked initially because we were evolving from the rigorous written world and our media sources were primarily people with some authority and proven credentials who we trusted to handle the rigors of analysis for us. But inevitably credentials faded in importance and were replaced by well spoken attractive people who Look and Sound Authoritative but can be dumb as a rock.
This book was published in the mid 80s, before the rise of email much less the internet and today’s smart phone centric Matrix. But the root cause is the same, society has been dumbed down from thinking for itself and instead conditioned to accept Innuendo and Soundbites as fact from a Pretender Class without question.
It’s a great book I highly recommend.
https://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/014303653X/ref=asc_df_014303653X?tag=bngsmtphsnus-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=80676783691793&hvnetw=s&hvqmt=e&hvbmt=be&hvdev=m&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=&hvtargid=pla-4584276309582944&psc=1
MDN: A most excellent point. You describe the precise reasons I despise Twitter, which encourages emotional soundbite thinking lacking depth or rationality. It also explains my distaste for smart phones, which I think has elevated the power of shallow platforms like Twitter and taught an entire generation who grew up with them how not to think.
And here we have………………………………..true Socialist equality.
Take the walking tour: https://youtu.be/fompqYwSCoY
And this is what the “progressives” today in America, particularly in the Democrat party are looking for whether they understand it or not.
Everyone is equal in Cuba, truly equal.
Be careful what you wish for.
We’ve always been a two-tiered system…it’s just that when centrists like me pointed it out—we got Red-Baited.
It wasn’t that long ago that talk radio and William F. Buckley types called pro-border union men “knuckledraggers” and other names now used against Trump populists.
Blue Blood Republicans created the Rust Belt and ruin porn long before Biden and Sons joined up.
We need a third party.
I have called these people the New American Aristocracy and Pseudo Aristocracy for a decade. The pseudo is because they think of themselves as such but aren’t really because most of us go about are lives ignoring them. Aristocracy needs a class of people who accept the idea of being of a lower order.
Robert Pratt: That this fake royalty exists is agreed, but that wasn’t my point. My point is how, now and in the future, that fake royalty wants to use the stamp of approval given by established big name universities to maintain its power.
What must happen is a complete discrediting of those universities, in every way possible. The impression Reynolds, his commenter, and myself have gained of the public’s opinion of those universities must become common knowledge and fully understood, throughout the culture.
I must add that even if the reputation of these establishment universities falls into the toilet, as long as a degree from them results in powerful jobs with big salaries in corporations and government they will continue to be the gateway into that bankrupt fake royalty.
This fact describes the dark age we are now in. You no longer need a real quality education to gain power and wealth, only a fake degree that carries with it the name of the right institutions.
Jeff, unions that encouraged the rank-and-file to think they could get whatever they wanted – whether or not the business could sustain it – did as much to ruin American manufacturing as the corporate greed of blue-bloods.
But this is just one example of the same problem that has been turning our Best and Brightest into the Peter Principle royalty I call the Pedestaled Elite.
We have been conditioned to let those deemed to be the Smart People™️ do out thinking and solve our problems for us, instead of looking to them as advisers while retaining the individual authority AND responsibility to evaluate the problems and decide for ourselves the best ways to resolve them.
The move away from “a degree” as the One and Only True Way to prosperity is a sign that people are beginning to realize this, for they are rejecting that conventional wisdom brought to them by the “experts” known as guidance counselors and HR departments and deciding for themselves. People are doing the math for themselves and realizing the value of a Whatever Studies degree from Designer Label University does not justify the cost.
And if this trend persists, that value is going to erode even more, for Robert Pratt is right: Aristocracy needs a class of people who accept the idea of being of a lower order. . And we have been giving them just that for decades, to the point that these aristocrats build their entire lives around attaining that elite status for their personal gain, in money … and power to impose even their mere beliefs as the One True Way and demand our submission.
Every bit of advice we unthinkingly followed from them … every bit of “help” (with the Silly Strings always attached) we accepted from them, reinforced the above dysfunction.
We forgot that, while these Pedestaled know a lot … they CAN’T know us as individuals well enough to assure that their ideas will work to benefit YOU.
Until we return to making the effort, and taking the risk, to responsibly make our own decisions as individuals to better our lot and help our neighbors, the slide into decline will continue.
We need to stop government backed payments to these institutions.
As soon as the government made those promises the banks giving them made huge profits and the universities made even bigger profits and just keep raising prices to the limit the government will pay.
We need to break that cycle.
We need to take back more control over it by making each state pay instead of the federal government. If the people even want the government to help at all.
I have been warning about the “ruling class” for sometime.
They will never call them royal, but watch the modern new media. They are treated that way, and if you question them, you get smacked down.
Rush Limbaugh called them that openly. Codevilla wrote an article and later a book about it.
https://spectator.org/americas-ruling-class/
Robert Zimmerman,
You suggested: “What must happen is a complete discrediting of those universities, in every way possible.”
As you noted in your essay, this discretization process is underway.
What kind of graduates do we get from universities who cannot train their students to support their positions, whose minds are so weak that they need 57 genders, coloring books and crying rooms for election results, crusades against “whiteness” and “heterosexism,” and are triggered by the mere thought that someone may disagree with them. Reality is just too much for these college’s students, and by extension, their alumni.
The reality is that Democrat Elizabeth Warren is as white as Andrew Jackson, the first Democratic Party president and instigator of the Trail of Tears, but the fantasy is that she has “high cheekbones” and therefore must be Indian, or at least Indian enough that she gets Affirmative Action priority over those who are as white as Jackson.
The system works for those who reject reality and embrace fantasy.
But it may not be the end of the world, and it may not be the beginning of the next dark age. When Rome fell, its rivals were tyrannies and monarchies (not necessarily exclusive concepts). Today, people know another way. Today we know about freedom, liberty, and free market capitalism, three concepts that turned a backwoods colony that couldn’t feed itself under socialism into a nation that, after a mere three centuries of living under these three concepts, was able to save the world from tyranny. Twice. A world that had many millenniums of governance that failed to prepare itself to prevent tyranny from taking over. A world that had lived for almost all that time under tyrannies and monarchies.
Much of America may fall to tyranny and tyrants, but there will be regions of holdouts that will live more free, free enough to rise once again to save the world from tyranny.
“Just like the European nobility who was generally incompetent but guaranteed power, America will have its own incompetent royalty.”
This reminds me of some movie or television mini-series that I watched a couple of decades ago. European noblemen were the policymakers of the day, and they were attempting to avoid a second great worldwide war. These noblemen believed themselves to be the smart ones, the ones capable of thinking and reasoning well enough to keep the peace. As history tells us, they were not as smart as they thought they were. The European nobility and royalty has been starting wars for centuries, if not millenniums.
We commoners, we civilians, have proved ourselves to be pretty smart. Smarter than the bloodline policymakers. Rather than smarter-than-thou royalty setting American policy, it has been we civilians, without titles or noble upbringing — elected into policy-making positions after explaining why our policies would be better than our opponents’ policies –who have generally kept ourselves from starting wars. We are smart enough to elect the better policy. Or we were, but now that the elections are corrupted, we have lost our say in the governmental policies.
Monarchies lost a lot of their reputations after The Great War, World War I, and after World War II, national socialism lost what little reputation it had. The United Nations continues to ask the United States to come to the rescue of nations that have been attacked by their neighbors. I don’t know what it is, but somehow we civilians are smart enough to make the world a better place than those noblemen have been able to do. I suspect that the American civilians will still be able to outsmart the American royalty. The royalty will be too busy, trying to figure out what gender to be today, to figure out how to run a country, or a state, or a county, or a town. We see plenty of evidence of this inability all around the country. By 1960, Detroit had been turned into a boomtown by the Republicans, then the Democrats took over, declared the city to be their model city (see how good we are? Detroit is booming) but turned it into a disaster with fleeing companies and a half-sized population during a time when the nation’s population doubled and business increased. In the past two decades, San Francisco went from a beautiful tourist city to one that tourists avoid (has anyone seen Fisherman’s Wharf lately? Seriously, what happened to it?). California went from a state that attracted residents to losing 800 residents a day. American royalty knows less about ruling populations than Europe’s royalty knew, and they knew less than We the People know and knew. American royalty cannot even define a woman, yet will confirm such a stupid fellow American royal on the U.S. Supreme Court.
If we stick to reality and reject their fantasies, America’s royalty will run to their coloring books to keep from having a crying meltdown in an isolation room, and they won’t be able to fight back. When we accept their fantasies, we fear naturally changing climates and let them lockdown, knockdown, and smackdown their subjected peons over some silly flu.
_________________
Jester Naybor wrote: “We forgot that, while these Pedestaled know a lot … they CAN’T know us as individuals well enough to assure that their ideas will work to benefit YOU.” [ellipis in original]
This does not only apply to the national level or to every level of government, it also applies to the schoolroom, where the modern schoolteacher seems to think that he knows whether your child should have a secret gender or even a sex-change operation. The teacher has two dozen or so other students, so why does he think that his distracted time with your child gives him better insight than your quality time? And yet, these teachers think exactly that. They have been corrupted by the power they have in the classroom. Absolutely.