Mencius Moldbug: Actual Letter to a Liberal Friend
15th August 2010
50 years ago, Detroit was a thriving metropolis, the fourth largest city in America. It had no presentiments whatsoever of any imminent disaster. Today it is a burned-out ruin, more or less. This is the sort of objective phenomenon that, if you’re a student of history, you can’t help but try to explain.
When gentlemen look at progressivism, they see a movement whose purpose is to help the underclass, those whose plight is no fault of their own. When peasants look at progressivism, they see a movement whose purpose is to employ gentlemen in the business of public policy, by using the peasants’ money to buy votes from varlets. Who, in the peasants’ perception, abuse the patience and generosity of both peasants and gentlemen in almost every imaginable way, and are constantly caressed by every imaginable authority for doing so.
San Francisco’s public school system, which literally assigns children randomly around the city to aid in the great cause of social homogenization – a cause which makes the war in Afghanistan look like an unqualified success – causes immense headaches, costs or both to the very same social class which sets the public policies of San Francisco. Yet they accept it with hardly a murmur.
Peasants see a patron-client relationship between the gentlemen and the varlets – a relationship not at all unlike the late Roman relationship of clientela, where a patrician measured his social status by the vast army of plebeians that battened on his trenches. Again, what to the gentleman appears as a noble act of charity, compassion, etc, to the coarse and cynical peasant reveals itself as a purchase of political power, with his tax dollars if not his physical safety. Therefore a vision of the gallows arises in his hindbrain.
As Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.
August 15th, 2010 at 18:30
“Peasants” don’t head to the range with ropes, and neither do “gentlemen” agitate against the “rope amendment”.