The Ruling Class and the Lie They Told Us

[00:00:00]I still remember the first time someone used white man as an insult directed against me rather than a descriptor.

[00:00:08]I was in college at the time having a friendly debate with a friend who happened to be a liberal. The topic was about international relations, but I honestly can't remember the details because what happened next shocked me so much.

[00:00:22]One of her even more liberal friends interjected and said my entire argument was invalid because I was a white man.

[00:00:30]And at the time I was blindsided. To me this was a total nonsequittor. I mean what did my race or sex have to do with the merits of my argument? Little did I know what was about to happen. And at some point in the last dozen years, you've likely had a similar experience that caught you completely off guard, too. What I didn't understand at the time, in what took me years to fully work out, was that this exchange hadn't been a coincidence, something changed, obviously. We all know what to call it today, the Great Awakening.

[00:01:09]But many people still can't fully explain what exactly wokeism was or why it happened in the first place. I mean, doesn't it seem strange that virtually every major institution in America, the media, academia, government agencies, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, corporate America, even the military.

[00:01:35]All of them seem to just wake up one day and start paring the exact same thing.

[00:01:40]Now, the explanation we've usually been given that this was just a spontaneous grassroots movement of 20some year old activists who demanded change and that our institutions simply responded has quite frankly never made any sense.

[00:01:57]Grassroots movements comprised largely of college-aged women don't take over Wall Street investment firms or major Hollywood studios in just a few years, let alone every other institution in the country all at once. Why would the military care what your local Starbucks barista thinks about pretty much anything? That's like asking your grandparents who their favorite VTuber is.

[00:02:24]So what exactly happened and why?

[00:02:27]To answer that, we have to first ask a question that sounds almost too simple to be worth asking. Who actually runs this country? Or for that matter any country?

[00:02:40]Well, according to Aristotle, there are three forms of government. The rule of one, the rule of the few, and the rule of the many. monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.

[00:02:55]This is the basic framework for how people have thought about politics for over 2,000 years. And if you ask most people today, especially in a western country like America, they'll tell you that we've settled this question. After centuries of conflict and experimentation, we've arrived at the final answer. Liberal democracy, the rule of the people, that's the democratic part, mediated by institutions that temper their passions, but which protect their rights in turn, the liberal part. This is the system we believe we live under. But there's just one problem. It's a lie. The very premise of democracy is a sham. Elites are the only ones who ever truly rule a society. That's why they're called elites in the first place.

[00:03:48]Now, sometimes they're open about it and call that arrangement a monarchy or an aristocracy.

[00:03:55]And sometimes they obscure it and call it democracy.

[00:03:59]But all of these labels are just different names for the same system of politics that has been with us since the dawn of civilization, which is that a small minority of people make decisions everyone else has to live with.

[00:04:14]The fact is that all societies have a ruling class. We the people have never ruled. And we know this because the very document that begins with these words was written by just 55 men in a strictly closed door meeting in Philadelphia in 1787.

[00:04:34]Now, none of this is an argument that elites are inherently evil or that having a ruling class is itself the problem. The founders who wrote that document in secret were among the most capable, principled, and patriotic ruling classes in history. They built something truly incredible. That's my entire point, though. Ruling classes are like fire. It can heat your home or burn it down, but it's an essential part of life all the same. The moment politics begins, elites aren't far behind. The question is simply what kind of elites will exist and whether they're actually good for the people they govern. And from the perspective of the elites themselves, there's perhaps a third question which might be the most important of them all. How do we legitimize our status at the top of the social hierarchy? How do we justify our rule? What is the explanation we tell ourselves and everyone else for why we find ourselves in the position we're currently in rather than someone else?

[00:05:44]Power alone isn't enough. There's never been a regime in history, no matter how tyrannical or authoritarian it might be, that has ever declared its own existence to be a brute fact. In all places and at all times, every elite that has ever existed justified its position by appealing to something higher than themselves.

[00:06:08]And when you look at history, you can see examples of this all over the place.

[00:06:13]Alexander the Great and his companions ruled Macedon because they were the ones who personally led armies into battle and conquered the Persian Empire.

[00:06:23]Medieval kings claimed a divine right to rule and Chinese emperors had something similar with the mandate of heaven. The northern German princes in the Holy Roman Empire could point to their role in preserving the Protestant Reformation.

[00:06:37]During the English Civil War, Parliament defeated the monarchists and claimed the sovereign right to rule for itself.

[00:06:45]The founding fathers ran America for the first generation of the country's independence because they were the ones who organized, directed, and ultimately won the revolutionary war. Napoleon and his generals claimed to be the culmination of the French Revolution.

[00:07:03]Bismar and the Prussian Junkers ruled Germany because they were the ones who unified it. The robber barons in the 19th century pointed to their role in kickstarting the industrial revolution and all the huge philanthropy projects they built as a result of their wealth.

[00:07:20]The Marxists in Russia claimed to represent the dictatorship of the proletariat who themselves were supposed to be the world's final ruling class after all the monarchs, aristocrats and bourgeoa capitalists were to be overthrown.

[00:07:36]The fascists in Italy claimed to be the spiritual embodiment of the nation. I can go on and on with more examples, but you get the point. A ruling class always exists and only by virtue of a story that justifies why they occupy the top of the social hierarchy instead of someone else. And obviously, the more convincing the story, the safer their position is. Ruling classes that build their legitimacy on a complete lie might have a hard time making anything good happen, but ones who build their legitimacy on a story that absolutely no one buys, don't tend to remain in power for long. That means that while it would obviously be a good thing for both the story to be true and for people to easily believe it, it's actually more important for the ruling class for people to believe in it than it is for the story itself to actually work out in practice.

[00:08:37]And by the way, this same principle applies to any political structure. It doesn't have to just be nations or empires. Political parties and HOAs have ruling classes, too. All institutions do. Which brings us back to America.

[00:08:54]Because our ruling elite aren't industrialists who built factories or military leaders who won wars. They're not even elected politicians in the traditional sense. They're the people who occupy all the institutions I mentioned at the start of this video.

[00:09:11]They are essentially a class of credentialed technocrats, managers, and so-called experts who derive their power from essentially gatekeeping the flow of information and money and access to careers that we typically associate with the upper crust of society.

[00:09:31]But what great empire did the HR departments carve out for the American people? Did the managerial class tame the western frontier? Do we have queer theory to thank for the industrial revolution?

[00:09:46]Did the sociology department at Cal Berkeley give us the transcontinental railroad or the iPhone?

[00:09:52]Did DEI help get us to the moon or win us the Cold War? Of course not. These people have never contributed anything to society except sow division and foster endless agitation for no other reason than to create chaos.

[00:10:10]But there's a cost to chaos. And if one were to look back at the last 50 years, they might conclude that de-industrialization hollowed out the working class, that the traditional nuclear family imploded, that hyper financialization enriched asset holding elites over workers, that our inner cities either look like Berlin after the war or have Zillow listings with sticker prices like this.

[00:10:39]And last, but certainly not least, that globalization turned America's ruling class into tourists in their own country.

[00:10:49]This is a damning indictment against our current ruling elite. They're essentially a bunch of parasitic leeches with no national loyalty and little productive capacity who simply got rich by looting this country. So, how do you keep that going? Remember, all ruling classes need a moral justification to explain why they're in charge and are a weak phobic elites are no exception. In fact, they're in dire need of a legitimizing mythos more than perhaps any other ruling class in history. At least previous elites saw themselves as being tied to the country they ruled over. For all of their faults, names like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie helped make America great in the first place. Whatever you think of how they made their money, they made real things that outlasted themselves for more than a century. And in doing so, they permanently changed the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans for the better. But none of that is true of our modern managerial elite. This country isn't their home in any deep sense. It's just an economic zone that they happen to be in. They take pride not in being an American, but in signaling how much contempt they have for America itself.

[00:12:13]Our ruling class has done nothing but farm society for more mental illness, impulsive, lumping proletariat rubes, and violent migrants from the third world. That's what they produce. Their crowning achievement is that they've given us indoctrinated 20-some year old men who think they're women in Somali welfare scammers.

[00:12:38]More than 30 years ago, Christopher Lash saw this when he wrote a book called Revolt of the Elites. And his thesis was pretty simple. It's that the people at the top of society were steadily detaching themselves from any heartfelt obligations to the particular nation and people that they rule over. They've stopped seeing themselves as Americans first and have begun to see themselves as members of a global professional class that just so happens to be based here.

[00:13:08]But this creates a very specific problem. You can't justify your power over a particular people by appealing to their traditions and their interests when you've mentally and financially checked out of both of them. You need a different kind of moral framework entirely. one that makes your cosmopolitan ruthlessness look like a virtue rather than an act of abandonment and which preemptively delegitimizes the inevitable public backlash that will naturally arise from America's elites betraying America herself.

[00:13:46]Wokeism became that justifying mythos.

[00:13:49]It offered America's ruling class a means to escape from the very people they wish to rule over and enabled them to retain all the power that comes from rulership without ever having to admit that they wielded power at all. Even more ingenious was the fact that wokeism not only shielded elites who were essentially waging war on middle America, it presented middle America itself as the villain.

[00:14:18]It told the dispossessed working and middle classes of largely straight white Christian men who were being economically gutted and culturally erased that their sufferings were not only irrelevant but actually a cause for celebration because of their racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, toxic masculinity, whiteness. And in case none of that worked, their unconscious bias.

[00:14:49]Wokeism presented itself as a sort of grassroots driven challenge to power.

[00:14:55]But in reality, it protected power by redirecting blame onto the very people who were being screwed over by the system.

[00:15:04]This is why every major institution adopted it seemingly all at once. This didn't happen because wokeism emerged from below. It solved a legitimacy problem from above that the people running all these institutions needed to confront.

[00:15:22]It's genius if you think about it. But where does that leave us now? Because it turns out that running every single institution in the country on the basis of total ideological conformity rather than any sort of competency actually has some devastating consequences.

[00:15:40]The ruling class got what it wanted.

[00:15:42]They achieved total ideological dominance over pretty much every corner of America. In many respects, they won the culture wars. They monopolized the moral high ground for years. They possessed and wielded the power to destroy anyone who stepped out of line.

[00:16:02]But it turns out that none of this was enough to actually govern the country.

[00:16:07]And in response to this, right-wing populists naturally want to fight against the elites because they rightfully see that America's current ruling class has betrayed their own country.

[00:16:21]But if your political strategy is to wait for we the people to wake up, take power, and overthrow the current regime, unfortunately, you're wasting your time.

[00:16:32]Waiting for the people to overthrow a regime on their own is like waiting for GDAU. The people will rise has consistently ranked among the most disastrous political miscalculations of all time. All movements predicated on this belief have ended in total disaster.

[00:16:52]The people will never rise. They'll never wake up. The people are incapable of political action as a cohesive entity. with a singular will because the people don't agree on everything.

[00:17:07]This is why accelerationists find themselves always accelerating without ever reaching their stated destination because they're constantly banking that by intentionally making things worse, the normies will be redpilled.

[00:17:22]But the normies will never be redpilled.

[00:17:25]That's why they're normies in the first place. And this is not a flaw that can be fixed with proper education or mobilization or a change in the news cycle or a shift in the economy. This is a fundamental law of political reality.

[00:17:42]The ones who wake up and rise are counter elites and they displace the existing ruling class in a process known as elite circulation.

[00:17:53]Ultimately, an organized minority that knows who they are, what they believe in, and how to gain the system will always triumph if given enough time to do so.

[00:18:06]This process is how the United States was founded in the first place. It was Samuel Adams who once said that it doesn't take a majority to prevail, but rather an arate tireless minority keen on setting bushfires of freedom in the minds of men. And this process isn't ideologically biased towards one side or the other. It's also how the left reached such commanding heights in society to begin with. Understanding this means that the most important political project of our time isn't just tearing down the progressive managerial class. It's building a new patriotic elite who absolutely adore their country, want to see it thrive, and are willing to make personal sacrifices to see it happen, and who view their own destinies as being inextricably intertwined with that of America itself.

[00:19:05]We don't yet have that patriotic counter elite. But if the right wants to win and truly defeat wokeism once and for all, they'll need to build one sooner or later.

[00:19:19]Who will that be? I don't yet know, but the applications are open and maybe it'll include you.