The well off were expected to grant zero interest loans under Old Testament Law. True, they got servants for six years from those who could not pay back, but they were expected to treat those indentured servants well and give them startup capital upon release.
A mixture of duty and power.
But not feudal. The servants were released on the Sabbath Year, and land was released on the Jubilee Year.
In the American West we overemphasize "king AMONG THE PEOPLE" completely dismissing that it's a King. This relates smoothly to your comments on cinematic Aragorn.
Our revolutionary roots leave kingship with a bad taste in our mouth. But leadership without ownership, leads to duty without weight.
You see this in the protestant churches and family structure as well. No sense of authority. The father became a sort of master deliberator. And pastor has been relegated to scriptural rhetorician.
We need to return language of "my people" back to the public consciousness.
On the one hand, it's wild that a country with such a suspicion of hierarchy was commandeered by a vicious oligarchy. On the other, it's not surprising at all. Nature abhors a vacuum. If you don't have a proper understanding of authority, you are going to make yourself vulnerable to bad authorities.
It’s the most natural social arrangement in the world. When you live in a dangerous world, you need people who have your back, and you need to have their back.
No doubt, the entire order is built to destroy this ethos! Just about everything militates against it. But that order is showing signs of cracking. What is fake and ghey will eventually fall, and life might get very interesting!
So I hugely admire and agree with this essay in many ways, and I think it is one of the most important messages for our times to hear, but I choked on this:
"We religiously assure ourselves that all men are created equal while also submitting to the rule of a class of vampires who recognize no equality and feel zero obligation to those beneath them. Quite the opposite—their expertise and paper credentials entitle the meritocrats to bleed others dry in their quest for more."
Umm, no. Not even close.
Our elites bear no resemblance to bloodsucking vampires.
Most ruling classes in history have coerced others to work for them, while living in comparative comfort. I don't necessarily condemn that. Maybe you haven't figured out how to run the economy without coercion, and you need more comforts in order to dedicate yourself effectually to the business of ruling. But still.
In the 19th century, the capitalist power elite largely left the masses free to work as they chose, refraining from coercion. Except that the punishment for idleness was starvation. There was little or nothing for a social safety net. That's a kind of backhanded coercion too.
Our rulers have no slaves and no serfs. Anyone is free to leave any job. And the threat of starvation has also been taken away. Now there's Medicaid and SNAP and TANF and LIHEAP and the EITC and Social Security and Medicare and much more to keep the improvident from starving. And the elite pay taxes to support it all, and then *still* give a lot of money to foundations.
That may not be a moral improvement, taken holistically. But it absolutely refutes the charge of being vampires.
I absolutely agree that our elites need more of the spirit of noblesse oblige, and need to stop deluding themselves and others by the myth of equality of opportunity. And part of that should consist in giving *themselves* in the form of examples, by laboring to become models of virtue. People have to think about the power elite a lot in order to survive. That can be very beneficial if the elites fill their minds with exemplars of virtue, and very harmful if it gives them examples of resentment, ossified unjust thinking, cowardly conformism, and so on. Our elites are pathologically uninspiring, and wrong the people by failing to supply them with heroes.
But that point would come across more clearly and cleanly without the phony baloney rhetoric of calling them vampires.
If you want to preach virtue, you'd better practice it by not randomly spewing unjust slanders.
By the way, if that makes you want to know now about my, here's a kind of autobiographical sociology called "the author as a case study of the educated elite":
Well, thanks. That's interesting. It may be a clue to where the "vampires" rhetoric is coming from. Was it the Covid pandemic, lockdowns etc., that exposed the elite as "vampires?"
I disagree, but I think I kind of get where you're coming from. I was haunted at the time by the feeling: how can this possibly be right? It's just pathetic for a great civilization, with so much power and wealth and knowledge, and so many achievements, to be cowering and hiding, abandoning its way of life, even closing churches (!) to run away from a disease that doesn't seem worse than a bad flu.
And yet the excess death statistics don't really have a plausible explanation other than that Covid was really as deadly for some as they said, and killed a million people or so. Was it right to shut down the face-to-face economy for a year-- more in some places-- to try to save a million lives? Probably so.
But it still seems so *cowardly!*
I think part of the problem with Covid was that it temporarily made altruism and cowardice behaviorally indistinguishable much of the time. If you were reasonably brave but fairly indifferent to the well-being of others, you wanted to break the lockdown rules and go on living as normal. If you were full of altruism and wanted to save lives, that was one reason to be very strict in your social distancing. But if you were extremely afraid of dying of Covid-- including if you were just plain cowardly-- that was *also* a reason to be very strict about social distancing.
And there were huge exceptions, but they were distributed very unevenly across classes. In general, there were:
1. "essential" workers, who had to keep working in face-to-face jobs at enormously increased risk;
2. remote work capable jobs, who just went home and kept in working and earning more comfortably than ever with no danger (that was me); and
3. non-"essential" but also non-remote-capable workers, who got laid off and forced to live in government benefits.
Class (1) had all the courage, class (2) had all the power, class (3) bore the economic brunt. If you're inclined to be credulous of conspiracy theories, it looks very suspicious.
I'm not inclined to be credulous of conspiracy theories. I'm too rational for that. I can poke holes in them very fast. They make no sense and lack evidence.
But I do think that a kind of great wound to the honor of the educated elite occurred at that time which needs to be repaired.
J. Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the White Star Line, survived the Titanic disaster and was widely criticized for it. As a high-ranking official of the company that owned the Titanic, many believed he should have gone down with the ship rather than board a lifeboat. Some newspapers labeled him the "coward of the Titanic." Maybe Iamay did right. Maybe he saved more lives than his own by staying around to run things. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that he did. It still *looked* like cowardice, like failing a test. What should he have done? He might have needed some way to redeem himself.
Educated elites are like that. We could work from home, so it was the right thing to do. But it made us look like cowards, and we somehow need to live that down.
It makes me think we need to figure out some way of sometimes getting killed in the line of duty. And yet Ukraine is fighting for its life and could use some volunteers, and here I am sitting at home working instead of going there, just because I'm a married father of four and have people depending on me. It's the second time-- the first was the Iraq war in 2003-2007-- that I've been a "chickenhawk."
Anyway, am I at all guessing right about where you're coming from?
And I'm not talking about Covid alone. I'm also talking about larger patterns that Covid exposed. Starts with health: a very long list of things proclaimed by the EXPERTS to be "healthy" is not, and visa versa. From there one sees the pattern again and again in other areas of life. If a person doesn't have eyes to see, then I don't know what to tell him, other than to wish him the best.
Are the health experts sincerely mistaken? Then they're not "vampires"/exploiters. Or are they lying, for some sort of profit? But how does that work exactly? And what's the evidence?
There are all sorts of problems with the educated elite. But Charles Murray was in the right track in *Coming Apart*: they're more wrong in what they preach than what they practice. They treat people fairly decently other than polluting their minds with dumb woke ideas.
“Our rulers have no slaves and no serfs. Anyone is free to leave any job.”
Forcing low IQ poor people to compete for the janitor job is a perverse downward mobility (that nevertheless shows great fruit in a homogenous closed society).
“ An honest man falls in love with an honest woman; he wishes, therefore to marry her, to be the father of her children, to secure her and himself. All systems of government should be tested by whether he can do this. If any system—feudal, servile, or barbaric—does, in fact, give him so large a cabbage-field that he can do it, there is the essence of liberty and justice. If any system—republican, mercantile, or Eugenist—does, in fact, give him so small a salary that he can't do it, there is the essence of eternal tyranny and shame.”
G.K. Chesterton
The first job of a good leader is to organize scarce resource and labor into efficient outcomes for all parties (janitors make less than engineers, because fewer people can be engineers — this is just as true in a feudal society as capitalist society). The capitalist replaces this foundational need, for the most efficient outcome of resources for himself.
Words like freedom or serfdom are just marketing words for democracy.
"In a more dramatic gesture, Austen’s Mr Darcy parts ways with a small fortune to save the Bennet family from ruin; he also doesn’t say a word about it (unlike the billionaires of our times who hire PR agencies to trumpet their fake philanthropy)."
First-- why "fake" philanthropy? These foundations are trying to do important things like cure malaria.
But also, the contrast you draw here might suggest that the secrecy of Darcy's act is indicative of the general nature of noblesse oblige. That's not right.
The rich and powerful have patronized arts and sciences as well as providing charity for centuries, and they've often done in quite publicly. There are good reasons for that. You want to set an example. You want to use your reputation as well as your money to support a good cause. Publicity may be part of the transaction. If you want to give broad-based help to a large class of people, it will take some marketing to get the word out.
Of course, that does create the risk that you're doing it just to get a good reputation. There's something especially beautiful and disinterested about secret almsgiving. It can be more effective too, since you don't waste their time asking you it risk attracting a flock of gold diggers. But sometimes it's impractical. The story of Saint Nicholas tossing bags of coins into the stockings hanging up to dry illustrates how tricky andv serendipitous secret giving can be.
The Gospels, of course, contain wonderful exhortations to secret almsgiving. Yet they also say "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven," and exhort the faithful to be like a city on a hill that cannot be hidden, and not to put their light under a bushel. There's a *prima facie* contradiction here. Should we seek fame or not?
I think there's an important sense in which seeking fame is a duty for many, and is the right reading of "let your light so shine before men." Darcy was right to conceal his help of the Bennet family, because the truth would have been embarrassing to them. But philanthropists are also often right to advertise their charity, in order to notify needy people that help is available, and/or to set a good example to others. The key is to do it in a way that will NOT make people glorify YOU, but to glorify GOD instead.
The well off were expected to grant zero interest loans under Old Testament Law. True, they got servants for six years from those who could not pay back, but they were expected to treat those indentured servants well and give them startup capital upon release.
A mixture of duty and power.
But not feudal. The servants were released on the Sabbath Year, and land was released on the Jubilee Year.
In the American West we overemphasize "king AMONG THE PEOPLE" completely dismissing that it's a King. This relates smoothly to your comments on cinematic Aragorn.
Our revolutionary roots leave kingship with a bad taste in our mouth. But leadership without ownership, leads to duty without weight.
You see this in the protestant churches and family structure as well. No sense of authority. The father became a sort of master deliberator. And pastor has been relegated to scriptural rhetorician.
We need to return language of "my people" back to the public consciousness.
Good post.
On the one hand, it's wild that a country with such a suspicion of hierarchy was commandeered by a vicious oligarchy. On the other, it's not surprising at all. Nature abhors a vacuum. If you don't have a proper understanding of authority, you are going to make yourself vulnerable to bad authorities.
Feudalism is underrated
It’s the most natural social arrangement in the world. When you live in a dangerous world, you need people who have your back, and you need to have their back.
Accountability, Protection, & Service 💥
Inequality exists even without feudalism. That is what the classical liberals missed.
You might like my post on "The Age of Chivalry." :)
https://open.substack.com/pub/lancelotfinn/p/the-age-of-chivalry
Any semblance of this was killed once the Nuremberg Regime took over.
No doubt, the entire order is built to destroy this ethos! Just about everything militates against it. But that order is showing signs of cracking. What is fake and ghey will eventually fall, and life might get very interesting!
So I hugely admire and agree with this essay in many ways, and I think it is one of the most important messages for our times to hear, but I choked on this:
"We religiously assure ourselves that all men are created equal while also submitting to the rule of a class of vampires who recognize no equality and feel zero obligation to those beneath them. Quite the opposite—their expertise and paper credentials entitle the meritocrats to bleed others dry in their quest for more."
Umm, no. Not even close.
Our elites bear no resemblance to bloodsucking vampires.
Most ruling classes in history have coerced others to work for them, while living in comparative comfort. I don't necessarily condemn that. Maybe you haven't figured out how to run the economy without coercion, and you need more comforts in order to dedicate yourself effectually to the business of ruling. But still.
In the 19th century, the capitalist power elite largely left the masses free to work as they chose, refraining from coercion. Except that the punishment for idleness was starvation. There was little or nothing for a social safety net. That's a kind of backhanded coercion too.
Our rulers have no slaves and no serfs. Anyone is free to leave any job. And the threat of starvation has also been taken away. Now there's Medicaid and SNAP and TANF and LIHEAP and the EITC and Social Security and Medicare and much more to keep the improvident from starving. And the elite pay taxes to support it all, and then *still* give a lot of money to foundations.
That may not be a moral improvement, taken holistically. But it absolutely refutes the charge of being vampires.
I absolutely agree that our elites need more of the spirit of noblesse oblige, and need to stop deluding themselves and others by the myth of equality of opportunity. And part of that should consist in giving *themselves* in the form of examples, by laboring to become models of virtue. People have to think about the power elite a lot in order to survive. That can be very beneficial if the elites fill their minds with exemplars of virtue, and very harmful if it gives them examples of resentment, ossified unjust thinking, cowardly conformism, and so on. Our elites are pathologically uninspiring, and wrong the people by failing to supply them with heroes.
But that point would come across more clearly and cleanly without the phony baloney rhetoric of calling them vampires.
If you want to preach virtue, you'd better practice it by not randomly spewing unjust slanders.
I don’t know how you could have lived through ‘20-‘22 and still believe what you do.
By the way, if that makes you want to know now about my, here's a kind of autobiographical sociology called "the author as a case study of the educated elite":
https://open.substack.com/pub/lancelotfinn/p/the-author-as-a-case-study-of-the
Well, thanks. That's interesting. It may be a clue to where the "vampires" rhetoric is coming from. Was it the Covid pandemic, lockdowns etc., that exposed the elite as "vampires?"
I disagree, but I think I kind of get where you're coming from. I was haunted at the time by the feeling: how can this possibly be right? It's just pathetic for a great civilization, with so much power and wealth and knowledge, and so many achievements, to be cowering and hiding, abandoning its way of life, even closing churches (!) to run away from a disease that doesn't seem worse than a bad flu.
And yet the excess death statistics don't really have a plausible explanation other than that Covid was really as deadly for some as they said, and killed a million people or so. Was it right to shut down the face-to-face economy for a year-- more in some places-- to try to save a million lives? Probably so.
But it still seems so *cowardly!*
I think part of the problem with Covid was that it temporarily made altruism and cowardice behaviorally indistinguishable much of the time. If you were reasonably brave but fairly indifferent to the well-being of others, you wanted to break the lockdown rules and go on living as normal. If you were full of altruism and wanted to save lives, that was one reason to be very strict in your social distancing. But if you were extremely afraid of dying of Covid-- including if you were just plain cowardly-- that was *also* a reason to be very strict about social distancing.
And there were huge exceptions, but they were distributed very unevenly across classes. In general, there were:
1. "essential" workers, who had to keep working in face-to-face jobs at enormously increased risk;
2. remote work capable jobs, who just went home and kept in working and earning more comfortably than ever with no danger (that was me); and
3. non-"essential" but also non-remote-capable workers, who got laid off and forced to live in government benefits.
Class (1) had all the courage, class (2) had all the power, class (3) bore the economic brunt. If you're inclined to be credulous of conspiracy theories, it looks very suspicious.
I'm not inclined to be credulous of conspiracy theories. I'm too rational for that. I can poke holes in them very fast. They make no sense and lack evidence.
But I do think that a kind of great wound to the honor of the educated elite occurred at that time which needs to be repaired.
J. Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the White Star Line, survived the Titanic disaster and was widely criticized for it. As a high-ranking official of the company that owned the Titanic, many believed he should have gone down with the ship rather than board a lifeboat. Some newspapers labeled him the "coward of the Titanic." Maybe Iamay did right. Maybe he saved more lives than his own by staying around to run things. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that he did. It still *looked* like cowardice, like failing a test. What should he have done? He might have needed some way to redeem himself.
Educated elites are like that. We could work from home, so it was the right thing to do. But it made us look like cowards, and we somehow need to live that down.
It makes me think we need to figure out some way of sometimes getting killed in the line of duty. And yet Ukraine is fighting for its life and could use some volunteers, and here I am sitting at home working instead of going there, just because I'm a married father of four and have people depending on me. It's the second time-- the first was the Iraq war in 2003-2007-- that I've been a "chickenhawk."
Anyway, am I at all guessing right about where you're coming from?
And I'm not talking about Covid alone. I'm also talking about larger patterns that Covid exposed. Starts with health: a very long list of things proclaimed by the EXPERTS to be "healthy" is not, and visa versa. From there one sees the pattern again and again in other areas of life. If a person doesn't have eyes to see, then I don't know what to tell him, other than to wish him the best.
Are the health experts sincerely mistaken? Then they're not "vampires"/exploiters. Or are they lying, for some sort of profit? But how does that work exactly? And what's the evidence?
There are all sorts of problems with the educated elite. But Charles Murray was in the right track in *Coming Apart*: they're more wrong in what they preach than what they practice. They treat people fairly decently other than polluting their minds with dumb woke ideas.
“Our rulers have no slaves and no serfs. Anyone is free to leave any job.”
Forcing low IQ poor people to compete for the janitor job is a perverse downward mobility (that nevertheless shows great fruit in a homogenous closed society).
“ An honest man falls in love with an honest woman; he wishes, therefore to marry her, to be the father of her children, to secure her and himself. All systems of government should be tested by whether he can do this. If any system—feudal, servile, or barbaric—does, in fact, give him so large a cabbage-field that he can do it, there is the essence of liberty and justice. If any system—republican, mercantile, or Eugenist—does, in fact, give him so small a salary that he can't do it, there is the essence of eternal tyranny and shame.”
G.K. Chesterton
The first job of a good leader is to organize scarce resource and labor into efficient outcomes for all parties (janitors make less than engineers, because fewer people can be engineers — this is just as true in a feudal society as capitalist society). The capitalist replaces this foundational need, for the most efficient outcome of resources for himself.
Words like freedom or serfdom are just marketing words for democracy.
If IM1776 published this, you know it's shit.
"If IM1776 published this, you know it's shit."
Your observation 'is sound, nothing but sound.' The internet - a place where Genetic Fallacies reign supreme.
Go back to Reddit
Readers of this post may be interested in my post "The Christian Case for Class Stratification," which covers done of the same ground: https://open.substack.com/pub/lancelotfinn/p/the-christian-case-for-class-stratification
I also need to quibble with this a bit:
"In a more dramatic gesture, Austen’s Mr Darcy parts ways with a small fortune to save the Bennet family from ruin; he also doesn’t say a word about it (unlike the billionaires of our times who hire PR agencies to trumpet their fake philanthropy)."
First-- why "fake" philanthropy? These foundations are trying to do important things like cure malaria.
But also, the contrast you draw here might suggest that the secrecy of Darcy's act is indicative of the general nature of noblesse oblige. That's not right.
The rich and powerful have patronized arts and sciences as well as providing charity for centuries, and they've often done in quite publicly. There are good reasons for that. You want to set an example. You want to use your reputation as well as your money to support a good cause. Publicity may be part of the transaction. If you want to give broad-based help to a large class of people, it will take some marketing to get the word out.
Of course, that does create the risk that you're doing it just to get a good reputation. There's something especially beautiful and disinterested about secret almsgiving. It can be more effective too, since you don't waste their time asking you it risk attracting a flock of gold diggers. But sometimes it's impractical. The story of Saint Nicholas tossing bags of coins into the stockings hanging up to dry illustrates how tricky andv serendipitous secret giving can be.
The Gospels, of course, contain wonderful exhortations to secret almsgiving. Yet they also say "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven," and exhort the faithful to be like a city on a hill that cannot be hidden, and not to put their light under a bushel. There's a *prima facie* contradiction here. Should we seek fame or not?
I think there's an important sense in which seeking fame is a duty for many, and is the right reading of "let your light so shine before men." Darcy was right to conceal his help of the Bennet family, because the truth would have been embarrassing to them. But philanthropists are also often right to advertise their charity, in order to notify needy people that help is available, and/or to set a good example to others. The key is to do it in a way that will NOT make people glorify YOU, but to glorify GOD instead.