Become?
The ruling class are the ones with insatiable ambition and no morals. Intelligence doesn’t matter as much as willingness to abuse others.
The willingness to abuse others is low intelligence
nah these have nothing to do with another. they’re orthogonal properties.
Depends on who you’re abusing / pissing-off. Can’t imagine it’s good for your health to have large numbers of people angry at you.
Emotional vs intellectual
it’s not stupid if it works (taps head)
Was there a time when they weren’t?
Based on everything I learned about history from watching Blackadder, probably not.
You know, genuinely…American education tends to go “Then there was World War One and we tried to stay out of it because it was Europe’s problem but we had to go win it anyway then there was the roaring 20s and the great depression 30’s and then MOTHAFUCKIN WORLD WAR TWO, the four years that makes up two thirds or our nation’s 250 year history.” So the scene where Blackadder sits George and Baldrick down and describes the alliances and how “there was only one problem. It was bollocks.” Is genuinely my understanding of WWI. That and rotary piston engines. I know what a blip switch is.
I mean…
You know…
Like for a bit…
Remember during the French Revolution where, when told that her people were starving because they didn’t have any bread, Marie Antoinette wondered why they don’t just eat cake? Rich people have always been idiots who believe they’re smart. They live simple lives due to the luxury they enjoy, and wonder why poor people without such luxuries think life is so complicated.
On the one hand, I’m convinced Marie Antoinette didn’t say or think like that.
On the other hand, I think there’s a good case to make that if her brother had come to Versailles and explained to Louis XVI how to fuck his sister four or five years before he actually did, the French Revolution wouldn’t have happened.
The short version of this story as I, an American nearing the bottom of his third Mint Julep of the evening, understands it, is the French–of all people–came up with a king that didn’t know how to use his penis. Letters from nobles at the time explain how he would stick it in, soak without moving for two minutes or so, and then “bid goodnight.” I mean, to be fair, they were like 15 on their wedding day. So Marie Antoinette’s life consisted of hanging around Versailles, a palace designed specifically to be an expensive place to hang around. She basically partied the French economy empty, like any teenage girl in her shoes would have. Eventually her brother, Joseph II, visited Versailles and apparently had to awkwardly explain to the young king what orgasms are, and eight months later Marie was pregnant with her first child. She significantly toned down the lavish lifestyle by then, but not after spending the country into an actual crisis.
It is my understanding that, later in life, Marie would show some frugality, doing away with expensive gifts for her children during famines and such. This happened when she was an adult, I think I must point out. Again, I am an American and thus indoctrinated against the very idea of royalty, but a flaw in absolute monarchy is that absolute power over foreign and domestic policy may land in the hands of a teenager who can’t figure out his crotch by himself, and the only thing standing between the nation and an empty treasury is one very specific teen pregnancy.
not to defend french royalty, but she didnt say that, im certain she wouldnt have thought it either.
to think the rich are unknowingly oppressing their people is a stupid idea, they know where their cake comes from, and they want it because you can’t have it.
They were NEVER smarter. At most at one time they had more leisure time and access to books and tutors when reading and books were rare. That made them more educated, and they want to go back to that desperately.
I dont think much of our ruling class wants to go back to reading, looking at the way they… are.
they don’t want to be more educated than they already are, they want to be more educated than us. they’re doing it by destroying the public school system, keeping tertiary education prohibitively expensive, eroding trust in experts through anti-intellectualism, and promoting the spread of misinformation
Exactly. They want to be perceived as smarter (basically look down on the unwashed masses.) They don’t want to do the work to be more educated. Hence the hurdles they can put in front of the poors while they get to pay for fastpass to skip the line directly into the ivy leagues.
They read, a lot more than you probably realize, and probably a lot more than the average person.
They also have access to teams of analysts.
Have you read the “analysis” on the 2024 election?
I think that “analyst” is just fancy talk for their relatives who dont have another job when its not an actual scientific field cause I have worked with real analysts.Sure they are more literate but also the way they balk at expanding their knowledge makes me think they aren’t reading much worth it.
They have access to money and trial and error with more room to make more errors than the average person.
They’ve always been morons about something. Just seems now that they are morons about damn near everything.
Yeah, at least like their grandparents had interesting and clever schemes about money that made you feel like they thought it through even if they were largely incapable of anything else.
Currently it feels difficult to assume they think about anything.
You’ve bought the image they’re selling. If you think they’re idiots, it just gives them another mechanism to manipulate you.
I’m no fan of Bush Jr, but go watch some of his speeches.
Sometimes he says “nuclear”, sometimes he says “nuke-u-lar”.
That’s someone putting on an act. No one says it both ways.
Go watch any politician’s speeches, look for the subtle variations in their behaviours.
They’re not morons, they’re Machiavellian. Appearing to be a moron is just another tool in the box.
(That said, some genuinely are morons, but I’m not dismissing any one of them so lightly - even morons can be Machiavellian).
And in the end, all politics is about manipulation (or said more positively, inducing groups of people toward a shared goal). And politics exists in every single group of humans, no matter how small.
We occasionally get lucid leadership. As a whole group though, our leadership class has always had some glaring idiocy going on.
Checks notes: “All men are created equal…” Maintains slavery and women can’t vote.
Nope, they’ve always been morons.
They had a very narrow definition of what counted as “men” and used that to justify removing rights from people.
R you saying this from an american perspective?
This idea is referred to as “Circulation of Elites” and suggests that every ruling-class has to be a minority group (E.G WASPs in USA, Normans in medieval england, “the rich” in general in most places), but they will always end up being displaced by another minority group. Because the key to securing power over, for instance, a country, is to be highly organised (only possible for a small, organised minority - never a/the majority group) and when in power, this group becomes complacent, so their grip over power slips and in comes the new elite minority ruling class
historically this is often identified/misidentified as Elites mixing, sexually/culturally, with majority groups or other groups. This is more usually a symptom but it could in some cases be the cause. The opposite - Inbreeding - is of course also bad, as is a refusal to learn new ideas (i.e refusal to mix culturally).
So… it’s like a law of nature. Whatever elites do they slip out of power sooner or later. American elite have probably been in power for a “healthy” amount of time tbh.
just in case it’s not clear, minority does not mean racial minority here. It’s literally any group that is small and organised - christians or atheists, rich middle class or gangsters.
You need to read Machiavelli
Sophistry has always been king. We’ve at least been moving away from divinely chosen, but when most people can’t be bothered to understand sophistry exists…
They’re not all morons - some are, for sure. Those are the ones being manipulated by the smarter ones.
This also holds true in any group of people.
Sophists “why think when you have the money to afford a thinking man for you”
I’m not sure how much of this is misinformation I picked up, if it’s kinda true, or not true at all, but I’ve always thought the airborne lead poisoning from leaded gas certainly didn’t help. Made everyone dumber and more aggressive.
The ruling class uses the morons. It’s the perfect crime.
People need to understand we are cattle, from the bottom of the streets to the president.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It only takes one
Hard times create strong men
Strong men create good times
Good times create weak men
Weak men create hard times
The cycle continues
While this sounds very cute, it’s wrong. Times are always hard for most people. Point to a good time in history and I’ll point to the people whose backs it was resting on.
