Of Anointed and Laymen

Have you noticed how many things we have been told about what we should and should not eat are wrong?  A generation of people who were told by "science" how to eat are now FAT. 

In the book Tales of New America, there is a scene which stuck with me. In it, an intelligent, educated man of some stature is attempting to sneak in to the “red state” half of a Balkanized America. The man is wealthy, powerful, and possesses the self-confidence of such folks.

He is outsmarted by a lowly, unattractive border guard. The border guard explains that he was not a good-looking man, nor was he privileged to attend great universities. But that didn’t mean he was stupid. The assumption that a man employed in a lowly, backwater job is dumb is a mistake. In this story, it caught the interloper by surprise, and cost him his life.

And that is one reason Donald Trump is President.

For all their vaunted education and intellectual credentials, the intelligentsia was outsmarted by a boorish real estate developer. Note also the difference in payroll expenditure. The way things work in the anointed world, and I’ve seen it first hand, is everything is accounted in terms of the size of your demesne. The more people you have, the more powerful you appear. Their first instinct is always more. More money, more people, more media exposure.

Even a regular old construction worker can tell you that at a certain point, more people and more money won’t buy you a damn thing. In fact, in many cases, adding more people just means there are more folks getting in the way. Most laymen have an instinctive distrust of committees, and for good reason.

So what is the difference between the layman and the anointed, anyway?

It isn’t precisely college education, though that is related in some fashion. There are laymen who hold advanced degrees and do excellent work. And there are laymen who hold no degree, and nonetheless do great work, also. The primary difference may be the focus.

Laymen are job-focused. You have to build a building, or fix a car, or write software to do something. The anointed are power-focused. Whether or not anything gets built is of no concern. Indeed, it may even be the opposite, in that if an organization they control ever achieves its primary goal (like, say, eradicating breast cancer), then their power would be diminished. So often times, their goal is to prevent the work from being completed. This is heresy to the layman.

Sometimes it gets ridiculous.

The anointed are hyper sensitive to perceived political shifts. This has, in recent years, been used to embarrass them with planted political issues, like 4chan’s push of free bleeding, which led women around the world to bleed in their pants to protest the patriarchy.

And this shows the absurdity of it all. These people propose to rule the laymen, and yet no layman would have been fooled by such an obvious political ruse. He’d have said something like “well, if you want to bleed in your pants, that’s your own business, I guess. But seems kinda stupid and gross to me.” Even a construction worker with an IQ of 95 wouldn’t be quite that gullible.

This, of course, has led to colossal flip-flopping on political issues as the anointed try to gauge how best to play the power game at that particular moment.

So an anointed can believe, simultaneously, in an extreme example of doublethink, that evolution must be true, and evangelical Christians are stupid for believing in Creationism (and thus must be accounted as science deniers), while trying to tell us that biological gender doesn’t even exist. The fact that kindergartners can tell the difference, but Yale grads can’t, is telling. So much for the Party of Science, eh?

And the bottom line is ... power.

And, as O’Brien [1984] explained, it was all about power, nothing more. Truth was irrelevant and could be manipulated anyway. Accomplishment was meaningless. Everything served the feeling of power. There was no other reason to exist. This is how our anointed elites feel. Their entire lives are an endless pursuit of power over their fellow man, and the emotional high this provides.

Whether they really are more intelligent in some way or not may be irrelevant, because in the end it doesn’t matter if the person asserting that 2+ 2 = 5 is smarter than you. He is still wrong, and is trying to deceive you (and often himself, too). Sometimes greater intelligence only provides a man with a greater capacity for deception.

The Ruling Class will not give up its power without a fight to the death.