As much as I hate linking into Facebook, this is too good to pass up:
As a part of the ongoing back and forth with Michael Saladino, I posted a comment that seemed to resonate with us both. I thought I’d problem it and see what other folks think of it.”
Let me present a hypothesis. The ‘front-row kids’ have a coherent, articulatable worldview – which is reassuring and which cements their internal cultural alliance. That worldview has policy/action outcomes which – so far (key point) – have worked relatively great for those who can get over the wall and join the front-row crowd.
They are also those _charged with_ developing the consensus worldview (what Habermas calls ‘communicative reason’). The _problem_ is that the worldview developed is one that has cast adrift everyone outside the wall, and is now busily working to make the wall as high as possible.Why? Because the model doesn’t work in the real world.
So they build a huge pool of people who checked the boxes on joining the front row team, but there aren’t enough chairs any more. This gives us three groups:
A. Folks comfortably in the front row (or who are confident that by scrambling they can stay there);
B. Folks trying to get into the front row, and realizing that there aren’t enough chairs and the wall is impossibly high;
C. Folks who aren’t front-row (note that this doesn’t mean poor) who no longer have a coherent worldview that _they can relate to_ to latch onto.
Group C is in the midst of Millenial (as in thousand-year) craziness as the social and mental structures they depended on splinter. So they are ripe for all kinds of crazy shit.
Group B is the group that has historically launched revolutions – we oughta watch what they do very carefully.
Group A is just trying to hang on long enough to cash out and buy the house in Sun Valley. They are increasingly abandoning their duty of care for their fellow citizens.Note that I see this in my European friends as well as my US friends…it’s not Trump that splintered things.”
The concept is called “Elite Overproduction.” It’s what happens when there are too many wanna-be elites and not enough room at the top.
“Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition that gradually undermines the spirit of cooperation, which is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class. This happens because the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions.”
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/peter-turchin-how-elite-overproduction-and-lawyer-glut-could-ruin-the-u-s
A, B, and C sound quasi-“Class War” to me. How do they compare to Marxist class theory? (Are we allowed to think that way?)
I would guess B are what Marxists call the “petit bourgeois” and C don’t have a coherent worldview because they are the working class who are seeing their world closing in on them and are frantic because they don’t understand what is being done to them by A and B. So indeed they will buy into all kinds of crazy shit, while A and B work at shifting blame and attention away from themselves. I don’t see that as being “Millennial” though, since it is a phenomenon that has repeated itself countless times in recorded history.