By Jonathan F. Keiler -
An 18th Century European lord puzzling over the accelerating decline of the aristocracy only had to look in the mirror to find his answer. Chronic inbreeding ensured the degeneration of the gentry, and yet even though the nobility well knew this, they were powerless. The entire European system of class and governance rested upon the idea of hereditary rule, even as it sowed the seeds of its own demise.
Elites always need more than just raw power. They need a justification for rule to establish legitimacy, at a very minimum in their own eyes, if not those of the lower classes. Today’s elites are no different, and their claims to legitimacy no better than that of modern Europe’s doomed nobility. They must inevitably fall, though the questions as always are -- how long and at what cost?
Today’s elites define themselves very differently from those gentry of old, but their justifications to take and keep power are even more obviously self-destructive. In general terms, these elites define themselves as graduates of exclusive schools of higher education, globally oriented, contemptuous of traditional Western values, and indoctrinated in the ideas such as multiculturalism and catastrophic global warming, though they would likely never put it that way. Rather, they would define their class as virtuous, that virtue residing in essentially in their resumes and worldviews. Since wealth and power alone are not sufficient to gain class entry, you get a lot of so-called virtue signaling, by which members can recognize and honor one another.
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