America's Upper Class Has No Class

The ascent of Cringe. The eclipse of Duty.

I’ve been thinking about my Peasant Theory long enough to do so without getting quite moralistic about it. I recently viz L’Affaire d’Gay made mention of the Ivy Cabal and those new money midwits who have managed to overpower all semblances of reserve and perspective in the major media. Today I’m annoyed and I don’t want to be. Today I need to get back to work, but yesterday there were no bugs up my butt and so I finished a Sunday Times crossword. I must say that even they have morphed since I last got into this sort of mental masturbation back in 1987 when I had temporarily moved in with my ex-girlfriend and first discovered Moliere and Monk, and played a simulation of four man Jeopardy on the couch in my head.

I know that rich people who have bored themselves of buying things and making fashion statements have moved over into the realm of experiences. It is the gateway to exotica. All I need to do is attend a CAP event from UCLA’s calendar. It’s full of experimental this and avant-garde that. I mean even I get tired of Horowitz playing Rach 3, but really? Drag queens pulling pre-teens into the Pride parade to dance with? I know, I shouldn’t be spending so much time on X/Twitter, but between now and the next Starship launch, there isn’t much inspirational drama for Old Schoolers like me. I’m still rolling through some old Clint Eastwood films I’d never seen, thanks Cinefix. But I’m still a bit transfixed by Lean’s Dr Zhivago which I had never seen. Transclude those ideas with Niall Ferguson’s provocation and I’m kind of stuck. I’m stuck with the idea that hashtag revolutionaries have shouted down the Tsars of America’s aristocracy and there ain’t much nobility left. What if the future was Andrew Tate and Jake Paul? What if the future was Jimmy Kimmel and Kevin Hart?

I was thinking to myself the other day about who was the producer who made Snoop Dogg rich. That’s sad just saying so. What kind of icons are the leaders of American culture? I’m not ashamed to use the terms of two other Substackers have used.

Cringe
That’s precisely it. It’s what we’re producing at an accelerated rate. Why cringe? I like Limberg’s restatement of Sarah Perry’s definition so let’s share that protocol. Cringe is the result of a failed emotional manipulation. Hard fail. Whereas Morpheus described the Matrix as a subtle yet persistent sense of unease like a splinter in your mind, cringe is the blunt force trauma of bad performance drama. Headline: Katy Perry is in space. What is that even supposed to mean? It makes your eyes roll so hard the momentum throws your head back. Cringe is the lead balloon of seduction that falls directly on your big toe.

But there’s something worse than ‘cringe’ that makes me cringe, and I feel a bit naive for not sensing what has recently been revealed in my own somewhat haphazard method of discovery.

There are three factors in this discovery. Maybe three and a half.

The Original Old Boys
A weird secret about me is that one of my favorite films is The Dead Poets Society. I very much identified with characters in that film like young people today (well, my kids) identified with the Harry Potter universe. Same thing with Timothy Hutton in Taps. White Squall, not so much. I’ve never bothered to read Brideshead Revisited or watch The Talented Mr Ripley, so I don’t rightly know how much my own private school edification is some bounder’s cultural appropriation or dare I say ‘self-hate’. But my respect and admiration for proper boys and hale fellows well-met is significant. After all, my own grandfather worked at Yale and my father was USMC. So for me, it goes a bit beyond the appeal of An Officer and a Gentleman. It’s not simple “I got nowhere else to go”, more like, yeah that’s me, the four year letterman. (Bottom left)

Monogram Club, Fall 1975

Yet having read Orwell’s memoirs, and now C.S. Lewis’ own, I am truly getting a sense of the soul shredding properties of the English public school, as well as the strange intimacy it creates, something I experienced some measure of in my own Catholic school education. This morning I finished The Precipice by Robert Harris which is an excellent book about the personal dimension of romantic love and ruling class manners at the beginning of WWI - a romance between Prime Minister Asquith and Beatrice Venetia Stanley which was about as loving and heartfelt as such an illicit affair can be, with him married and her 35 years his junior.

It is this latest book in combination with what, on background, are the infamous betrayals of Kim Philby and others, (I just recently finished, the also excellent The Trinity Six) that tempers my Old School anglophile tendencies. It is tempered in the negative way in that the ancestral relations of the upper class (my Peasant Theory Rulers) bind people together against merit and the Open Society. Yet it is reinforced in that way I see the necessity of humanized protocols and trust as the fundamental currency of civilization. One can certainly say that these old Brits trusted each other by forging their young in the cauldron of Victorian class. Their faith in empire was a generator of greatness, often beyond their individual capacity to handle.

What Sort Are You?
So I guess this tempers my Anglophilia only slightly, because in the end what you want is a bunch of very capable, intelligent, hardheaded people to have some absolute fidelity to their homeland. Since I believe that the fundamental currency of civilization is trust, then treason is the worst sin. Our difficulty is getting Americans to be patriotic. Say what you like about America, you are either class A, B or C

Class A: God, America, Self
Class B: America, Self
Class C: Self, America

I’m the kind of Deist that the Founders were. I’m not so willing to name a God and worship. I’m Class B, but there’s something undefined out there - a god shaped hole. But I’m really happy to respect it in terms defined in common by the Universes and by the sharpest of the Faithful. I have a healthy dose of analytic philosophy in there, as well as a healthy respect for history.

When it comes to domestic affairs, I refuse to engage in social politics, or ‘social justice’ which I see as nothing more or less than a mad scramble for power and influence. Once you have seen it named, you cannot unsee it. My new enemy is Jason Calcanis. Why? Because of his lies against Palmer Luckey, my new hero. And as I rationally, but not sentimentally, mark down the years I’ve been around to see institutions stunted, I am reminded of the people whose individual domination of those around them and in the public have drawn us all down to their level. When we lost William F. Buckley, we were at the beginning of the end. When we lost Christopher Hitchens, when we lost Bernard Shaw at CNN, when we lost Jim Lehrer, we lost so much. Have we had a real presidential debate since 2012? I remember that it was the tenor of talk on the McLaughlin Group that made me want to stop watching TV news altogether, but I hung on for a few years of Charlie Rose and Brian Lamb.

The only ones who have survived are the comical cynics, and now we even have to take Tucker Carlson seriously? I’d actually rather have Dennis Miller.

Jeffrey Epstein: Age 27

Since COVID I have learned some hard lessons about the acceptability of luxury beliefs that have nothing to do with integrity or intelligence. I think the lessons of Jeffrey Epstein and Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs are the ones we’re going to have to remember. Not to mention the Palisades Fire. There are empires of lies that stand on sandy soil. There are decades of idolatry that will suddenly collapse. We need to remember how much power there is in this world that is completely untethered to any ethics we can comprehend rationally outside of cancer.

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France
I want England to survive. And the EU beside the truth of this chart.

I think it’s time we look around for honest sophistication. I don’t have much more than the standard answers. Good books, fine food, excellent film, honest sports, real friendships, and general reverence for virtue and the precious and fragile things we must attend, like children and budding plants. But the lessons of life are teaching me that we must attend to these things with more than just a thumbs up.

Duty
What I’m thinking about is duty. It’s the step beyond paying attention and nodding. It’s not something that’s on your to do list. It’s the reason you maintain the list in the first place. It has to be centered in your sense of self. Without duty you will be continually searching for purpose.

This is what I have learned about duty. You can fulfill your duty without having mastered any skills. Sometimes duty takes a lot out of you without giving back much. It can be painful and frustrating. When you initiate and fulfill your duty, it never generates regret. Duty is not necessarily mandatory. You don’t just say “I did what I had to do.” Duty is something you compel yourself to do.

For me, it starts with a public promise. I tell somebody or some people that I will do something. Now I have given my word, I will not be right until I have made the effort. It’s me, maintaining my integrity. Now the question falls to my judgement in picking the right thing to do. I have to be sensible in my selection of duty. It’s not always something showy. It could be taking out the trash or dressing my feeble father. I could wait to be called to this duty, or I could volunteer. The point is fulfillment. Make yourself useful. No regrets.

Philanthropy
I tread lightly when I talk smack about philanthropy, but then again, enough people hate the rich on principle nowadays. It used to be a matter of fact that we once said of Americans, that we have enough social mobility that we might always be right next to the rich guy at the bar. So we don’t hate them so much, whereas the average Brit revolts against their rigid class system and doesn’t want to be anything like those public school old boys.

I have mixed feelings about my loyalty to the Peasant class, as I feel like an outsider most everywhere. I think I am absolutely right about my direction in edification. I want to enjoy my love of classical European piano, but I feel the pain of lonely isolation in this cultural pursuit despite the fact that it gives me personal joy. I can only say tangentially that it is part of my duty to the old school gentleman my grandfather was. I am not drawn at all to the boom boom clack. But I don’t second guess my own shared humble beginnings. I sympathize with those who shared those times, with our powder blue track suits and bus passes.

But so much of what has been revealed of late in the sloppy mediocrity of the Ivy Cabal and Ruling Class feels like a betrayal. A betrayal papered over with just enough foundational charity to make them sound like dutiful Americans aiming to cure cancer first and get a tax break second, oh by the way. It always seems like it’s just a matter of time before all of that social capital falls away like whore panties. Are we just panoptically attuned to scandal mongering, or are our wealthy brothers and sisters just that idle? More often it feels like the Devil’s Playground. More often it feels like cringe is just around the corner.

I’m thinking Philanthropy is not so much a duty as an indulgence.

When you don’t cure cancer, when your dollars don’t free South Sudanese, when you don’t check back to see if that water well is still pumping, when the dust has accumulated on your plaques, then what? I’m only saying that running businesses that employs or preserves the freedom of the common man must be nearer the center of duty. Civic duty.

I’ve come close to one or two folks that have accomplished that, and I must say that I’m disappointed in myself that I have not achieved enough to have a similar grip on the helm of such large dutiful ships. In these moments I kick myself for turning away from that ROTC office, because it would have meant shutting up and taking orders. There’s no way to know how that might have turned out. I have got a lot of nerve to talk. I guess that’s all I can do. I guess that’s why I’m a Peasant, just wishing things were better and feeling sorry for myself. Don’t we all have such moments?

Nationalism
This, then perhaps, is the final gasp of hope for nationalism - the concept that the fate of the millions is not so much in the hand of God, but in the decisions and actions of those with the power and influence to go where they go and do what they do at a level significant to the national interest. That’s often a lot smaller and more specific than we think.

The man who knows the secret formula to the inner lining of Coke cans that allows them to resist the corrosion of that bubbly deliciousness. The woman who knows the secret formula of weights and proportions in the kind of glass perfect for cellphones and OLED screens. Such things are only worth 100 million dollars to change an industry - especially when that kind of investment is easily spent by a certain hostile Asian wannabe superpower. It’s unclear that our Rulers are protecting our Geniuses, and the FBI as catching them in progress.

Meanwhile what does it take to setup a chemist in a 100 million dollar startup? That’s the market in industrial espionage. But where are our entrepreneurial initiatives? Another dating app? Rebranding a vitamin supplement? Another sequel for streaming? Another dozen undergraduate scholarships for some oddball intersectional identity? Another brand of naturally aspirated chrome plated V8 for supercars? Another grant for another equation that slightly brings us closer to the understanding of black holes? Black holes indeed. Are we past the event horizon? Are we losing the Republic?

I think we could use a revitalization in the idea of citizenship in our society. I have no idea how that’s going to happen. I want to write some OAuth2 application that creates a new set of personal networks, Old School networks, without the fabricated mush of AI in the middle. If I had the dosh, I’d buy a building. Some new kind of Dead Poets Society where our own very lives and spirits matter and count for much more than they do now. Maybe that’s my duty. Whatever it becomes, I’ll show up. In person.