The Lessons of Trump

One of the harsh truths of history is that the institution and maintenance of social justice in society ultimately requires the existence of a stable upper class.

Aristotle portrayed in the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle as a scholar of the 15th century AD.

The frailties of democracy have been well understood since Antiquity.

The historical evidence is irrefutable as well. Democracy is mob rule. It is brutally chaotic and can wind up in catastrophe.

Enlightened folks want to think the People will go along with enlightened ideas, but unfortunately democracy is often regressive and conservative, for the simple reason that the mob is not enlightened but uneducated and ignorant. Inevitably democracy, in ignorance, results in dictatorship.

In democratic societies such as America folks who gain any sort of education come to realize this brutal fact about democracy at some point. It usually comes after great disappointment and shock following an electoral defeat to a madman whom the mob has decided to make a king.

Every society produces people who travel, who learn about the greater world, and who thus become more cosmopolitan in view. They naturally begin to think of themselves as citizens of the world, rather than a particular nation. America has produced a lot of such people now, as our universities have exploded in volume of degrees awarded in recent years.

Educated and cosmopolitan people, more than others, realize that society is broken in fundamental ways that create unfairness, pain, and social injustice. They see that it is possible for these problems to be overcome through the right collective action.

With the right action, social justice can be accomplished, by the will of people, through the institution of the State. By allowing these progressive actions and ideas to take hold of society, we mold society into a new type of configuration. We can cure society of some of these ills, perhaps all of them ultimately, as we discover new hidden injustices over time.

Sadly the mob will never fully understand this. The enlightened ones will always be a minority, at least for a little while more.

Now perhaps you understand why society needs a stable upper class.

Who did you think the rich folks really were? You thought they were the bad guys. But you know in heart they are not.

The world has a new upper class now, and it turns out they are the good guys. 

You thought the rich were the money-grubbing middle class business owners and landlords who cheat you. You thought the rich were people who ran your local bank branches.

Petty stockholders and petty managers of outdated corporations think of plunder. But they are closer to the mob than they are the true upper class. They still think in terms of pensions and checks arriving in the mail.

Those people are, like you yourself, still stuck in the obsession of money itself, which is a mark of lower class. Once you are born into that, it is is very hard to overcome it and think of yourself as beyond money.

At some point one realizes that no matter how rich you get, almost everybody is going to have much more of it than you. Unless you are of the most select of select families, there will always be others richer, or people with more social status than you somehow.

At some point, for most rich people, life becomes about something more ineffable. If there is a competition, it becomes about who can play the most. Who can enjoy life the most? Who can gain the most admiration from one's fellow enlightened travelers in leisure, through some measure of accomplishment that is beyond sheer bank deposits and land holdings.

Who do you think are the most cosmopolitan and educated people on earth, the folks with the widest view of history and global affairs?

Who are the people whose politics are closest to those whom you would want to rule the world, if someone had to rule it?

Who do you think is the greatest users of parks and wildlife preserves? The poor mob? Who do you think had the best vantage point to act as stewards of the planet? The rabble?

Who do you think understands most acutely that most religion is superstition?

Who you think is the most beyond gender? Who do you think is the most accepting of Islam?

Hint: it's not the masses.

No, the people who love the earth most dearly---the whole of it, are the people who have come to know it most deeply, the ones who have seen the greatest diversity of its natural wonders from the ground, airplane windows, and even outer space. You think they want to destroy the earth? They just want to play in it?

Thankfully we are all getting much richer. Haven't you noticed that the more free time and leisure society produces,  and the more emphasis is place on education, that the more liberal and progressive people get, even as the mob stays hopelessly ignorant? Progress is frustratingly slow, although perhaps it is now accelerating.

Do you really want to help the world get better, or do you want to wallow in petty jealousy that you weren't born in the right bloodline, and thus spend your life fruitlessly thwarting the very people you should be helping, if you actually believed in what you believe?

Did Obama just go full Stormfront here? Of course not. He didn't say "we should but the Nordic countries in charge because Nordic people are racially superior" We wants to put them in charge for a completely different reason.